by Gordon Brown
Years later people still remember Mrs Thatcher thumping the table to secure a UK budget rebate from Europe, but not one of the concessions negotiated by David Cameron in the run-up to the EU referendum are remembered – and but for a few positive column inches at the time the referendum date was announced, they featured little in the ensuing debates. His was a botched renegotiation that did not even bring the paper-thin but at least tangible results yielded by Harold Wilson’s renegotiation after 1974.
David Cameron was the wrong man in the wrong place with the wrong argument at the wrong time. His campaign playbook was simply the same script he and George Osborne had used in the elections against Labour in 2010 and 2015, and what he still thought had been the winning card in the Scottish referendum – fear. A day away from an economic fear story was, for David Cameron’s team, a day lost. Yet they found it impossible to keep immigration and issues of national identity off the agenda, while at the same time George Osborne’s fear stories crowded out any positive appeals that might have been made, and hardly ever did any Labour voice hold centre stage in any news cycle.
At the end of April 2016, I asked for a phone call with David Cameron to warn him that he was facing a perfect storm on immigration, terrorism and a fragile economy. I said that the Remain campaign’s message was getting through to Tory voters who were financially secure and worried that Brexit might make them insecure, but it was not having an effect on Labour voters who were financially insecure and did not think that leaving Europe would make things any worse. I argued that we needed ‘horses for courses’, including a positive message targeted towards Labour voters that would show how membership of the EU could improve their lives. The last thing Labour voters needed was another round of Project Fear.
To show what I meant I released a video, shot at Coventry Cathedral by two very talented film-makers, Eddie Morgan and Mark Lucas, in which I made the case for a Remain vote. The video began with a shot of the ruins of Coventry Cathedral, bathed in morning sunlight. Bombed and destroyed by the Nazis in the Second World War, I pointed out that these ruins had been painstakingly and lovingly maintained as a monument to the wars we had left behind and to the sanctity of peace. ‘What message would we send to the rest of the world,’ I asked, ‘if we the British people – the most internationally minded of all – were to walk away from our nearest neighbours?’ It was an appeal to people’s emotions and their patriotism. To my great surprise, the film received 5.5 million views on Facebook.
I also wrote a book, Leading, not Leaving, which attempted to put the positive case for Remain. I tried to show not only that Britain’s best interests were served within Europe on everything from the economy and employment to the environment and security, but that because of our quite unique outward-looking and engaged approach to the wider world, Britain was capable not just of trading with Europe but of leading it. My first national speech of the campaign – hosted at the London School of Economics on 11 May – coincided with the book’s publication. There I argued that the Remain campaign should stress to working people the benefits of EU membership on pay, working conditions and employment rights. Despite the speech being covered by the BBC and ITV, its message was drowned out by a political comic opera that dominated the week’s news – first, a gaffe in which Cameron called Nigeria and Afghanistan ‘possibly two of the most corrupt countries in the world’, remarks picked up by a stray microphone; then a speech in which he implied that if we left the EU, the Third World War might break out. Project Fear was becoming Project Apocalypse.
The following weekend I spoke to a large pro-European audience at the Fabian Society Summer Conference, articulating the Labour reasons to ‘vote Remain rather than remain at home’. I argued that being part of Europe could deliver positive, practical and progressive benefits for Britain over the next decade – new jobs, energy-bill cuts, enhanced security, tax fairness and the protection of workers’ rights. I had been assured that no other Remain politician would be competing for the headlines that day. But that morning, George Osborne entered the fray from the G7 finance ministers’ meeting in Sendai, Japan, with another scare story – this time that the value of houses in the UK would fall by as much as 18 per cent following a Brexit vote. This preoccupied the broadcast media all day and the only question I was met with in my post-speech interviews was how I could defend such an indefensible claim. At each point, I tried to turn back to an affirmative message but we had again lost the opportunity to put it across. Over and over the ‘blue versus blue’ debate – Tories such as George Osborne and Boris Johnson fighting each other – drowned out any attempt to get through to Labour voters, whose alienation by it all would only fuel the urge to vote Leave.
A few days before the referendum, David Cameron phoned me and we spoke for a second time. The call started well. He said he wanted my advice on how to win. I replied that we had to appeal to British patriotism – by showing that Britain could lead in Europe. I suggested to him that he put British leadership at the heart of the campaign by publishing and setting out the practical benefits we could secure from an EU reform agenda, including half a million new British jobs through reforms to the European single market; European financial assistance for hard-pressed steel, coal and other industrial communities hit by closures and restructuring; and funding from Europe to pay to reduce the pressures from migration on our NHS, schools and housing. This would appeal to Labour voters, many of whom felt they had nothing to lose.
Cameron responded that he had already produced his own reform proposals after negotiations in Brussels and would be criticised for reopening the issue without European support. I countered that we should present this as the agenda for our presidency of the EU that was scheduled to begin later that year and that I had already gathered support for it from the president of the European Parliament, Martin Schulz, and was in touch with the Social Democrats in Italy, the Netherlands, France and Germany who were all anxious for Britain to remain.
