Brexit referendum

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description: a public vote in the UK in 2016 that resulted in a decision to leave the European Union

politics

172 results

Brexit and Ireland: The Dangers, the Opportunities, and the Inside Story of the Irish Response

by Tony Connelly  · 4 Oct 2017  · 356pp  · 112,271 words

union’. The next day Cameron held an emergency Cabinet meeting, the first on a Saturday since the Falklands War. The Cabinet endorsed the deal. The Brexit referendum would be held on 23 June. Cameron declared he would fight ‘heart and soul’ for Britain to remain in the EU. Any optimism that Cameron

a firm friendship with Declan Kelleher, his Irish counterpart, who himself had just arrived from Ireland’s embassy in China. By the time of the Brexit referendum, he had been ‘Sir Ivan’ for less than half a year, the title having been bestowed on him in the 2016 New Year’s Honours

out, it’s so complex.’ The contours of that complexity had been steadily mapped out by civil servants in the months leading up to the referendum. Once Brexit became a theoretical danger, changes were made. Inside the Department of the Taoiseach, the Economic, International Affairs and Northern Ireland Division, in existence since

lorry again to a distributor in the West of Ireland. This entire paradigm of economic activity was now under threat. On the night of the Brexit referendum, the BBC signal found its way to a quiet farmhouse near the village of Ballacolla in County Laois. Jer Bergin and his wife, Margaret, stayed

, Hogan’s reinvention as the Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Affairs proved fortuitous for his career, but also, arguably, for the EU itself. During the Brexit referendum campaign, Jean-Claude Juncker insisted the Commission could not get involved. The logic was obvious: the first intervention by a Brussels bigwig would have allowed

British government said the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland would attend the Brexit Cabinet Committee only ‘as required’. When he visited Belfast after the referendum, the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, had to meet the DUP and Sinn Féin separately. While the devolved administrations of Scotland and Wales have both produced detailed

-Brexit, when the UK is likely to end up outside that regulatory sphere. For Irish companies operating in the UK, the anxiety created by the Brexit referendum and its aftermath was not entirely conducive to trying to break into the European market. ‘Brexit is a burning platform,’ says Marina Donohoe, Enterprise Ireland

Armagh back in November 2016. It was very general, and had been gathering dust while the Executive was in hiatus. One year on from the Brexit referendum, the Irish government was still looking for the UK’s direction of travel. The two advisers who dominated Theresa May’s thinking and policy on

technically complex,’ says one Irish diplomat. ‘There aren’t hundreds of people they can call upon to set something up.’ On the morning after the Brexit referendum, the European Council General Secretariat hit ‘send’ on an email intended for 27 EU governments. It was a statement by Donald Tusk, the European Council

also established the North South Ministerial Council, which prioritized the first seven cross-border areas that should be looked at in the wake of the Brexit referendum from a list of areas which included environment, health, agriculture, transport, education/higher education, tourism, energy, telecommunications/broadcasting, inland fisheries, justice and security, and sport

This Land: The Struggle for the Left

by Owen Jones  · 23 Sep 2020  · 387pp  · 123,237 words

him in nominations, Smith duly became the standard-bearer of the anti-Corbyn resistance. With a significant number of Corbyn’s supporters disillusioned after the Brexit referendum result and the subsequent goings-on, Smith’s team were confident. Smith was further boosted by a High Court ruling that 130,000 new members

’s then-unprepared team and make a positive impression on the electorate from the outset. The attempted internal coup against Corbyn, following the June 2016 Brexit referendum, destroyed that fantasy timetable. So, too, did the rumours that the Tories planned to call a snap general election. That July, they had their own

shadow cabinet minister and Labour’s campaigns and election chair. ‘Don’t panic! Don’t panic!’ May had presented the upcoming election as a second referendum on Brexit, an issue that had split the Labour Party. It was, as Labour press officer Joe Ryle recalled, ‘the worst nightmare for us’. That afternoon

the capital. Moreover, the centrist Lib Dems were proving useless. Not only had they characteristically misunderstood the mood of the country by pledging a second referendum on Brexit, but within days of the election, their leader Tim Farron was dropping clangers left, right and centre. After initially refusing to state whether or

been sacked twice for dishonesty, once by a newspaper editor, another by a Tory leader. His lack of principles was on show before the 2016 Brexit referendum, when he wrote two newspaper columns, one supporting Remain and the other Leave, before casually opting for the latter. His record of overt homophobic, Islamophobic

