It looks as if we have got through the idiotic phase of wild and dire forecasts from Remain and rivers of phantom cash from Leave. We are moving into a new dimension where hard truths are debated. Leave’s heavy weapons are immigration and borders. Remain’s heavy weapons are jobs and the economy. Remain’s weapons are more powerful.
At this point I want to look at another occasion when somebody decided to leave a Union back in America in 1860/61. The Confederacy was high on idealism, overflowing with confidence, driven by passionate belief in its cause and confident that its economic power, derived from cotton exports to Britain and France, would force both to recognise it as an independent nation. Its industry was weak and its economic plans were fluid. Wishful thinking flowed like a torrent through every nook and cranny of this new nation, which for all the heroism and hope, was doomed to fail. Britain and France gave a bit of covert aid but turned east for vital cotton and in the end turned their backs. The new nation stood, tottered and fell alone. All the calculations mistaken, all the assumptions flawed and all the elan and glamour enshrined in the dream powerless in the face of the hard battering ram of the reality of the world as it had now become, which was not going to turn back to an older page, to accommodate a new nation looking back to values of a departed age.
It is now the case that not a single national leader, nor banker, nor economist, nor statistician of any stature or reputation in the world has come out to support the Leave campaign ; indeed the line up supporting Remain is becoming awe-inspiring. Why is this?
The answer is simple. This is not about borders, sovereignty, immigration or economics. It is about rows of crosses marking battlefields where millions have died, about a continent that has engaged in almost uninterrupted strife for nigh on one and a half thousand years, which has come together to create a voluntary Union albeit with many flaws, which is the greatest political achievement since the fall of the Roman Empire. It is about an island nation with a footprint which one way and another bestrides the world, without whom this Union may not in the end endure. Because whether Britain likes it or not, it is one of the three great powers of Europe and without it and its funny ways neither it nor the Union will thrive. The world will become a poorer more dangerous place.
In the cold light of morning when dreams turn to dust, nobody wants that.