Wanted: A moderate Leave camp with a plan
There has been much to-ing and fro-ing in ‘Leave’ Politics this week. Following the manoevering of some Conservatives, Westminster’s favourite Brexit campaign ‘Vote Leave’ has now lost key support from Labour and the Greens. And even Conservative MPs, who are the political backbone of Vote Leave, are deeply upset about the organisation and are starting to drift off to ‘Grassroots Out’.
This is all after an attempted Conservative coup to remove Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, resulting in the two men being taken off the Vote Leave Board but otherwise remaining in their positions.
The anguish now permeating the organisation appears to lead back to the abrasive Cummings. But whether it is Cummings, Elliott or various other spokesmen and supporters, it makes no odds. Vote Leave have fundamentally got their pitch wrong.
Since his Business for Britain days, Elliott has been calling for reform of the EU. Note reform, not exit. This arguably reached its peak in his now-infamous statement last June that “If the government gets a two-tier Europe, we’re very much in.”
If this were one stray statement, that may be fine. But the same theme of wanting reform rather than Brexit has been plastered all over Business for Britain output since its inception and has also been subsequently woven into the output of its campaigning succesor, Vote Leave. Bloggers ‘Mr Brexit’, ‘Lost Leonardo’, ‘The Boiling Frog’ and of course eureferendum.com have already documented the Vote-Leave-Get-Remain saga very well.
Why the reform theme?
Because there is a general belief at the heart of Vote Leave that to bring others into the fold who may be less convinced about leaving, one has to look and sound less like a Brexiteer and more like a ‘reasonable’ centre ground kind of person.
This goes to the heart of the Conservative ‘eurosceptic’ problem: Apart from about 30 Conservative MPs who are ‘conviction Outers’ (a fairly consistent number since the early 1970s, through the Maastricht wars to the present day) all the rest are merely ‘sceptical’ at best. The vast majority want to remain in.
In June 2015, the founder of Conservatives for Britain, an MPs’ grouping that is the major party-political force behind Vote Leave made clear the problem: Of 110 MPs in the new group, only about 20–25 were certain to vote to Leave; about 60 were waiting for Cameron’s deal; and the rest would just back David Cameron regardless of the deal he struck.
The idea that the Conservative Party is a Brexit party is an illusion and always has been. It is a pro-EU party - the “party of Europe” as it used to call itself - with a consistently small rump of MPs who would like to leave.
Before joining Vote Leave, Dominic Cummings recognised this as a potentially big problem for any Leave campaign. He wrote in June 2015 about how such a campaign might increase the likelihood of a Leave vote by telling voters:
“You should vote NO to Cameron’s rubbish deal. If you vote NO, you will force a new Government to negotiate a new deal and give you a new vote. A NO vote is much safer than a YES vote.”
This 2-referendum strategy has run and run ever since, with Cummings in his role as Vote Leave Campaign Director being very pleased when Downing Street was forced to quash such talk.
But the logic of it, as stated in Cummings original blogpost, was that voting to leave was not actually a vote to leave at all - it was a vote to support a more robust negotiation.
In other words, the tactic fitted very neatly into Vote Leave’s reformist strategy and thereby rejected Brexit. It was this approach that prompted Arron Banks to say after an early discussion with Matthew Elliott that he really wasn’t sure whether Elliott wanted to leave at all.
However Vote Leave continued to dig themselves into a hole.
At the end of September 2015, we had a curious article by Vote Leave’s Labour-supporting chairman, John Mills, entitled:
“Labour should be campaigning for changes to EU”
Within the article, Mills made the claim that:
“Most people want to stay in the EU but only on changed terms”
This is not Brexitism. It is Reformism, written in large capital letters and flashing neon lights.
The Elliott-Cummings nexus has since claimed that September was when they switched to an overt Brexit approach. But, if they did, it was barely noticed; drowned out by other noise coming from the Vote Leave camp including the Mills intervention and Cummings’ own continued output on the 2-referendum tactic which ran and ran up to the 15th January.
But also on the 15th January, Cummings opened up a new front. He suggested that after a Leave vote, there was no need to invoke Article 50 (the mechanism for leaving the EU). Coming after months of Vote Leave’s reformism (and its predecessor’s overt reformism), this statement naturally created further waves, prompting various Brexiteers to step in and point out that yet again Vote Leave had no intention of leaving at all.
