The Leave.EU scandal proves the Brexit vote was rotten – only a second referendum can give us a fair result
All’s fair in love, war and democratic elections I suppose. I’ve lived through enough of them to take manifestos and “read my lips” type pledges with a shovel full of salt. I’ve even participated in a few dodgy ones myself – student contests and by-elections stand out in the memory for low-level dirty trickery. I’m not proud of that.
Even so, the more we know about the Brexit referendum of 2016 the more it feels like a campaign that crossed a few lines. Legal ones in fact, with successful prosecutions against both Remain and Leave groups. The latest accusations levelled at the Leave.EU campaign are disturbing. Then again you only have to read Arron Banks’s candid memoir Bad Boys of Brexit to understand some of the excesses they went in for.
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To be fair, I also felt that the government spending millions of pounds on a supposedly neutral leaflet, but which was also a flimsily disguised case for Remain was also pretty deplorable. In the first European referendum, that is the one in the 1975, we did things better – a government recommendation plus one each for the equivalents of Leave and Remain. It was loaded to the EU cause, but still.
There was a big structural issue in 2016 too. The Leave campaign was not a government in waiting. It was divided by personality and by part. When the famous official Vote Leave bus had the £350m a week pledge for the NHS on the side, a figure constantly repeated by Boris Johnson, it could be cheerfully renounced by the rival Leave.EU and Nigel Farage. We were not about to elect a Leave government with Boris as PM, Kate Hoey as Brexit secretary and Farage as chancellor (can you imagine?). It was cobblers anyhow.
It was a cynical campaign on all sides, including Project Fear, the failure of which is George Osborne’s personal part in the whole sorry affair.
Will it be different next time?
Certainly. We’ve spent the past three years or so having the facts and the arguments tested to destruction. As an exercise in deliberative democracy it has no precedent in history. We are ready now as we were not in 2016 to make the judgement. We are still divided. We may still vote Leave. But none on either side could say they didn’t know what was at stake. If we do quit, under WTO terms or the May deal then we will do so with our eyes open and our consciences clear. It is the right thing to give people the final say. It is inevitable.
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