THE LANGUAGE OF BREXIT

by STEVE BUCKLEDEE

  In this book I have repeatedly argued that Remain campaigners – with the notable exception of the Green Party – hedged and side-stepped and generally did not make their case with great vigour or passion. They tended to be pushed onto the defensive on matters such as the alleged lack of democracy in the EU instead of adopting a pro-active approach and pointing out the positives deriving from EU membership rather that the risks entailed in leaving. They did not do enough to mobilize young voters who had the biggest stake in maintaining freedom of movement within the Union and, as it later transpired, were less keen to splash through puddles to get to the polling station than elderly Brexit supporters were (David Cameron [2016: 4, 5] used the very last paper edition of The Independent on 20 March 2016 to explain that his greatest fear was low turnout). Ironically, when the polls started to suggest that a victory for Leave could not be ruled out, the reaction was to turn up the heat of Project Fear to such an extent that the apocalyptic warnings and hysterical rhetoric were in the end not taken too seriously.

  Six weeks before voting day, Allister Heath (2016) observed that the policy was proving to be counterproductive.

  Behind the scenes, there is now real worry on the Remain side. But it is so wedded to its elite-driven fear campaign – getting powerful people or institutions to warn of Armageddon – that its answer is simply to do more of the same, albeit even more aggressively. It hopes and believes that most people haven’t switched on yet, and that they eventually will as the referendum nears and the volume is turned up ever further.

  This is a dangerous strategy. Apocalyptic claims from endless grey-suited figures may come to sound like old news. Hysteria only works when it is seen as plausible and dispassionate. Barack Obama’s heavy-handed intervention backfired, while the prime minister’s claim that a Brexit would increase the risk of war was so over the top that it will have encouraged many undecided voters to switch off altogether.

  Charlie Cooper (2016) for The Independent noted that Remain started the referendum campaign well as ‘warnings of the economic consequences of Brexit had an effective shock and awe quality to them’, but as the weeks and months passed and the polls showed that Leave were winning over more voters, the public seemed to give less and less credence to more and more dubious claims and began to seek, not facts, but a vision, or for Cooper, a ‘story’.

  In this feverish post-truth atmosphere, facts and reason go out the window as effective political arguments. Many voters simply don’t trust anything anyone says on the EU anymore. The eventual winner in this referendum therefore won’t be the side with the best facts, it will be the one with the best story to tell.

  Cooper also noted that in an interview lasting less than an hour, Michael Gove had managed to use the word control thirty-five times, and that those who had not benefitted from globalization felt that what they had lost most of all was control over their destiny. Gove, therefore, was telling the story that people wanted to hear, albeit a story (anyone who has studied his political career would be sceptical about his willingness to cede real control to the populace).

  Project Fear was effective in Scotland largely because the main warning was not a worst-case scenario but an objective fact; independence would have left the country without a currency, unable to adopt the euro and dependent on the Westminster government’s good will for continued use of sterling. No one could predict with much confidence the immediate and mid-term consequences of the UK leaving the EU, so the 2016 version of Project Fear was much more a question of interpretation, and Leave’s attempt to terrify voters with a vision of catastrophic fallout lacked credibility, and sometimes descended into silliness.

  In some ways we should not compare the two referenda of 2014 and 2016, but the general election of 2015 and the Brexit referendum the following year. In 2015 the polls predicted a close result and another hung parliament, so it came as a surprise – not least to the Tories – when the Conservative Party finished with an overall majority of twelve seats in the Commons, though with a popular vote of only 36.9 per cent. Since MPs of the Northern Irish Sinn Fein party never take up their seats at Westminster, the Conservatives actually had a working majority of seventeen. Labour was generally viewed as having performed badly even though it had slightly increased its number of votes compared with 2010. However, the party lost forty of the forty-one Scottish seats it had won in both 2010 and 2005; in 2015 the SNP won fifty-six of the fifty-nine seats in Scotland, with the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats emulating Labour in securing just one seat each. The extraordinary success of the SNP was the single biggest cause of Labour’s poor return, and with the main party of opposition in such a weak state, and with the Tories freed from the obligation to consider the views of the Lib Dems, it is hardly surprising that the newly re-elected David Cameron felt he could do as he liked, and even take the enormous gamble of authorizing a referendum that most of Parliament did not want. Faced with a stronger and more united Labour opposition still led by Ed Milliband, Cameron would not have been quite so cock-a-hoop. SNP MPs, pro-EU to a (wo)man, had by their own electoral success weakened the party most capable of leading opposition to the very idea of holding a referendum on continued membership of the European Union.

  10

  Leave’s appointment with history and Remain’s another day at the office

  Had the referendum produced a 52-48 per cent victory for Remain, on 24 June 2016 we would all have gone about our business as usual, and after two or three days we would have turned our minds to other matters. David Cameron would still be prime minister with George Osborne in charge of the economy, Theresa May would still be pretending that she had always been in favour of staying in the EU, and Nigel Farage would be getting a little tedious in his insistence that the fight would go on.

