I’ll go out on a limb here and predict that, regardless of the result in today’s “in or out” referendum, Britain will remain in the EU. In fact, I want to make the case that the British regime never had any intention of detaching itself from the EU, and that this ‘Brexit’ campaign is a ruse to give Germany and other continental powers ‘something to think about’ while retaining a controlling interest in the EU’s direction on behalf of joint Anglo-American interests.

After spending some two decades garnering support for holding this referendum, the British elite, from the moment they set a date for it, have overwhelmingly come out in favor of Britain remaining in the EU. Big business and most of the media, think-tanks, all political parties and most members of government are all encouraging voters to say ‘remain’.

This, in itself, is illogical. The only apparent reason for developing a political movement towards some specific political goal is to reach that political goal, not deviate from it at the very last moment. Can you imagine the Scottish Nationalist Party, having spent decades lobbying for an independence referendum, achieving that first major step and then advising Scots to vote to remain in the UK?

And so, I suggest, we must look beyond the domestic scene to understand why this charade is playing out. British foreign policy, much like US foreign policy, is indistinguishable from domestic policy, at least from the point of view of their elites, who instinctively equate ‘the national interest’ with their own personal interests, most of which lie abroad in the framework of an increasingly integrated Western corporate global order.

The UK regime

The British regime’s invasions/bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen are well known. But those theaters of operations are but the continuation of the British empire, on which the Sun has still not set, not the blood dried. British military, corporate and financial interests globally, though often subsumed within wider Western interests, remain as vastly disproportionate today as British colonies under over Empire once were relative to the UK’s small geographical size.

As regards their relationship with other countries in Europe, the British establishment has repeatedly (and often successfully) argued for ‘opting out’ of the EU laws and institutions it co-wrote and co-created, specifically where they apply to workers’ rights and human rights. They may not want to be ‘in socialist Europe’, but they damn well won’t let Europe be ‘taken over’ by Germany, France or the dominant power alliance du jour. Sabotaging, subverting, or otherwise retarding European integration – unless the process takes place on terms amenable to British and American dreams of world domination – is the name of the game.

The British economy is formally the 5th largest in the world and second only to Germany in Europe, but this status is built on debt and has little to do with real labor productivity and industrial output, and much to do with the City of London’s function as ‘clearing center’ for the US’ petrodollar recycling scheme and ‘casino capital’ for money-laundering criminals everywhere. The UK, for all the faults it sees in others, is arguably the most corrupt government on Earth.

Brexit, an establishment campaign

The Guardian recently published a history of the political movement that led to this referendum. They track its origins to Normal Lamont who, shortly after being sacked as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer (Minister of Finance) in 1994, gave a speech warning about the dangers awaiting Britain if it gradually yielded to the process of increasing EU integration.

Before entering Thatcher’s government in the 1980s, Lamont was a director at N M Rothschild & Sons, the British branch of the Rothschild banking empire. Today he is a director at a number of large London-based hedge funds. The current prime minister, David (‘please, call me Dave’) Cameron, was a ‘special adviser’ to Lamont at that time. Cameron was ostensibly elected, in part at least, on the basis that he would hold this referendum and lobby for an ‘exist’. Yet now, Cameron is encouraging the Queen’s subjects to vote ‘remain’.

    

Britain’s strange ‘in/out’ relationship with the European Union (and the European Community before that), and the Tories’ relationship with it in particular, is old – as old as the centuries-long pattern of the British elite meddling in continental affairs. Despite over a quarter-century of near-constant political posturing against the evils of ‘the coming European federal state’, when push comes to shove, Tory power brokers and the British establishment they represent are demonstrably ‘pro-Europe’.

In 1991, the British establishment came down on, and effectively sacked, their own Maggie ‘the witch’ Thatcher because of her euroskeptic views. There was intrigue galore as Thatcher, already reluctant to peg the British pound to the European Monetary Union’s ‘exchange rate mechanism’ – forerunner to today’s single-currency eurozone – discovered that her own ministers were answering to a higher power: behind her back, they had been preparing the country’s finances for entry into EMU, regardless of what she was telling the great British public.

Curiously, no sooner had the British signed up to EMU than billionaire American speculator George Soros booted them back out of it via an act of financial warfare that came to be known as ‘Black Friday’. I don’t know whether or not Soros had explicit political motivations for doing so then, but just this week the Chinese revealed that this “psychopath’s psychopath” has been attempting to attack the Chinese yuan, while Soros himself popped up in the British press to warn that financial predators like him are prepared to do it again; he effectively threatened another financial attack on the British pound if Britain leaves the EU.

Threatening ‘contagion’

How can the most British of the British hate and love Europe at the same time? How do we reconcile this paradox of the British elite (together with the wider Western banking-corporate elite, who are all cut from the same cloth) striving to cement the ‘Atlantic Alliance’ of Western corporate hegemony… while doing something that could potentially destabilize their regime?

I think the answer can be found in recent statements made by members of the British government. In mid-February, the British Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond warned that “Europe could fall apart if Britain votes to leave the EU,” predicting a “contagion” of other European countries calling for their own referenda if the UK left. He went on:

“Britain has been an enormously important influence in Europe, an influence for open markets, for free trade, for a less dirigiste approach to running the economy. We would be dealing with a Europe that looked very less in our image, and I think the thing that we have to remember is that there is a very real fear in Europe that if Britain leaves, the contagion will spread. I think people who say we’d do a great deal with Europe if we left, forget that the countries remaining in the European Union would be looking over their shoulder at people in their own countries saying, ‘if the Britain can do it why can’t we?’.”

