BY ALEX STORY
Alastair Campbell has graced our TV studios a great deal of late.
As the seventh anniversary of the vote on leaving the European Union came and went, he was the de facto cheerleader for the struggling institution.
His main line of argument was and is that the people who campaigned for Brexit lied to a gullible and mostly ill-educated electorate.
Because the Brexit campaigners lied, it is thought in certain circles, the referendum result is defunct, and so, by extension, is democracy.
The basis of the entire claim was the Vote Leave Red Bus. It stated that £350 million were transferred from our exchequer to the European Union every week.
The Vote Leave team thought that kind of money could be better used on the domestic front.
The number was not a lie.
It came straight from our very own Office of National Statistics.
After all, the United Kingdom was a net contributor to the ever growing and cash hungry European Union budget.
The dispute, if ever there was one, was whether the gross figure reported by the Office of National Statistics was the appropriate one to use.
Some thought a net figure of £175 million for weekly transfers, discounting rebates and grants, would have been more accurate.
A point worth debating surely, but not a lie.
Indeed, if the pitch to remain in an institution the United Kingdom had been part of since 1973 could not survive a single Red Bus with a punchy number on its side, it might have been worth investigating the causes of Remain’s defeat more thoroughly.
An honest post-mortem should have been undertaken.
It never was. Braying self-righteously about the big “Lie” was much easier.
Introspection requires humility and courage. The losing side showed little of either.
Nevertheless, a historical view of why Remain lost is needed.
The international context in which the referendum took place is crucial.
The European Union and the Euro leapt from one crisis to another.
The imposition of a single currency on a very complex European political reality led to ever increasing distortions.
Before the advent of the single currency, northern banks would only lend cautiously in Escudos, Francs, Pesetas and Lira. Every bank had macro-economic desks focused exclusively on the state of every European country with its own currency.
Each country would be assessed on economic prospects, political developments, and national debt levels among other things.
However, overnight, aggregate Eurozone data was the new thing, national expertise became old hat.
Taken in by the fiction that Southern inflationary and risk differences had disappeared, these once cautious banks lent with gay abandon from 2002 to 2008.
When Lehman Brothers went bust in September 2008, the reality hit home. Suddenly, the Southern States, having gorged themselves on cheap debt from Northern lenders, found themselves unable to refinance themselves, leading to a near permanent “balance of payment” crisis.
From 2009 to 2015, Portugal, Ireland, Greece, Spain, and Cyprus went bust.
Unable to devalue their non-existent national currency, their local populations just had to bear the brunt of extreme economic dislocation.
Each disaster was overseen, and made worse, by the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission and the European Central Bank, also known as the Troika.
Furthermore, in an unforgettable act of political overreach, Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor in 2011 lobbied to remove Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s Prime Minister. Italy, for all her problems, is one of the world’s richest countries. Yet, within the confines of the European Union and the Euro, she was stripped of her dignity.
As Helen Thomson, Professor of Political Economy at Cambridge University, reminds us in her latest book “Disorder: Hard Times in the 21st Century”, in September 2011, “Angela Merkel rang the Italian President, Giorgio Napolitano, to suggest he find an alternative government”. Berlusconi resigned a few days after the call.
She adds: “from that political moment until September 2019, no minister of economy and finance in Italy was an elected politician”.
All were technocrats, none had a democratic mandate.
This sequence of events, among others, meant that much of the European Union’s population lived in countries in perennial distress from 2008 to 2015.
The corollary was a great migration. The youth of Southern Europe and France, wallowing in unemployment, moved North to the UK.
The United Kingdom, armed with her own monetary tools and the flexibility these imparted, became the employer of last resort.
Millions crossed the seas to find work. And many found it in the warm embrace of Britannica. Wages, though, dropped. The cost of living increased. Aggregate GDP grew; GDP per capita stalled. The poor got poorer, the rich much richer.
To compound the view that the end was nigh, Merkel unilaterally invited the Middle East to come to Europe. While many leaders across the European Union accepted, much of the population of Europe did not.
The pictures of thousands of men walking through Europe added to a sense of loss of control and purpose.
This was the international context in which the referendum took place. These issues were not lies. They were real. They spelt “continent wide failure” in large letters.
The second, perhaps, most important issue, often overlooked, was how we entered the European Union. The European Communities Act of 1972 passed by Ted Heath and penned by Geoffrey Howe subordinated our legislative bodies to the European Commission.
As paragraph 2.1 of the act says: “Treaties are without further enactment to be given legal effect or used in the United Kingdom shall be recognised and available in law, and be enforced”.
The same could not be said of other European Nations.
Indeed, Germany’s Constitutional Court never accepted the idea of European Union supremacy. In its 2009 judgement, the German court “insisted on national sovereignty and a national “living democracy” in key political areas as citizenship and fundamental rights, social and financial policy, legislation in criminal matters, civil and family law, relations to the churches and defence”.
That is to say, the United Kingdom accepted a constitutional arrangement that subordinated her parliament to the European Union, which itself stood beneath the German Parliaments.
In short, the UK stood two constitutional steps beneath Germany (and France).
If there was a big deception, it did not come from those campaigning to leave.
It was perpetrated by the 1970 to 1974 Ted Heath government (and carried on by all governments until June 2016), in which he signed away our democratic and sovereign rights for seeming perpetuity, telling the people of the United Kingdom that they had only agreed to a simple trade deal with no political ramifications.
Remainers lost, but not because of a lie. They were selling a self-satisfied status-quo, promising no change of direction, when most with eyes to see just wanted a return to stability, normalcy, and political accountability.
The Voter just didn’t want the “more of the same” pitch Remain had to sell.
There was no vision for a better or improving United Kingdom, no desire or courage, for instance, to take ownership of international trade negotiations, which recently saw the country become part of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP).
In so doing, we sealed trade deals with economies such as Australia, Brunei, Canada, Chile, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia – many of which are very fast growing, certainly compared to stagnant Europe.
That means, in the field of agriculture for example, access to tariff free products such as palm oil, to name but one. Such products will bring important benefits to our food manufacturers and to our beleaguered consumers through lower input costs.
Only recently, palm oil feel neatly in the crosshair of a deeply nationalistic nexus of European Union Common Agricultural Policy politics and suffered as a result.
It is now available, politics, regulation and tariff free.
Perhaps less than many on the Leave side would have wanted but revolutionary, on that and many other fronts, from a pre-2016 perspective.
It is high time that the likes of Alastair Campbell stop blaming the consumer for defective products and policies they hawked; time they started looking, as Michael Jackson would have sung, at the man in the mirror for answers as to why Remain lost.
Alex Story is Head of Business Development at a City broker working with Hedge Funds and other financial institutions. He stood for parliament in 2005, 2010 and 2015. In 2016, he won the right to represent Yorkshire & the Humber in the European Parliament. He didn’t take the seat.