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem

by Tim Shipman  · 30 Nov 2017  · 721pp  · 238,678 words

About the Publisher Acknowledgements This is the second book I never intended to write. Just as with All Out War, my 2016 book on the Brexit referendum campaign, Fall Out is the product of extraordinary events. The original intention was to add a few chapters to All Out War to bring the

-age group in society is worse off in terms of living standards and stagnant wages and cuts. Those in charge have lost control, as the Brexit referendum demonstrated. And we recognised there is an underlying volatility in British politics since the financial crisis with the rise of the Lib Dems, the rise

squad, Banks rounded on Nuttall for opening his general election campaign with a push on Muslim issues rather than treating the election as ‘a second Brexit referendum’, pronounced Ukip dead and announced that he and Farage would start a new movement in the autumn. In an extraordinary statement emailed to political journalists

sticking point was the party’s Brexit position. Farron’s closest aide Paul Butters was among those arguing, ‘We should make this election a referendum on Brexit. If you are voting for us you are voting for an anti-Brexit party.’ Most of the party’s big guns agreed that they should

May had given to LBC’s Iain Dale on the Wednesday, in which she refused to say how she would vote if there were another referendum on Brexit. ‘I don’t answer hypothetical questions,’ the prime minister said, effectively refusing to endorse her own government’s main policy. Pressed, she added, ‘What

How to Stop Brexit (And Make Britain Great Again)

by Nick Clegg  · 11 Oct 2017  · 93pp  · 30,572 words

may help to provoke precisely the reforms that will assist in securing the EU’s own future. So there is a silver lining to the Brexit referendum: it may help to strengthen the EU itself; and it may lead to the conditions in which the UK could be reintegrated into a reformed

eve of the referendum vote. Indeed, it has been reported that in a private conversation in the Prime Minister’s flat shortly before the referendum, the pro-Brexit editor of the Daily Mail, Paul Dacre, pointed to a TV screen and told David Cameron that the pictures of refugees on the daily

dramatic shift in the political weather; could Europe survive the coming storm? The answer, it appears, is a resounding Yes. By the Christmas after the Brexit referendum, the clouds had already begun to lift. In Austria, the pro-European Alexander Van der Bellen defeated Norbert Hofer’s far-right Freedom Party and

Brits than that which came before. So there has been a huge amount of change across Europe – and the world – in the months since our Brexit referendum. And when the world changes, people’s views change, too. In this new landscape, I will now explain why stopping Brexit would not be anti

-democratic. It would actually be the more democratic thing to do. Why it is right to stop Brexit THE REFERENDUM CAMPAIGN was, for the most part, an uninspiring affair – for which both sides must bear some responsibility. Much of the argy-bargy between the

pair of shoes, should apply to the way in which Brexit was sold falsely to millions of voters? There are many reasons to revisit the Brexit referendum outcome, but this is the most compelling of all: we took the decision on a false prospectus. Voters were sold a dodgy promise on a

UK. The economic benefits to a nation supposedly ‘liberated from the shackles of Brussels’ are nowhere to be seen. Just over a year after the Brexit referendum, it turns out that the eurozone is growing twice as fast as the British economy. So much for economic liberation. While the full extent of

shaping events across the globe. Don’t take my word for it. Just look at how the world’s largest nations have reacted to Brexit. Since the referendum the leaders of two of the world’s most significant new powers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India and President Xi Jinping of China

. Modi has also been to Spain and France. Xi has taken trips to Belgium and the Netherlands. Neither has come to the UK since the Brexit referendum. Both Xi and Modi know that it makes far more sense to do business with a major bloc rather than with an isolated nation. The

very much that many – maybe any – of those names are familiar to you, and I doubt whether their money alone could have bought the referendum result. The Brexit elite, however, wields influence in many ways. A small group of newspaper owners and editors – again, all men, none of them young – have made

else. But while the Brexit elite played a decisive role in making Brexit happen, they cannot be held responsible for the conduct since the referendum of the Brexit talks themselves. For that display of serial incompetence, only government ministers and their advisers are responsible. It is their job to negotiate the best

the Conservative Party’s Europhobic demons from engulfing the country. And once the Conservatives got their way in power on their own and triggered the Brexit referendum, the Lib Dems have been consistent in arguing for a way back into Europe. But at a time of national emergency, and for as long