So having established Vote Leave as being a clear and present danger to the Brexit cause (prompting Leave.EU and Arron Banks to ‘throw stones’ at them), we now come on to another key figure at the heart of Vote Leave, namely Dan Hannan MEP.
Now I must declare up front that I have a bit of a connection to Dan from years ago. I like and greatly respect him and I’m in no rush to overturn that. He is one of the Brexit movement’s great characters and I cannot fail to enjoy his speeches, his mastery of the English Language and how he uses it in making the case for Brexit in a sometimes spellbinding way. If I know he’s appearing on a TV programme, I have always tried to tune in. He is also an excellent historian.
He has however reinforced Vote Leave’s reform theme and done so overtly and regularly, apparently in a spirit of reasonableness. He starts by saying openly that a Leave vote will not be accepted by the EU, just as French, Irish, Danes, and Dutch No votes were not accepted. Any audience listening can do little but agree that yes this is exactly what happened in those countries. He then adds that this will force a tougher renegotiation and, at that point, Associate Membership of the EU will be put on the table. Associate Membership is an arrangement that EU federalists Andrew Duff and Guy Verhofstadt have outlined and which formed part of a Spinelli Group document (it also has a much longer history going back to before Britain joined the EEC).
Dan has regularly declared - in print and on television - that he would accept this arrangement as a compromise solution. We would then vote in a second referendum on that final arrangement: Associate Membership of the EU. [EDIT 15/02/16 — Dan Hannan has since distanced himself from the calls for a second referendum. But this has actually had the effect of making the situation worse — his now looks like a “Vote Leave Get Remain” position because there would be no further vote on the ultimate associate settlement.]
So let’s unpick that by starting with his declaration that the EU will not accept a Leave vote. My problem with this is that it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were Vote Leave to become the lead campaigner and go on to win the referendum, Cameron and Osborne could very legitimately say that they “get the message” and will “therefore go back to the negotiation table”, but with no intention of leaving the EU. There would arguably be no need for either Cameron or Osborne to resign. The Conservative Party would stay intact. With the electoral threat of Labour always in the background, maybe that’s the intention.
We then come to the point about Associate Membership being put on the table.
Would it?
According to almost every analysis out there, Cameron’s renegotiation “deal” is proving feeble in the extreme. It wouldn’t take much for Cameron to bolster it further in a ‘re-renegotiation’ and claim another victory. We would then go through all this again with a public bored sick of it and just wanting it out of the way. And as far as the EU and the negative (to them) referendum results are concerned, the EU has never shifted much after them. It is generally a case of repackaging the original deal, before asking the particular electorate to try again.
But just suppose the UK was offered ‘Associate Membership of the EU’. My problem is everything after the word ‘Associate’.
It is not a Leave proposition.
It puts Britain in a kind of leashed twilight zone that aims to please everyone but would in fact please no one - from the UK’s pro-EU establishment to the most ardent Brexiteer. If nothing else, as Andrew Duff said in his proposal, it will keep us under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. So worse than if the UK stepped out to the EEA.
Now recall Matthew Elliott’s quote at the start of this article - “If the government gets a two-tier Europe, we’re very much in.” And Cummings’ 2-referendum tactic. And Cummings suggestion not to invoke Article 50.
This is reformism through and through. It is not Brexitism. I might add that this is why the jibes about Judean People’s Fronts are so wide of the mark — neither of the Judean Fronts wanted Associate Membership of the Roman Empire.
But wait. On 5th February, the day the ‘Labour Leave’ group appeared to disassociate from Vote Leave after a week of chaos and rumour, something else curious happened: A letter from Matthew Elliott to Paul Nuttall MEP was suddenly published.
Dated from the week before, its intention was to clarify Vote Leave’s position on 2 referendums. Said Elliott:
“I thought that I would write to send you some more information about our position on a second referendum, just to make it crystal clear what Vote Leave’s position is.
Vote Leave does not recommend that we have a second referendum. Let me be perfectly clear: we want Britain to leave the EU following a Leave vote in the referendum.
In a blog last summer, our Campaign Director, Dominic Cummings, pointed out that, because we are not in Government, we can’t control whether there will be a second referendum. It’s a historical fact that the EU always tries to make the people vote again if they get the “wrong result”. Because we want Britain to leave the EU — no ifs nor buts — we have to be aware of the possibility of a similar scenario and prepare for it.
