We’ve known for a while that Boris Johnson wrote two articles for the Telegraph, for and against Brexit, two days before declaring himself as a “leaver”. Only the leave article was published, leaving the remain article under wraps. Via a book and the Sunday Times, the second article has now been revealed.
It contains such corkers from Boris as these:
This is a market on our doorstep, ready for further exploitation by British firms. The membership fee seems rather small for all that access. Why are we so determined to turn our back on it?
…Britain is a great nation, a global force for good. It is surely a boon for the world and for Europe that she should be intimately engaged in the EU.
….Almost everyone expects there to be some sort of economic shock as a result of Brexit. How big would it be? I am sure the doomsters are exaggerating the fall-out but are they completely wrong?
…Then there is a worry about Scotland, and the possibility that an English-only ‘leave’ vote could lead to the break-up of the union.
You can read more in the Mail here.
It would be a cheap shot to point out that this “two articles” situation highlights the ambition of Boris Johnson. That he was in two minds about the EU and was perhaps calculating which approach would do his career the most good.
It is more pertinent to observe that this focuses on the stupidity of Theresa May’s all-guns-blazing hard Brexit approach. When her leading Brexiteer was thinking and writing such pro-EU thoughts just days before the referendum campaign, it highlights that she is being hasty and unwise in going all-out for hard Brexit.
* Paul Walter is a Liberal Democrat activist and member of the Liberal Democrat Voice team. He blogs at Liberal Burblings.
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36 Comments
It doesn’t matter what kind of Brexit we want. As Donald Tusk made clear the other day, soft Brexit is not even an option – it is hard Bexit or no Brexit. Theresa May may not be pursuing the kind of Brexit we all want, but it could be argued that she is simply being realistic.
The kind of approach Nick Clegg is taking (as seen in his interview on Marr this morning) is giving a very misleading impression to the public, because he is talking as if the UK has some kind of power to decide what sort of Brexit we get. The fact is that we have virtually no power over what happens. It doesn’t matter how many Parliamentary votes we have telling Theresa May what position to adopt; all it would take would be for any one of the other 27 EU countries to reject that position, and soft Brexit would be dead in the water. Much better to let her go and do the initial negotiations with all options open to her, and see what happens.
……..It would be a cheap shot to point out that this “two articles” situation highlights the ambition of Boris Johnson……..
It MIGHT be a cheap shot but it would CERTAINLY be true….
What was in people’s minds as they voted in the referendum?
How might they have answered this question, “If the UK does vote to leave, do you think the British government should or should not consider a similar relationship [to the Norwegian model]?”
Well on the 8th of June YouGov polled 1750 adults and asked them that question.
57% answered yes. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2016/06/11/uk-voters-back-norway-style-brexit-poll-reveals/
Since April I have been arguing here (having assumed that Leave would win) that this was the key campaign that needed to be won subsequently to the vote.
Others can tell me whether the Conference vote puts us in such a campaigning camp or not. If it does, that doesn’t seem to be coming across as our position. I accept that this apparent position may be a good thing for growing or reestablishing the Party, but it is not the right thing for the country and for those in this country least able to cope in a world leading up to a a future outside of the EEA with its four freedoms.
What Johnson wrote, what he thought prior to the campaigning, or during the campaigning or after the campaign is irrelevant to what we should be campaigning on now; viz the EEA/EFTA option.
I’ve no idea if Boris was genuinely on the fence or just took the position that he thought would benefit his career the most. That we will probably never know. But I just don’t understand the Lib Dem’s position on this at all. And that is something I would like to know:
This article says “the stupidity of Theresa May’s all-guns-blazing hard Brexit approach”
Teresa May is being very clear – she will honour the result. The winning result was the one that said “leave the European Union”.
When I voted leave I knew that we couldn’t have this all on our own terms and that the EU would hold more of the cards than we did. Donald Tusk has then since said that it is hard Brexit or no Brexit. So surely honouring the result means leaving with a hard Brexit if that is how the EU are going to insist it is? The EU’s position is clear, leaving means hard Brexit, take it or leave it. Mrs May’s position is clear, honour the result, the result was leave.
There Liberal Democrats position is not clear. They say the want to honour the leave result?
But they also want a referendum on the terms of the exit deal? The EU say they won’t talk about our deal until we first trigger article 50, and once we trigger article 50 we leave two years to the day and we don’t have the power to stop that process? So, how on earth can the Lib Dems promise something that isn’t in their power to give?
I get that you guys didn’t want to leave, and you want to criticise Teresa May (that’s kind of an opposition parties jobs), but I really don’t understand:
1. What are you actually criticising her for? Honouring the result on the terms the EU have told us that they will insist upon (hard brexit).
