The battle to see the euref result implemented was the longest, bitterest political battle I've ever heard of in Britain. One might need to go back to something like the Appeasement debates to find something worse. It ends tonight in final & total victory for the Brexiteers.
By and large, the euref itself was fought in a friendly spirit. There were some wild exaggerations such as the "punishment budget" & the claim voting to leave would trigger an instant recession, but these fell well within the range of normal political to & fro.
The one big exception to this was the Remain campaign's shameful attempt to use the death of Jo Cox to gain votes. I believe they were always bound to get a sympathy vote bounce from that (& did so), but the open attempt to maximise that was a sorry episode in electoral history.
Nonetheless in the end the result was what it was & we all expected to move on. I genuinely believed the commitment of mainstream respectable Remainers to democracy was stronger than to the EU & the euref result had no chance of being questioned by serious people. I was wrong.
Maybe if a Leaver had become PM instead of May, the Continuity Remain campaign would never have got going. I was an Anyone But May person & openly said I feared that if she won she would prioritise immigration control over everything else. She did. That was a catastrophe.
I believe that following the euref there should have been an immediate General Election. What we needed was the election we had in Dec-2019, with parties led by leaders genuinely committed to implementing the euref requiring MPs to sign up to doing so & opponents of that defeated
At the euref, the entire British establishment - all the major political parties, the BoE, civil service etc were defeated in their central policy. The system had to face another election to re-establish its legitimacy. We saw through late 2016/early 2017 that it wasn't respected
May wasn't wrong to call an election. She waited too long to do so. By the time she called it, Labour had already started to established its cavilling position on Brexit, & a Continuity Remain campaign had formed set on thwarting democracy & overturning our whole system.
Such things do not happen in a vacuum. Just as in the 1970s Union political power rose when the political parties were ineffectual, so the Continuity Remain campaign was able to make progress through 2017 & 2018 because its notional opponent was May, the UK's worst ever PM.
As it happens just as I disagree with the view May shldn't hv called GE2017, I also disagree with the view May blew the Brexit negotiations in Phase 1. If in Phase 2 we'd stuck to the Phase 1 deal as May's ministers explained it in the Commons it would have been UK. We didn't.
May's attempts in Phase 2 of the Brexit negotiations to engineer a situation where we followed EU laws & traded in the Single Market without restrictions, but controlled our own immigration, were catastrophic. She exacerbated that with zero (her) credibility threats of No Deal.
The euref wasn't a decision to make a Withdrawal Agreement with the EU or renegotiate our arrangement within the EU's ambit. They were to leave. Everyone knew it. Yet May & Continuity Remainers blatantly lied & lied abt that, with zero respect for democracy or the UK constitution
May came back with the deal she wanted: a deal to keep the UK locked within the EU's legal & trading ambit but with more control over immigration. But Leavers weren't buying it. Continuity Remainers saw the split & sought to exploit it. May's deal went down to epic record defeat.
She surely should then have gone. She faced a confidence vote. But those who agreed with her goals believed they cld blackmail Leavers into backing her deal, & those who wanted to keep us in the EU saw a chance to exploit splits. So she survived - handily - with 200 Cons MPs.
There was no doubt: the only reason to vote to keep May as leader in Dec-2018 was cos she wld cancel leaving in March 2019 if her deal was not passed. That was what 200 Cons MPs wanted to happen (aside from those too sheep-like in their allegiances to be players in the debate)
Continuity Remainers in the other parties, or Communists & nationalists seeking chaos, saw their chance to tag along & up the pressure. True Leavers became very isolated. It was obvious that May's deal wld never pass & that that Parliament wld never vote to leave with No Deal.
Things were very dicey for a time. The Conservative Party was dominated by anti-democrats; the Labour Party by Communists. Many said the only way through was to call the anti-democrat Conservatives' bluff by backing May's deal & fight to leave the EU again some other future year.
I did not agree. I was confident we could stop May's deal in Parliament. I was also confident that May could never beat Corbyn in a General Election, especially if her deal passed. Passing May's deal wld not have avoiding the Marxists; it wld hv guaranteed them.
I also never accepted the claim May's deal or not equalled leaving the EU or not. I always believed leaving the EU was certain. I'd believed that from years before the euref, I believed that throughout the euref (except the wknd after Cox was murdered) & I believed it ever after.
The threat wasn't that we wldn't leave the EU. The threat was a) that we'd bind ourselves into an unfavourable post-Brexit arrangement; & b) that we'd be taken over by quasi-communists or face some serious constitutional dislocation, perhaps including violence.
If May cldn't keep out the quasi-Communists, that left 2 alternatives: have her replaced by a Tory leader that cld win or see a new party emerge that cld beat both Corbyn & May. Or both.
As matters stood in early 2019, May had won a confidence vote & 200 Cons MPs had voted to cancel leaving if her deal didn't pass. The Tory Party had turned decisively against democracy. That was not the 1st time it had betrayed voters on the EU.
For 4 General Elections in a row, the Tories stood on a platform of seeking to repatriate powers from the EU. But as soon as it got a whiff of power in 2010, none of that mattered. It made us, its activists, liars - liars for more than a decade.
When it did that again, in early 2019, choosing to cancel leaving the EU rather than accept a democratic vote & rather than implement its own solemn promises at GE2017 - when it made me a liar again, the choice was clear. The Tories had to be forced to change radically or die off
I initially said I didn't think Farage was the right person to lead any new True Leavers movement. His flaws were well-known to mainstream Leavers. But no-one else stepped up to the plate, & he did. So Farage & the Brexit Party it had to be.
To force the Tories to change or die off, & to do so quickly enough to avoid the country being taken over by quasi-Communists, could not be a gentle task. It was all-in or Corbyn wld win. So the attacks on the Tories were, of necessity, pitiless & without restraint.
The EU Parliament result of 2019 created the terror in the Tory Party that was required. They ditched May. But even then, with it crystal clear that any leader other than Boris meant extinction, 150 Tory MPs voted for other candidates in the final MPs round. Amazing.
It was clear we cld never leave without a new General Election. I hoped Boris might purge his party enough, secure a new deal with the EU, & win the General Election. But though I trusted him I didn't trust his Party. Sure enough, it refused to support him. But he did purge it.
Boris managed to purge his party much more completely than I had anticipated he cld. And with his party purged, a new possibility came into play: that Boris wld back No Deal & enter into an electoral pact with the Brexit Party - surely winning a huge majority & leading to No Deal
The EU seemed to grasp No Deal was about to actually come. That, plus a feeling on the EU side that it simply wanted Brexit over, induced it to do a deal with Boris. That deal changed everything. It wasn't great. But it was just, marginally, enough. Almost all Leavers backed it.
Parliament had to accept a new election in the end. It could not carry on with so little legitimacy, defying the country's largest democratic vote in favour of anything, for long. And so we had our election, Leavers backed Boris, & we come to total & final victory.
