Brexit: Part I, The Origins
Bacongate
“Well son, it all started with a bacon sandwich.” Avid redditors will recognize this line as the meme du jour on the /r/ukpolitics subreddit. The refrain pokes fun at how our current generation will try to begin explaining the convoluted and embarrassing political saga that Brexit has become to our children. The reference is to a now infamous photo that was taken in 2014 of the then leader of the Labour Party, Ed Miliband, looking painfully awkward as he munched his way through Britain’s signature breakfast sandwich.
Poor Ed had stopped at a market to buy flowers for his wife and figured he would chow down a quick bacon batty before he went home. Who could be watching? The whole country, it turns out — the photo quickly made its rounds in the British press with every commentator from London to Edinburgh piling on to ridicule his appearance. The photo dogged Ed Miliband for the rest of the campaigning season, with the final coup de grace coming the night before election day when the most widely circulated newspaper in the country, the Sun, revived the photo one last time to splash it across their front page, along with a searing indictment of his policies.
Ed lost the election and was relegated to the sidelines of history. Was he treated unfairly? Probably, I mean there’s a whole Wikipedia article dedicated to the incident and it’s a bacon sandwich for Christ’s sake — even the Queen would struggle to look dignified eating one. Perhaps what made it stick though is that the photo seemed to embody everything everyone already thought about Ed: a nice enough, relatable guy, but kind of a goofball, and just not Prime Minister material.
His opponent in the election, David Cameron, capitalized on ‘Bacongate’ to cast himself as everything Ed was not: a strong, steady, confident man who felt at ease at the helm. Cameron summed it up himself in a tweet (which would also go on to be infamous):
The irony in all this, of course, is that David Cameron, because he brought about Brexit, unleashed the most chaotic and unstable era of British politics since the Second World War. Apparently graceful table manners aren’t a good proxy for political acumen. The reason David Cameron had resorted to what was basically a high school popularity contest to get elected is because his election road hadn’t exactly been smooth sailing either. His own Conservative Party (the other ‘major’ party in UK politics) was in the grips of a bout of factionalism over Britain’s relationship with the European Union. For years, Conservative party members had had reservations about the EU (I’ll get more into reasons for disliking it later) but in true British fashion they had mostly kept their grumblings to themselves and carried on stoically down the path of further European integration. To be sure, the Brits had always kept one foot out the boat — we got to keep our own currency, didn’t have to join the common travel ‘Schengen zone’, and even negotiated a fat rebate on our contributions to the EU budget, meaning we pay considerably less for membership than we ought to based on our GDP. Some wanted us to take a harder line on these issues, maybe get an even bigger rebate or exact further concessions, but hardly anyone was seriously entertaining leaving the European Union altogether. That is until the dawn of the 21st century and the arrival of one world historic man onto the stage: the third character in our story, Mr. Nigel Farage.
Mr. Brexit
Very little is known about Farage’s life before he exploded onto the national stage as a Member of the European Parliament in 1999. When he tells everyone he was a “metals dealer”, he gets quizzical looks, which he brushes off by following up with: “you know, a buyer and seller of metals”, as if that at all clears up the confusion¹. Whatever his origins, Farage is a quick-witted, impatient, yet charismatic man seemingly brimming with endless energy. Even before he became a household name, Farage had been a long standing member of UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), a single issue political group which advocated Britain withdrawing from the European Union. UKIP members (or ‘kippers’ as they liked to call themselves), earnest and committed though they were, had always been a fringe group — as late as 2006 David Cameron himself, then merely leader of the Conservative Party and not yet Prime Minister, felt comfortable describing UKIP as “a bunch fruitcakes, loonies, and closet racists” and not having to apologize for it. No one took them seriously, but Farage would change all that.
He put his life and soul into dragging the “European Question” kicking and screaming to the forefront of British politics. He was everywhere — talk shows, radio stations, university campuses, leading a flotilla up the Thames river, broadsheet newspaper columns, tabloid newspaper columns — always banging the drum about how the European Union was the source of all our nation’s ills. He unironically referred to his party as ‘The People’s Army’. To his critics, Farage was a demagogue and a rabble-rouser, who oversimplified everything and spoke in exaggerations, half-truths, or sometimes outright lies. He never found a problem he couldn’t blame on those “bureaucrats in Brussels.” To his supporters, however, dear Nigel was a brilliant, candid communicator and a beloved ‘man of the people’. He could often be found ‘down the pub’ knocking back a few pints and smoking a cigarette. His words came across as earthy and candid. Nigel ‘told it like it is’, which, in a world of stale talking points and rehearsed stump speeches, was seductively refreshing. Unlike Donald Trump, however, to whom a lot of comparisons have been made, Farage was genuinely smart; journalists trying to ensnare him with ‘gotcha questions’ found he would wriggle away with some clever quip or retort; he would rattle off economic figures in the middle of a debate and, crucially, make them intelligible and relevant to his audience; perhaps most impressively, Farage always managed to control the agenda — wherever you started the conversation, he would bring it back to the EU, but in a way that did not feel forced or unnatural.