acrimony that would no doubt arise once again, I believe that the British people would vote to change the judgement we arrived at in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 – especially because voters will, unlike then, be able to compare the promises made by Johnson, Farage, Gove et al. with the reality

quo ante is wise, or feasible. Those who believe Brexit is a mistake should not make the same high-handed error committed by the Brexiteers. After the referendum, they simply assumed that they could ignore the 48 per cent of voters who had voted the other way. But one half of the

asked to foot the bill for eurozone liabilities. This was a point already conceded in David Cameron’s much-maligned ‘renegotiation’ package, prior to the Brexit referendum. Britain would remain, as it is now, by far the largest EU country outside the eurozone. As now, it would remain a member of both

December 2016 20. Nigel Farage in a speech on 24th June 2016 21. www.statisticsauthority.gov.uk, 23rd May 2016 22. Dominic Cummings, ‘How the Brexit Referendum was Won’, blogs.spectator.co.uk, 9th January 2017 23. Office of Budget Responsibility, Economic and Fiscal Outlook – November 2016, 23rd November 2016 24. D

Revolting!: How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They're Afraid Of

by Mick Hume  · 23 Feb 2017  · 228pp  · 68,880 words

really can be more. It is an attitude captured in the UK by former Conservative prime minister John Major who, dismissing the suggestion that the Brexit referendum result should be binding, declared that ‘the tyranny of the majority has never applied in a democracy’.2 Some of us might naively have imagined

the surface of our civilised societies once more. The real Brexit–Trump connection There has been a concerted attempt to explain the link between the Brexit referendum result and the election of Donald Trump. For angry social media commentators, it seemed obvious that ‘both were clearly mired in racism, bigotry and hate

the illiberal, free-speech-stomping Donald. Nor, by the way, could we have stomached supporting the illiberal-liberal Hillary Clinton. (Note to the confused: the Brexit referendum result was not a vote for Trump fan and UK Independence Party leader Nigel Farage, who responded to his triumph by giving up politics rather

Johnson had no history of being anti-EU, and had gone so far as to write an (unpublished) pro-Remain column months before the referendum. The popular Brexit vote looked far more like a spirited revolt against discredited and two-faced politicians than any tame acquiescence to their instructions. In response, those

‘toxic’ UK vote and declared that: ‘The island of Ireland is facing the biggest constitutional crisis since partition [in 1921] as a result of the Brexit referendum.’17 This might have come as a surprise to those who recall the ‘constitutional crisis’ posed by the twenty-five-year armed conflict over sovereignty

verdicts, and instead handed Trump the keys to the White House via the electoral college, there appeared to be even greater astonishment than after the Brexit referendum. How could this have happened? After all, Trump had not only been denounced as a disgrace to US politics by the Democratic Party establishment, but

’ political demagogues and stupid voters is taking hold across the political and cultural elites on both sides of the Atlantic. Open debate about borders The Brexit referendum vote was not a racist backlash but a revolt of the Others. It opened up the opportunity for a new kind of political debate about

cult hero among many young leftists in recent years, seen almost as the last European intellectual standing for fundamental political change. In response to the Brexit referendum result, however, the radical Guy Fawkes mask slipped to reveal a different face of Zizek beneath. ‘You know,’ he told openDemocracy days after the referendum

for the wise unelected men and women of the House of Lords to protect the British people from their own irregular passions by reversing the Brexit referendum vote have some auspicious forebears. Others among the Founding Fathers were even more adamant that America would be a republic, but not a popular democracy

and accountability’ was spelled out in more honest fashion in response to the UK vote to leave. Speaking in Berlin a few months after the Brexit referendum result, as talks about the terms of future relations between the UK and the EU grew nearer, Europe’s most powerful leader, German chancellor Angela

-wing politicians in the UK and the US who want to reverse laws on human rights or legalised abortion. And of course there is the Brexit referendum result, (wrongly) claimed as proof that popular racism is on the march in the UK. So no, democracy does not come with any guarantees or