2. How can you call for a referendum on something that you don’t have the power to deliver?
3. How can you honour the result without supporting leaving, as that is what was on the ballot paper?
El Sid
The Libs Dem position seems to be fairly straightforward – that the leavers didn’t understand what they voted for. They can’t get it into their heads that the people put leaving the EU and taking back border control ahead of being in the single market. Personally – and I voted remain – I haven’t met any leaver or remainer that was confused about what they voted for.
El Sid 16th Oct ’16 – 10:44am………….When I voted leave I knew that we couldn’t have this all on our own terms and that the EU would hold more of the cards than we did….
Perhaps you should have told Boris Johnson; he still believes that we ‘can have our cake and eat it’…He is not alone; we are constantly being told that the EU needs us more than we need them, that tariffs will hurt them more than us, how their businesses will suffer, etc., etc….
Perhaps Boris was trying to reconcile in his own mind whether Leave or Remain was better. Once he saw the contrasting arguments he could make for each side he could see a clear winner.
The four arguments you present are each valid, each is more or less true. It’s just that they are quite weak and quite easily trumped by the desire for sovereignty.
@El Sid
Article 50 says:
1. Any Member State may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.
The referendum was advisory; Parliament is sovereign. If Parliament chooses to state before the triggering of Article 50, that the deal with the EU will be subject to a further referendum before the two years are up with the options to leave on the agreed terms or to remain in the EU on existing terms, then they have the constitutional right to do so and the EU cannot refuse to accept this. UKIP wanted a hard Brexit and they only won 12.7% of the vote at the 2015 General Election, so it is not obvious that the 52% who voted Leave all wanted a hard Brexit or would still vote Leave if that was the only choice.
I’ve never impressed with Boris Johnson.
The hard/soft Brexit debate is really about trying to string the triggering of article 50 out for as long as possible, in the hope that it will be overturned by a general election. It’s a desperate rear-guard action, perfectly valid and all that. But it will fail. By 2020 the progressive parties will either be fighting to re-join the EU or will have realised that they have to fight on a national rather than international platform. The point is you’ve got a fixed term parliament and a government that will probably strengthen its electoral position rather than lose ground.
@ Bill le Breton
“Well on the 8th of June YouGov polled 1750 adults and asked them that question.
57% answered yes”
There is firstly the problem of how accurate an opinion poll is. If I remember correctly opinion polls were putting Remain ahead. It is therefore likely that the number of Leave voters in the survey was too low and this would reduce the overall majority. 42% of Leave voters said only that we should CONSIDER a SIMILAR relationship to Norway. The question seems vague and there might have been people who stated it should be considered only if the bit they disliked was not included. There does not seem to be a link to get behind the report to the full survey and its breakdown.
It would be interesting if a new survey was taken and the question was better defined to spell out exactly how much Norway pays and how much EU law, (justice) and control of EU (or EEA) migration it has.
In a perfect world the UK would negotiate two deals, one based on the Norwegian model and the other with total control over migration from the EU (EEA) and then put them to a referendum for the people to decide. If we could get the other 27 EU countries to agree to this before negotiations start, then we might have a chance of convincing the government to do this. However I don’t think we are even trying to do this.
@malc: “The Libs Dem position seems to be fairly straightforward – that the leavers didn’t understand what they voted for.” – Yes but I also saw Tim Farron on TV saying that he “respected the result”. Saying that people didn’t understand what they were voting for is essentially saying that the people’s decision is invalid because they are to ignorant and stupid to make it. That’s the very definition of not respecting the result.
@Laurence Cox 16th Oct ’16 – 11:55am “The referendum was advisory; Parliament is sovereign. If Parliament chooses to state before the triggering of Article 50, that the deal with the EU will be subject to a further referendum before the two years are up with the options to leave on the agreed terms or to remain in the EU on existing terms, then they have the constitutional right to do so and the EU cannot refuse to accept this.”
I really don’t think that is correct. Article 50 doesn’t say that when we trigger it we can insert clauses saying that we get to rollback and abort the whole process if we don’t like the look of it when the final outcome becomes clearer.
In fact, I believe article 50 was designed that way on purpose. It seems to me like it was designed to make invoking it a leap into the dark and thereby discourage countries from ever invoking it. When I consider this in the light of the comments by the French President and others suggesting that we need to be punished for leaving in order to stop other member states doing the same thing it confirms for me that voting to leave was indeed the right thing to do.
