Take Back Control Turns Out to Mean Something Different to Everyone Who Voted For It
Britain Votes Brexit, Wakes Up to Discover Slogan Requires Plumbing
Take Back Control Turns Out to Mean Something Different to Everyone Who Voted For It
On 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent to leave the European Union, ending a membership of forty-three years, reversing a referendum result of forty-one years earlier, and beginning a process whose complexity, duration, and political consequences none of the campaigns that had produced the result had fully described to the electorate that was being asked to endorse it.
The morning of 24 June was, in the memory of those who lived through it, one of the most disorienting mornings in British political life since the end of the Second World War not because a democratic vote had produced a result, which is what democratic votes are supposed to do, but because the result was one that a significant portion of the political class, the financial establishment, and the international community had not believed would happen and had not adequately prepared for. The pound fell sharply. The stock market fell sharply. David Cameron appeared outside Downing Street at eight in the morning and announced his resignation, an announcement made with the controlled composure of a man who has absorbed a shock and is not going to be seen absorbing it in public, but whose composure contained, visibly, the specific quality of someone for whom the event of the morning was not what they had planned.
Cameron had called the referendum to settle the Conservative Party’s European question once and for all, in the confident expectation that Remain would win, that the Eurosceptic wing would be quieted by democratic defeat, and that the European question would be removed from British politics for a generation. The expectation was wrong in every particular. The Eurosceptic wing had won. The question was not settled. The generation of removal had not been purchased. The Conservative Party’s European question had been answered by the electorate in a way that produced new questions of far greater complexity and duration than the ones it had resolved.
The Campaigns: What Was Said and What Was Heard
The Leave campaign’s central messages Take Back Control, £350 million a week for the NHS, reducing immigration were, in their relationship to literal accuracy, an exercise in the creative use of the available evidence. The £350 million figure on the side of the campaign bus the claim that leaving the EU would free up £350 million per week that could be redirected to the NHS was disputed by the UK Statistics Authority and by independent analysis throughout the campaign, and was modified, revised, and eventually abandoned by its principal advocates within hours of the result, a speed of abandonment that suggested the claim’s primary purpose had been electoral rather than informational.
The Remain campaign’s central message the economic risks of leaving was accurate in its substance and inadequate in its politics. Project Fear, as the Leave campaign labelled it, was effective in conveying the message that Brexit carried economic risks, and ineffective in making those risks feel more significant to the electorate than the arguments about sovereignty, immigration, and democratic control that the Leave campaign was deploying. The economic argument addressed one set of concerns. The Leave campaign was addressing a different set of concerns. The different set proved more electorally powerful.
The immigration argument was the most politically significant dimension of the campaign, combining the genuine concerns of communities that had experienced rapid demographic change with the specific anxiety about free movement that the post-2004 EU enlargement had created and that successive governments had failed to address with the combination of honesty and policy that the combination of honesty and policy would have required. The Leave campaign’s poster depicting a queue of refugees with the headline Breaking Point was, in its specific use of an image of Syrian refugees rather than EU migrants, a deployment of visual anxiety that critics condemned and that its creator defended with arguments that the subsequent years have not made more convincing.
The Geography of the Vote
The geography of the result was its most revealing dimension Scotland voted 62 percent to Remain, Northern Ireland voted 55.8 percent to Remain, London voted 60 percent to Remain, and England outside London voted, in aggregate, to Leave by a margin that determined the overall result. The university towns voted Remain. The seaside towns voted Leave. The prosperous suburbs voted Remain. The post-industrial towns voted Leave. The graduate population voted Remain. The non-graduate population voted Leave.
These patterns which correlated with age, with educational attainment, with geography, with economic circumstance described a country divided not just on the question of European membership but on the deeper questions about identity, representation, and economic experience that the European question had activated but not created. The communities that had lost their industries in the 1980s and had not been regenerated by the subsequent decades of growth, the communities where immigration had been rapid and public services had not expanded to match, the communities where the promise of globalisation had been experienced as loss rather than gain these communities voted Leave with the conviction of people who had concluded that the existing arrangement was not working for them and that a change of direction, even an uncertain one, was preferable to more of the same.
