‘Bliss was it at that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!’ (William Wordsworth on the French Revolution).
I WAS certainly not young on that morning on June 24, 2016, but as my whisky-fogged brain and sleep-deprived body walked along Whitehall on the way back from Parliament Square that Friday morning I did feel a sense of exhilaration. Although I had campaigned for Leave and helped finance Martin Durkin’s Brexit the Movie, I did not expect we would win, especially after the terrible murder of MP Jo Cox during the final days of the campaign. Even so, I couldn’t resist staying up to watch the result with a bottle of the hard stuff to drown my sorrows. As the results from first Newcastle and then Sunderland came in, it was clear that Leave was in with a chance, and I dared myself to hope. Once the result was announced, I immediately wrote an article for TCW that matched the mood of what the MP, Gisele Stuart, would subsequently call that ‘unfrozen moment’ when anything seemed possible but is painful to revisit now. Bunking off work, I went down to Parliament Square where the atmosphere was euphoric as the day was historic. We had done it! Two builders cheered and waved a Union Jack from the back of a flat-bed trunk rushing towards Millbank: the little people had beaten the elites – or so we thought. On the way back, I remember seeing the Australian flag flying from a building and thinking of the new, potentially Anglospheric future my children would be blessed to live in: the rebirth of Britain as an ancient free-trading nation that could combine its deep sense of history and traditions with modernity, rebinding itself to its kindred throughout the world.
This blog is written in the first-person singular style because Brexit and its aftermath was deeply personal to me, as I imagine it to many of you: I had always hated the EU from my teens due to my revulsion at the Common Agricultural Policy, and long before Maastricht it was obvious for those who cared to look that the direction of travel was inevitably towards an anti-democratic European super-state. Since joining TCW I had written much on the subject and in the months following the referendum, as it was plain that Brexit was being betrayed, wrote a great deal more. As Remain turned first into Remoan and then to an ever more self-confident move to Rejoin, a sense of outrage and increasing desperation grew among Brexiteers. Like many on the Leave side I was so angry and aghast at the betrayal it was causing me sleepless nights. People even started to talk openly of civil war.
I must admit that initially I was no fan of the idea of a referendum, being rather cynical about the capacity of people to take an interest and judging that almost always on such occasions people tended to be scared into sticking with the status quo, as indeed they had done in the previous referendum in what was then the Common Market in 1975. What a hypocrite I was – hating the EU’s imperial ambitions but not really trusting the people to make the right decision. That said, not long after the campaign got underway, I revised my thinking. All through the campaign Remain looked like they were going to win, but I was deeply humbled and impressed by observing the way that ordinary people diligently went about their solemn democratic duty. Brexit was truly being discussed everywhere – in pubs, at work, on public transport, at home and online. It impressed upon me that people will really rise to the challenge if they feel they are genuinely empowered to do so and are only apathetic if they feel disenfranchised, which makes the subsequent betrayal by the elites even more disgusting.
The second thing Brexit taught me – indeed taught us all – was that our elites and political class were truly rotten – venal, arrogant, cynical, contemptuous and profoundly anti-democratic. Very few realised just how deep the rot had gone, and in the first few days following the vote we naïvely expected our representatives to honour the democratic mandate of the people. Within a very short time we were to be disabused: Leave voters were castigated as ‘bigots, ‘racists’, ‘thick’ and ‘low information’ by people leading gilded lives, who had plainly never lost before and weren’t going to take it lying down. Moreover, the problem wasn’t simply a domestic one: those of us who thought that talk about the globalist ‘New World Order’ was best left to those wearing tin foil hats were forced to concede otherwise as their supposedly mad conspiracy theories crystallised into fact before our eyes: British MPs, elected as guardians of our democracy, instead saw it as their job to openly conspire against their own country, travelling to Brussels to encourage the EU to take as hard a line as possible in what can only be called acts of treason. The elites were in open revolt against the people: Brexit lifted a stone and shone sunlight on a deeply morally corrupt political class and if it achieved nothing else, we should be thankful for it achieving that. From that moment onwards, it became apparent to me that the way the world was architected, with its exceptionally powerful global networks of influence and governance, meant that the purely representative model of democracy had had its day, and only a Swiss-style system of direct democracy could hope to adequately represent the people going forward – a belief I still hold to this day.
Thirdly, Brexit taught me that great events, far from being determined by the great tides and flux of history – a man’s ‘swarm life’ as Tolstoy wrote in War and Peace – can at critical points turn on extremely individual and chance occurrences. In 2019, during the great drama of the third meaningful vote on Theresa May’s doomed withdrawal agreement, the leaders of the European Research Group (ERG), Jacob Rees-Mogg and Steve Baker, faced an impossible moral dilemma: accept the terms and trap Britain in the EU’s orbit with no escape, or vote down the bill and Brexit may not happen at all. Both Baker and Rees-Mogg agreed with deep reluctance to advise the ERG to accept the terms and vote for the bill. However, quite by accident Baker then met his fellow Brexiteer spartan Suella Braverman, who inquired about what he was going to advise. Her look of disgust so quailed Baker he did a volte-face and advised the ERG to stick to its guns, leaving Rees-Mogg politically stranded. The ERG followed Baker’s line and voted down the bill.
Much similar drama centred around Boris Johnson, who famously wrote two draft Daily Telegraph articles the night prior to the beginning of the referendum campaign – one for Remain and one for Leave. Had the highly articulate and charismatic Boris decided to plump for Remain, it is very doubtful that Leave would have won. However, had he not become infatuated with the then Carrie Symonds – later dubbed ‘Carrie Antoinette’ due to her regal sense of entitlement to influence her by then husband on government policy – then Johnson may have made far better success of Brexit. Instead, we got the biggest Brexit betrayal of them all – the post-covid ‘Boris Wave’ of truly unimaginable and nightmarish migration inflows.
So, was it all worth it? Despite all the drama, pain and passion of the Brexit years, it seems a dead, grey thing now. As Brexit has receded into the distance, it has been eclipsed by the even greater betrayals and horrors of a still intransigent political class that continues to govern in defiance of its people, changing the country out of all recognition through mass immigration and committing ever more authoritarian outrages against them. In the process it has severely crippled the Conservative Party and almost certainly the Labour Party. In their wake new political forces have risen, but despite increasing civil unrest the often-predicted civil war has so far failed to break out. After all the dashed hopes of that last decade, the public seemed instead gripped by a grim fatalism and resignation that the country is passing, or has already passed, the point of no return.
But yes, it was all worth it: ultimately, the lesson of Brexit was that, as flawed and painful as it was, by sheer persistence and bloody-mindedness we did at least leave the EU in the end, which is now in an even worse state than we are, cold comfort that that may be. As dismal and fated as things may seem presently, Brexit teaches us the lesson to ‘keep buggering on’, as Churchill put it. Who knows how the wheel may spin again in the years to come, allowing us another chance to free the country we love from the tyrannical grip of the elites and to resurrect the courage, vision and hope that defined the best spirit of the Brexit years.
‘Til Brexit rises again!