. Shifting public attitudes to race in Britain are actually an advert for putting your faith in democracy and freedom of speech. This goes for the Brexit referendum, too. Immigration was certainly a concern for many Leave voters. But surveys show it was not the main one for many, and that the overwhelming

elites turns history on its head. Racism has indeed been bad in the UK at times, so some might argue (as they have since the Brexit referendum) that the pendulum could swing back the other way and unleash another wave of prejudice. But when racism has reared its ugly head in the

make choices that matter, and take responsibility for the results. M is for the MASSES – the one group it now seems legitimate to hate. The Brexit referendum result in the UK sparked an outpouring of bile from high places, vomiting down on to the ‘ignorant’, ‘racist’ and ‘hateful’ mass of Leave voters

for DIVISIONS – the basis of universal democracy. There is a widespread assumption today that divisions are necessarily terrible in liberal societies, as revealed by the Brexit referendum in the UK and the election of Donald Trump in the US, and we should all want to heal them. But in a sense divisions

Three Years in Hell: The Brexit Chronicles

by Fintan O'Toole  · 5 Mar 2020  · 385pp  · 121,550 words

her party conference speech, Theresa May confirms Article 50 will be triggered before the end of March 2017 18 June 2016 Six days before the Brexit referendum, it seems that something profound is being created: not a mere exit from the EU but the real possibility of an English state. Yet no

worth savouring. TIMELINE 17 January 2017: Prime Minister Theresa May gives her Lancaster House speech, setting out a hardline interpretation of the meaning of the Brexit referendum result. 26 January 2017: Government publishes European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Bill. 2 February 2017: Government publishes its Brexit white paper, formally setting out its

May does. 9 June 2017 May and Corbyn both lost the election. The result – a hung parliament – seems to bear out the feeling that the Brexit referendum had undermined the stability of Britain’s political institutions. So there’s only one queen in England after all. The coronation of Queen Theresa is

Nemo me impune lacessit, which roughly translates as ‘Don’t mess about or there will be consequences’. The British political class messed about with the Brexit referendum, and the consequence is, if not quite anarchy in the UK, a crisis of authority that has profound implications for Brexit itself. The prime minister

brand that has been trashed three times in two years by the Tories themselves. David Cameron took a hammer to it when he called the Brexit referendum in the first place. May gave it another kick when she decided, entirely spuriously, that the vote in that referendum was a mandate for an

to be lived with and perhaps even embraced. Irish people, for the most part, have come to terms with this necessity. The English, as the Brexit referendum suggested, have not. This is why the Irish border has such profound implications for Brexit – it is a physical token of a mental frontier that

to happen. The only triangle it actually resembles is the mythical one off Bermuda into which flights of fancy disappear. In the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, the brilliant historian of post-war Britain, John Bew, suggested the only way forward was a ‘reinvigorated special relationship’ with the US that would, in

that many Brexiteers seem to find extremely difficult: Northern Ireland is part of the United Kingdom. You would not have known this, admittedly, during the Brexit referendum debates, and it does not seem to have become any more obvious to the true believers in the period since their great victory. But it

the moment of conception’, inserted in 1983, is overturned by a majority of two to one. The whole process contrasts starkly with the way the Brexit referendum had been conducted and points to how any second referendum might be handled. In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on

. So did the government. And it turned out that a sample of ‘the people’ actually knew pretty well what ‘the people’ were thinking. If the Brexit referendum had been preceded by such a respectful, dignified and humble exercise in listening and thinking, it would surely have been a radically different experience. Second

second was what usually happens when something very big is building up and everyone is trying to keep the lid on it: an explosion. The Brexit referendum vote on 23 June 2016 was about many things, but one of the main ones was the non-metropolitan English blowing the lid off. And

of the Irish Sea. Except that to fetishise it at this moment is to miss the point spectacularly. The point is not just that the Brexit referendum showed how disunited the union is: Scotland and Northern Ireland voted one way, England and Wales another. It is that the great force that lay

can deny that English Dreamtime is a nightmare from which we are all struggling to awake? 24 November 2018 In February 2016, just as the Brexit referendum debate was getting going, the Evening Standard columnist Anthony Hilton wrote, ‘I once asked Rupert Murdoch why he was so opposed to the European Union