Cameron, Boris Johnson, and the Personal Dimensions
The referendum’s political drama had personal dimensions that subsequent analysis has tended to treat as peripheral to the structural causes of the result but that were not peripheral to how the campaign was conducted. Boris Johnson’s decision to support Leave announced after a famously agonised period of private calculation that produced public reports of a man writing two newspaper columns arguing opposite positions before choosing the one whose political trajectory he preferred gave the Leave campaign a figure capable of broadening its appeal beyond the committed Eurosceptic base and of deploying the specific charm, wit, and apparent spontaneity that the Remain campaign’s more sober spokespeople could not match.
Whether Johnson believed in the Leave case or was using it as a vehicle for his own advancement is a question that the evidence does not definitively resolve and that his subsequent career has not clarified in the direction of intellectual consistency. What is clear is that his presence in the Leave campaign was a significant factor in its success, and that his subsequent claim to the Conservative leadership which the referendum’s result enabled by making Cameron’s position untenable was the political harvest of the vote he had helped to win.
Nigel Farage’s role was the other personal dimension the UKIP leader whose decade of campaigning on the European question, conducted outside the Conservative Party but increasingly within its political territory, had shifted the terms of the debate and the Conservative Party’s position in ways that made the referendum both necessary and winnable for the Leave side. Farage had not won the referendum alone. He had created the conditions without which it would not have been held, and had built the popular movement that made the Leave campaign’s ground operation possible in the areas where the Conservative Party had insufficient presence to conduct it alone.
Article 50 and the Beginning of the Process
Cameron’s resignation left the implementation of the result to his successor. Theresa May who had been a quiet Remain supporter during the campaign and who won the Conservative leadership when Andrea Leadsom withdrew, after a campaign that had reduced the candidates from a larger field without producing the democratic clarity that a contested vote among members would have provided entered Downing Street with the specific mandate of Brexit means Brexit: a phrase of such deliberate emptiness that it acknowledged the complexity of what it was asserting while declining to specify any of the content of that assertion.
May’s Lancaster House speech of January 2017 set out the government’s objectives in terms that committed to leaving the single market and the customs union a hard Brexit rather than the softer versions that some Remain supporters and some Leave voters had believed the vote would produce. The speech narrowed the negotiating space in ways that the subsequent three years would demonstrate were not conducive to the parliamentary majority that the implementing legislation would eventually require.
The slogan had said Take Back Control. The control that was being taken back required, as it turned out, not a slogan but approximately three and a half years of parliamentary crisis, two general elections, three Prime Ministers, a withdrawal agreement, a transition period, a trade and cooperation agreement, a Northern Ireland protocol, a subsequent protocol revision, and a sustained argument about what the word Brexit had actually meant when the 51.9 percent had voted for it which was, by the end of the process, an argument that 51.9 percent of those who had voted for it were not in complete agreement about.
The plumbing was complicated. The slogan had not mentioned plumbing. This was, in retrospect, an omission.
Auf Wiedersehen, amigo!
The UK voted to leave the European Union on 23 June 2016 by 51.9 percent to 48.1 percent on a turnout of 72.2 percent. Scotland voted 62 percent to Remain; Northern Ireland 55.8 percent; London 60 percent. David Cameron resigned as Prime Minister on the morning of the result. Theresa May became Prime Minister in July 2016 after Andrea Leadsom withdrew from the Conservative leadership contest. The UK Statistics Authority disputed the Leave campaign’s claim that EU membership cost £350 million per week. Article 50 was triggered on 29 March 2017. Britain formally left the EU on 31 January 2020. The Trade and Cooperation Agreement was concluded on 24 December 2020.
ORIGINALY PUBLISHED: 23 June 2016 (London, UK)
Alan Nafzger was born in Lubbock, Texas, the son Swiss immigrants. He grew up on a dairy in Windthorst, north central Texas. He earned degrees from Midwestern State University (B.A. 1985) and Texas State University (M.A. 1987). University College Dublin (Ph.D. 1991). Dr. Nafzger has entertained and educated young people in Texas colleges for 37 years. Nafzger is best known for his dark novels and experimental screenwriting. His best know scripts to date are Lenin’s Body, produced in Russia by A-Media and Sea and Sky produced in The Philippines in the Tagalog language. In 1986, Nafzger wrote the iconic feminist western novel, Gina of Quitaque. He currently lives in Holloway, North London. Contact: [email protected]
In British comedy, the prat is the character who provides the laughter by being completely oblivious to their own ridiculousness.
Read this in an actual planning meeting and the satire becomes documentation with better structure.