Book Read Free

The Brexit Club

Page 26

by Owen Bennet


  Turkish accession to the European Union had been part of UKIP’s argument for Brexit for years, but usually in the context of evidence of the organisation’s expansionist ambitions. Nigel Farage started focusing on it as an issue in its own right in autumn 2015, when the EU began steps to allowing Turkish citizens visa-free access to the Schengen zone in exchange for the country helping to stem the flow of migrants from the Middle East into Europe. Turkey would also take back any refugees who had entered the Continent via its borders.

  Another condition of the deal was the reopening of talks regarding Turkey becoming a full member of the EU – a process that had started in 1987 when the country applied for formal membership into the then Economic Community. Progress had been slow, and of the thirty-three chapters of membership Turkey needed to negotiate, only one had been completed by 2015 – science and research, in 2006.

  Speaking about the visa-free access deal on LBC Radio on 16 October 2015, Farage said:

  This is all a precursor to Turkey joining the European Union. So listen, folks, if you want Turkey to join the European Union, if you think another 75 million poor people should have access to come to Britain, to use the Health Service, to use our primary schools, to take jobs in whatever sector it may be – if you think it’s a good idea for our political borders now to reach Iraq and Syria, then please vote to stay inside the European Union, because that is what is coming down the tracks at you.

  Farage’s side of the Leave campaign maintained its focus on the issue, and on 4 December 2015 – the week when the EU’s deal with Turkey was formally announced – Leave.EU issued a statement titled ‘Turkish Delight and EU Security’. It read:

  ‘Go sell crazy somewhere else, we’re all stocked up here.’ So goes Jack Nicholson’s line to his neighbour in the film As Good As It Gets, and surely the logical response to the EU’s latest crazy plan. Clearly, the plan hasn’t been thought through. The latest proposal takes craziness to the next level.

  It went on:

  Turkey is the main conduit for ISIS’s oil for weapons sales. With one hand, Turkey’s deeply unpleasant regime bombs our allies, the Kurds; while the other tacitly helps ISIS.

  Furthermore, by the time we have finished the job of destabilising Syria by bombing it to pieces, with no ground troops, no reconstruction plan, and no replacement for Bashar Al-Assad, refugees will be flooding into Turkey via its porous border with Syria.

  There is a strong possibility Turkey will then issue passports to these refugees and wave them on their way to Europe. The PM’s position that the EU helps maintain our Security is clearly wrong. We need to take back control of our borders as soon as we can.

  Realising that linking Turkey, migration and the EU – together with the €3 billion of financial aid promised by Brussels – ticked numerous boxes, Farage continued to press on with making Turkish accession a key part of the referendum debate. On 3 February 2016, UKIP produced a three-minute, forty-second party political broadcast on the subject, which was shown on the BBC. A Survation poll carried out on behalf of Leave.EU over 10–12 February showed the issue was having some cut-through, with 38.6 per cent of respondents agreeing that if Turkey was to join the EU, it would make them more likely to vote out. Armed with this information, Farage told the European Parliament on 9 March: ‘Perhaps this referendum on 23 June will become a referendum on whether we wish to be in a political union with Turkey. A vote for Remain is a vote for Turkey.’

  However, it initially seemed that Vote Leave were not going to play ball. Boris Johnson appeared to shoot down the notion that Turkey was on the ballot paper on Tuesday 15 March, during a phone-in show on LBC Radio. Johnson, whose grandfather was Turkish, said:

  I think the chances of the Turks readily acceding to the European Union are between, you know, nil and 20 per cent… Well, probably lower than that. I mean, it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future. And if it were to happen, what you wouldn’t get is anything to do with free movement. I think that is where people are rightly spooked at the moment. They think the idea of suddenly 75 million Turks having the, you know, and all of those coming in to Turkey notionally having rights of free travel, visa-free travel to the EU, that’s just simply not on the cards.