  The dilemma for Leave campaigners was the fact that all they could promise voters was an anticlimax, the prospect of more of the same. Brexiteers, in contrast, promised a once-in-a-generation opportunity to change the course of history, correct the errors of the last four decades and liberate Britain from a role in Europe with which she had never felt comfortable. It was not about petty details of tax rates or tariffs, but the much bigger picture of the UK’s position on the international scene and our relationship, not just with Europe, but also with the United States, the Commonwealth and the BRIC countries.

  This meant considering the referendum in the context of Britain’s ongoing search for an appropriate role since 1945, an approach that sometimes resulted in historical overviews being somewhat distorted by a touch of journalistic spin. Evocations of the Second World War were common, with references to ‘our finest hour’ and other examples of Churchill’s stirring rhetoric. What was often lost in the historical analysis was a realistic assessment of Britain’s greatly diminished clout on the world stage since 1945.

  On 4 February 2016, when the referendum campaign was still building up steam and a number of high-profile figures had yet to commit themselves one way or the other, The Mail published an unsigned editorial with the headline Who will speak for England? The question is not a direct quotation but it refers to the imperative – ‘Speak for England!’ – that the Conservative MP Leo Amery shouted across the floor of the Commons at Labour deputy leader Arthur Greenwood on 2 September 1939, the day after Hitler invaded Poland. According to The Mail, the prime minister, Neville Chamberlain, had shown reluctance to abandon his policy of appeasement despite the fact that Britain was guarantor of Poland’s independence, but Amery’s challenge sparked Greenwood into launching a spirited attack on the prime minister, which led to a heated debate in the Commons, and resulted in Chamberlain declaring war on Germany the next day.

  As we noted in Chapter 8, in 1938 the Daily Mail used the front-page headline German Jews Pouring Into This Country, and Lord Rothermere left it rather late before distancing himself from Adolf Hitler, so it required a certain chutzpah for The Mail to evoke the House of Commons on one of its better days as MPs obliged the government to stand up agai
nst a racist tyranny. The editorial writer denies that the intention is to suggest that ‘there are any parallels whatsoever between the Nazis and the EU’, then immediately makes it clear that (s)he sees the choice facing Britain in 2016 as comparable to the momentous decision the nation had to make on the eve of the Second World War, a choice that would have profound consequences for future generations.

  But as in 1939 we are at a crossroads in our island history. For in perhaps as little as 20 weeks’ time, voters will be asked to decide nothing less than what sort of country we want to live in and bequeath to those who come after us.

  Are we to be a self-governing nation, free in this age of mass migration to control our borders, strike trade agreements with whomever we choose and dismiss our rulers and lawmakers if they displease us?

  Or will our liberty, security and prosperity be better assured by submitting to a statist, unelected bureaucracy in Brussels, accepting the will of unaccountable judges and linking our destiny with that of a sclerotic Europe that tries to achieve the impossible by uniting countries as diverse as Germany and Greece?

  Up to this point the piece is clearly aimed at the paper’s entire readership, but as the editorial proceeds it becomes increasingly obvious that other, much more specific readers are being indirectly addressed, that is, those leading Conservatives with a track record of Euroscepticism who, The Mail clearly believes, should have the courage to stand up to the party leader and put principle before political expediency. Just as Amery’s shouted challenge to Arthur Greenwood in 1939 set in motion a revolt that shamed the prime minister into honouring Britain’s commitment to Poland, so The Mail’s provocative headline was intended to shame leading Tories into rebelling against David Cameron.

  Names are named. Boris Johnson – still to declare his position and therefore not yet good old BoJo – is ‘happy to play flirtatious footsie with the ‘out’ campaign’ but is likely to support Cameron ‘at the first whiff of a plum Cabinet job’. Former Tory leader William Hague is another ‘Eurosceptic leopard to change his spots’, Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond is a ‘once outspoken Eurosceptic’ backing Cameron, and Home Secretary Theresa May ‘appears to have been bought off by the EU’s professed willingness to crack down on sham marriages and make it easier to turn away criminal migrants’. That leading Conservatives are suspected of ‘finding the allure of office more appealing than the duty to speak up for their country’ is presented as morally reprehensible since it leaves the Brexit case to people of questionable competence outside the party, including ‘the dismal ratbag of policy-wonks, cranks and nonentities (almost all male) in the feuding factions of the ‘out’ camp’. For The Mail the only people who can be entrusted to lead the Battle of Brexit are senior Conservatives willing to stab their leader in the back.

  The message to voters is that the referendum represents a defining moment in British history, and the parallels with 2 September 1939 remind prominent Conservative MPs that their duty is to defy their leader just as the Commons once challenged Neville Chamberlain. The Daily Mail, always among the Tory Party’s most reliable supporters, now takes on the role of kingmaker, using allusions to a literal war to incite a metaphorical civil war and the overthrow of the party leader.

