Rejoiners accuse Brexiteers of lying, while spreading their own mistruths. But slowly and quietly, Britain is turning towards the future
Source - Daily Telegraph - 16/06/23
Seven years after we voted Leave, Remainers finally got rid of the man they and their EU allies blame personally for Brexit. There rises a great cry … Of what? Of triumph? No, more a vindictive gloat. Whatever Boris Johnson’s manifold faults – and I find it hard to forgive his waste of a historic political opportunity – the language of his opponents tells us much about what has been going on over those seven years and these last weeks.
The arguments some of them are coming up with are more revealing than they perhaps intend. Matthew Syed in The Sunday Times diagnosed “the psychological state of the UK” as “doublethink” (“to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies”) – then, with a comical lack of self-awareness, blames a whole list of things on Brexit which he must know have no connection with it. Martin Kettle in The Guardian lets slip that the tarring and feathering of Johnson by the Committee on Privileges is “fundamentally about Brexit”. Oh, so it’s not just about whether he misled Parliament, then. It’s about reversing Brexit, says Kettle. Isn’t that what Johnson and his supporters claim?
To explain Brexit as all down to Boris Johnson (Syed thinks he “cast a spell” over the electorate) shows an amazingly superficial understanding of the politics of the last seven and more years. Do they comprehend nothing of the deep causes, both domestic and international, of the 2016 vote? Nothing about falling support for the EU right across Europe, which led to No votes in referendums in France, the Netherlands, Ireland, Denmark, Sweden and Greece?
I’m reminded of a rather grand Remainer in Cambridge who assured me that she at last understood Brexit because her gardener and cleaning lady had explained it. Perhaps the anti-Brexit pundits might try asking theirs.
There is a psychological process at work when vocal Remainers accuse their political opponents of precisely what they themselves are guilty of – “doublethink” and untruthfulness. It’s an ego-defence mechanism called “projection”; or in common language, the Kettle calling the pot black. There have indeed been plenty of what Remainers love to call “lies”, but they have been almost entirely on the Remainer/Rejoiner side. On the Leave side, the example they come up with time and time again is the famous Vote Leave bus. Compare that with the torrent of false assertions that have been made over seven years by Remainers, and which are still being made.
I don’t like throwing around accusations of lying. Let us just say that prominent Remainers are not merely economical with the truth: they show a Scrooge-like parsimoniousness with it. It began with “Project Fear”: threatening an immediate recession, mass unemployment, an emergency budget, and huge tax increases. There followed years of cherry-picked pessimism spiced with whoppers so huge that, if they were not deliberate untruths, they prove a breathtaking degree of ignorance both by those uttering them and those believing them.
My favourite is the reported statement by the Remainer ex-MP Heidi Allen (remember her?) who claimed that eight million people – a quarter of the total workforce! – would lose their jobs. In fact, employment increased by over a million. Later came the statement by the former governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, that Brexit had shrunk the economy by a considerable margin in comparison with the German one. But, in truth, Britain had been growing faster than Germany, and still is. The Tory MP Tobias Ellwood has been repeating for at least a year, despite being corrected, that Brexit has caused a 4 per cent hit to the economy.
On BBC Question Time on June 1, Lord Patten, chancellor of Oxford and hence a man whom one would expect to weigh his words, produced a string of inaccuracies: for example, that due to Brexit the UK is now poorer than Lithuania, and the poorest in Britain are poorer than their equivalent in Poland. Even cursory research would have disproved these statements. Per capita GDP in Lithuania is around half that of the UK when measured in dollars, and the poorest in Poland are around 20 per cent worse off than their British equivalent.
Those making such statements – and these are but a small sample – are evidently not idiotic people. But they are at best culpably ignorant. Remainers/Rejoiners are reckless with the truth. They pour vitriol over Johnson for misleading the Commons over partygate, but they grossly mislead the country over the greatest political issue of our time, and they do so apparently with a light heart.
How can one explain this “doublethink”? I am not sure that I can. But I would suggest some possible components. One is intellectual and social arrogance. Another is that the real issue for them is not the advantages and disadvantages of EU membership, of trade relationships, diplomacy and the rest. It is a struggle for political and cultural power, and (as Kettle actually put it in his article in The Guardian) to “take back control”.
From whom? From the people, of course. So facts are secondary, certainly facts about the EU, about which enthusiastic Rejoiners seem to know and care little. As the philosopher John Gray put it, “they think of themselves as embodiments of reason, facing down the ignorant passions of the unwashed rabble”, and to do so they create “a dangerous myth, in which the EU is a semi-sacred institution”. Hence, capable of miracles and immune to criticism.
Why worship at this tarnished shrine? We should not underestimate personal interest, vanity, the weight of routine, and even convenience (not wanting to queue en route to the mas in Aquitaine). The economist Sir Paul Collier suggests too that “Europeanism” is a way for the relatively privileged to shrug off their responsibilities to poorer citizens.
More broadly, it is taking a huge effort – more than we Leavers realised – to turn what one analyst categorises as a “member state” (where the political class derives power and legitimacy from its counterparts in the other states) back into a “nation state” (where power and legitimacy come from the citizens). Rejoiners do not want, or are afraid, to become a nation state again. But they are incapable of making a rational case for EU membership, so they resort to mistruths and accuse their opponents of lying – that ego-defence of projection.
Meanwhile, back on Planet Earth, there are still a few politicians trying to make Brexit work in practical matters, and a few experts (not the sort dismissed by Michael Gove) supporting them. They have to wade against a tide of “progressive” opinion, the inertia of much of the Civil Service and the groupthink of academe, and of course the understandable strategy of the EU to make it as hard as possible – a strategy that influential Rejoiners have all along abetted, as Michel Barnier’s published diaries reveal.
Nevertheless, there is some progress, political and economic. Long before Brexit, our trade was moving steadily away from Europe, and hence our political and security focus too. Aukus is a post-Brexit recognition of a new alignment. So are the recent favourable trade treaty with Australia and the announced accession to the Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP). We are starting to unravel EU law.
However slow it seems, there is coherence here and a turn towards the future. It makes a retrograde policy, pining for a European vision that had faded long before Brexit, ever more chimerical. Destroying Boris won’t change reality.
Robert Tombs is the author most recently of This Sovereign Isle: Britain In and Out of Europe
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