The Brexit Miracle, Ten Years On
The American Conservative · R · trust 33/100
A book from one of the architects of Leave shows how accidents of circumstance and a few personalities determined the UK’s future.
Loading the Elevenlabs Text to Speech AudioNative Player... Ten Years On: The Untold Story of Brexit – Reflections on a Life of Campaigning , by Matthew Elliott
“Even now, people call the Brexit vote a victory for right-wing populism … They are right that Brexit was a victory for populism; they are wrong to think it was for the right-wing kind,” says Matthew Elliott in Ten Years On , which is certain to be the most insightful and honest telling of how Brexit happened. The referendum’s 10th anniversary passed in June; the day before, the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, resigned. This will mean that in 10 years we’ll have had seven heads of government.
So has Brexit broken Britain or did a broken Britain produce Brexit? Elliott was the chief executive of Vote Leave, the official campaign to get us out of the EU (I was a director), and we of course say that however Brexit happened, it’s a thoroughly good thing that it did. As now at least we can solve our own problems, and it won’t be the fault of furriners if we don’t. The age of political excuses is over, the time of finding out is begun.
Elliott’s book shows, with more candor and precision than anything I have seen anywhere else, how it was a generation of right-wing failure that brought us to this point. Failure of tactics, strategy, personnel, and even principles. I don’t know whether the idea that a vast conservative settlement, capable of sustained electoral success, but in fact being rotten to the core, is something Americans can appreciate, but let us see how Brexit over here looks over there.
Starmer’s departure was heralded by your president canvassing it on social media. Such are the ties of blood and comity between us that we were merely Truth Socialed, rather than Maduro’d. But even here, the departure of yet another lackluster PM is just what Jack Womack was aiming at in his dystopic sci-fi novel, Random Acts of Senseless Violence ; his 12-year-old prep-school protagonist is as blithely oblivious about that year’s fifth presidential assassination as any of the grown-ups are.
Adult indifference is the hallmark of the British state currently. When Starmer stood in front of Number 10 to resign, his words were drowned out by a fool called Steve Bray playing amplified music (in this instance, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy,” aka the EU’s national [sic] anthem). Bray has been a serial bore in Westminster since, you’ve guessed it, the referendum a decade ago.
Why can’t the British state stop a lout outside the Downing Street gates from disrupting prime ministerial press conferences? You’re maybe tempted to say, and in that precise tone of voice, “ nobody knows .” But of course everyone who cares does. It’s because although we’ve left the EU, we’ve remained welded to something called the ECHR , which was a piece of paper we wrote after the war to see if the Germans would mind awfully being slightly less so. We don’t need it, we shouldn’t be in it, the Tory Party now pretends it wants to quit it, but here we still are, after decade upon decade of Conservative failure to do anything conservative.
In short order, our next prime minister, a lackluster Scouser called Andy Burnham, who lost two Labour leadership elections, but won his third attempt in July because there wasn’t a contest, came to London on the train.
It might have surprised Americans to see just how little security there was for the PM-elect when he left Manchester, where he had been mayor, or on the train to the big smoke, or at Euston, the London station he arrived at, or for the humble black cab he took to parliament. Burnham, I regret to say, wears black tee-shirts , a la Ricky Gervais. This is a kind of faux-populist uniform for progressive time-servers here, and as such, unknown garb for Lord Elliott, as Matthew now is.
Three men were indispensable to winning the referendum 10 years ago: Elliott, who drew the Leave campaign together, and perhaps still more important, kept it more or less united; Boris Johnson, then the outgoing mayor of London, and at the time, the country’s most popular celebrity, never mind politician; and Jeremy Corbyn, the IRA-loving , antisemite-enabling leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
Of these three, the greatest, in the cause of Brexit winning, was Corbyn, then Labour leader and a longtime skeptic of the EU. As Elliott rightly notes, any other Labour leader would have wanted Remain to win, and, unlike Corbyn, who polled dismally, would have had the popularity to add something to the pro-EU campaign. But God decided that what Britain needed in 2016 was a Marxist crank who would do that final piece of heavy lifting the British right would have been quite incapable of doing on its own.
So that’s how the referendum was won, but how did we get to having one in the first place?
Britain does a good trick in politically seeming ancient and rooted, when in fact we’re trivial, untrue to ourselves, and—I say this clinically—spastically reckless.
That the referendum on British membership of the EU happened at all was one such instance. It was our third national referendum—the first had been in 1975, as a device by the wily then Labour PM, Harold Wilson, to keep the UK in the EEC, to which it had acceded in 1973, and manage his own party, which mostly disliked that fact.
Our second national referendum was in 2011, on whether we should fundamentally change our voting system, from majoritarian first-past-the-post single-member districts being the basis of our parliamentary system of government to a dismal thing called AV. This was the coalition price Liberal leader Nick Clegg demanded of his coalition-partner David Cameron, after the latter failed to win the 2010 general election (against Gordon Brown, the most unpopular PM in history up to that point).
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