At last the Government leaflet on the EU referendum has popped through my door.
Should the HMG have spent the best part of £10 million on it? Possibly not. But a genuine attempt to cut through the lies and distortions of both sides of the campaign would have been welcome and, who knows, might even have bolstered the Remain side if waverers had seen it as being candid and even-handed.
So I turned with interest to page 1 of the leaflet, where the following statement appears - "We will keep our own border controls".
We will keep our own border controls.
The mind flaps at this statement like a goalkeeper trying to grasp a spinning ball on a rain-sodden pitch. In what way can it possibly be true?
We, or rather the British electorate of forty years ago, signed up to free movement of people (at a time when the EU had only half a dozen countries, few of whose citizens had any economic incentive to come and live in the UK). We have to let EU nationals come and go freely because of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, and unless we leave we are stuck with it.
So we "keep our own border controls" only in the sense that the British government operates, administers and pays for its "own border controls". The substance of those border controls however is determined by the 1975 British commitment to the EU. The leaflet says we have "the right to check everyone, including EU nationals, arriving from continental Europe". The weasel words there are "check" and "arriving", because although we can "check" them to make sure they're EU nationals we can't put any limits on the number of EU nationals who "arrive".
If a British government elected by the British people in (oh I don't know) 2015 decided to introduce tighter border controls it would very swiftly find itself in front of the European Court of Human Rights. And it would have no defence. There is no better illustration of the powerlessness of the British government than David Cameron's election pledge to reduce net migration to the "low tens of thousands". He failed in that pledge precisely because we don't "keep our own border controls". If we had been able to maintain an immigration policy the Tories said they wanted, net migration would not now have been in the region of 300,000 annually.
"We will keep our own border controls" is then an outright lie.
Why does the Government do this? There is a case to be made for free movement (I don't agree with it, but many do). It is also arguable that post-Brexit a British government would have to accept free movement as the price of a trade deal (some countries have to, although not Canada). Why not make those arguments instead of just lying to us? Is it because they think we're stupid?
I can only assume so. After all, these statements don't appear in expensively printed leaflets by accident. Well-paid people sat for a long time drafting this missive, and at some point someone said, "What are we going to say about borders and migration?" And there was then a good deal of pencil chewing because everyone knows that migration is one of the two political issues (the other being the economy) which poll after poll shows the British people are concerned about most. These apparatchiks knew they had to say something. It had to be appear on the face of it to be true. So someone said, "Well in a sense we do keep our own border controls because we operate and administer them", and this statement, conflating slipperily the execution of border control and its substance, was greeted with relief all round the table.
It is a deliberate, contemptuous and cynical attempt to deceive. I very much hope it doesn't do so, because no Government should lie to its own people.
It's a shame the leaflet is so glossy. I might have found a use for a cheaper, more absorbent version.