“Parliament is sovereign…”. Himmm. It would be a brave English or Welsh MP who tried to overturn the result using that argument. Parliament is sovereign because its members are directly elected by the people to represent them. However parliament choose not to decide this question, and instead decided that the people should answer this one for themselves directly. If MPs, after getting an answer that they didn’t like, decided that they as the constituency MP were “sovereign” rather than the voters who put them there to represent them, then I think they would discover that while parliament was sovereign they were easily replaceable and would be getting their P45 at the next election as UKIP cleaned up in England and Wales like the SNP did in Scotland.
With campaigners for Brexit divided between those who called for greater protectionism and those who advocated more laissez-faire free markets, so no consensus amongst Brexiting politicians what they were voting for, it is obvious that those who voted to leave cannot have known what they were voting for. There is no mandate for where Brexit takes us and any claims of the kind are at best wishful thinking.
El Sid: Parliament IS sovereign. That is how our constitution works. And the referendum was advisory. If it had been a binding referendum, then the government would have had to trigger Article 50 at the earliest opportunity after the result, with no parliamentary consultation. You can’t have it both ways. Either the referendum was binding, in which case we wouldn’t be discussing this at all as the process would already in place, or it is not, in which case parliamentary sovereignty should be respected.
As to how voters would react to MPs delaying or overturning the process, well forgive the cliché but a week is a long time in politics, and the referendum result was just one poll and does not hold for all time. The SNP win in 2015 is also not equivalent to the hypothetical case of UKIP making massive gains as a result of MPs ignoring the referendum result (which I don’t think would happen, except maybe in a few hard Brexit regions, and probably as part of a wholescale realignment of UK politics on a pro/anti-EU axis). The SNP gains happened after a referendum that REJECTED its demand for independence, and was mainly a result of Cameron’s reaction to the referendum result, in which instead of striking a conciliatory tone immeediately announced moves for “English votes for English laws”. It was a childish “We won, you lost, neh neh neh neh neh” approach, and very similar to the attitude of Brexiteers now.
Martin.
With campaigners divided between small government advocating laissez faire capitalists, economic liberals. socialist, social liberal, liberals. nationalist and Greens why should anyone believe Remain were anymore coherent? I voted leave to leave the EU as a rejection of supranational politics . What kind of government we get after that will be determined in the usual way by a general election.
@Alex Macfie “El Sid: Parliament IS sovereign.”
But with a governing majority party that stood on a manifesto commitment to hold an in/out referendum and to honour the result.
The Lib Dems were punished for breaking promises to voters and I don’t think the Conservatives will be in a hurry to do the same, especially if it also involves ignoring the majority vote of the referendum.
I suspect that the Tories would love to see Brexit scuppered by opposition parties who voters would punish in the next election, leaving the Tories with a huge majority and EU membership.
@Martin ” it is obvious that those who voted to leave cannot have known what they were voting for. There is no mandate for where Brexit takes us and any claims of the kind are at best wishful thinking.”
I think you’re playing with words. I knew exactly what I was voting for, I was voting to leave the European Union. So did 17 million other people. I admit that when I voted to leave I did not know what life outside the European Union would look like and I still don’t. The 17 million other leave voters also did not know what life outside the EU would look like and they still don’t.
But see, we knew that we did not know. We choose to leave and take a chance because we are dissatisfied with the European Union and consider membership of it to be totally unacceptable.
@Alex Macfie 16th Oct ’16 – 3:29pm “El Sid: Parliament IS sovereign. That is how our constitution works. And the referendum was advisory.” Yes, parliament is sovereign but its members will answer to those who elect them to it. I think, that if the SNP/Tories/Labour and Liberal MPs decide to use their positions as MPs to overturn Brexit then the 52% who voted for Brexit will turnout on mass at the next election and replace them with UKIPers. But I doubt we will ever find out, because we almost certainly will leave the European Union.
If the Lib Dems are actually fighting to attempt to stop Brexit (rather than arguing about what sort of deal we get) then I suspect they are fighting a losing battle that will cost them the majority of their 8 remaining seats.
@Peter Watson, El Sid: The 48% also have votes; what makes you suppose that they would not also use their votes to support politicians who delay or scupper Brexit, or punish those who seek a hard Brexit? You forget that the 52% is a small majority (of those who voted) and that public opinion can change. Just because 52% voted Leave a few months ago, doesn’t mean those 52% will always have that opinion.
And the “broken promises” analogy is flawed: the Lib Dems were punished over broken promises because those were the promises that got people to vote for them. As Lib Dems, we never promised Brexit, and the sort of voters who would choose to punish politicians for delaying Brexit are not the ones who are most likely to vote for us anyway. There is no point in us chasing what is perceived as the majority opinion by allowing Brexit to happen, because (i) it wouldn’t be convincing; (ii) it’s not who or what we are, and (iii) it would lose us potential votes of people who support us BECAUSE of our anti-Brexit stance.