  The day before The Mail editorial The Sun also evoked the Second World War with the headline Who do EU think you are kidding Mr Cameron? (Newton Dunn 2016). The headline is a reference to the song Who do you think you are kidding, Mr Hitler? (composed by Jimmy Perry and Derek Taverner, and performed by the Second World War comic Bud Flanagan), the signature tune to the BBC sitcom Dad’s Army, which is about the war-time Home Guard. This consisted of volunteers who were either too young or too old for the regular army, whose main role was to patrol places where the Germans might try to infiltrate troops, either on coastal sites or by parachute drops. The comedy series is about the bungling exploits of men who meant well but whose existence probably did not unduly worry the Third Reich, and Newton Dunn’s headline portrays David Cameron as incompetent rather than wicked after he had failed to secure significant changes to immigration policy following lengthy negotiations with EU partners. This impression of bumbling ineptitude is reinforced by a photo montage of the khaki-uniformed cast of Dad’s Army with the superimposed faces of Cameron and his better known ministers.

  Two years earlier The Sun had used almost the same headline (Wooding 2014), the only variation being the conventional pronoun you instead of the you/EU pun. On that occasion the link to Dad’s Army was occasioned by Nigel Farage’s description of Cameron as a ‘stupid boy’, the epithet regularly applied to the sitcom’s youthful Private Pike by his commanding officer, Captain Mainwaring. In 2014 Cameron’s alleged stupidity was evident in his futile attempt to block the nomination of Jean-Claude Juncker as president of the European Commission when, according to Farage, the appointment was already a done deal. As it turned out, twenty-six member states voted for Juncker, with only Hungary joining Britain in opposing his nomination. For Farage this had exposed the prime minister’s lack of influence in Europe and had made him look ‘like Private Pike, the stupid boy, and everyone’s laughing at him’. Not content with using practically the same headline twice, The Sun then updated the 2014 article on 6 April 2016.

  The appointment with history was bound to generate appeals to voters to make Britain great again, and Emma Pullen (2016), CEO of The British Hovercraft Company, duly provided a headline, lead and opening paragraphs that linked the country’s wartime spirit with the interests of British businesses today.

  Leaving the EU will make Britain great once again

  The British showed the world what we are made of in 1940.

  I believe that fire still burns in our hearts and I pray that June 23 will be the day when Britain once again becomes Great Britain. I’m passionately excited about this huge opportunity we have to take back control of our country, take our place on the world stage and build a bright future for British businesses to flourish outside the EU.

  But it is not just my business head that wants to leave the EU – my heart does too. I’m extremely proud of my late father, who fought at Tobruk, Libya, in 1941. He wasn’t a hero, just a lad from Chatham who knew what had to be done and got on with it in that stolid way his generation did.

  When the head and heart have a shared objective, and the owner of said organs is ‘passionately excited’ and motivated by the fire of 1940 that ‘still burns’, the reader might expect the road to renewed greatness to be a well-lit highway. Reading on, however, it turns out to be the familiar path of liberating British businesses from EU regulations.

  As noted earlier in this work, the right-wing Daily Express, which in normal circumstances cannot find even the most grudging word of approval for anything the Labour Party does, was quite willing to let the Lexit voice be heard. Brendan Chilton (2016), leader of the Labour Leave campaign, seized the opportunity to make an impassioned appeal in The Express for a return to the values of a historical period the country can be proud of, not the Second World War, but the post-war Labour governments of Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson that created the National Health Service and enacted enlightened legislation in such areas as workers’ rights, equal pay and race relations before Britain joined the EEC. In contrast the EU, which imposes austerity upon Greece, Portugal and Italy and conducts secret negotiations with the United States over the TTIP, is presented as a reactionary institution intent on reversing the hard-won reforms of the twentieth century. Where the top-down mindset of the Daily Mail urges senior Tories to replace Cameron with one of their own, Chilton’s bottom-up view of things leads him to use imagery of class struggle in correctly predicting Labour voters’ drift towards Leave and deploring the party hierarchy’s loss of contact with the base.

  Up to 40 per cent of Labour voters are set to vote Leave on June 23 – and this figure will rise. It is extremely embarrassing to see senior Labour figures bowing to the EU as if it were a compassionate deity handing out rights to grateful serfs
.

  In doing so, these grandees are blindly ignoring the history of the British Labour and trade union movement and all that it has achieved for working people in the UK and abroad. It was Labour and trade union figures who won the rights for working people in this country – not the EU.

  It is unlikely that Richard Desmond, owner of Express Newspapers, and his editor, Hugh Whittow, have particularly fond memories of the Labour and moderate Conservative governments between 1945 and Thatcher’s victory in 1979, but Brendan Chilton’s anti-EU stance evidently overrode certain ideological differences.

  On the eve of voting day The Sun reported on leading Brexiteers’ final efforts to drum up support (Hawkes et al. 2016) and, predictably, it was Boris Johnson who found the most grandiloquent terminology to describe the pivotal moment in history and, less predictably, heap praise upon the wisdom and courage of Sun readers.

  Sun readers have the future of our country in their hands. They represent the best of Britain, the best of British instinct, and I know they believe in our great country and I hope very much they want to take our country forward tomorrow on a path toward greater democracy, greater openness to trade with the rest of the world and a more dynamic future for Britain.

  They know the brave cross they put on the ballot paper can make the difference between restoring democracy to Europe or remaining shackled to Europe. It will be a historic moment.