Decision time in Britain

OPINION:

These are not encouraging days for the “elites” and the political “establishments” of the world. Voters are fed up everywhere, and looking not only for ways out of the mess but for ways to punish the authors of the misery. A president’s/prime minister’s/premier’s lot is not a happy one.

Here in America, voters are so unhappy with having to choose between “a clown and a crook” for president that some of the especially conscientious are said to be dying early to avoid having to choose. Certain newspaper obituaries tell the sad and gloomy tale.

Nowhere is such angst — and anger — more on the boil than in Britain, where the very concept of the establishment was first invented. Voters will decide Thursday whether to leave the European Union and take control again of their economy, their borders, and their future. The outcome is uncertain because never have the elites had to deal with such a surge of the populist sentiment that has become so familiar in America over the last year or so.

The British skeptics call it “nationalism,” which the elites regard with the disdain usually felt for a baby’s nappy. In fact, it was the Germans who distorted the idea of national pride, taken to excess, and put in particularly bad odor anything even faintly “nationalistic,” such as wanting to control who can come to squat. Such sentiment is regarded as something vaguely improper and certainly inappropriate. But there the referendum is and nobody knows quite what to make of it.

“It’s very close,” Prime Minister David Cameron told London’s Financial Times on Wednesday. “Nobody knows what’s going to happen.” The latest and probably the last public-opinion poll put the sentiment to Leave at 45 percent, just a point ahead of Remain. The pollster, Opinium, calls it a “statistical tie.”

British political campaigns in recent years have taken on the trappings of American campaigns, with the flash and thunder once frowned on in Old Blighty as something inappropriate if not improper. Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London (who was actually born in New York while his mother and father were living abroad) who has led the Leave campaign, spent the last hours of it flying around the isles in a helicopter, as if invoking the ghost of George M. Cohan to urge voters to show their patriotism by declaring Thursday as “independence day.”

Nigel Farage, the leader of the anti-EU United Kingdom Independence Party, raised the ante of the rhetoric: “At the end of the day when people vote [on Thursday] they must make a decision — which flag is theirs? I want us to live under British passports and under the British flag.”

Prime Minister Cameron appealed to the traditional British reluctance to avoid doing anything to frighten the women or the horses. “If we Leave,” he told a rally in the west country, “we will diminish our country and our ability to get things done in the world.” John Major, who succeeded Maggie Thatcher as prime minister in a previous century, struck a similarly somber note. A vote to Leave would have to be respected, he said, “but the gravediggers of our economy will have to account for what they had said and done.”

Leaders of other “establishments” across the world, once careful about butting into the elections and referenda of other countries, have shown no such butting reticence this time. President Obama and Chinese Premier Xi Jinping, as well as leaders of NATO and the British Commonwealth, have urged Britons to Remain.

There’ll always be an England, but until late Thursday night nobody can be quite sure where it will be.