‘Liberal’ Brexiteers are trying to get off scot-free — we shouldn’t let them.

Dan Hannan has been spending an awful lot of time trying to suggest an obsession with immigration is merely a figmentation of the Remainers’ mind. Indeed, if only they could see that sovereignty and self-determination, the supposed cornerstones of the Vote Leave campaign, were in fact the greatest factors in the country’s decision to vote to leave the European Union.

Here he is, in two tweets that could encapsulate seemingly all of his tweets since the dangerous, illiberal implications of the referendum -that which do not actually affect him- started to become clear:

Frasier Nelson, a fellow liberal Brexiteer, also backed this up in a recent article for The Telegraph. He wrote:

The Tories who campaigned to leave the EU were very keen to portray it as a internationalist endeavour — not a nativist yawp. A mission to raise the national sights to more distant horizons; to go out into the world. Boris Johnson, Liam Fox, Michael Gove, Daniel Hannan, all spoke of Britain as a globally-minded country straining at the leash of the EU. As they knew, the Remainers were keen to portray Brexit as a sinister, xenophobic cry from Little Englanders who wanted to stop immigration. No, they replied, immigration is good and we want more of it. But in a way that’s fully controlled by an elected government.

The absolute cheek of it.

The extent to which the ‘liberals’ are now trying to disassociate themselves from the illiberal forces they have unleashed, legitimised, and indeed embraced during the referendum, is a sight to behold. This is an attempt to rewrite history we shouldn’t allow to happen.

Not only does it betray an incredible amount of intellectual dishonesty about how the EU referendum played out, but it is an ambitiously fabricated revision of the Leave campaign itself. The EU referendum and its aftermath isn’t the story of the Farageist Right cannibalising hapless and powerless liberals who just wanted to spread the joy of freedom and sovereignty. The EU referendum was the story of the ‘liberal’ Right discovering the power of immigration as a tool and snatching it from the Farageist Right. It was they that cannibalised.

The doorstep was defined by immigration, if not as a sole determinent, indeed the most vocalised. Something that increased in intensity the longer the referendum went on. That was no coincidence. The Leave campaign of the early campaign was different to that of the late campaign.

The vocalisation of immigration as an issue also became more cultural as the referendum went on. Turkey was frequently cited, despite the facts. This happened just after the Turkey poster. The poster no liberal Leaver seems to acknowledge ever existed.

Perhaps they started as liberals. Perhaps. Plenty of my Brexiteer friends are genuine and sincere liberals whose contempt for the EU was based on romantic sovereignty and democracy, of the free market. The latter of which they -middle class Tories- must have thought was still shared as a value with a majority of the population. Many wanted to open talks with the rest of the world. A butterfly. ‘Out, and into the world’. But as with the Left, and certainly with a naive segment of it rooting for a Lexit, they didn’t get the turning tide of history. In favour of the nativists. But then they did, then they did not hesitate to follow. And in doing so follow Farage.

The Leave campaign found a way to win. An incredibly effective way. They saw that Farage was successfully defining the campaign as a referendum on immigration -which it largely was- and they followed him, they snatched his ideas, and won. They won. They won because the campaign chose immigration. They would condemn the Breaking Point poster, then print leaflets on Syria and Iraq. They won on the back of those leaflets. Of the Turkey poster.

And the Remain side never grasped this in time. Long busy fighting on economic grounds, replicating the 2015 Tory campaign, on a basis that perhaps these ‘liberals’ feared and fought early on. But Remain did not turn. They kept to what liberals were concerned about: the economy. And they lost, because they were liberal.

Leave won because they were illiberal.

In denial, Dan Hannan and Fraser Nelson are guilty of intellectual dishonesty and an abandonment of duty. They want to sleep well at night while hate crimes increase and the PM turns authoritarian. That’s their privilege, and we shouldn’t grant them it.

Don’t let them forget this: