My Brexit Diary

My first preference was never to leave the EU.

What we all wanted, of course, was a ‘reformed EU’.  The single currency project would be either abandoned, or wound back to a central core of countries whose economies were sufficiently on a level to cope with it.  The aim of political union would be given up, as posing insuperable problems of accountability.  The CAP would be done away with, or at least radically updated, MEPs’ and officials’ expenses reined in, the free movement of people rethought to stop millions of workers depressing wages in wealthier countries while depriving poorer ones of their skills, and, of course, Britain would finally be given a ‘top table’ say in policy formation instead of perpetually jumping up and down like a schoolboy dying for a pee, being told to wait in line by the impregnable France-Germany duo … yes, this was what we wanted, but we didn’t seem likely to get it.  Not this year or next, anyway, as long as the prospect of Europe imploding still seems less unbearable to the Eurocrats than losing face and admitting they were wrong.

And when Mr Cameron came back from his negotiations with 1% of nothing much, that seemed all the less likely.  A painful sight. 

So the next option was to vote Leave.  When you are in a train racing towards a disastrous collision, and you can’t get hold of the brakes, your next best bet is to try to derail it to cause a limited accident before it gets there.  Europe can’t be allowed to go on sleepwalking towards disaster.

I had given up on UKIP previously because of their disgraceful xenophobia.  Here was the xenophobia again.  Unfortunate, very.  Still, the way I saw it, xenophobia is something that can and must be tackled over and over again, at home, whereas a vote on Europe would not come round again in my lifetime.  A substantial majority for Remain would be actively harmful to Europe, as it would reassure the EU leadership that they were fine to carry on just as they were, and that Brits would put up with any amount of humiliation because they were too scared to leave.  Juncker’s crowing made that more or less explicit.  ‘Ha ha, we know you’ll never dare to leave and you can’t affect what we do from inside, we have got you exactly where we want you’, he said, in effect.  Can he be so surprised that a lot of people thought ‘Oh, really?’

I did my best to ignore the Leave campaign, although when that leaflet came through the door with the £350 million more a week for the NHS nonsense, I cringed before shovelling it in the bin.  That claim will come back to bite them, I thought … how can they be so stupid?  But then, I thought, it’s not surprising that this campaign is being led by mavericks and knaves and generally disreputable characters.  Anyone who leads the way in calling 50 years of received wisdom into question and advocating a leap into the unknown is bound to be a chancer.  The respectable won’t commit too fast, they have got their reputations to think of.  But if change really comes, sooner or later they’ll persuade themselves they were for it all along.

Instead I paid attention to the Remain campaign.  Perhaps it’s true, I thought to myself, that the press has represented the EU unfairly from the start.  Maybe the EU is better for Britain and Europe than we realise.  Maybe it has brought a lot of quiet, unsung benefits that we don’t sufficiently appreciate – other than the obvious ones like easy travel and assorted forms of patronage – and here is the Remainers’ chance to tell me.  I might change my mind.

Fat chance.  The Leave campaign would have made me vote Remain if anything could … but the Remain campaign finally tipped me into voting Leave.  It was called ‘Britain Stronger In Europe’ but that was a misnomer.  The general tone of campaign was more like ‘Britain Useless Even In Europe’ …

Britain, the pundits lined up to say, is finished, a has-been, a paltry little rain-soaked island that nobody in the rest of the world much cares about.  Its only chance of survival is to huddle together with its 27 kind Euro-neighbours and accept their crumbs of charity.  Moreover, Britain cannot be trusted to elect governments that will protect workers’ rights and prevent the vulnerable from being exploited.  Without the benign influence of Brussels, Britain would even now be a heartless capitalist hell-hole where climbing boys were sent up chimneys and old folk starved in the street, and if it left the EU, it would certainly get back to that stage in a few years.

Anyone who thought Britain would be better off outside Europe, or hadn’t got the deal it deserved inside, was a fantasist – a Little Englander nostalgic for the palmy days of Empire, for an all-white, stuffy, deferential Britain that never existed, or that was quite ghastly in so far as it did.  Moreover any such person was obviously a racist who detested anything foreign on principle.  To be anti-EU was to be anti-civilisation: it meant rejecting Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Monet, Beethoven, Proust, and even decent food in favour of suet puddings and warm beer. (Yes, according to A. A. Gill in The Times, the EU was responsible for bringing us European culture in its entirety, rather like the Party in Orwell’s 1984 giving itself credit for discovering electricity and inventing the steam engine.)

