Banging on about Europe

A cartoon from the pop-up newspaper The New European

 
By ADRIAN TAHOURDIN

���Banging on about Europe��� was what David Cameron (remember him?) pledged back in 2010 he would stop the Conservatives from doing. He hoped to achieve this by promising a referendum on the UK���s membership in the European Union. It is said that Cameron never expected to win the general election in 2015 outright but rather that the Conservatives would probably end up in coalition with the Liberal Democrats again. Did he have a slight sense of foreboding when he realized that, with the surprising outright victory, he would have to deliver the referendum, or was he absolutely confident that the Remain camp would prevail? Or did he really believe ��� as he asserted to his fellow European leaders in March ��� that the Remainers had it in the bag because he ���was a winner���? I guess we may find out one day when the history of the tumultuous past few months in British politics comes to be written.  

Events have moved so quickly that it���s easy to forget that in the post-Cameron/Osborne landscape we were faced with the prospect of a Boris Johnson premiership. The writer and political columnist Harry Mount wrote in the London Evening Standard on June 24: ���The age of Cameron and Osborne is giving way to the age of Johnson alone���. Cameron could not withstand ���the blond exocet missile now aimed at the front door of No 10���, he went on. The Exocet has, thankfully, been intercepted ��� for the time being at least, or redirected to the Foreign Office where it can do only a limited amount of damage.

Three days later, again in the Standard, Mount wrote that the referendum result had ���triggered a mass outbreak of bad losers who won���t accept the result���. Pointing out that 3.5 million voters had signed a petition demanding a second vote, Mount wrote that ���the bad losers can���t accept that the rest of the world doesn���t agree with them . . . . In democracies, the people can���t be told how to vote ��� or told to try again if they produce the wrong result. It isn���t a difficult concept to handle, whatever age or class you are���.

But the Remainers can accept the result, and have done so! No one has seriously suggested there should be a second referendum ��� I imagine many of the signatories to that petition signed out of a sense of frustration rather than in the expectation of a second referendum.

Meanwhile, in the Times on July 21, Tim Montgomerie complained about ���Remoaning nonsense��� (do I detect light abuse there?). The Times published a good riposte to Montgomerie on its Letters page (July 22) from James Shillady of London SW15, who took exception to Montgomerie���s suggestion that Remainers should ���be denied the right to fight against or to seek to modify Brexit and every aspect of its implementation���. I particularly like his conclusion: ���Had we just lost a general election we would not now be expected to profess our support for the winning party���s manifesto . . . . It is called opposition and the Leavers should get used to the idea that there will be plenty of it���.

And a very visible manifestation of this opposition comes in the form of the New European, the self-styled ���new pop-up paper for the 48%��� (who voted Remain). Quick off the mark, the weekly, which sold 40,000 copies on its launch, has already brought out its fourth edition, and costs ��2 or ������3 (where sold in the Eurozone)���.

It seems almost calculated to raise the hackles of the Brexiters: there have been articles by Howard Jacobson on ���Racism, Brexit and Fear���, Hardeep Singh Koli writing under the rubric ���Expertise��� (which contains the witty tagline ������People in this country have had enough of experts��� ��� Michael Gove���) on the ���dearth of diversity in our media���, which is perhaps slightly off the point. A. C. Grayling, meanwhile, suggests that far from it being ���anti-democratic to debate this bad referendum, . . . shutting up and accepting it is wrong���. In the most recent issue (July 29���Aug 4), the distinguished Professor of the History of the Church at Oxford Diarmaid MacCulloch explains why the sixteenth-century Reformation instigated by Henry VIII (���the old monster���) was ���not the first Brexit���. MacCulloch suggests that the Reformation offers history lessons: ���Those who remember the Reformation aright should resist breaking the natural wider ties in our Continent���.