Brexit and British Politics by Geoffrey Evans & Anand Menon

Author:Geoffrey Evans & Anand Menon [Evans, Geoffrey]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781509523894
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-11-09T16:00:00+00:00

It was all too indicative of the fate of the Remain campaign, and of the panic that had afflicted it by its latter stages, that, by the time of the ITV debate on 9 June, Amber Rudd, Nicola Sturgeon and Angela Eagle were reduced to launching personal attacks on Boris Johnson.

Beyond party politics?

As the campaigns became increasingly personalized, so, too, did they impact on traditional party loyalties. As we discussed in the preceding chapter, these had been progressively eroded over the previous two decades. The Referendum campaign merely reinforced this trend.

For one thing, it crystallized a division in society not represented by the major parties. The Referendum did not divide people along traditional left–right lines, but, rather, centred on values. And, as we’ve seen, the battle between social liberals and social conservatives cuts across party lines.26

Divisions in the Conservative Party over Europe meant that prominent figures were always going to feature in both camps. When it came to the campaign, however, the Prime Minister was reluctant to engage in ‘blue-on-blue’ attacks on Conservative colleagues. His focus – somewhat hubristically – was on the need to reunite the party once the Referendum had been won. And so a poster featuring Boris Johnson in Nigel Farage’s pocket (modelled on the one of Ed Miliband in Alex Salmond’s pocket that had proven so effective during the General Election campaign) was ultimately not deployed. As one Downing Street source put it, there was ‘a sense that we were bringing knives to a gun battle’.27 Matthew Elliott subsequently expressed his surprise at this, arguing that linking the two senior Tory defectors to UKIP as ‘crazy, right-wing nutters’ would have proved ‘terminal’ for the Vote Leave campaign he ran.28

In stark contrast, the Leave side exploited the ‘blue-on-blue’ dynamic assiduously. They took every opportunity to attack the government and its record, which both earned them extensive media coverage and contributed to the gradual erosion of trust in Cameron and Osborne. Not incidentally, the fascination of the media with Conservative in-fighting also had the effect of making supporters of other parties lose interest in the Referendum campaign.

The policy pledges announced by Vote Leave as purdah kicked in were a deliberate ploy intended to play on the fact that the media’s main concern was with the identity of the next Prime Minister. What, after all, could be juicier than the sight of leading politicians setting out an alternative manifesto from within the same government as the Prime Minister?29

At the same time, the Leave camp skilfully crafted a populist appeal designed to tap into the kind of suspicions about politics and politicians described in the previous chapter. Boris Johnson wrote – graphically – about the ‘vast clerisy of lobbyists and corporate affairs gurus – all the thousands of Davos men and women who have their jaws firmly clamped around the euro-teat’.30 He went on to point out not only that the rich are not exposed to the pressures caused by large-scale immigration, but that they use EU regulation to maintain their oligarchic position.

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