Dominic argued on his blog last summer — before Vote Leave launched — that there is a reasonable argument to suggest that there should be a second referendum on any new deal that is negotiated between Britain and the EU following a Leave vote. This would not be another referendum on whether we should leave the EU, but a referendum to endorse the new relationship between an independent Britain and the EU. However, this would be for a future Government to decide.
But just to be clear, this is not my position, John Mills’s position, our Board’s position or Vote Leave’s position — nor Dominic’s position as Vote Leave’s Campaign Director.”
It is a deeply disingenuous letter considering that Cummings was still highlighting the 2-referendum tactic only two weeks before it (as Stronger In immediately and gleefully pointed out). Yet it does at last state clearly and unequivocally that they are actually campaigning for Brexit.
However given all the chaos in Vote Leave, it is now an act of panic, with a desperate eye to the Electoral Commission and the looming process for designation. They are thrashing around under fire, trying to recover from the reformist mess they themselves have created over a very long period, despite Brexit bloggers constantly criticising them for it (and being attacked/blocked for doing so). Indeed I suspect the letter is a direct result of the internal wars Vote Leave has been having, with someone powerful on the inside demanding that they stop the reformist nonsense once and for all.
Anyway, apart from all the damage this has done to the Leave proposition (and could still do until Vote Leave are marginalised), it matters in another important way:
How is the moderate non-UKIP case for Brexit going to be made?
Vote Leave was widely seen as the moderate Brexit group. Most Vote Leave followers who felt this way believed that Vote Leave wanted Brexit when it was perfectly clear that they did not (and those followers also attacked bloggers for pointing out the painful truth). With important supporters now withdrawing from Vote Leave, some commentators like Iain Martin are despairing once again saying Farage cannot be the leader of Leave, which indeed he can’t and nor can UKIP. Martin is also realising what some of us have known for a while: that Cummings and Elliott are just “too clever by half” and have got this completely and utterly wrong from the start.
And this litany of failure includes something I haven’t mentioned yet but comes up with monotonous regularity: the need for a vision of “what Out looks like” and a comprehensive de-risked plan to get us there. Again Vote Leave have got this badly wrong and have failed to realise that if you don’t write an exit plan, the Remain side will write one for you. The need for a plan was rejected way back by Cummings in his blog in June 2015, where he also started talking about 2 referendums.
However thankfully there is a moderate alternative and a detailed plan and a vision to support it. As is often the case in these apparent ‘impasse’ situations, it requires us to look to someone far outside the normal circles; to an Old Testament-type prophet (according to writer/blogger Adrian Hilton); the wise old sage “up in the cave”.
That man is Dr Richard North and the plan is called “Flexcit” — a real world exit plan.
This plan, painstakingly researched over years, is the voice of reason and pragmatism. One of its core principles is that Brexit, as well as being a one-time event by giving up EU membership within two years of a Leave vote, is crucially also a longer-term process of disentanglement from the EU which, after 40 years, simply cannot be undone overnight. That process is also about steadily re-establishing Britain as an independent nation without “frightening the horses”, which crucially means not affecting trade.
It is very likely that something close to Flexcit would be followed by the government and civil service in the event that they were actually faced with having to take Britain out of the EU, because it is a smooth or “soft” exit that recognises we need to part as friends and will still be important partners, even from outside. It maintains what is good about the EU: The Erasmus programme for example, as well as science cooperation.
It shoots a mass of foxes on the Remain side and also confronts the Remain side over years of lying. And it doesn’t rant about foreigners but accepts that this is a complex world requiring complex and modern solutions, that the EU is ill-equipped to cope with (as has been demonstrated over and over).
It also recognises the reality of globalisation and what that means to this country, how we can help shape it….and how it is quietly destroying the EU’s raison d’etre.
It would create a free trade counter-weight to the EU’s “country called Europe” objective known as political union. It may even encourage others such as Denmark and Sweden to join us, thus remapping Europe in a benign trade-focused way.
In the event of a Brexit vote, the plan would be eminently supportable by the Conservative Party and indeed by the rest of the political spectrum and establishment. But it would require the rejection of some false friends, not least Open Europe.
All the plan now needs is a good hearing. The time is ripe.