And furthermore, if Leave won the referendum the economy would tank, the pound in your pocket would become worthless, no one would trade with us, house prices would crash, the City of London that pays for the whole show would fold up its tents, expats would be bundled back home, and we wouldn’t be able to take holidays in Europe ever again.  And without all those nice Eastern Europeans willing to do tough jobs for wages that no Brit would accept, our old people would go uncared for, our fruit unpicked and our drains unfixed.  Barack Obama came over specially to tell us we’d be ‘at the back of the queue’ for any trade deal with the US of A.  The Eurocrats took particular pleasure in telling us that being such good friends of ours, they would turn every possible screw on us if we had the nerve to walk out.

Bizarre, ahistorical claims were made so often they became factoids.  The European Community/Union has kept the peace in Europe since World War II, we were repeatedly told.  By exactly the same people who I remember, back in the 1980s, laughing in the face of anyone who told them that the nuclear ‘balance of terror’ had kept the peace between Russia and America.  Correlation does not imply causation, they would say.  You might as well say that there are no polar bears in Piccadilly because a bloke is keeping them away by firing a shotgun.  Their present argument is on precisely the same level of logic but because they want to believe it, they can’t see that.  (In reality what has kept the peace in Europe is that no country in it can aspire to being a superpower any more.)  Similarly, we were told that Britain’s growth in prosperity since 1973 was due to our membership of the EU.  Nothing to do with Mrs Thatcher, then, or the Big Bang, or the end of the Cold War, or a generally growing world economy, or any of that stuff.  The liberalisation of society, the advancement of women and minorities, etc, etc, all obviously would have been impossible without that particular set of bureaucrats shuttling busily between Brussels and Strasbourg …

Underneath it all was an arrogant, sneering dislike and contempt for Britain (especially England) as such.  These right-thinking people were not just indifferent to the nation they had grown up in, they were actively hostile to it.  They didn’t want it to be ‘stronger in Europe’, they wanted it to be dissolved in Europe – for Europe to help them forget it ever existed.  Britain meant nothing to them except a discredited, imperialist past and an embarrassing, fudge-and-flummery present.  To be proud of your country, even to want it still to exist and provide you with an identity, was parochial, backward-looking and borderline racist.  This is why most bien-pensants supported Scottish independence two years ago, and are so gleeful at the fact that tearing Britain free from the European Union seems to come at the price of risking losing Scotland all over again.  Only the death of Britain will wipe out their shame: they want it cut in two and buried with a stake through its heart.

By class, education and occupation I am one of these people, but I don’t like them.  I am half Austrian and one quarter Irish and have Australian citizenship.  I don’t have to be British, but I choose to be.  The British national character is something real, not a fake, and I value it even though it drives me mad.  If these were the kind of people who were urging us to stay in the EU and those were the best reasons they could offer, I wanted no part of it.  Nick felt the same, and we both felt increasingly lonely at work and among our friends and families as everyone seemed to unite in scorn of the Brexit ‘quitters’, ‘bed-wetters’, ‘ignorant chavs’, ‘nutters’, ‘racists’, ‘haters’, ‘Little Englanders’ etc etc etc …

We both have PhDs from Cambridge and work at high professional levels, Nick as a statistician, I as an academic historian.  Between us we are fluent in three European languages (other than English).  We did not much like to be told that our opinions made us poor deluded proles, at best.  We gradually found out, though, that it wasn’t just us.  The Leave voters who shared their views with us are people whose sanity I would rate well above my own.  David, the chilled, humorous fortyish driving instructor who got all our children through their tests the first time, being working class, wasn’t shy about telling us how he was voting.  Michael, who is a hands-on father of four and the CEO of a fast-growing eco-building firm, who has worked his butt off to provide apprenticeships and training opportunities for teenagers, came out passionately for Leave as we put our books away after singing in the church choir.  Mary, a Yorkshire lady, the mother of one of my students, a teacher of adult literacy and numeracy classes at her local further education college, confided in me at her daughter’s graduation ceremony; I think if she had known what the average Cambridge academic’s opinion was likely to be, she might have kept quiet.  All these people are the sort who cheer you up when you meet them, and make you think the country has a future; solid, practical, effortlessly kindly, public-spirited without making a fuss about it; miles away from the angry, confused, alienated Leave voter of media myth.  Add to those the lay reader at church, a twinkly chap and a diplomat to his fingertips.  What a catch he would be for a pro-Brexit march; but he will never stand up for his vote in public, because it would be ‘divisive’.

And that is just the point.  In a very similar way to what happened at the general election last year, the opinion polls got it all wrong, because All the Right People had so seized the moral high ground that you would be hesitant to admit you were on the ‘wrong’ side, even to an anonymous pollster or your best friend.  Perhaps Remainers were well-off and Leavers poor, Remainers city types and Leavers small town or country, Remainers young and Leavers old … but an under-reported divide is Remainers noisy, Leavers quiet.  Remainers all over social media, creating the narrative; Leavers getting on with their jobs and sticking to the old-fashioned idea that their vote is between them and the ballot box.  (This was well expressed in a column in the Spectator by Emily Hill.)  There must have been some parts of the country where it was the Leavers who were making the noise, but it wasn’t the case around here.