Cameron then made the request I had been anticipating. He wanted all three ex-prime ministers – Tony Blair, John Major and me – to stand alongside him outside No. 10, each in front of lecterns, to make the case for staying in Europe. I said there would be no greater signal of an establishment stitch-up than four prime ministers of opposing parties appearing together to make the case for a Remain vote. I had no doubt the ploy would garner column inches, but it would be perceived as the agenda of the elites and would not win over Labour voters. Just as David Cameron and his Conservative colleagues were the only ones who could get through to the Tory vote – only 43 per cent of whom would, in the end, vote Remain – only Labour leaders had the best chance of getting through to the Labour base. In the end, the prime minister had little influence over Labour voters just as I would have had little influence with Tory supporters.
I offered a different proposal: a rally attended by past and present Labour leaders from Neil Kinnock and Tony Blair to Ed Miliband and, critically, Jeremy Corbyn, with all of us affirming without reservation that we wanted Britain in Europe. It was better, I thought, than Cameron’s idea, and he liked it too. Through the shadow chancellor John McDonnell – who shared my concerns about the erosion of support for Europe among Labour voters in the north – the message from Jeremy’s office came back: he would not appear on the same platform with Tony. I countered with a compromise: what about Jeremy in London, Tony in Belfast, Neil in Cardiff, and Ed in Yorkshire? Margaret Beckett could appear in the East Midlands and Harriet Harman in the south-east. I would speak in Glasgow. Again, Jeremy said no. All he did agree was that on the same day the following week, each of us would make pro-Europe appeals. In the event, for very understandable reasons, Tony could not appear – his mother-in-law’s funeral was that day – but he wrote an article published that morning. While the initiative went ahead, it was never going to have the impact of a joint appearance.
Everything I had worried would happen was now coming to pass. Weeks before the referendum campaign launched in earne
st, I had sent a note to the Labour peer and party-funder David Sainsbury – who did more than any other single individual to support Remain – as well as to other Labour colleagues, warning that the Leave slogan ‘Take Back Control’ would resonate with Labour voters. I argued that we could not leave the field open to their campaign that played on the loss of manufacturing, a lack of decent jobs, our country not being what it once was, the prospects for our children being poor, other countries doing better than us, and Britain being stronger when it stood alone. The lesson of the Scottish referendum was that we had to demonstrate in concrete terms not only how Labour supporters would be hurt by leaving the EU – but also how they could benefit by remaining.
The campaign led by Cameron and Osborne could only mobilise voters in the shires and cities who wanted nothing to threaten their already comfortable lives. Yet Britain was becoming two countries economically – and to secure a majority for Remain we had to recognise and respond to that. Cameron and Osborne had argued in the 2015 general election that a Labour government would put prosperity at risk; in the Brexit campaign, they reprised this familiar line, but now the enemy was not Labour but Brexit. The Remain pollsters had identified two groups who had to be hauled back: those who were torn between heart and mind – emotionally they wanted to vote Leave but intellectually they had to be convinced that it was in their interests – and ‘the disengaged middle’ who, the campaign calculated, would be won over because of economic risk. Cameron and Osborne were insistent that a firm focus on risk could blunt cultural concerns, not least over immigration. And so while I wanted to reassure voters worried about immigration by pointing to the new immigration fund I had proposed to Cameron, No. 10 was terrified of us even mentioning the word.
Both Ed Balls and Yvette Cooper also urged a change of stance on free movement of workers. But when, with ten days to go, Peter Mandelson called for a positive Remain initiative on migration, and Will Straw, the director of the official campaign Britain Stronger In Europe, suggested a major speech at Dover to confront the issue, Osborne reportedly responded that ‘we just need to stick to the economy’. The chancellor’s view was that while everyone criticised negative campaigning, it was the only message that was working. This strategy culminated in a ludicrous ‘shadow Budget’, which asserted on the basis of patently contrived figures that the costs of leaving the EU would mean slashing funding for the NHS. This transparently cynical ploy was rightly condemned across the political spectrum as a low point in British politics.
Tragedy then struck. On Thursday 16 June, a week before the referendum, my friend Jo Cox, the Labour MP for Batley and Spen in West Yorkshire, was brutally murdered. For days I grieved, our family grieved and the whole country grieved. Sarah and I had been privileged to work with Jo and her husband Brendan over many years and in her tireless efforts on behalf of poor and desolate children and mothers. She went to some of the most dangerous places in the world to do so. The last place she should have been in danger was in her home town.
There was now little time left before polling day and when I agreed to speak at the eve-of-poll rally in Birmingham, I did so with the specific intention of getting through to Labour voters in danger of defecting to Leave with a positive case based on better jobs, stronger workers’ rights and – perhaps more important – taking the unusual step of citing Orwell, Churchill and Shakespeare as I tried to encourage patriotic pride in our long history of engagement with Europe and the world. But the speech had little impact. Indeed, most of the speech that I composed was never delivered. The meeting at Birmingham University was supposed to have been in a large auditorium that would offer a platform for final appeals to the British people, but the event turned out to be nothing more than a small gathering outside, mainly Tory staffers assembled to greet David Cameron as he descended from the Remain tour bus – and the twenty-minute speech I had planned had to be condensed into less than five minutes.