@Alex Macfie: “The 48% also have votes; what makes you suppose that they would not also use their votes to support politicians who delay or scupper Brexit, or punish those who seek a hard Brexit?”
They could, but I suspect you are misreading the situation.
Now that we have had a majority vote for Brexit almost all the 52% are pleased and want the government to get on with it. About half of the 48% who voted for remain say that the will of the majority should prevail and now believe we should Brexit. Support for leaving is at around 75%, not 52%.
It is only when you ask what type of exit should we have that this group splinters. But in the real world, once Article 50 is triggered, what type of exit we get will depend more on the EU than it does on us – as I said, the EU, not the UK, are holding most of the cards…
Both Teresa May and Jeremy Corbyn (both former remainers) now say that the will of the people must be respected and that we therefore need to leave the EU. For parliament to vote against a position that both the majority government and the leader of the opposition hold would require a massive rebellion by all the establishment parties MPs. If that were to happen your side would be split 3 or 4 ways, but the angry 52% would only have UKIP.
Teresa May’s position is not actually extreme at all. She is saying that as per her party’s manifesto, the result of the referendum will be honoured and we will leave. It is the EU that is saying it is hard Brexit or no Brexit.
If the Liberal Democrats real position is what I’m starting to suspect it is, ignore the result of the referendum and do anything we can to circumvent the original vote and stay, then they are the ones with the extreme position. And it is a position that I believe will cost them seats too. Under FPTP 25% of the vote will not win a party a single seat if it is spread fairly evenly. At 8% of the vote you could gain votes and lose seats. Incidentally, we recently had a referendum on changing that voting system which the electoral reformers lost. How would you feel about parliament if you won and parliament said, “yes, the plebs voted to end FPTP, but that is just advisory, we are sovereign, not the plebs. We don’t want to be elected under anything other than FPTP so we are overturning that result”. How would that have gone down at the next election if the majority were in favour of ending FPTP and MPs from all the other parties overturned the result?
Neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Theresa May were particularly enthusiastic Remainers. Corbyn in particular has a long history of opposing the EU, believing (in keeping with his school of hard-left socialism) that it is a capitalist club and the best thing for the UK would be to withdraw so that a proper British Socialist state could be established. His less-than-enthusiastic support for Remain likely played a large part in the Leave victory.
People may say “the will of the people should prevail” but it is the people themselves who decide their will. They may say as an abstract principle that the result from June should be respected, but will they continue to hold to that position once prices rise, unemployment rises, salaries fall, they can no longer travel freely within Europe like they used to? Public opinion changes; it would be farcical if a majority of people said they wanted the UK to remain in the EU but the “will of the people” should prevail (based on a flawed plebiscite) and so we should leave.
The AV referendum was NOT advisory. It was binding: it provided for a change in the electoral system if supported by the referendum. All the groundwork for the potential change had been done before the referendum, so there would not have needed to be any parliamentary vote after the referendum, should Yes have prevailed. (Of course, that did not stop No2AV from lying about the cost, including for things like “expensive voting machines” when none were planned.) I can’t think of anything sillier than having an advisory referendum on electoral reform.
will they continue to hold to that position once prices rise, unemployment rises, salaries fall, they can no longer travel freely within Europe like they used to
Yes.
I am getting uneasy with much of this talk.
I didn’t vote leave either and think Brexit will be the biggest disaster we have faced since losing the American colonies but I see not the slightest empathy or respect for the 17 million who won the vote. Rather, the voices on this forum, and in much of the party, treat them with utter contempt. They are routinely insulted as stupid, ignorant racist bigots and are repeatedly informed of their reasons for voting the way they did and bluntly told what a mistake they made and how the political class in general and the LibDems in particular, intend to rescue them from their own folly.
The citizens were told, all along, that they should think carefully and that it was the most important choice they would make in a generation.
To now tell them “Nah! Only joking. Your vote didn’t count after all!” is a recipe for public disorder on a grand scale.
Alex.
People do change their minds. But (a) if, and it is only if. those things happen attitudes could harden with Leave voters blaming the EU and (b)the Remain vote could just as easily collapse. As for the vote being advisory the Conservatives are in power and they don’t think so. Article 50 will be triggered in March 2017 and the ground will shift very rapidly.
As Alex Macfie has said, we are, quite frankly, waiting for the great British public to catch up with the situation. It is true as people above have said, that the EU will not (cannot) allow a “soft” Brexit. What Theresa May is going to embark on next year (if we ever get that far) is only euphemistically described as “negotiation”. Personally, I am going to take a fairly imminent trip to the bookies’ to put a tenner on Brexit never happening. Truly, we have rarely seen a more clear cut case of the Emperor’s new clothes.