  Johnson’s view was not that dissimilar from that of David Cameron, who told Parliament on 21 March:

  Look, I know that in this debate, which I know is going to get very passionate, people want to raise potential concerns and worries to support their argument, but I have say that when it comes to Turkey being a member of the EU, this is not remotely in prospect. Every country has a veto at every stage. The French have said that they are going to hold a referendum. So in this debate let us talk about the things that are going to happen, not the things that are not going to happen.

  Yet, as the campaign entered its final few weeks, it seemed that Vote Leave was starting to reach the same conclusions about the Turkey issue as Farage and UKIP had reached more than six months before. In a speech on 14 April, Theresa Villiers said: ‘If people believe there is an immigration crisis today, how much more concerned will they be after free movement is given to Turkey’s 75 million citizens?’ This was followed up by Iain Duncan Smith – who had now stepped down as Work and Pensions Secretary after clashing with George Osborne over welfare reform – with a speech on 10 May. Just six days after Cameron had insisted Turkish membership was not an issue in the referendum, his former Cabinet colleague said:

  Turkey is on the ballot paper because the EU is on the ballot paper. As I understand it, the Prime Minister and others said they wanted a road paved from Brussels to Ankara. The EU has made it very clear that they are going to get visa-free travel and then enter the EU. It is on the ballot paper, everything to do with the EU is on the ballot paper.

  On Friday 20 May, the same day that Richard Tice emailed Vote Leave board members and Eurosceptic peers urging the official campaign to talk more about immigration and focus on the fact that there was no ‘status quo’ option on offer, a new campaign video was released, titled: ‘Paving the way to Ankara’.

  The 55-second video began with a clip of Cameron’s appearance before the Liaison Committee, before cutting to footage of Turkish Members of Parliament brawling at the beginning of May. The video then overlaid Cameron’s speech in Turkey in 2011, in which he had indeed vowed to ‘pave the road from Ankara to Brussels’. Two days later, Vote Leave claimed in a statement that the birth rate in Turkey would lead to a million people coming to the UK within the next eight years. It was an extraordinary claim, but Vote Leave supporter Penny Mordaunt, who was also a Defence minister, doubled down on the suggestion during an interview on The Andrew Marr Show that morning. Marr kicked off the interview by saying: ‘You are on the front page of The Observer this morning warning that a million people may come here from Turkey in the next eight years, which is strange because very few people expect Turkey to join the EU in the next eight years.’

  Mordaunt replied: ‘I think it’s very likely that they will. In part because of the migrant crisis.’

  Later on in the interview, Marr pointed out that the UK had a veto over Turkey joining the EU, to which Mordaunt responded: ‘No, it doesn’t. We are not going to be able to have a say.’

  Cameron was furious and, on the Peston on Sunday show on ITV minutes later, he slapped down the junior minister. ‘Let me be clear. Britain and every other country in the European Union has a veto on another country joining. That is a fact,’ he said, then added:

  The fact that the Leave campaign are getting things as straightforward as this wrong, I think should call into question their whole judgement in making the bigger argument about leaving the EU.

  It is very important. They’re basically saying vote to get out of Europe because of this issue of Turkey that we can’t stop joining the EU. That is not true, we can stop Turkey becoming a member.

  The Turkey issue would not go away, and the next day Vote Leave released a poster with the words: ‘Turkey (populatio
n 76 million) is joining the EU.’ Alongside the text was a UK passport mocked up as an open door, with a trail of footprints going through it.

  On 6 June, Vote Leave’s official referendum mailshot – which would be distributed to 40 million households – was revealed by The Spectator. Under the headline ‘Countries set to join the EU’ was a map of Europe. There were only three countries directly labelled: the UK, Syria and Iraq. Five other countries – Albania, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Turkey – were coloured red and marked by numbers, with a key containing their names in the top-right corner. At a glance, it appeared that Syria and Iraq were set to join the EU. Matthew Elliott defended this, claiming that Syria and Iraq were the only ones labelled ‘because they were the biggest’. Elliott said the campaigning on Turkey was instigated by Dominic Cummings, and it was supported as ‘it was a good way into the migration debate and also one of our key objectives in the campaign was to basically show the status quo wasn’t an option’.

