How Brexit got done and the Tories were undone, by Tim Shipman,
926 pages, hardback, ISBN 978-0-00-870996-9, William Collins, 2024, £30.
This splendid book is the fourth and final volume in Tim Shipman's magnificent account of Brexit. Shipman was the political editor of the Sunday Times from 2014 to 2022. Brexit was the product of broader trends, but it is impossible to understand the specific path it took without close study of the actions, views, ambitions and abilities of the key players.
The European Referendum Bill gave the right to the British people, not to the British Parliament, to make the decision on the question of remain or leave. The referendum campaign was all about the British people asserting their right to rule themselves.
The 17.4 million votes cast to leave the EU were the most for any proposition or party in British history. Shipman comments, "Those who had won the referendum did feel responsible for delivering it and sincerely believed it was better if the result was honoured."
But two thirds of the members of the legislature opposed the decision of the people. The pro-EU MPs broke the rules first to try to reverse the referendum result. They devised ways of changing established precedent in the Commons, with the help of speaker John Bercow. As Dominic Cummings warned, "…They're trying to overthrow the biggest democratic vote ever. We're entitled to use extreme measures to stop them."
As Cummings said, "What is not reasonable to say is, 'We've promised to have a referendum, and we're going to respect the result and swear blind there won't be a second referendum and your vote for is for a generation. But oh, we lost. F*** that, we're going to undo it.' You can't do that."
As he added, "the great irony is that the people who were pushing hardest for the second referendum are the people who babble on most about Trump's 'coup' and the anti-democratic nature of Trump."
In June 2019, TV pundit Robert Peston wrote of his friend Roland Rudd, "The chairman of the People's Vote campaign seems to confirm for the first time that the PV campaign is in favour of Remain, rather than simply a campaign to deliver a referendum." The very name 'People's Vote' raises the question, who were the 17.4 million who voted for Brexit? Were they not people? As the diner at the Savoy Hotel said in 1945, "This is terrible. They've elected a Labour Government. The country will never stand for that."
On 25 September 2019, Johnson told the House of Commons, "The truth is that opposition Members are living in a fantasy world. They really imagine that somehow they are going to cancel the first referendum and legislate for a second referendum, and Parliament will promise that this time it really, really will respect that vote. They think that the public will therefore vote to remain, and everybody will forget the last few years. That is an extraordinary delusion and a fantasy … It will not happen."
Cummings told officials in Downing Street, "Most MPs and journalists do not understand how much the country hates Parliament and wants someone to sort out this mess." He observed about a second referendum, "It wouldn't have be about Brexit but about how much the public likes Parliament and MPs. They'd have been trounced." As Shipman observes, Leavers had "a better grasp of public opinion than Remain-dominated political Westminster."
Cummings forecast that "the election will be about: do MPs get to cancel votes? We have to leave and the current Parliament has to be destroyed."
Immigration has exploded as a political problem, in large part because of Johnson's policy on legal migration. The system he put in place was among the most liberal in the world – it just no longer discriminated in favour of EU citizens.
The government had the chance to stop the boats but didn't take it. It rejected an amendment that would have given it the power to ignore Article 39 rulings of the European Court of Human Rights. A backbench amendment tabled by Sir Bill Cash MP and others would have ousted the Human Rights Act, the European Convention of Human Rights and the Geneva Refugees Convention from applying to the removal of illegal migrants.
His immigration reforms opened the door to ever more mass immigration. His government issued 331,000 work visas in the twelve-month period ending in June 2022. This was nearly double the 168,000 average between 2014 and 2019. In total, the government issued nearly 1.2 million visas allowing residence in the UK in the year to June 2022, the highest ever.
Shipman concludes, "If Brexit had one true legacy, as the events of these books illustrate, it was that a country which had for years tended to blame Brussels for its own problems, now had the freedom to make its own mistakes. It was a freedom that the British political class would exercise repeatedly."
Shipman gives Johnson credit for getting Brexit done. "In the end, a democratic vote was upheld."
But successive governments have completely failed to use for the benefit of the British people the freedoms we voted for in 2016. The lesson for us must be that we never again leave our freedoms at the mercy of this decrepit ruling class.