Johnson’s Telegraph column of 16 March 2016. It is important because it is the one in which he announced that he was backing Brexit in the referendum. We now know that Johnson had in fact submitted two columns – the other one arguing passionately for Remain – because he had not, at deadline

government sure managed, to adapt Samuel Beckett, to fail better. It is worth saying that the EU made mistakes, especially in the period between the Brexit referendum in June 2016 and May’s triggering of the Article 50 withdrawal process in March 2017. Brussels pressured her to invoke Article 50 quickly, which

possibly have had a slight whiff of contempt and vilification. But that was then, this is now. Liddle’s ‘chavmonkeys’ have been redeemed by the Brexit referendum. Their ‘fugue of idiocy’ is now a swelling symphony of reasserted sovereignty, their ‘dumbed-down culture’ a fount of wisdom. The man who saw ‘a

the breathtaking recklessness of Johnson’s career. But it is akratic that intrigues. The Leave campaign that Johnson led to a stunning victory in the Brexit referendum of June 2016 owed much of its success to its carefully calibrated slogan ‘Take Back Control’. Akrasia, which is discussed in depth by Socrates, Plato

. 20 July 2019 England wins the cricket World Cup. The team’s Irish captain knocks xenophobia for six. If there were to be a new referendum on Brexit in the UK, what should the slogan be for the Remainers? Last time out, the Leave campaign owed much of its appeal to a

so superbly that he is now prime minister: he could never be found out because his mendacity was never hidden. Just three months before the Brexit referendum, Johnson was publicly and forensically exposed as a liar by his own party colleague Andrew Tyrie, who cross-examined him before the House of Commons

raise you a sceptical eyebrow. 3 October 2019 Johnson unveils his proposals for a new Brexit deal that will ‘honour the result of the referendum and deliver Brexit on 31 October’. They are based on the long discredited idea that the UK, including Northern Ireland, can leave the customs union and single

dead end. Their respective exit strategies give us two very different ways of thinking about the Brexit endgame. It is tempting to imagine a new Brexit referendum in which the question is: do you want to be in Crossroads or do you want to be in Emmerdale? Boris Johnson is currently an

the wilful erasure of an obvious truth that both the British government and the DUP themselves accepted and articulated in the immediate period after the Brexit referendum: that Northern Ireland is different from Britain and that therefore Brexit would have to be different for Northern Ireland. It is hard to remember, after

. With Brexit, a deadline is a line that is drawn forever and then dies away. What we glimpse in these moments is that, with the Brexit referendum, time went out of joint. Britain began simultaneously to occupy two completely different temporal worlds. In one, Brexit was hurtling ever faster forward, towards a

Protest and Power: The Battle for the Labour Party

by David Kogan  · 17 Apr 2019  · 458pp  · 136,405 words

to build this, and we needed to grow. Beth Foster-Ogg was supposed to be on her gap year. I left two days before the Brexit referendum. I was going to have five weeks in Cuba, come back, do a couple more weeks with Momentum, and then go to Uni. That was

.’ This occurred the same afternoon that Corbyn sacked Owen Smith, his rival in 2016 for the leadership, from the frontbench for daring to suggest another referendum on Brexit. Over the weekend, fury grew, both over Corbyn’s 2012 tweet and LOTO’s failure in 2018 to answer Berger. The Jewish Board of

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Brexit, No Exit: Why in the End Britain Won't Leave Europe

by Denis MacShane  · 14 Jul 2017  · 308pp  · 99,298 words

national life.’ Adam Boulton ‘All is not lost. That’s the important message of hope from one of the very few who forecast the referendum result correctly. Brexit is the biggest challenge for Britain in a generation as a hard UKIP-style Brexit would align Britain with Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin

, suffered a humiliating defeat after less than a year in office. Although she did not resign on the spot as David Cameron did after his Brexit referendum defeat the year before, few could see Mrs May staying long in office after voters rejected her policy and her decision to call an opportunistic

AfD from their group in the European Parliament in March 2016 as part of David Cameron’s attempts to schmooze Angela Merkel ahead of the Brexit referendum. There is understandable bitterness that having been welcomed by conservatives as a fellow Eurosceptic party after winning seats in the 2014 European Parliament elections, the

conference Mrs May was not speaking to the world or even the nation and its elected representatives, let alone the 48 per cent of the Brexit referendum voters who voted in favour of Europe, but to her beloved Tory Party rank and file. She refused to say anything to heal the wounds

in January 2015 it might provoke some discussion and I would be able to alert fellow citizens to just how likely it was that a Brexit referendum would end the way it did. After the referendum the social affairs commentator Sunder Katwala, a clever and thoughtful man, wrote of ‘Britain’s surprise

