The great complacency: what Cameron unleashed

Nine years ago this week, on 23 January 2013, David Cameron announced that the UK would hold an In-Out referendum if he was returned to power at the next election. That speech led ultimately to his own political demise. We are now quite likely to have the fourth Tory Prime Minister in seven years.

I watched his speech in a hotel room in St Moritz where I was skiing with an old foreign correspondent friend, the Guardian‘s Martin Walker. I turned to him and said “We’re f****d!”

I went home and wrote a book: Brexit. Why Britain Will Leave Europe. The establishment media refused to take my thesis seriously. I gave Jim Naughtie a copy of my book and he assured me an invitation to appear on Today would follow. I am still waiting. The centre-Right Standpoint (then edited by Daniel Johnson, now editor of TheArticle) published my Brexit thesis, but other editors were part of the great complacency — that Britain would not vote to leave the EU.

Every editor, MP, diplomat, and heads of all think-tanks (with the exception of Charles Grant of the Centre of European Reform) patted me on the head and said it wouldn’t happen.

It did. Here are ten guilty men and women who ensured we left Europe.

1) Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. Blair made endless pro-EU speeches on the Continent but never in Britain. Brown’s associates briefed endlessly against the EU. The Treasury blocked nearly all EU directives that helped protect British workers.

2) David Cameron and William Hague. As Tory leader after 1997 Hague chose to turn the Tories into an anti-EU party, hoping that would derail Blair. He called for referendums on minor, long forgotten EU Treaties and made the idea of a referendum on Europe central in UK politics. Cameron ordered the first political Brexit when he cut all links with centre-right Conservative parties in Europe. Neither he nor Hague, later his Foreign Secretary, found a good word to say about EU membership between 2005 and early 2016, when Cameron suddenly realised that trashing the outfit he wanted the UK to stay in was not smart politics. Too late.

3) Nick Clegg. The Lib Dems regularly called for an In-Out referendum. Paddy Ashdown and Charles Kennedy were referendum obsessives. In coalition, Clegg did nothing to block Cameron’s plebiscite commitment.

4) The BBC and the liberal press. The Guardian comment pages were full of articles by Sir Simon Jenkins, the cleric Giles Fraser and the rising young Leftist commentator, Owen Jones, attacking Europe. Jones called for a “Lexit”, a Left-wing Brexit. The BBC put Nigel Farage, a populist who failed consistently ever to win election as an MP, on Question Time no fewer than 33 times in the run-up to the referendum. No other MEP who told the truth about Europe was on Question Time more than once or twice.

5) The Labour Party. Ed Miliband was pro-European, but his shadow cabinet had plenty from the Gordon Brown tradition of Treasury opposition to any efforts by the EU to limit the damage of ultra-liberal Davos-style “Get Rich” capitalism. The Left of the Labour Party, headed by Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell, were still living in the Tony Benn world of Europe as a giant capitalist plot to do down workers. They did so even as evidence mounted that in many EU member states, workers and unions enjoyed more rights, better pay and a greater say in the running of their firms than was the case after 13 years of Labour rule in Britain.

6) The CBI. I went to talk to the CBI and British Chambers of Commerce to beg them to talk to their employees directly about the damage Brexit would cause. The business outfits — mostly pro-Remain — refused, arguing this was a political matter and they did not want to get involved in politics.

7) The Remain campaign. The campaign was put together by City PR experts who had absolutely no idea about the needs and worries of especially workers and voters in what we now call Red Wall seats. They had been told all this century that Europe was about immigration. Now they had their chance to vote against immigrants — a demand first raised by Enoch Powell in the last century. They could also vote against the Tory-LibDem clique who imposed austerity on Britain after 2010 and punished Red Wall voters to ensure tax cuts for the middle classes in the South of England.

8) The failure to manage people movement. Other countries had more EU immigrant workers arriving than the UK, but they were properly controlled with ID cards, workplace inspections, deportation after 3 months if they failed to have jobs, more training for young citizens. Britain had the most deregulated labour market in Europe, leaving millions angry at not having a decent job and taking the chance to vote in June 2016 to punish London elites they held responsible.

9) Boris Johnson welcomed Cameron’s 2013 announcement saying: “This is a chance to get a great deal for Britain which would mean lopping off some of the brambles that have grown up around the European project — but keeping us firmly in the single market.” The lie that voting to quit Europe would keep Britain in the Single Market was widely propagated by pro-Brexit MPs. It lulled voters into a false sense of security that a mainly anti-immigrant vote would be cost-free.

10) If Lord North lost America, David Cameron lost Europe. Now the political class is united in not challenging Brexit. Labour says there is no question of seeking Single Market access for the next 50 years. Cameron’s Brexit plebiscite offer has changed Britain more than any other development outside wartime in the last 200 years.

Denis MacShane is the former Minister for Europe and author of Brexiternity: The Uncertain Fate of Britain (IB Tauris-Bloomsbury).

A Message from TheArticle

We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every angle. We have an important contribution to make, one that’s needed now more than ever, and we need your help to continue publishing throughout the pandemic. So please, make a donation.