Transcription
Which words come to mind when you think about Brexit? Boredom, pride, fury, hope. For me, the word is, and it's going to sound a little odd, sacred. Brexit for me is sacred. I say that because of my late wife. She died relatively young, certainly much too young for our six children. And a couple of years after the Brexit vote, which meant so much to her, Joe was a Brexiteeer, not an obvious one.
As a student, she'd been pretty left-wing, a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, no less. And although she moved towards the center ground of politics over the years, she retained a respect for hardcore socialists like Tony Ben, the one-time Labour cabinet minister and Euroskeepic. And that meant when she and I lived in Brussels, where I worked for a few years, she looked at the massive collection of blue flag DU buildings in the city, not with awe or respect or affection, but with suspicion. Why? Because of Tony Ben. It can feel hard to believe now, but time was when lots of the British left wanted to leave the European Union. They saw it as a capitalist con.
So when the Brexit vote happened, Joe saw no contradiction in Labour voters voting to leave. She never wasted an opportunity to speak out for Brexit and loved the idea that however briefly democracy mattered again, that millions of people were suddenly talking about politics at supermarket checkouts in offices when people still went to them or in the pub. I think like a lot of people, she and I were a little bit radicalized by the Brexit campaign. Some friends were lost, but a sharper understanding of how Britain worked for better or worse was gained. In particular, we both objected strongly to the stereotyping of Brexit voters as as wicked, low IQ xenophobes. If you voted leave, you will know exactly what I mean. the slurs, the smears, not just the project fear, but the attempt to paint often longheld and settled opinions as an ephemeral spasm of stupidity or racism. You will have been scolded, I certainly was, by remainers who told you, still tell you, how millions of people voted leave based on a lie. It was, they insist, all about the Boris bust, the slogan which went, "We send the EU350 million a week. let's fund our NHS instead." The idea that 17.4 million Britons voted for Brexit because of a bit of Boris overpromising is intellectually insolvent. It's absurd and it's deeply insulting.
People like my late wife weren't voting to leave because of some campaigning sophistry days before the poll. They were voting to leave because given the choice, they would have done so for years. because for years they'd seen the way the EU had enlarged, had ignored national votes against its federalizing ambitions, had become deeply anti-democratic, and frankly borderline corrupt. We didn't vote Brexit because we were taken in at the last minute by a blonde chancellor making a vow he couldn't keep. We voted Brexit because we believed had believed for years that the nation state was is the irreducible unit of governance.
So why sacred for me? Because of 2018. In spite of the people voting in greater numbers than ever before for Brexit, MPs were dragging their feet in parliament that year. Theresa May kept saying Brexit means Brexit, but nobody really knew what she meant, least of all her. But that spring, a withdrawal deal of sorts with the EU was agreed. And that was when, as Joe and I walked back to the car after one particularly promising hospital CT scan, she turned to me in the car park and she said, "I might just live to see Brexit." It meant that much to her. It meant an awful lot to her. Well, sadly the scan turned out to be a red herring. Within a few weeks, she was gone. But in the years that have followed, I've always remembered her words and belief in Brexit.
So sacred, then as we approach the 10th anniversary of Brexit next month, the remainers are back on the march. For them, Brexit wasn't sacred. It was stupid. An act of national self harm. They say the world's moved on since the vote a decade ago. Trump, Ukraine, Iran, a favorite remainer barb is that the people who voted to leave were old, didn't deserve a stake in the future, and are now dying off in sufficiently large numbers to give remain a majority if the referendum were rerun. This is the sort of thing I'm talking about. In this case, on Twitter, I posted uh this week that I thought it was a mistake for Labour to reopen the Pandora's box of Brexit. Uh this was one of the replies I got that if the Brexit vote was to happen now, the result would be different because Brexiteeers, to put it delicately, have fallen off the electoral register. Well, all I can say is that my late wife didn't go to her early grave thinking Brexit was a glitch or a temporary fix. She believed what she and the rest of us were told that the result of the biggest vote in British history would be honored, not ditched within a decade.