% Remain 39%; Leave 61% Remain 38%; Leave 62% Over the next period, the majority for Brexit will slowly vanish. In the three years between the Brexit referendum and the European Parliament elections in 2019, 1.26 million British citizens over 65 will die and 2 million will reach the voting age of

with Canada and support the increasingly multicultural Canada that was coming into being by the time of the referendum in 1995. In other words, referendums, including the Brexit one, tend to be about nativism and nationalism, not simply the question on the ballot paper. Those who shape the final interpretation and response

the trade logic would appear to dictate staying in the Customs Union. But the ideological logic dictates otherwise. Trade did not feature much in the Brexit referendum. Because Britain has been united with other European nations on trade policy since 1973 there are few experts and no politician who has ever specialised

Northern Irish interests, as was the case during the ‘mad cow’ episode. This may explain why there was a 55 per cent vote against Brexit in the referendum, though one should never underestimate the pleasure of the Irish in voting against what rightwing and anti-European figures like Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson

they really want to leave once we know what Brexit means. This is democratically the right thing to do and the way to fight hard Brexit. A referendum is just another vote. Its authority must be respected, just as we respect the result of a vote to change a government. But the

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics

by Peter Geoghegan  · 2 Jan 2020  · 388pp  · 111,099 words

need to understand the disease’s aetiology. I have structured this book both chronologically and thematically. The opening chapters are directly concerned with the 2016 Brexit referendum and examine in some detail examples of electoral sharp practice that took place, from Vote Leave’s law-breaking to Arron Banks’s record spending

alternative voting system.” ‘Yes’ lost by a crushing two to one on polling day.18 NO to AV also provided a trial run for the Brexit referendum in other ways. Elliott focused heavily on digital campaigning. He pushed messages on Facebook and built online applications that encouraged voters to attend real-world

that the money saved on another layer of government could be used to hire additional doctors, teachers or police.23 In another echo of the Brexit referendum, the campaign was also dogged by arguments with the Electoral Commission and fellow campaigners against the assembly over designations and spending. In his insider account

world and for Europe that she should be so intimately engaged in the EU”26). In the end, Johnson filed the original column, backing Brexit. Suddenly, the referendum seemed winnable. By then, Vote Leave had moved out of 55 Tufton Street to larger offices in the Westminster Tower beside Lambeth Bridge, right

twenty years and was a member of the Department of Culture, Media and Sport select committee’s inquiry into ‘fake news’ which had examined the Brexit referendum. “I voted against the election because I thought we needed regulation before the election. It’s a charade,” he said. With a short, unkempt beard

, that you won’t break the rules, goes, you’re stuffed.” Vote Leave was not the only campaign fined by the elections watchdog following the Brexit referendum. Arron Banks’s Leave.EU was sanctioned, as were the Liberal Democrats and the official Remain campaign, for failing to provide receipts and invoices. A

an optician’s in a shopping centre in the small city of Victoria, British Columbia. Cummings said he found AIQ “on the internet” before the Brexit referendum. “It was strange. Nobody in the UK had heard of AIQ. They seemed to come out of nowhere,” says Sam Jeffers, an expert on digital

to run the biggest targeted digital misinformation campaign ever seen in Britain. Vote Leave was often seen as the ‘nice’ face of an often vicious Brexit referendum campaign. Daniel Hannan preferred to talk about sovereignty and Brussels bureaucracy, rather than immigration. UKIP’s only MP, Douglas Carswell, joined Vote Leave ostensibly because

and an admiration for President Vladimir Putin’s muscular foreign policy. Banks had acknowledged meeting Russia’s ambassador to Britain, Alexander Yakovenko, months before the Brexit referendum. Over six hours in November 2015 that ended with shots of vodka from a bottle supposedly produced for Stalin, Banks and Wigmore discussed everything from

case. Reports in the Observer and elsewhere revealed that Banks had numerous previously undisclosed meetings with Russian officials and businesspeople around the time of the Brexit referendum.59 He eventually admitted to having three meetings with the Russian ambassador in London. He soon revised that figure to four in a newspaper interview

meetings with the Russians and much else. When it was revealed that he had spent £450,000 bankrolling Nigel Farage’s lavish lifestyle after the Brexit referendum, Banks dismissed the story as “a smear”.106 He accused the established media of bias and even set up his own news site, Westmonster, modelled

the full weight of its electoral machine behind a Leave vote, at least not initially. The Democratic Unionists only registered as a participant in the Brexit referendum a month beforehand. Becoming an official participant was significant – the DUP could now spend up to £700,000 on the campaign. But there was little

within the bounds of electoral law and only gave out money from eligible donors domiciled in the UK. * In the days leading up to the Brexit referendum, around five million voters – most of them in England – received targeted Facebook ads from the DUP.19 Bright blue and red messages with the party

a surprising choice for the DUP. The company was small and young, with little obvious experience in the world of political advertising. But during the Brexit referendum, various Leave-supporting groups spent more than £800,000 with the firm. Otherwise fierce rivals Vote Leave and Leave.EU both employed Soopa Doopa to