  With the campaign shifted to Turkey, and therefore immigration issues, the polls also started to move. Of the fourteen opinion polls conducted between 20 May and 6 June, Leave was ahead in six of them, with Remain in the lead in five. The remaining three were dead heats.

  The shift of focus on immigration was not lost on those in UKIP, who had been repeatedly told by Vote Leave that immigration would not be the issue that would convince swing voters to back Brexit. ‘This is the sheer hypocrisy of these people,’ said Farage, while UKIP’s head of press Gawain Towler commented: ‘That just made us laugh, it made us laugh. We’re accused of being bad guys and dreadful and toxic no less – who were the ones who produced the map?!’ Tice was equally surprised by the dramatic change in tone: ‘They had castigated us for things we had done, it was outrageous, but they realised they were losing,’ he said.

  Labour Leave’s Brendan Chilton admits he ‘found some of the stuff on Turkey very unpalatable, I really didn’t like it all’. He added: ‘It played into the narrative of “the Muslims are coming and Al-Qaeda are coming”, and I thought it was just awful. If Farage had done it he would have been a racist and a loony, but because they did it, it’s acceptable.’

  After the campaign, Elliott admitted that Vote Leave had indeed used some of the same arguments deployed by UKIP. The difference was, he said, they weren’t coming out of the mouth of Farage:

  Of course Farage said these things previously. But when a different spokesperson is saying it, it has more resonance with people in a sense that a lot of those swing voters we were keen to attract – a lot of them tuned out Nigel Farage. In a sense they didn’t like him, or they didn’t trust him, or they thought he was a racist or whatever, and they didn’t want to hear from him. The natural upper limit for a UKIP-led referendum campaign would have been at most 40 per cent, and that’s being generous, more like 35 per cent. You would have seen basically a two-to-one defeat for the Leave campaign had it been a UKIP-led/Nigel Farage-led effort.

  Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell also both disputed the notion that the campaigning on Turkey and immigration was somehow kowtowing to Farage’s tactics. When this point was put to Carswell, he said: ‘No, I really don’t think so. EU expansion is a legitimate point and it’s a legitimate concern. It was not the main thrust of the campaign.’ He claimed the most important part of the campaign was ‘take control’, whether that be of money going to Brussels, of UK sovereignty or of border control.

  Yes, in addition to that we also have something to say about immigration because it is a concern – not as big a concern but it is a concern. We also have something to say about EU expansion. If we were running an immigration-based campaign, why would we use the phrase take control? Why would have we emblazoned on the bus what we had emblazoned on the bus? You can’t sift through everything we said, pick out the mention of Turkey and claim that we led on Turkey.

  Hannan agreed:

  Immigration was always a valid issue, I don’t think it was ever going to be our top issue. All of our internal polls showed what the published polls showed, which is by far the biggest issue was democracy, immigration was quite a distant second and even those citing immigration as their top issue, very few wanted or expected a very dramatic fall in numbers.

  One of the reasons for the shift in focus was that voters were telling Vote Leave they were worried about the issue. Alexander Thompson, who joined Vote Leave as its head of film in April 2016, made a telling admission in an interview with Newsweek after the referendum. He said: ‘Immigration and Turkey’s EU membership weren’t priorities when I started, but when it kept coming up in focus groups we realised it was a huge issue, and we changed tack.’

  There was, of course, a simple way for Downing Street to neutralise the whole Turkey issue: the Prime Minister could have vowed to veto the country joining the EU, or even promised a referendum if Turkey ever completed all the chapters for membership – whether that was in eight years or a thousand years.

  Vote Leave’s Gisela Stuart believed such an action would have killed the problem ‘stone dead’, while Duncan Smith argued that the more Cameron insisted that the French would veto Turkey’s membership in a referendum, the more it showed how much power the UK had let ebb away to the Continent. ‘Why are we relying on somebody else?’ he asked, before adding: ‘It was quite damaging, the Turkey stuff, for them and I thought they could have handled that better, but they didn’t.’

