THE BAD BOYS OF BREXIT: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign
ARRON BANKS, Biteback Publishing, 2017, 364 pages
Here’s an insider’s book (The Bad Boys of BREXIT by Arron Banks) on the 2016 referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union (EU) that’s actually worth reading. Most BREXIT accounts to date are turgid chronicles written by Westminster bubble-dwellers whose shallow analysis reveals that they still haven’t understood the fundamental dynamic – the democratic, anti-elite yearning for national sovereignty, especially control over immigration – that propelled the successful vote to leave the EU.
Although his CV (Bright Young Thatcherite, up-and-coming Tory, billionaire businessman with wealth from banking, insurance and South African diamond mines) suggests otherwise, Banks harboured a radical democratic sensitivity feeling and he sided with the pleb power that stuck two fingers up to the political and business elites in rejecting the “clique of anonymous, unelected foreign officials” of the democratically unaccountable EU in a referendum that turned out to be the immigration/national sovereignty curtain-raiser to the Trump spectacular that followed soon after.
Banks had become gradually dismayed by the shift of legislative power from Westminster to Brussels over Britain’s economic policy-making independence including the impact of mass immigration on wage stagnation and the consequent erosion of consumer-spending power as well as the net cost of immigration to the economy because of increased government spending on low-tax-paying immigrant use of public services.
When Banks (with a cool £1 million for starters) decided to financially back Nigel Farage’s UKIP as the only genuine anti-EU and immigration-restrictionist party in the 2015 elections, the Tories haughtily disowned him. Banks’ response was to become co-founder, at Farage’s invitation, of the UKIP-initiated, but broad-based, BREXIT referendum campaign organisation, Leave. EU.
The Tory Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron, had made a 2015 election pledge to hold a referendum on Britain’s EU membership (a vote he expected to be a shoe-in for retaining EU membership) to soothe fractious Eurosceptic Tory MPs and to fend off the electoral threat of UKIP. It didn’t turn out that way, however.
As Banks’ Leave.EU flew from the referendum starting blocks, their fellow anti-EU rivals, Vote Leave, sauntered out as the much more sedate ‘official’ opposition, consisting of the “cravat-and-blazers brigade” headed by “old waxwork Tories” from Maggie’s crypt of “desiccated Thatcherites”, supplemented by other has-been politicians and “ambitious backstairs crawlers seeking to build a Whitehall profile”.
This ‘respectable’ line-up was utterly incapable of connecting with the working class (and lower middle class) who were the most distrustful of the political elite and who experienced the most detrimental effects of mass immigration and EU trade and economic diktats. To be successful, concluded Banks, a campaign to leave the EU had to engage with these people. It should be a politician-free movement and, taking a leaf out of Trump’s playbook, it had to be “blunt, edgy and controversial”. Most importantly, it must keep immigration front and centre with three key messages of “border control, keeping British money at home for the British, making their own laws”. Only Banks’ Leave.EU could do this. It would be the “provisional wing” of the official Leave campaign.
With “fun and energy”, Leave.EU combined “good old-fashioned street campaigning” with bold social media. In response, Club Establishment tried to marginalise them. Remainers slandered them, Hillary-style, as xenophobes and racists in order to denigrate anyone concerned about uncontrolled immigration. The Remain-friendly BBC (the “Biased Brussels Corporation”) effectively boycotted them, preferring the authorised Leave stuffed shirts, having spent “years, sometimes decades, sharing the same television studio couches, dining in the same restaurants and quaffing champagne at the same events”.
The politically inbred elite also included the Electoral Commission, the state body tasked with anointing the official representatives the Remain and Leave camps. On the Leave front, Banks feared that the Commission would “just choose whichever campaign manages to sign up the greater number of Cabinet ministers, run by the people who can best navigate the Westminster cocktail party circuit”, which they duly did by rejecting the grassroots, umbrella GO bid (of which Banks’ Leave.EU was one, particularly colourful, member) in favour of Vote Leave, the policy wonk, Tory-heavy ‘soft’ Brexiteers.
Nevertheless, the Banks/Farage Leave. EU remained the real pulse of the Leave campaign - “we’re on the outside, where we belong”, with the genuinely mass movement they had energised. Whilst Remain and the official Vote Leave outfit could chummily agree on the taboo issues, especially immigration, which were not to be discussed in front of the children i.e. the voting public, it was only the outsiders who could force the debate onto the issues that most mattered to ordinary people. The Establishment worthies could pretend that losing the Commission’s endorsement “made us vanish in a puff of smoke” but it is clear who really won the referendum for the Out vote.
That, and cold, hard facts. Cameron had promised during the election to reduce immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’ but when the government’s Office for National Statistics released its 2015 migration report during the referendum campaign, showing net immigration at its highest ever (333,000), half from the EU, it was obvious that, as Banks writes, there was “not a damn thing we could do about it” whilst Britain remained a member of the EU. The Remain goose was cooked, over the immigration fire.
Globalisation has, as Banks perceptively notes for a wealthy businessman, allowed only an “international elite” to prosper, as its shock troops of free trade and open border had, by opening up domestic markets to cheap imports and cut-price labour, and by luring free-loading clients to an access-all-areas welfare and services state, been detrimental to “jobs, public services and communities”. In response, BREXIT (and Trump) have, says a delighted Banks, “given a voice to those left out, ignored by the metropolitan class, with its group-think love of free markets and left-liberal values”.
Banks is amazed at his own political transformation - like Farage, he had started out as a conventional Tory but, courtesy of BREXIT, he now finds that the business and political elites are his enemies, as they are to all who desire national sovereign democratic control over their own societies. Banks says of his Tory-convert-in-arms, Farage (and which could also apply to Banks’ fellow ‘people’s billionaire’, Donald Trump, at least in parts of his political agenda) that “extraordinarily, it appears we’re turning into left-wingers”.
Relishing the sound of his new democratic, plebeian political voice, Banks’ book comes with many other virtues, including a particularly nice line in personal invective against representatives of the EU-loving, immigrant-coddling Establishment – ‘Old Drearybones”, “pompous old bore”, “little twerp”, “knob”, “tosser”, “patronising harpy”, “little greaseball’ – which is perfectly calibrated to counter the special blend of condescension and contempt that the Remain elite display towards ordinary people who rebuffed the conventional wisdom of their betters and voted Leave. BREXIT, for Banks, was a true eye-opener. It showed that change is possible, and Banks “wouldn’t trade that for all the diamonds in South Africa”.