£435,000 was not the only donation that the CRC made to the Democratic Unionists. Cook’s outfit also made two further contributions after the Brexit referendum, totalling more than £13,000.30 The last came just five days after the party lost eight seats in the snap 2017 Stormont election. The

shadowy operation. Privately, some within the DUP regretted accepting the CRC windfall. The £9,000 left over in party coffers at the end of the Brexit referendum was hardly consolation for the endless, at times hyperbolic, questions about dark money and dubious donors. The story broke at the very worst time for

politics since the 1970s, libertarian-minded universities and think tanks were helping to nurture an outsider idea that would later come to prominence during the Brexit referendum and, especially, in its aftermath. As might be expected, the Anglosphere had support from the dispensers of American libertarian dark money. Conquest was a fellow

City of London. Six years previously, it had been a quarter.68 Many of the Conservatives’ growing ranks of City funders supported David Cameron’s Brexit referendum strategy. Big business heavily backed Remain, including Goldman Sachs, Citi Group and The City of London Corporation.69 Pro-Brexit funding came from the City

as publicly unpopular, and which he supports, came to dominate British political debate after June 2016. Free trade and deregulation – issues largely absent during the Brexit referendum – were held up as totemic of the “will of the people”. Prominent Leave voices, from Nigel Farage to the ERG, declared that anything less than

role was largely to support Legatum’s international philanthropic work. He contributed a chapter to a Heritage Foundation report on economic freedom. Then came the Brexit referendum. “When I turned up at Legatum on the morning after the vote, it was like walking into a morgue,” says Legatum board member Toby Baxendale

able to have very focused messages to all of those people.”35 Digital campaigning in Britain really came into its own during the 2016 EU referendum. The Brexit vote followed an unprecedented surge in targeted advertising. During the final weeks of the campaign, Vote Leave alone sent more than a billion targeted

fewer activists on the ground, the online platforms give parties the opportunity to vastly extend their reach. Data has become political hard currency. Before the Brexit referendum, the Liberal Democrats sold personal information about their members to the Remain campaign for £100,000.48 Political parties now employ in-house staff dedicated

, but the measures were not implemented – apparently because of fears that any revamp of electoral law would raise awkward questions about the legality of the Brexit referendum, according to a November 2019 report in Politico.79 Around the same time, May’s successor Boris Johnson took the highly unusual step of refusing

Steven Edginton, a 19-year-old former digital strategist at the TaxPayers’ Alliance, to head its online campaign. Just as Leave.EU did before the Brexit referendum, the Brexit Party specifically targeted Labour voters on Facebook. It spent hundreds of thousands of pounds on slick ads. Attacks on the British political establishment

far right. Ted Malloch, an American professor and friend of Nigel Farage based in England, met Salvini on a number of occasions. Ahead of the Brexit referendum, Salvini met Farage and promised to celebrate the demise of the European Union if the UK voted to leave.30 In America, intermediaries between the

in loans from Russian banks, including one close to the Kremlin. (She insisted that the deal was commercial, not political.) Ahead of the 2016 EU referendum, Brexit’s most generous backer, Arron Banks, discussed lucrative gold and diamond investment deals offered through the Russian embassy in London. Banks has said that he

Conservatives did better than anyone else in 2019 was to actively stoke the growing frustration with politics and politicians among many British voters. Unlike the Brexit referendum’s promise to “take back control”, Johnson’s winning campaign promised to make politics go away. Get Brexit Done. No more politicians squabbling on voters

needed to push dark money and disinformation from a niche concern to the top of the political agenda? If proven law-breaking – as in the Brexit referendum – and obvious electoral manipulation is not enough to make us all stand up and take notice, what would be? And even if public anger at

. 44 James Cusick and Adam Ramsay, ‘Police still not investigating Leave campaigns, citing “political sensitivities”’, openDemocracy, October 2018. 45 Dominic Cummings, ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, January 2017. 46 Tim Shipman, All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit (London, 2017), pp. 415–416. 47 Carole Cadwalladr, ‘Vote