Instead, as we've now learned, Brexit has become a tactical instrument in the hands of Labor leadership rivals. Labour has shown this week what it really thinks about Brexit. And it's a very, very long way from what Tony Ben once believed. Because Labour, having ditched its workingclass red wall, is now the party of metropolitan liberal remainers. And the temptation to reach out a desperate hand in search of their political affections proved too much for one Labor hopeful to resist. This was worth streeting this week. >> Leaving the European Union was a catastrophic mistake. >> Well, at least he was being honest. No more euphemisms about closer alignment with European partners. This plain speaking is what many Labour Party members wanted to hear. They've been saying so privately for years. Saying so when it was of no consequence. Take Andy Burnham when it didn't matter so much when he was happy to jog on as a provincial politician. He was honest about what he really thought about Brexit. This is what he said last year. >> I I would I want to rejoin. I hope in my lifetime I see this country rejoin the European Union. I'm absolutely clear. >> Now Mr. Bernham has changed his mind. He's planning an upgrade from mayor of Manchester to prime minister of the whole country. The road to number 10 requires him to become an MP and the constituency is standing in Makerfield voted heavily for Brexit. Q reversing ferrets this week. Guess what? Andy Bernham is not planning to rejoin the EU anymore. It's off the table for now. Or so he says. Here's a prediction. Whether it's Burnham Streeting or Starmer in Downing Street, Labour will contest the next general election on a promise to rejoin the EU. They've been building up to it for years. And such is the mess they've made of the country that they need to find something, some sort of manifesto alchemy that can galvanize their failing support, steal a few lib dem and green votes and help them avoid the polling booth oblivion they so richly deserve. And it will be to Europe they turn.
Something else. Brexit for a failing government like this one has become the go-to punch bag. An Aunt Sally, the ultimate get out clause. Productivity falling, blame Brexit. Unemployment and inflation rising, blame Brexit. Any bump in the road will do. Blame Brexit. Everything from unfixed potholes to a shortage of laggera, I'm not joking, has been at some point in recent years attributed to the failures of Brexit related supply chains. It's the sort of thing we saw under lockdown. Businesses would cancel services because of COVID. Brexit is much the same, an excuse for when things don't go to plan and you need someone, something to carry the can. Under Labor, that displacement activity is now in full swing. Rachel Reeves, far from growing the economy as she said she would, found that guess what? Increasing national insurance and the minimum wage and taxes has had the effect of tanking the economy. Labour started out by blaming this financial mess on the last lot, on the Tories. But when that didn't work, they've moved the blame game onto Brexit. Suddenly, all the talk of late has been of striking deals with Brussels, of stronger economic ties. Until this week, nobody has said out loud that Brexit was being unwound. They preferred to say things like working more closely with our European neighbors. But the direction of travel has become crystal clear. And now, thanks to the likes of Streeting and Burnham, they've gone public. Labor is ready to relitigate Brexit. And they've also decided to weaponize Brexit against their new mortal enemy, Nigel Farage. Take this tweet from Labour headquarters earlier this year. It said, "You can't trust Nigel Farage. He's got a track record of selling the British people false promises." But the bus they used to make this point had nothing to do with Nigel Farage. I mentioned the bus earlier. It was part of the Boris Johnson vote leave campaign which was completely separate from Nigel Farage's leave.eu campaign. But Labour calculate that people have forgotten the details of what happened in 2016. That many of the people who fought the Brexit wars have died off and that people who were too young to vote in 2016 will swallow any old lie about who did what when.
Because though they will never admit it, Labour and their remainer fellow tra fellow travelers hold to one assumption as if it were holy writ. And it's this, that people were duped into voting for Brexit because they were lashing out at other things and were too intellectually feeble to understand what was at stake. This patronizing view of levers ignores the fact that many of those who voted Brexit knew that subject inside out and spent much of the first half of 2016 talking frankly about little else. And just on that point, in my two decades at Sky TV, I lost count of the times my journalistic colleagues lamented the apathy of the British electorate. After a bi-election, for instance, where turnout was, as it often is, was pretty anemic. There would be anguished conversations in the newsroom about how to get folk engaged again with the democratic process. I'd interview guests on screen about the merits of things like compulsory voting or lowering the voting age. Nothing seemed to work until Brexit. And then of course the hand ringing was for a different reason. My old colleagues at Sky could scarcely believe what had happened when ordinary members of the public turned out to be very engaged with politics when it really mattered. And by the way, there were tears in the Sky TV newsroom on the morning of June the 24th, 2016 when that Brexit result became clear. The mainstream media were incredulous, dumbfounded, dismayed. the country, not the big university cities in London, but the other country that journalists don't often get to see, they had turned out for Brexit in unimaginable numbers. And they done so in spite of the best efforts of the media, big business, and the political establishment to paint Brexit in the darkest possible light.
Remainers also believe that as well as being stupid, levers are fickle. They think many Brexiteers have learned to regret their mistake. Here the picture is more mixed. But if you look at the latest polling and when you consider how everything that could be blamed on Brexit has been, then I think the Brexit vote is holding up remarkably well. The latest Yuggov poll showed that 55% of voters favored rejoining. It's not that different from the 48% who voted to stay in in the first place. To those people, that relatively small number of levers who have recanted and lost faith in Brexit, I want to say this. Please make a mental note. The next time someone says to you, Brexit has been a waste of time and money and we should go back in, please consider these facts.
