How distraught Remainers threw away the possibility of a second EU Referendum

No Second Chances: The Inside Story of the Campaign for a Second Referendum by Morgan Jones

Morgan Jones starts by describing the favourite headgear of indignant pro-European protesters: blue berets with yellow EU stars stuck onto them by passionate Remainers in Bath.

These first-time campaigners were distraught at losing the EU Referendum, held ten years ago this June, and believed they could yet overturn the result. Jones notes

“the strange, anarchic and stubborn spirit of older, previously not hugely political, people doing activism, often viewing getting under the right people’s skin as a victory in and of itself.”

Nothing would induce these bereaved Remainers to moderate their tone, and they could not see their efforts were off-putting to considerable numbers of people whose support they needed if they were ever to get a second referendum, and then overturn the result of the first. As Jones says,

“the base and the culture they created was, well, kind of mad, out of touch with the country and made them often deeply alienating to advocates for their own cause.”

The campaigners believed with passionate intensity that Leave had only won by lying to uneducated voters in backward parts of the country. As the political scientist Rob Ford puts it, the view taken by zealous Remainers of Leave voters was:

“They were lied to, stupid. They are reactionary. They are wrong. The vote was not legitimate. The vote was not fair. They were misled by the media.”

Bereft Remainers could not accept there were honest, honourable, intelligent arguments for leaving the EU.

Nor, usually, were academics able to see this. Anand Menon, Director of the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, told Jones:

“What was absolutely staggering was the degree to which the academic literature’s starting point was, ‘We’re in the European Union. It’s a good thing. Let’s look at how it works.’ “

In Menon’s view, “We failed as a profession, I think, pretty badly.”

During the 2015 general election I went for ConHome to Bolton West to gauge opinion there, and wrote a piece entitled “Bolton West wants to talk about immigration”, in which I quoted a voter who said:

“We get treated like second-class citizens.”

Voters who felt treated like second-class citizens took the chance in the EU Referendum to confound the Establishment by voting Leave.

Immediately after the Referendum, it was not feasible simply to tell these voters they had got it wrong, but that changed after the general election called by Theresa May in 2017, at which the voters took the chance to render her parliamentary position precarious.

It now seemed worthwhile to a coalition of anti-Brexit organisations to set up People’s Vote, launched in April 2018 at the Electric Ballroom in Camden to campaign for a second referendum.

But a large number of Remainers wished only to preach to the converted. The New European was set up as a newspaper which would only appeal to the converted, who were sufficiently numerous to make it a success.

On Twitter, the hashtag #FBPE, standing for Follow Back Pro-EU, was alienating, Jones observes, to pretty much anyone who was not already a strident Remainer, and was “primarily used by people who were not very good at speaking on the internet, who couldn’t quite get the tone right”.

It was part of a “drive to insularity” which ruled out the winning of converts, and tended instead to antagonise anyone who leant towards Leave, and also anyone who was not sure what to think.

Labour Party members were generally pro-EU, but Jeremy Corbyn, who remained leader until April 2020, was a silent and ineffectual Leaver, who nevertheless thought that party members ought to be allowed to have their say, which they got by applauding Sir Keir Starmer to the echo at the party conference of 2018, when after saying another referendum might be needed to break the logjam, he uttered nine words unauthorised by Corbyn’s office:

“And nobody is ruling out Remain as an option.”

Jones sketches the many different pro-EU organisations which jostled for influence at this time, and touches on some of eminent people who were involved on the Remain side, including Roland Rudd, Hugo Dixon, Peter Mandelson, Alastair Campbell, Andrew Adonis, Alan Rusbridger, Will Hutton, Bill Emmott, Anne Applebaum and Tom Baldwin.

Some of these people could not stand each other. Campbell was heard to say:

“If a computer designed someone to annoy me, you would get Hugo Dixon.”

Campbell’s first career was as a tabloid journalist. He is a bit of a brute, but understands power, and the transforming importance of the story.

Dixon had been at The Economist and The Financial Times, and quoted a prissy remark made to him in 2015 by Hutton, a former editor of The Observer:

“This campaign is going to be polluted by lies and by twisting of facts.”

Dixon had accordingly created an organisation called InFacts, to “try to set the record straight”. We see here the factual heresy, as Claud Cockburn called it, in all its naivety and bogus even-handedness. For as Dixon admits to Jones,

“The fact was that 99 per cent of our fire was targeted on the Brexiteers and increasingly on Boris.”

Boris Johnson is an old friend of Dixon: they were at Ashdown House, Eton and Balliol together.

But Dixon and Johnson remained friends. The bitter divisions were between various Remainers, and Jones relates in a calm tone quite a few of the vicious insults they flung at each other. Baldwin, the Director of Communications at People’s Vote, remembered

“Roland Rudd saying, ‘Well I have appointed myself Chairman of the People’s Vote Campaign’ – in the same way that Idi Amin gave himself Victoria Crosses – or, ‘My friend from college, Hugo Dixon, is now Deputy Chairman of the People’s Vote campaign’, which was news to a lot of us.”

Meanwhile the most fervent Remainers went on huge marches through London, which gave those who took part the feeling that victory was in sight, but which made many onlookers cringe.

Members of staff at People’s Vote tried to persuade the demonstrators to carry Union Jacks instead of European flags, but were informed that the Union Jack is “a National Front symbol”.

As Baldwin said, the more the campaign empowered the most virulent Remain activists, the less chance there was of winning over the Conservative MPs whose support they needed in order to defeat Brexit in Parliament.

In October 2019, the antipathies within People’s Vote burst into public view when Rudd sacked Baldwin and the campaign’s Director, James McGrory.

The staff of People’s Vote sided by a margin of 40 to three with Baldwin and McGrory. When Rudd attempted to appeal to the staff by saying, “We’ve been through a lot together, ” one of them retorted, “No we haven’t. What’s my name?”

This book has the great merit of focussing on what ten years ago was the losing side. Jones in not particularly eloquent, but she is careful and scrupulous and fair as she recounts how the enraged Waitrose shoppers who were the most zealous Remainers antagonised the voters in Bolton West who wanted their country back.