Farage brilliantly weaponized the recordings of European Parliament sessions transforming them from dreary, academic clips of stuffy bureaucrats talking about agriculture subsidies into his own theatre platform. When Herman Van Rompuy (yea, exactly: who?) was elected President of the European Council, Farage took the opportunity to lay into him with characteristic biting humor:
“I’m sorry, but you have the charisma of a damp rag, and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk…and the question I want to ask, that we are all going to ask is who are you? I’ve never heard of you. No one in Europe has ever heard of you.”
Farage was fined 3000 euros for what was deemed unparliamentary language, but in terms of his fame and credibility, it was well worth it. It’s important to understand that before Farage, hardly anyone whose job wasn’t directly related to politics even knew who the European Council President was. Now, everyone knew him, but not for the right reasons.
Cameron’s Gamble
UKIP’s star rose. In the 2014 European elections, Farage’s party swept to victory, marking the first time a political party other than Labour or Conservative had won a British election in over a hundred years. Fruitcakes no more. Even worse for David Cameron, and key to understanding how the referendum came about, his own MPs — the ones who used to grumble about the EU but never did anything — began to defect to UKIP. First Douglass Carswell in August 2014, and then, a month later, Mark Reckless. Rumors spread that any day more would follow. That is the situation Prime Minister David Cameron found himself in during the run up to the 2015 General Election². While Miliband was fending off bacon sandwiches, Cameron was desperately trying to fend off UKIP. Cameron himself occasionally gave lip service to Euroscepticism, but it came across as someone pretending to cheer on a team in a sport they neither knew nor cared anything about. In truth he basically supported the European Union, but more than anything, he just wanted the issue to go away.
Cameron set upon a solution to stop the bleeding. He made a public promise — if the Conservative Party were to win the 2015 election, he would put the question of EU membership to the electorate in a national referendum. To understand why Cameron thought this was a good idea (and not an insane gamble) it’s important to understand that he had already won two high-profile referendums during his first term in office. In 2011 he won the Alternative Vote referendum, which asked voters whether the UK should ditch its ‘first-past-the-post’ electoral system in favor of proportional representation; and then in 2014 he had won the Scottish Independence referendum. Neither had been a blowout victory (68–32 and 55–45 respectively) but both had been won by comfortable margins and, crucially, both had been effective at shutting up a particular interest group. To the Scottish nationalists he could now say ‘well, look we had a referendum, and the people don’t agree with you, so that’s the end of that — don’t bother me anymore, please’. Cameron figured he could use this same panacea to lance the annoying UKIP boil.
The promise of a referendum, at least, worked like a charm: all UKIP voters ever wanted was a chance to vote their way out of the EU, and with Cameron now offering them that, there was little reason to keep supporting the Eurosceptic parties — UKIP had sort of lost its entire raison d’etre. Election day 2015 came and the Conservative Party won a sensational victory, earning 330 seats, a clear majority in the House of Commons. Nigel Farage and UKIP had to settle for one seat. In truth, however, Farage was licking his lips. He had won. A public referendum? Put to the electorate at large? In a simple Yes/No vote? This is exactly the kind of situation where his populist messaging would thrive. We all now know how the referendum turned out, and I won’t bother going into the details of the campaign. What I will do instead is use this space to lay out the issues that are at stake in the big European Question.
What’s Next
When expounding on a thorny, controversial issue like the European Union, what many commentators tend to do (and, hence, what lots of readers have come to expect and even ask for) is to present what they call an objective, neutral description of the issues. ‘Here are just the facts of the matter’, is what they will say, ‘we’ll leave it unbiased so you can draw your own conclusions.’ The problem with this style is that there really is no such thing as ‘just the facts.’ Any description of a subject like this, however noble its intent, will be pregnant with the author’s own biases, some conscious, others unconscious. The selection of which facts to present, the historical events to specifically highlight, the characters you elect to focus on — all of these are choices which must be made, and the choice will change depending on the author’s political leanings. What is much more helpful, in my view, is to present both sides of the issue, each explicitly partial, so the reader can feel the full weight of each narrative. That way there is no need to couch statements or tone things down in the name of ‘impartiality’, a chimera that you will never obtain anyway. What then follows in the next chapter is an overview of the arguments for each side, beginning with the case for Leaving the European Union.
[1] Of course, what Farage really was was a commodities trader in the City of London, Britain’s financial center.
[2] The European elections that UKIP had won had been to elect Members of the European Parliament, held all across Europe, including in the UK. The one in 2015 was a regular British election to elect Members of the British Parliament.
