The final week of Britain’s referendum campaign on its future in Europe was shaping up to be an undignified, theatrical farce.
Then came Thursday, and the first assassination of a British politician since an bombing murder by the Irish Republican Army in 1990.
Jo Cox, 41, a Labour Party MP and passionate advocate for Syrian refugees, was stabbed and shot as she left a meeting with constituents at a library in West Yorkshire.
Her alleged killer Thomas Mair, 52, a local man, unemployed for many years, is reported to have shouted “Britain First” as he attacked her, before being tackled and arrested.
As slogans go, this would be like shouting “Make America Great Again.” The words are innocent, but they conceal a roiling nationalist, protectionist, nativist anger that is rising quickly in political influence, taking the establishment by surprise.
“The campaign has been incredibly negative on both sides, everybody stressing threats and dangers,” said Harold Clarke, the Canadian editor of Electoral Studies and professor of political economy at the University of Texas at Dallas, who researches polls, elections, referendums, and the political climate that moves them.
Citing extensive polling, Clarke described a rising populist sense among mostly white, working-class Britons that the “world has passed them by.”
All that is contained in “Britain First.” The slogan speaks of fear of losing control over immigration on a crowded island, or shifting economic threats, or loss of blue-collar jobs to cheap foreign labour.
It speaks of the loss of national and personal security, from street crime to terrorism. And it reflects a fear that Britain’s language, culture, and religious heritage are being overrun and replaced by foreign influence — and not just foreign, but European, that great cultural other against which the British define themselves.
This is what inspires the Leave side, which has risen in the polls in recent weeks, and now is at least equal with Remain, possibly even a few points ahead.
It shows itself in three main movements: the mainstream Conservative euroskeptics; the barely disguised racist thuggery of the British National Party, whose slogan is “putting Britain first;” and the milder, nostalgic, jam-tarts-and-hedgerows nationalism of Nigel Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party.
The spectrum between them is wide, but these movements are united in fearing loss of control over courts, sovereignty, even democracy, and seeing it replaced by unelected star chambers in Brussels, under the economic hegemony of Germany.
Even the location of the murder is rich with nationalist symbolism. It happened in Birstall, in the post-industrial north of England, between gritty Leeds and Bradford, the home riding of noted political wacko George Galloway, site of famous race riots, and almost a byword for the uneasy assimilation of Asian Britons, such as the 7/7 London Underground bombers, all of whom grew up nearby.
Referendums like the EU one are known as “polity-shaping events,” meaning they shape political systems rather than decide one specific issue. Much is wrapped up in either answer, Leave or Remain.
The last British one, the 2014 Scottish referendum, was similarly conducted in a climate of fear, and fear won the day.
To secede, for Scotland, was to risk being alone on the turbulent seas of a global economy, with a new and vulnerable currency, and not much more than an oil industry to stay afloat. To stay was to enjoy the support of the United Kingdom and its pound sterling. The subsequent collapse in oil prices, in hindsight, made the Scottish independence seekers seem reckless. Fear, in this case, had been wise.
This time, though, fear is looking ever more unhinged. For Leave, the ballot question seems less economic, more existential. It cuts deeper into the British identity, as if the argument is happening within the soul, not the mind.
For its part, the Remain side has acted much like the federalist side in the 1995 Quebec referendum, Clarke said, offering “practical and prudential” arguments, basically saying Britain is better off economically if it stays in, hoping to appeal to head over heart.
In this context, Cox’s murder is likely a “pulse-decay phenomenon,” he added, meaning it will have a strong, but quickly dissipating impact on voting intention.
Had it happened a month ago, it would likely be irrelevant. But with only a few days to go, it could be much more significant.
Polling suggests a nationwide majority preference for Remain, but factoring in turnout and a motivated anti-Europe vote, Clarke thinks Leave could win the day.
Just before the shooting, and seeking to move the vote in its final week, Farage and UKIP released a poster ad that shows a massive line of Syrian migrants, overwhelmingly young men, with the slogan “Breaking Point.”
Now, with a young mother dead, a political career ended by a criminal outrage, and a nation in shock at the anger within, that poster has turned out to be sickeningly ironic.
This was Jo Cox’s issue. The breaking point was meant to be a risk in the future, something to be averted by a vote. It was never meant to come a week before, on a quiet village street.
As Alex Massie, an editor at The Spectator magazine, wrote in the immediate aftermath of the shooting: “When you encourage rage you cannot then feign surprise when people become enraged. You cannot turn around and say, ‘Mate, you weren’t supposed to take it so seriously. It’s just a game, just a ploy, a strategy for winning votes.’ ”
• Email: jbrean@postmedia.com | Twitter: JosephBrean