The turnout on 23 June was greater than in any general election since 1992, and I was not surprised when the northern towns voted Leave. They had not even been visited or canvassed. In the same way that Hillary Clinton would mistakenly take much of the rust belt for granted in the US election later that year, the Remain campaign neglected the old industrial towns, almost all of which voted to leave by two to one. Many working-class parts of the cities, including poorer communities in London, also voted for Brexit. The middle-class Labour vote turned out heavily for Remain but, in total, 3 million Labour voters were for Leave.
Lord North is remembered as the prime minister who lost America at the end of the eighteenth century. David Cameron may be remembered as the one who lost Europe at the beginning of the twenty-first – and who in the process plunged a three-centuries-old United Kingdom into even greater danger. What the Brexit-voting public rejected was not just the Cameron advice but the combined and concerted view of the financial, industrial and cultural elites. In this sense, the result of the EU referendum was more than a confirmation of the limits of one-dimensional, negative campaigning, it was the biggest rebellion the country has ever seen against its political establishment, perhaps the most remarkable moment in British politics since Churchill was deposed by Attlee in 1945. There have been moments in our history when pressure from below forces change in the political system: the popular unrest that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, the riots demanding voting reform in 1832, the Chartist demands of 1848, the industrial agitation in the aftermath of the Second World War, and after 1979. In 2016 there was an earthquake that was as close to a revolution as modern Britain has ever come.
Behind the disaffection that spiralled upwards in the EU referendum are the same basic concerns that also lay behind the drive for Scottish independence and the dramatic chastening of the Tories in the 2017 general election: growing insecurities over jobs, livelihoods and futures, all of which seem to be endangered by tidal waves of global change. People sense that globalisation permeates every aspect of our lives, but because it is leaderless and lacks a human face it presents itself as a conspiracy of the powerful that the majority are powerless to resist – almost like a lottery that is forever loaded against them. This perception is confirmed and exacerbated by structural inequalities that divide the north from the south and decouple the former industrial towns from the global hub that is London, a separation every bit as profound as the ones between England and its Scottish and Welsh neighbours.
Part of the solution, therefore, has to be more balanced regional economic development to secure additional and better jobs and rising living standards. This is in the interests not just of the north, Scotland and Wales, but of London and the whole country. While the northern regions face high structural unemployment and even forced emigration, a London-centric view of the United Kingdom no longer works even for London – a capital city rife with congestion, overcrowding, overheating of its economy and high house prices. In this sense, the so-called Great Repeal Bill, transferring powers from Brussels to Westminster, has got it wrong: wherever it is possible, following Brexit, the powers repatriated from the European Union – including agriculture and fisheries, regional policy, social policy and employment rights – should not be automatically transferred back to Whitehall, which would reinforce the over-centralisation of power but, in the spirit of devolution, to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh and Northern Ireland Assemblies, the new city mayors and, in my opinion, to newly established and enfranchised Councils of the North and Midlands and other English regions. Indeed, there is a case for even broader and more profound change: a People’s Constitutional Convention, modelled on the successful Scottish Convention, could test the case for a more federal approach to governing the UK, and for the end of the House of Lords and its replacement by an elected Senate of the Nations and Regions.
If one set of divisions is economic, the other is cultural. In government we were right to demand that immigrants speak English and learn about our history, and we were justified in emphasising the importance of integr
ation. But we did not encourage and foster enough contact between communities or talk enough about what unites us across the different religions and ethnic divides and thus build sufficient common ground. Of course, community has to mean more than ‘integrating’ minorities or immigrants: it is about discovering and acting upon what we all have in common. And national unity is not possible if we allow patriotism to become appropriated by those who think of themselves as the only ‘real’ or ‘true’ carriers of our national identity. But where there is day-to-day contact between people of different faiths, ethnicities and classes – as is the everyday experience in London and some of the other cities – the views we have of each other, and the contribution we feel each makes, become far more positive. It is in areas where immigration is lowest that UKIP and others can do most to fuel prejudices. One lesson of the referendum is that we have to work harder to forge a shared British citizenship and a shared sense of destiny – a matter I shall address more fully in the remaining chapters.
Scotland will also require a settlement more ambitious than any so far enacted. In the 2014 referendum I put the argument for a strong Scottish Parliament within a United Kingdom built on the pooling and sharing of risks and resources. Since then we have seen, in turn, Scotland and England diverge over support for the EU; the Supreme Court brushing aside the Sewel Convention – the devolved institutions’ right to consultation in matters that affect them; the Great Repeal Bill which will automatically repatriate all Brussels powers to Westminster; and the creation of a new UK fund which will amass at a UK-level what were previously our contributions to the European budget. All of these developments will make the Scottish people less willing to believe that English sentiment favours sharing.
