Yes, remainers are culpable

By Pete North - July 7, 2020

Following the EU referendum, we saw huge pro-EU demonstrations. I won’t say they were astro-turf because they were attended by ordinary people with sincerely held views. But mobilising repeated demonstrations such as those could only have happened from within the establishment.

One of the reasons we had a Ukip party was because the right have never been able to mobilise large gatherings of people. We simply don’t have the organisational infrastructure. But with remain largely having dominance over universities, unions and civil society institutions, they have a head start.

From the the very first moment they declared their opposition to Brexit and their intention to overturn the referendum. By way of having a parliament largely sympathetic to their cause, it was within their grasp.

What they failed to appreciate was that the 2016 referendum didn’t just pop up on a whim in 2015. It was the result of movement building over twenty years, doing all the things that democratic participants are supposed to do. To have then overturned a result because a minority of demonstrators and their sympathetic MPs didn’t like the result would have set a very ugly precedent.

It would have said that democratic participation was a waste of time and that any decision made by the people was subject to supervision by their middle class betters. We’d have had our objective dangled in front of us then snatched away by a small minority who had used their inherent institutional influence, without putting the ground work in, to nullify twenty years of intensive political activism. By that point leavers were deeply invested in our achievement.

Heedless of this, remainers set about killing off Brexit. Some prominent remainers paid lip service to compromise but their main stream of activity was still of open defiance. In the meantime we saw various remainer elite luminaries trotting off to Brussels to beg Verhofstadt to make Brexit hurt more. At some point it stopped being an anti-Brexit movement and became a full on middle class revolt against democracy. Even now the intensity of the bile and venom has not let up. Just this morning I’ve been accused of being some sort of sub-human monster.

From that point any kind of consensus was impossible. We’d seen rich lawyers doing all they could to delay and derail, blocking motions in parliament, and cynical campaigns to delegitimise the vote itself. They turned a constitutional dispute into a full blown culture war. From there, there was no turning back. It polarised Brexiter opinion, hardened resolve, and pushed even moderate leave voices into the ERG camp.

This is not to say that the leave camp didn’t exploit it for their own ends. Remainers gave them plenty of material to paint a not unfair narrative that Brexit was being sabotaged, and by way of marshaling their own opinion formers they even managed to cast doubt on Theresa May’s sincerity. The ERG could not have dominated the Brexit agenda were it not for the persistent and brazen attempts to overturn the vote.

What followed was a gradual fight to the death in parliament, running right up to the wire with each side fighting one another to a standstill that could only be broken by a general election. The rest is history.

People are quick to assert that it was only ever going to go this way and I shouldn’t have expected any different. But I think I did expect different. I did expect that there would be protests immediately following the referendum. I did expect that remainers in parliament would move to soften Brexit, and I would have supported those efforts. I expected after a brief spell of recriminations that things would settle down and parliament would get on with delivering what we voted for.

I really didn’t anticipate a full blown revolt against democracy by the progressive left. I honestly thought they were better than that. I thought that traditional sense of fair play and loser’s consent was still a thing. I was wrong.

When it became clear that was the case, upholding the vote was no longer about Brexit. It became a more fundamental question of whether we still abide by votes. This has been disintegrating over some years. I recall even in 2010 a sizable turnout to protest the result of the general election and they’ve grown larger ever since. It seems they’re not protesting the outcome, rather they are protesting that the oiks get a say at all.

This is why I took the view that a successful thwarting of Brexit would have set us on a path to a low grade civil war. At the time I was told such was an exaggeration, but the whole George Floyd business shows us just how little it takes to cause a global wave of unrest if the conditions are right. Thwarting the vote itself may not have been the trigger moment, but it would certainly have set the mood having told half the country that their votes are only advisory and subject to progressive approval.

In the end most remain voters accepted Brexit had to be enacted and most MPs reluctantly accepted it must happen, but there are still those who insist that the vote was in some way tainted, clinging on to an elaborate web of conspiracy theories as a psychological liferaft. It is still their pretext for harassing leave campaigners in acts of spiteful revenge.

If I made any miscalculation it was believing British democratic culture was in better health than it is. A viable departure and a good deal would have been possible in more favourable conditions, but the rot seems to have set in deep over decades. Had I factored that in, Brexit going off the rails in the way it has wouldn’t have come as any great surprise.

Still, though, that would not have influence my decision to vote to leave. The collapse of the democratic consensus within the UK and EU membership are not unrelated. A steady hollowing out of the institutions, defanging our unions and the potency of our votes has gradually eroded faith in the idea of democracy.

That Brexit is set to be the trainwreck we all hoped to avoid, just says to me that we didn’t get there in time. We needed to leave before Lisbon. Before so much of the damage was done. If anyone is to blame for this mess it is the parliament and prime minister who rammed through Lisbon without a referendum. Remainers wail about leave having cheated, but that was the greatest cheat of all. And now we all pay the price.