Glenn
You say “the Conservatives are in power”. They do, of course, only have a majority of 17, so if things get out of hand, their own rebels will easily defeat the present unstable consensus.
@Tim13 “As Alex Macfie has said, we are, quite frankly, waiting for the great British public to catch up with the situation. It is true as people above have said, that the EU will not (cannot) allow a “soft” Brexit.”
That risks leading to the sort of reluctant Bremain that could be a bit of a nightmare for the UK and the rest of the EU. I would much prefer a positive case being made for remaining in the EU but all I see is a continuation of the negative approach (“if you think being in the EU is bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet!”) that gave away the referendum to Brexit and still doesn’t look like it is changing hearts and minds.
El Sid,
Actually what you are quoting (more or less) is the % who currently do not want another referendum replicating the last one, which is also our position. The proportions who want to Leave and to Remain are actually very similar in the polls to where they were on referendum day.
What did change dramatically on 24th June (according to the British election study) is how much people care about it, which dropped somewhat among Leave voters (probably because they thought it was all over), but shot up dramatically amongst Remain voters (who evidently hoped it was not). Remain voters are now the constituency who might change their voting intention because of Europe. We can only gain votes from our current position by identifying with them. Meanwhile Leave voters will continue to vote for us if they did before, because other issues are more important now
http://www.britishelectionstudy.com/bes-resources/brexit-britain-british-election-study-insights-from-the-post-eu-referendum-wave-of-the-bes-internet-panel/#.WAQQZyTD6wg
Tim 13
You’re clinging at straws. Article 50 will be triggered in March. Brexit will happen. Personally, I think a lot of people in the Remain camp are so upset by the result they can’t conceive of the idea that the Leave camp are happy with it.
Paul
Why the kid gloves in one of our champs, you , capable of a bit of boxing ? Of course he , Boris , was thinking of his career ! As if ?!
Hard Brexit from him is as convincing as hard cheese from Dairylea!
@elcid I can’t believe I read this. This surely means that we ignorantly decided to gamble on our children’s future? “But see, we knew that we did not know. We choose to leave and take a chance because we are dissatisfied with the European Union and consider membership of it to be totally unacceptable”
The Remain campaign was terrible. People I met including our worried window cleaner asked me to tell them something about the EU as they felt they did not have the information, and a lot of what they knew was what the Murdoch, Barclay brothers- very anti- press gave them. The Boris articles made a big contribution to that. For instance the “bloated bureaucrats” of the Commission – there are 22,000 of them for 28 countries,( plus the necessary interpreters) when Leicester has 14,000 and Edinburgh 19,000, not the largest local authorities we have, and the Commission does not decide policy. Also their campaign was only negative And we know how many reliable facts Leave gave. I met people who really believed that the whole of Turkey was coming.
“The four arguments you present are each valid, each is more or less true. It’s just that they are quite weak and quite easily trumped by the desire for sovereignty.”
Don’t you love the loud Brexit OTT emotive desire for ‘reclaiming’ sovereignty from Brussels, yet are totally quiet as once again the UK simply hands over a UK citizen to stand trial in the US for something that isn’t a crime in the UK, all because Westminster ceded ‘sovereignty’ to the US…
@Roland
Isn’t that an argument for reclaiming sovereignty and repealing bad laws?
@John – No it shows the fatal fallacy at the heart of Brexit – Westminster doesn’t want to be sovereign! If it did it would not have signed the US-UK extradition treaty in 2003 – yes this wasn’t an EU treaty but a treaty the UK (ie. Westminster) negotiated on it’s own.
I suggest it is a good indicator of Westminster’s (current) ability to negotiate any treaty that actually benefits UK citizens…
@Roland
I think that’s an odd take on that treaty. All I take from that treaty is they should only come into effect when ratified by all parties involved.
@John Peters – Agree, however it was the UK government who both negotiated the treaty without real consideration of what it would mean in practice and then decided to ratify it ahead of the US – who have a considerable track record in negotiating treaties and then not being in any hurry to ratify them…
the key issue as I’ve pointed out over many of the Brexit issues and particularly sovereignty is that it’s cause and remedy are to be found at Westminster and not elsewhere. Remember it was Westminster, of it’s own volition, signed the treaties that transformed the EEC into the EU …
@Roland
The European Arrest Warrant is just as faulty as the USA extradition treaty in respect of whether any offense under UK law has been committed.
UK politicians are indeed a problem. The public has found they acted ultra vires with respect to the EU.