Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
Much of this misses the point. The important link between the Brexit and Trump votes was not the campaigns, but the reaction they provoked. Both results were met by an extraordinary outburst of fear and loathing from political and cultural elites, revealing their barely concealed contempt for the people and democracy. If there has been a dangerous hatred on view, it is the hatred of the ‘herd’ on both sides of the Atlantic.
To be clear from the start: while I supported the Brexit vote, I have no truck with Trump. The parallels are only in the way those backing the two campaigns have been condemned from on high.
Both results reflected the intensity of feeling against the respective political establishments. But the outcome was different. Whereas the vote to Leave the EU represented a positive blow for more democracy, the turnout for Trump was a negative reaction to the same problem of a political elite lacking legitimacy. There is a difference between supporting a broad democratic principle in a yes/no referendum, and backing a specific party’s narrow-minded candidate in an election.
That is why some of us in the UK who voted Leave with passion could not have contemplated voting for the illiberal, free-speech-stomping Donald. Nor, by the way, could we have stomached supporting the illiberal-liberal Hillary Clinton. (Note to the confused: the Brexit referendum result was not a vote for Trump fan and UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who responded to his triumph by giving up politics rather than taking power.)
No; the genuine comparison between the two concerns not the actors, but the anti-democratic reaction to the results. The backlash against Brexit set the pattern.
On 23 June 2016, the British electorate went to the polls to vote in a referendum on whether the nation should Remain a member of the European Union, or Leave the EU. They voted to Leave, by 51.8 per cent to 48.2. The 17.4 million who voted Leave constituted the largest number of people who have ever voted for anything in British political history; the 16.1 million who backed Remain made up the second-largest vote for anything, reflecting the importance of the issue. (The most votes ever acquired by any party in a UK general election were the 14.1 million won by Conservative prime minister John Major in 1992 – representing 41.9 per cent of the votes cast. Oddly, Major did not seem to object to the tyranny of the minority on that occasion.)
The result was a remarkable popular rejection of the institutions of the EU – which, as chapter 4 argues, have been one of the major barriers to the practice of democratic politics in Europe. It represented a demand for more democracy and national sovereignty, and less diktat from the Euro-bureaucracy. It was also a sharp slap in the face for the British political class, who have long used the EU to sidestep democratic debate at home.
The UK’s political, economic and cultural elites, who had all assumed until the last minute – along with every pollster, pundit and bookmaker – that Remain would win easily, reacted to the referendum result as if an earthquake had caused the solid ground to disappear from beneath their feet. How could this have happened?
After all, the Remain campaign had marshalled every authority in the Western world to warn those British voters that a Leave vote would lead to economic ruination, a political descent into barbarism, world war and, worse, falling house prices.
They had been told to vote Remain by the leaders of all Britain’s mainstream political parties, from Tory prime minister David Cameron to left-wing Labour opposition leader Jeremy Corbyn. They had been instructed that there was no realistic alternative to voting Remain by the governor of the Bank of England, the Chancellor of Germany, the President of the United States, a cross-section of leading lights from the arts and every imaginable celebrity from David Beckham to Johnny Rotten. For its part, the official Leave campaign had looked like an embarrassing shambles. Yet still a majority of voters had refused to do as they were told they must, and opted to Leave the EU.
In the eyes of the establishment it appeared that the only possible explanation for this outrageous outcome was that those millions of voters were simply too ignorant, too uneducated, too gullible, bigoted or emotional to understand what they were being told. Leave voters were depicted as being like that naughty child whose finger is drawn inexorably towards the big, red button by all the warning signs telling him ‘Danger – Do Not Press’.
Most striking was how quickly the discussion ceased to be about the specific issues of Brexit, and became about much bigger questions of democratic decision-making. The emphasis shifted away from what the electorate thought of the EU, towards what the pro-EU elites thought of the revolting electorate. Answer: not much. It may take a long time for the wrangling over the details of UK–EU relations to become clear. But the wider threat to democracy in the anti-Brexit backlash was evident from the start.
To clarify: this book’s attack on the antics of the pro-EU elites is not aimed at the 16.1 million who voted to Remain. That would be a remarkably large ‘elite’ by anybody’s standards. Most of those Remainers were normal voters who made a rational choice, just as the Leavers did. Millions of them are also respecters of democracy. In a YouGov survey published in November 2016, 68 per cent of all respondents said that the UK should follow the referendum result and go ahead with Brexit. Those who had voted to Remain in June were now ‘evenly divided’ between those who ‘think the government has a duty to implement the decision and leave’ and those who ‘would like to see the government ignore or overturn the referendum result’.10
The political, economic and cultural elites leading the anti-democratic campaign to ‘ignore or overturn the referendum result’ were a small minority within that minority, symbolised by such big-name, big-headed Remainers as Tony Blair or Sir Richard Branson. The 2016 poster girl for their crusade was Gina Miller, the multi-millionaire investment fund manager who led the legal challenge to the government over Brexit, because she said the revolting voters’ verdict made her feel ‘physically sick’. After the high court found in her favour, Ms Miller the City financier declared that the abuse she had received ‘means I am doing something right for investors’.11 This clique constitutes an elite in the worst sense of the word, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as a class of people ‘having the most power and influence in a society’, not due to any superior talents but ‘especially on account of their wealth or privilege’.
Weeks after the vote, European President Jean-Claude Juncker gave the official EU version of events in an interview with a French youth YouTube channel (where else would you make an important announcement these days?). Monsieur Juncker claimed that the blame lay with British politicians who had spent more than forty years spreading ‘so many lies, so many half-truths’ about the EU, telling ‘your general public that European Union is stupid, that there is nothing worth …’12 His underlying message was that the ‘general public’ in the UK must have been sufficiently ‘stupid’ to believe whatever lies the politicians fed them.
Yet if anything looked ignorant or misinformed in this discussion, it was Juncker’s claim that influential British politicians have been indoctrinating the general public with anti-EU ‘lies and half-truths’ for more than forty years.
Almost until the referendum campaign began, the political outlook labelled ‘Euro-scepticism’ had been a fringe affair, considered in parliament to be the preserve of only a few Tory head-bangers. Since the UK joined what was then the European Economic Community in 1973, no government had advocated leaving. The last time any major UK political party pledged to leave the EU at a general election was back in 1983, when it formed part of the Labour Party’s left-wing manifesto – described as ‘the longest suicide note in history’ – which resulted in a devastating defeat.
In the June 2016 referendum campaign, the leaders of every mainstream party – including Labour’s Corbyn, supposedly a long-standing left-wing Eurosceptic – backed the conformist Remain campaign. Even leading Tory Leave campaigner Boris Johnson had no history of being anti-EU, and had gone so far as to write an (unpublished) pro-Remain column months before the referendum.
The popular Brexit vote looked far more like