First, rejoining the EU would be a nightmare. We would join as a new entrant, a new member, and that would mean adopting the euro as a currency. The Margaret Thatcher rebate would be gone and our annual membership fee, what we would pay to Brussels for the privilege of joining a rapidly declining economic block, would be colossal. Back in 2020, it was 12.6 billion pounds. Today, it would be far higher. Remember, the EU is still expanding, still taking in poorer countries. Ukraine, brave Ukraine, poor Ukraine, is one such nation to have started negotiating membership. So no more Thatcher rebates, nor any of the opt outs we once enjoyed, like the one negotiated by John Major, which kept us out of the Shenan agreement. Were we to go back in, we would have to accept the free movement of EU nationals, theoretically giving half a billion people the right to live and claim benefits here. Many of them Europeans in name only last month in Spain for instance. Spain granted an amnesty to at least half a million mainly African undocumented migrants. Were we still part of the EU, they could all come to the UK? I remember reporting from Leicester more than a decade ago from a part of the city which had recently become home to many thousands of Somalians. I assumed they'd come from Somalia until it was explained that actually while originally from Somalia, many had entered the EU after living in the Netherlands. They were later drawn to the Somalian diaspora in the UK, not least because of the British benefit system. It's more generous than the Dutch one.
Perhaps most importantly of all, and this is often overlooked, by leaving when we did, we've avoided all the things Brussels has subsequently forced onto member states since we left. Do you think all that stuff that got the goat of euroskeptics, the ever closer union, the European superstate? Do you think any of that has stopped or gone backwards while we've been gone? Quite the contrary, in our absence, in the absence of a country that acted as a break on the worst instincts of a fanatical European Commission, it's got worse. But we've avoided all that because we got out. Romaniacs think none of this matters. That the EU would be so desperate for us to rejoin that they'd give us a special deal, the old rebates restored, and opt out from free movement reinserted. wishful thinking. Brexit was an existential threat to the whole EU project. It spawned talk of other nations leaving. Brexit, you'll remember, was a name given to the far-flung idea of even France pulling the plug. Back when Britain was in the EU, we were forever grumbling about it. We were we would be again a destabilizing force, and they know it, especially if we had to have another referendum to go back in. And by the way, people like Burnham, who argued for a second referendum on Brexit, could hardly deny one if the boot was on the other foot, and he planned to take us back in. Given all that, I think Brussels would rather give us a swerve.
Other than no longer being on the EU expressed oblivion, what else have we achieved by unhitching from the Brussels locomotive? Trade deals. It seems pretty deal, but it pretty dull, but it's really important. trade deals like the partnership we signed this week. This week after five years of talks with the Gulf States, this stuff really matters. It's a trade deal worth3.7 billion pounds, loads of jobs, business between Britain and countries like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Dubai, all that stuff expected to rise by a fifth as a result of this trade deal. A fifth. Karma was so pleased to have some good news to report that he even penned a piece in the Times this week in praise of this massive deal. But he couldn't bring himself to mention Brexit, the thing that had made it possible for the UK to negotiate such a lucrative agreement in the first place. Well, then there have been the freedoms that have allowed us to follow our own path on things like COVID vaccines or life science gene editing or AI. The critics will say, "What about the lost trade with Europe that we forfeit? What about the Boris wave which meant that having gained control over who came here, we then let everybody in?" Well, it would be folly to ignore the mistakes of the Brexit decade, but silly too to say they were just the fault of Brexit. I will be forever indebted to Boris Johnson for delivering Brexit. My late wife would have been too. But quite why Boris decided to open the immigration floodgates in the way he did remains. To borrow the words of Winston Churchill, whose biography Johnson wrote, "A mystery inside a riddle wrapped inside an enigma." But before we throw Boris under his own bus, let's remember this. The civil service blob aided and abetted by the mainstream media did everything they could to styy a successful Brexit. And having already said that too often people use CO as an excuse, let me now use CO as an excuse. We officially left the European Union on January the 31st, 2020. Less than two months later, two months on March the 23rd, we had our first lockdown. The Brexit butterfly never got the chance to exit the chrysalis.
Let me finish where I began with this idea. this awful idea that some remainers harbor, that Brexit was the fantasy of dying men, or in the case of my late wife, women who foisted a seismic change on an electorate who were hoodwinkedked or simply not clever enough to know any better. Well, we weren't fooled, and whether alive or no longer with us, we knew what we were doing. We got our chance to vote, and we took it. It wasn't about money or the Boris bus or the NHS. It was about freedom. And yes, having been in the EU and its predecessor for 47 years, those freedoms will take time to crystallize. In my opinion, it will be worth the wait. Nobody put this better than one of my favorite old men, Michael Kaine, now 93, who swam against the tide of thespian opinion when he said the words you're about to hear. Bye for now. I voted for Brexit. I look at it in the final thing and I tell you what it is with me is I'd rather be a poor master than a rich servant. You know, politics is always chaotic because in politics, you're always going into areas where you've never been before. So, you're going to get lost and then you're going to find your way and then it'll be all right.