    

What ‘image of Europe’ are Hammond and his kind afraid would manifest without British input? He tells us the answer to this in his opening statement. While ‘open markets’ and ‘free trade’ are assumed to convey universal meaning, in reality they mean quite different things to different people. For the British elite, whose forebears were the ideological founders of ‘free trade’, they have always had very particular meaning: the freedom for them to impose grossly unfair trading terms on other – especially non-Western – countries, which must be ‘open’ to the terms (lest they face gunboat diplomacy or, today, ‘humanitarian intervention’).

The other term used by Hammond – dirigiste – is more pointed still. Dirigisme (from French diriger, meaning “to direct”) is an economic system where the state exerts a strong directive influence over investment, viewed in post-WW2 France as a middle way between the Anglo-American policy of little state involvement and the Soviet policy of total state control.

This term has acquired derogatory meaning in the anglophone world, but Hammond wasn’t just here having a go at the French government: his remark highlights the primary ideological fault-line between the neo-liberal, Washington Consensus-based, Anglo-American world, and the largely social democratic center in Europe, where, despite the British “influence” Hammond boasted of, economic management by the state for all stakeholders, and not just by or for private corporations, is still generally upheld as ‘the natural order of things’.

And so, a Europe that “looked very less in Britain’s image” is naturally, as far as Hammond and the oligarchy he represents on both sides of the Atlantic are concerned, never going to happen.

Hammond’s predecessor, William Hague, who has also come out in favor of Britain remaining in the EU (after spending his entire career hystericizing the great British public against it), warned earlier this month that a British exit from the EU could “fragment the Western world”. I kid you not…

“I believe a great danger is a fragmentation of the Western world, in the face of terrorism and many other threats, including great economic threats and uncertainty and the UK leaving the EU will contribute to dividing us across the Atlantic and splitting America and Europe.”

Given that he knows this to be the case, why then has the ‘Right Honorable Baron Hague of Richmond’ been instrumental in pushing for and having the referendum in the first place?! Why risk an actual ‘Brexit’?

The Great Brexit ruse

The only thing I can deduce is that they have no intention whatsoever of leaving Europe. The referendum isn’t what matters here. What matters is the threat of a possible Brexit, which has generated direct and indirect effects on politics in Paris, Brussels, Berlin and beyond.

I suspect that the top Eurocrats, and thus the German and other European elites, are onto this game. European Commission president Juncker probably wasn’t being dramatic when he said, during last year’s ‘Grexit’ crisis, that:

“If we were to accept, if Greece were to accept, if others were to accept that Greece could leave the area of solidarity and prosperity that is the eurozone, we would put ourselves at risk because some, notably in the Anglo Saxon world, would try everything to deconstruct the euro area piece by piece, little by little.”

The charade that is ‘Brexit’ is British ‘balance-of-power’ politics in action (although today the strategy is used to maintain ‘Pax Americana’ rather than British imperial hegemony). ‘Brexit’ is part of the Western order’s hybrid warfare, something they love accusing Russia of, but at which they in fact excel. Together with the phony War on of Terror, the manipulation of international capital flows, the saturation of media with lies, the manipulation of the refugee crisis, and outright military warfare through NATO, ‘Brexit’ is a campaign conducted by the British/Western elites to ensure that the “Anglo-Saxon world” retains a controlling interest in the process of European integration.

Charting a course independent of the Anglo-Saxon world is verboten, thus rapprochement with Putin’s Russia is off the table. And in case anyone in Europe gets any funny ideas about embracing Russian overtures, the ‘Anglo-Saxon world’ can always carry out their threat of destabilizing Europe, thus ‘wrecking the chessboard‘, rather than ‘letting Europe slip away’.

    

With British voters falling into the trap of believing that the UK regime is giving them a ‘free democratic vote’, they’re torn between voting to remain in the EU and thus connected with a more humane regime, or voting to leave because their own media has convinced them that the EU is inherently evil. In the event that actual counted votes do produce a majority in favor of leaving, I think they will rig the result to ensure the UK remains in the EU, a contingency the British security services are undoubtedly prepared for.

Regardless of what the polls are saying, most ordinary British people find themselves in the unenviable position of siding with the despised Tories. This whole campaign has enabled the British establishment to thoroughly manipulate public opinion into line with its own interests. It was David Cameron who described, right when the scale of the refugee crisis was becoming apparent to the general public last summer, the refugees fleeing war-torn Libya, Syria and elsewhere as a “swarm of migrants trying to cross the Mediterranean to reach Britain.”

And now that same creature, one year later, is accusing those leading the ‘leave’ campaign of “stoking intolerance with their obsession over immigration.”

Immigration, in fact, has been a dominant theme throughout the Brexit campaign, thanks to the Cameron government’s obsession with it. On the one hand, the British government has been promising Turkey EU membership in exchange for its collaboration in Syria and against Russia; on the other hand, Cameron has been telling the British public that Turkey – and thus millions of Turkish Muslims – won’t be allowed into the EU “until the year 3,000.” Hypocrisy isn’t just a character trait among British politicians; it’s a way of life.

‘Brexit’ is a diabolically clever, though risky, geostrategic ruse. The one thing that could deliver the promise of a European ‘civilization-state’ i.e. the exclusion of the UK regime, and thus considerable containment of Washington’s influence on the continent, is being held up as the one thing that would strangle the Union in its cradle. But this is not surprising in the global political and social climate since 9/11, where psychopaths rule the day and war is sold to the people as peace and lies are proffered as truth.