The upshot was that nobody had the faintest idea that Leave was going to win.  I mean this quite literally.  Boris Johnson didn’t expect it: he hadn’t written a victory speech.  David Cameron didn’t expect it – he had no plan for a Leave vote, no more than anyone did on either side.  (Cameron seems to have promised the referendum imagining that it would be a cosmetic exercise, designed to show the Tory rebels that they had absolutely no mandate with the country.  Quelle surprise.)  I certainly didn’t expect it.  The opinion polls did have Leave edging ahead momentarily shortly before the referendum, but in the last day or two it slipped back again, and I thought that was that.  Caution and the status quo would prevail, just as they had in the Scottish referendum.  That being so, I made my mind up finally to vote Leave, because if the Leave vote was below 40% - as I quite expected it to be – no sort of message would be sent to Europe at all, except that Britain really was finished.  My biggest worry was letting down the Eastern European countries, and in a worst-case scenario, emboldening Russia to invade them.  But even as presently constituted, the EU doesn’t seem to offer much assurance that that won’t happen …

So we all voted, the whole family, for the first time, but in separate shifts. (I’m pretty sure the kids all voted Remain.  The EU is normal for them, it’s been around in its post-Maastricht form all their lives.  They think holidays and ERASMUS scholarships.  They haven’t seen the mission creep, the deception, the gradual stranglehold forming, the way that those of us who were around in 1975, for the first EU referendum, do. That makes their votes worth more than ours, of course, in the eyes of Remainers.  Long memories, experience and perspective, who needs them?)

I went to bed pretty cheerful, reckoning that breakfast time would be soon enough to find out how things had gone.  Just enough Leave votes to make a point and I would be satisfied.  But Nick couldn’t sleep, and got up at 2.30 a.m. and booted up his computer, waking me up in the process, and coming back to tell me that Leave was ahead.  Blimey.  He did it again at four and this time it was a cert.  Leave had won, and by a decisive margin.

It was a fine, sunny morning and very quiet.  We went outside and we both found ourselves thinking of the line ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive’.  Our nation had just got together and done something gloriously unexpected.  It had been so easy, after all, like pushing on an open door.  It reminded me of the scene in Terry Gilliam’s Baron Munchhausen movie where the Baron leads the townspeople out of the city gate and the enemy army that was besieging them has simply … gone.  Just melted away, as if it had never been.

…And then the howling started.  They hadn’t gone, after all.

If we thought we’d seen hatred and bile before, it was nothing to what came afterwards.  ‘Unfair! Unfair! We was robbed!’ wailed the entire Establishment.  The stitch-up had unravelled.  The cosmetic exercise had got out of hand.  They had listened only to each other and paid attention to the actual public too late.  Oh, how wise they were after the event – the referendum should never have happened, at least it should have been weighted towards the status quo, you can’t trust those ignorant people from council estates to inform themselves, to vote for the right reasons.  We demand a re-run! 

Well, if a retrospective stitch-up is applied and real Brexit never happens, at least the people have had a good chance to learn what the Establishment really thinks of them.

An excellent analysis here: http://ukandeu.ac.uk/why-britain-backed-brexit%e2%80%8f/.  This supports my hunch that Project Fear was counter-productive on this occasion, even though it worked – just – in the Scottish referendum.  The Remain campaigners, in the end, were old-fashioned economists who thought money was everything.  They thought that threatening people who are already badly off with being worse off as a result of voting Leave would work. From their ineffable height, they failed to realise that the poorer you are, the more – not less – your honour matters to you.  They hadn’t taken note of Fukuyama’s exposition of ‘megalothymia’, the need for a sense of self-worth.  Nor had they apparently heard of the games theorists’ experiment whereby you offer people the chance to join a game with you and win guaranteed prizes: they get a small proportion of the prize money and you get most of it, whereas if they refuse to play neither you nor they gets anything.  It has been consistently found that if you offer people only one or two per cent, even if the actual sum is very large and they are so poor that it will have a huge effect on their lives, they will have none of it.  Very few people will join the game for less than 25%.  The choice between having a few crumbs thrown your way, or a chance to send a complacent git about his business?  No contest!  Like the defendant in court who shouted ‘I don’t want to do myself any good, I want to do that b****r some harm!’