  On Monday 6 June, with Vote Leave’s Turkey leaflet about to be despatched and the polls starting to swing in the right direction, Brexit backers could allow themselves to feel more optimistic about the referendum. However, those at Vote Leave weren’t letting themselves get carried away, as the following day Nigel Farage was going to be representing their side in a TV debate with David Cameron.

  CHAPTER 28

  ‘What are my negatives?’ said Nigel Farage.

  ‘Well, you’re thin-skinned, snarling and aggressive,’ replied Gawain Towler.

  There was a brief pause as everyone in the room waited to see how the UKIP leader would react. A smile appeared on his face and he started laughing. No one was more relieved than Patrick O’Flynn, who a year earlier had used those exact words when describing Farage. After a period in the party wilderness, O’Flynn was now back at the top table and was one of those helping Farage prepare for his TV performance.

  In many ways, O’Flynn was one of the forgotten heroes of the Brexit movement. In 2010, while he was political editor of the Daily Express, he convinced the paper to launch a ‘crusade’ (as the Express campaigns were called) to get the UK out of the EU. Half a million readers sent in coupons backing the crusade, which were delivered to Downing Street in 2011. While many sneered at the paper’s stance – and its numerous EU-bashing front pages over the years – it provided much-needed coverage for UKIP, which in turn put pressure on David Cameron to promise the referendum in January 2013.

  O’Flynn also stuck to his guns when it came to supporting Vote Leave for designation – the only UKIP MEP to do so. His support stayed strong despite Farage repeatedly asking him to change his mind when the pair were in Brussels or Strasbourg on MEP duties.

  But the focus was now on the ITV debate, and O’Flynn joined Towler, Chris Bruni-Lowe and Leave.EU’s Brian Monteith in the UKIP offices to help brainstorm the kind of topics that might come up.

  While the clash would be Farage’s first significant TV appearance of the campaign, Cameron had already been subjected to a grilling. On Thursday 2 June, he had appeared on an hour-long programme on Sky News. The first half of the show saw him interviewed by Sky News political editor Faisal Islam, who managed to rile the Prime Minister when he tried to call out Downing Street’s ‘Project Fear’ tactics: ‘What comes first? World War Three or the global Brexit recession?’ asked Islam.

  The audience collapsed in laughter and applause, and Cameron claimed the words ‘World War Three’ had never left his lips when he gave a speech suggesting the security of Europe could be under threat from B
rexit.

  The following night, it was the Leave campaign’s turn to face a grilling. Surprisingly, Vote Leave did not put up the person many considered to be the de facto leader of the campaign, Boris Johnson, but instead opted for Michael Gove. The decision was taken by Vote Leave after it carried out focus group research. Matthew Elliott said:

  I remember one in particular, basically after all the politicians had come out on each side, and we tested everyone from Boris to Gove to Gisela to other Cabinet ministers, what have you, and one thing that did come up with Michael Gove was ‘I may not particularly like him, I don’t like what he did with schools, that sort of thing, but he basically let down his best friend, he’s followed his conscience, he’s friends with the PM yet he’s campaigning for Leave and the PM is annoyed about that and if he’s done that, he must be serious about what he is saying, he must be telling the truth.’

  Gove put in a solid performance, but during one speech hitting back against the avalanche of organisations, foreign leaders and professional bodies calling for a Remain vote, he delivered a line that would come to define the Brexit campaign – at least in the eyes of its opponents.

  ‘I think the people of this country have had enough of experts…’ said Gove, before Islam interrupted with: ‘Have had enough experts? People in this country have had enough of experts?’

  Gove tried to explain that he meant ‘experts from organisations with acronyms saying that they know what is best and getting it consistently wrong’, but Islam still accused him of Donald Trump-style politics.

 

‹ Prev