Brexit campaign ads for the fake news inquiry – but what’s wrong with them?’, New Statesman, July 2018. 53 Dominic Cummings, ‘Dominic Cummings: how the Brexit referendum was won’, Spectator, January 2017. 54 Carole Cadwalladr and Mark Townsend, ‘Revealed: the ties that bound Vote Leave’s data firm to controversial Cambridge Analytica

, Better for the Country and others referred to the National Crime Agency for multiple suspected offences’, The Electoral Commission, November 2018. 39 ‘Arron Banks faces Brexit referendum spending probe’, BBC, November 2018. 40 Arron Banks, The Bad Boys of Brexit: Tales of Mischief, Mayhem & Guerrilla Warfare in the EU Referendum Campaign (London

-offences; accessed 19 Jan. 2020. 83 Charles Hymas, ‘Arron Banks threatens to sue Electoral Commission after being cleared by National Crime Agency over loans in Brexit referendum campaign’, Telegraph, September 2019. 84 Andrew Marr Show, BBC, November 2018. 85 Ian Cobain, ‘Ashcroft’s millions: from Belize tax haven to Tories via Southampton

Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To)

by Chris Grey  · 22 Jun 2021  · 334pp  · 91,722 words

knowing what it was. This turned out to be prescient. Not only were all the models touted at different times by different advocates of Brexit during the referendum, but their differences were concealed, especially by persistent references to ‘single market access’ which could have meant any of them. The Vote Leave campaign

said that it would be for the government, not it, to do so if the vote were to leave. It was only after the referendum that Brexiters claimed the vote had been for any particular form of Brexit. But that was not true, as was shown by the fact that for many

extolling the soft Brexit Norway model, by the time of the referendum only hard or FTA Brexit would do. Some who campaigned during the referendum for soft Brexit afterwards championed an FTA hard Brexit. Still others who had argued for soft or hard Brexit came to say that ‘no deal’ was the

would be agreed before the Article 50 process to leave even began. This was simply impossible given the terms of Article 50. After the referendum, many Brexiters claimed that both the exit agreement and the future terms agreement could be done as part of a single process.4 This was also untrue

vote enabled a pivot from using the Project Fear accusation as a campaign tool to incorporating it into the post-referendum discussion of delivering Brexit. During the referendum campaign, Vote Leave had persistently and successfully attacked as Project Fear any warning of economic damage (or indeed any other kind of damage). In

, not least as many individuals campaigning for Brexit stated explicitly that this – the Norway model – was what Brexit would mean. But ever since the referendum many Brexiters, including Gove, have insisted that it meant no such thing, and that such a model would not be Brexit at all. So an alternative explanation

of the withdrawal negotiations that Brexit posed direct risks to the conditions that underpinned the GFA and, with it, the wider peace process. During the referendum campaign Brexiters dismissed these concerns as – yet again – Project Fear. More specifically, Boris Johnson said that the existing situation with the Irish border would be ‘absolutely

the EU, had been eligible (because Norway is in EFTA/EEA). This harked right back to the repeated invocations of the ‘Norway model’ by Brexiters before the referendum, a model which May had, since the Lancaster House speech, insisted was not acceptable as it would not satisfy the ‘will of the people

to potentially enable a no-deal Brexit that was not mandated by any election, nor by the referendum result. Brexit Ultras did not see it that way, of course, since they claimed that the referendum mandated any Brexit outcome, including no deal, regardless of Parliament and, moreover, claimed that the parliamentary vote to trigger

been perfectly compatible with the referendum result and actually in line with what at least some ‘liberal’ Brexiters has campaigned for prior to the referendum. But the Brexit Ultras were adamantly opposed to this and May endorsed them. It was only later, in April 2018, that the People’s Vote campaign started

approach imagined at the beginning of this chapter, not least as it was far too angry. For it is striking how, despite winning the referendum and getting Brexit, its supporters have never stopped being consumed by rage, as any social media discussion confirms. More fundamentally, as I have sought to stress throughout

of Brexit. Amongst those effects is likely to be the ironic one that whereas control of immigration was such a central theme in the referendum campaign, post-Brexit Britain, with its ageing population, will probably end up using its independent immigration policy to increase the amount of immigration.133 Yet doing so

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