RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: Now Britain, you really can take a bow — for a triumph of democracy
By
Richard Littlejohn for the Daily Mail
1 February 2020
Take a bow, Britain! That was the front page headline in this newspaper on June 25, 2016, celebrating the result of the
EU referendum. It was triumphant, but also cathartic. A clear majority had voted Leave.
We were entitled to congratulate the British people on their fortitude in resisting the threats and embellishments of Project Fear. For years the Daily Mail had demanded that voters should be given the final say on our future relationship with Europe.
Now the people had spoken and delivered an emphatic verdict.
Surely this would draw a line under decades of division over the issue. As a committed opponent of the EU and all its works, I was elated when the result was announced.
My jubilation was, however, tinged with disbelief and trepidation over how the fanatically pro-Brussels political and business Establishment would react to the failure of their best efforts to batter the British people into submission.
Pro-Brexit supporters pose for photos as they take part in the final leg of the "March to Leave" in London, Friday, March 29, 2019
Supporters of the Leave campaign celebrate at the Leave.EU referendum party in London, Britain, June 2016
Throughout the campaign, the superior, well-funded forces of Remain appeared to be dominant. We were warned that if we had the audacity to vote Leave, the country faced ruin. Millions of jobs would be lost, pensions were at risk, the NHS would collapse.
The then President of the United States, Barack Obama, was wheeled out to warn that we would be consigned to the back of the queue when it came to transatlantic trade deals.
Yet still the majority of voters refused to be cowed.
It soon became apparent that our moment of triumph would be fleeting. Remain refused to accept defeat and, as I predicted here in the immediate aftermath of the referendum, would move heaven and earth in their determination to overturn the result.
Ultimately, their resistance was to end in failure. But as we prepare to leave the EU at 11pm tonight, it is worth reflecting on how we got here.
Throughout my journalistic career, which began in 1971, the issue of Europe has never been far from the surface.
The following year, Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath achieved his ambition of dragging us into what was then called the Common Market, after agreeing a shabby deal sacrificing our traditional fishing waters on the altar of European integration.
It was a close-run thing. The Bill paving the way for our membership scraped through the Commons by just eight votes.
Still, out in the country most people accepted it. Even many of those who had reservations about giving up — sorry, 'pooling' — our sovereignty could see a certain logic in joining.
Leader of the Brexit Party since 2019, and Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England, Nigel Farage talks with supporters after his last speech during a session of the European Parliament on January 29
At the time, Britain was viewed as the Sick Man Of Europe, riven by strikes, low productivity and crippling debt. There was also a growing fascination with what we used to call 'The Continent', which seemed to be recovering from the ravages of World War II rather better than we were. This was the era of cheap package holidays to the Costas, of sex, sea and sangria and Y Viva Espana!
Modern Europe looked like a land of milk and honey, spaghetti bolognese, cut-prize booze and a lucrative captive market for British exports. Membership of the Common Market would be our economic salvation.
Bonnet de douche. This time next year, Rodney . . .
Of course, it wouldn't turn out that way. The 1973 oil price crisis sent the world economy into a tailspin. We should have realised that even a European protectionist bloc wasn't immune to global forces.
Today, hostility towards Europe has been presented as a purely Conservative phenomenon. It was in order to heal those divisions once and for all that David Cameron called the 2016 referendum in the first place.
But back then it was Labour tearing itself apart over the issue. Which is why then Prime Minister Harold Wilson held his own referendum on membership in 1975.
Even in the Seventies families were divided, often along generational lines. My father, who worked for a company which manufactured diesel engines, voted In. He was used to dealing with European suppliers and saw the benefits of staying in the club.
He also belonged to the generation that had fought in World War II and genuinely believed that anything which brought the countries of Europe closer together would prevent such horrific slaughter from ever happening again.
Me, being a card-carrying member of the Awkward Squad with an aversion to any kind of authority — and big government, in particular — voted Out, a position I've held ever since.
But there was none of the bitterness that has characterised the past four years. Those of us who vehemently opposed membership respected the honourable motives of those in favour and quietly accepted the outcome of the referendum.
The campaign to quit the Common Market was dominated by the Labour Left, supported by maverick Tories such as Enoch Powell.
The Left saw it as a capitalist conspiracy, a bankers' ramp, forcing up food prices and forcing down wages. They weren't wrong, as it turned out.
Britain's Speaker of the House of Commons John Bercow makes some personal remarks to thank staff, members and family members in the House of Commons in London on October 30, 2019
Yet tired of political and economic turmoil, the British people took the quiet life option and voted by more than two-thirds to remain.
Labour conferences continued to play host to anti-European demonstrations, debates and fringe meetings. And when the party fell into the hands of the hard-Left, electing the eccentric Michael Foot — aka Worzel Gummidge — as leader, Labour fought the 1983 General Election on a commitment to take us out of Europe without so much as the inconvenience of a referendum.
That manifesto was dubbed the 'longest suicide note in history' and Labour was crushed. It was only after Margaret Thatcher's third victory in 1987 that Labour came to embrace the European dream.
The epiphany followed a speech by Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, to a trades union conference promising that Brussels would become a bulwark against Thatcherite conservatism, enshrining collective bargaining and workers' rights.
Meanwhile, an increasingly Euro-sceptical Mrs Thatcher was experiencing her own problems over Europe, which first came to a head when Michael Heseltine — a Tory conference darling — stormed out of the Cabinet in 1986.
He resigned over the fate of Britain's last helicopter manufacturer, Westland, which was in danger of going out of business. Thatcher wanted to sell it to the Americans, Hezza favoured a European takeover.
It was the start of an internecine war which would eventually see Thatcher herself deposed by Europhiles in 1990. Her successor John Major fared little better, running into stiff resistance when he forced through the Maastricht Treaty without a referendum.