Nothing new here.  The dehumanisation of the poor, the failure to realise they have legitimate feelings as well as stomachs, has always been with us.  The extraordinary thing is the prevalence of this attitude among people who build their whole self-image around the idea that they care about the disadvantaged, that they are on the side of the underdog.  The increasing gap between rich and poor has wreaked its mischief on them without them even realising it.  It’s a high-danger moment for Western societies in general.  If the stake in society of the mass of the people falls below a certain level, they will disengage from the political process, and voter apathy in elections shows that this is already happening.  The Establishment, the people who run things, are beginning to respond in the standard manner of oligarchic elites by regarding the masses as the enemy within, as non-citizens who have to be ‘kept down’ rather than engaged.  If they don’t re-think and engage them, populism will grow crasser and nastier and the elite will have only itself to blame.

What astonished me even more, if possible, was the extraordinary level of risk-aversion manifested by people who at some level all espouse ‘revolutionary’ politics, who are all for embracing change and progress.  They all took it for granted that it was utter folly to rock the boat, to court a few years of turbulence for the sake of a greater good to come.  A week after the vote and the pound had lost 10% of its value against the dollar.  ‘What did we tell you?’ they shrieked, as though any Leave voter had expected that a U-turn after fifty years was not going to register with the money markets or cause so much as a ripple in a serene (?) economic sea.  It epitomised the ant-like Euro attitude.  Don’t deflect, don’t deviate, keep marching in the same direction, even if it’s towards the edge of a cliff.  Better all to get there together than try doing anything on your own!

A few days after the referendum, I had to stop saying anything about it on the internet under my own name for fear of upsetting a troubled family member.  This seemed a microcosm of the moral blackmail that the Remainers employ as their leading weapon.   There was a nasty outbreak of xenophobic and racist attacks in the days immediately after the referendum, or at least there was reported to be; unless it was simply that the normal trickle of bullies and yobs with a pretended cause could now use Brexit as a flag – or have it pinned on them regardless.  So of course as a Leave voter one had automatically voted for this and was an evil racist – the blackest of all evils in the left-liberal rulebook.  Was it such a wonder if the BBC managed to chase down a few people who were prepared to say they’d regretted their Leave votes – and imply on that basis that the result was illegitimate, because at least a million people probably hadn’t realised they were ‘voting for racism’, etc?  When thousands marched ‘against the referendum’ in London, I wanted to find out where you could march to respect the result.  Nowhere.  People like David, Michael, Mary and Rob, very much the ‘decent people’ of Nigel Farage’s much-mocked phrase, not the marching kind at the best of times, have been shamed into silence.  

The Blob are up to every trick in the book. 

Articles by Rod Liddle in the Sunday Times and various people in the Spectator and on spiked.online cheered us up to an extent.  As did this brilliant piece http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/2016/07/english-revolt by Robert Tombs, professor of French at Cambridge, which should at least give pause to all those weekend-trippers who claim that Eurosceptics know nothing of Europe.  There was also a surprisingly sympathetic and insightful analysis in French in a Figaro magazine I picked up at the airport.  (The one thing that really astonished me in this was the French perception that the British have a relaxed confidence and pride in their national identity!!!!  If only! What did not astonish me was that the article openly proclaimed that the EU had been created to give France a dominant role in post-war Europe – with quotes from De Gaulle et al. – even while mildly criticizing Britain for ‘unashamedly [or shamelessly?] pursuing its national interests’! ‘L’Europe des Six sera, selon le rêve du Général, le “levier d’Archimède” de la puissance française.’  And then the pro-EU types over here claim that popular British dislike of this French empire is just created by propaganda in the “Murdoch press”!!!)  Whatever happens now, as I said, the establishment has unmasked itself, the EU project has a major blow to its credibility, and a new and better kind of politics may be jolted into life.  But the Blob won’t give up that easily.  They are in charge of the universities, the schools, the councils, the public services, the quangos, and a large slice of industry.  They write the script.  At the moment the script says that not only the referendum result, but the Conservative government itself (democratically voted into power) has no legitimacy.  This anti-Establishment Establishment completely fails to see its own vested interests, though they have shown up quite a bit in the post-referendum kerfuffle.  

Of course all these disputes may be just rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic as Europe runs out of money and inexorably declines relative to China, opportunist Russia and rampant Islam … and America won’t be able to save it this time, itself in decline and moving towards isolationism as it fails to cope with its own deep internal divisions.  History – if there is any history of the rational, Enlightenment kind in the future, if those values don’t disappear from the earth – will surely judge the EU harshly, for commandeering and suffocating the true, quarrelsome, irrepressible virtues of Europe in the cause of a political fantasy, a myopic bureaucratic fortress that even relies on others to defend it.  ‘You can fence yourselves in, but you cannot forever fence the world out.’  But in the meantime we are in for interesting times.