Major lost all authority following the collapse of the pound on Black Wednesday in 1992 — from which he never recovered. Oh, yes.
I was presenting an afternoon show on LBC radio that day, and could only look on with astonishment as the business editor kept rushing manically into the studio to inform listeners that interest rates had gone through the roof, rising to an astronomical 15 per cent.
The government spent billions in a vain effort to keep sterling pegged to the ERM, forerunner of the euro single currency.
That was also the day a certain Nigel Farage, then a City trader, decided to resign from the Tory Party and dedicate his life to getting Britain out of the EU.
Farage's dream will come to fruition tonight, almost three decades later. The Brexit deal negotiated by Boris Johnson isn't perfect, but it secures our departure and gives us back control of our money, laws and borders.
OK, so we still have to agree a future trading relationship and already EU panjandrums such as Michel Barnier and that pipsqueak, soon-to-be-ex-Irish PM Lenny Verruca are shaping up tricky.
But I get the sense that their heart really isn't in it this time.
The Europeans need a deal more than we do and with a thumping 80-seat majority, Boris can always walk away — something the hapless Theresa May was never going to do. I'm not going to revisit the past four years in glorious Technicolor.
We've been living through a gruesome movie which we needn't replay. Project Fear has nowhere else to go. None, not a single one, of their doomsday predictions has come true.
The hardline Remainers have left the stage. That gurning gargoyle Bercow has been reduced to a circus act, touting for gigs on the after-dinner speaking circuit and demeaning himself on foreign TV shows.
Labour is an irrelevance and the Hammonds, Grieves, Soubrys and Gina Millers are little more than an historical footnote, an aberration best forgotten.
I must admit, though, at one stage, after Theresa May's Chequers debacle and with Speaker Bercow obviously hellbent on helping Remainers kill off Brexit altogether, I feared it might never happen. I've never been so pleased to be proven wrong.
With luck, future historians will look back at this period as a temporary bout of insanity, during which almost the entire political class suffered a collective nervous breakdown.
Some Continuity Remainers such as the ubiquitous Alastair Campbell and the ridiculous Andrew Adonis — neither of whom has ever been elected to anything — are still making petulant fools of themselves by refusing to handle the commemorative 50p coin. Ignore them.
Farage deserves his party in Parliament Square tonight and Boris has received his reward in spades, with a stunning election victory and five full years in Downing Street to look forward to.
Some people will never reconcile themselves to our leaving the EU, although I'd be astonished if we see the exodus they were threatening.
Despite the abuse and vilification we Leavers have had to endure, we should resist the temptation to gloat or seek reprisals.
The past four years have been like a series of heavyweight boxing championship contests. The first match was a narrow win on points, the last a knockout in the 15th round. Both boxers have fought themselves to a standstill. It's time for a final, sporting embrace.
The gouging and below-the-belt punches must be forgotten.
This is a moment for magnanimity, not retribution. Outside the metropolitan dinner party circles of recalcitrant, unreconciled Remoaners, who commandeered the EU referendum campaign to prosecute their culture war and flaunt their imaginary moral superiority, I don't detect any widespread appetite for resuming hostilities.
Even during the campaign, all of the demented, deeply entrenched bitterness seemed to be confined largely to Parliament Square, the House of Commons and the TV studios on College Green.
I have friends who voted Remain and can honestly say I haven't fallen out with any of them. If arguments over Europe have destroyed friendships and broken up marriages, then I can only conclude that those relationships must have been pretty fragile to begin with.
My sense is that most people accept the result of the General Election as drawing a line in the sand, however they voted. And, as they say in psychobabble circles, we must 'move on'.
Voters in Northern and Midlands seats who returned Tory MPs, some for the first time, have set us an admirable precedent.
If residents of former pit villages and rust belt ex-factory towns can forgive and forget their past animosity towards the Tories and send an Old Etonian back to No 10 with an unassailable majority, then surely Leavers and Remainers should have little difficulty settling their differences.
We have come together as one nation before, most notably after the Civil War. It's what has forged our resilience as a proud, independent democracy.
That's what is really at the heart of all this. We are once again masters of our own destiny. And that bestows the right to make the wrong decision. Not to say we won't make mistakes.
For instance, I think the decision to allow the Chinese to help build our 5G comms network is a colossal blunder. But it's the Prime Minister's prerogative and he will have no one to blame if it all goes pear-shaped.
In backing Huawei, Boris has demonstrated that he will only ever act in what he perceives as Britain's national interest.
Contrary to many expectations, he has shown that Britain is not America's poodle. And judging by the mollifying noises coming out of Trump's national security adviser Mike Pompeo yesterday, the U.S. respects that decision, no matter how much it dislikes it.
After losing four Prime Ministers — Thatcher, Major, Cameron and May — over Europe, the Conservatives are now united. They don't want to lose another.
We can look forward, fingers crossed, to five years of stability. Our future is in our own hands. With a fair wind, we can forge ahead to a glorious global future.
For that we must thank politicians such as Farage and Boris, who put their lives on hold and their careers on the line in pursuit of our freedom.
Farage deserves our gratitude for the crucial role he played in getting us out. He also deserves a knighthood. But much as I like and admire him, he was never going to be the man to bring Britain together.
Boris has that rare gift. Like Arnold Bennett's character, The Card, he possesses the ability to cheer us all up. Heaven knows we could all do with cheering up after the turmoil and rancour of the past four years.
But in the final analysis, this isn't a triumph for any one or other politician. It is a triumph for democracy, for the determination of the British people to assert their sovereignty at the ballot box.
Take a bow, Britain!
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/...OHN-Britain-really-bow-triumph-democracy.html
