Why bad ideas refuse to die

Steven Poole in The Guardian

In January 2016, the rapper BoB took to Twitter to tell his fans that the Earth is really flat. “A lot of people are turned off by the phrase ‘flat earth’,” he acknowledged, “but there’s no way u can see all the evidence and not know … grow up.” At length the astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson joined in the conversation, offering friendly corrections to BoB’s zany proofs of non-globism, and finishing with a sarcastic compliment: “Being five centuries regressed in your reasoning doesn’t mean we all can’t still like your music.”

Actually, it’s a lot more than five centuries regressed. Contrary to what we often hear, people didn’t think the Earth was flat right up until Columbus sailed to the Americas. In ancient Greece, the philosophers Pythagoras and Parmenides had already recognised that the Earth was spherical. Aristotle pointed out that you could see some stars in Egypt and Cyprus that were not visible at more northerly latitudes, and also that the Earth casts a curved shadow on the moon during a lunar eclipse. The Earth, he concluded with impeccable logic, must be round.

The flat-Earth view was dismissed as simply ridiculous – until very recently, with the resurgence of apparently serious flat-Earthism on the internet. An American named Mark Sargent, formerly a professional videogamer and software consultant, has had millions of views on YouTube for his Flat Earth Clues video series. (“You are living inside a giant enclosed system,” his website warns.) The Flat Earth Society is alive and well, with a thriving website. What is going on?

Many ideas have been brilliantly upgraded or repurposed for the modern age, and their revival seems newly compelling. Some ideas from the past, on the other hand, are just dead wrong and really should have been left to rot. When they reappear, what is rediscovered is a shambling corpse. These are zombie ideas. You can try to kill them, but they just won’t die. And their existence is a big problem for our normal assumptions about how the marketplace of ideas operates.

The phrase “marketplace of ideas” was originally used as a way of defending free speech. Just as traders and customers are free to buy and sell wares in the market, so freedom of speech ensures that people are free to exchange ideas, test them out, and see which ones rise to the top. Just as good consumer products succeed and bad ones fail, so in the marketplace of ideas the truth will win out, and error and dishonesty will disappear.

There is certainly some truth in the thought that competition between ideas is necessary for the advancement of our understanding. But the belief that the best ideas will always succeed is rather like the faith that unregulated financial markets will always produce the best economic outcomes. As the IMF chief Christine Lagarde put this standard wisdom laconically in Davos: “The market sorts things out, eventually.” Maybe so. But while we wait, very bad things might happen.

Zombies don’t occur in physical marketplaces – take technology, for example. No one now buys Betamax video recorders, because that technology has been superseded and has no chance of coming back. (The reason that other old technologies, such as the manual typewriter or the acoustic piano, are still in use is that, according to the preferences of their users, they have not been superseded.) So zombies such as flat-Earthism simply shouldn’t be possible in a well‑functioning marketplace of ideas. And yet – they live. How come?

One clue is provided by economics. It turns out that the marketplace of economic ideas itself is infested with zombies. After the 2008 financial crisis had struck, the Australian economist John Quiggin published an illuminating work called Zombie Economics, describing theories that still somehow shambled around even though they were clearly dead, having been refuted by actual events in the world. An example is the notorious efficient markets hypothesis, which holds, in its strongest form, that “financial markets are the best possible guide to the value of economic assets and therefore to decisions about investment and production”. That, Quiggin argues, simply can’t be right. Not only was the efficient markets hypothesis refuted by the global meltdown of 2007–8, in Quiggin’s view it actually caused it in the first place: the idea “justified, and indeed demanded, financial deregulation, the removal of controls on international capital flows, and a massive expansion of the financial sector. These developments ultimately produced the global financial crisis.”

Even so, an idea will have a good chance of hanging around as a zombie if it benefits some influential group of people. The efficient markets hypothesis is financially beneficial for bankers who want to make deals unencumbered by regulation. A similar point can be made about the privatisation of state-owned industry: it is seldom good for citizens, but is always a cash bonanza for those directly involved.

The marketplace of ideas, indeed, often confers authority through mere repetition – in science as well as in political campaigning. You probably know, for example, that the human tongue has regional sensitivities: sweetness is sensed on the tip, saltiness and sourness on the sides, and bitter at the back. At some point you’ve seen a scientific tongue map showing this – they appear in cookery books as well as medical textbooks. It’s one of those nice, slightly surprising findings of science that no one questions. And it’s rubbish.

 

A fantasy map of a flat earth. Photograph: Antar Dayal/Getty Images/Illustration Works

As the eminent professor of biology, Stuart Firestein, explained in his 2012 book Ignorance: How it Drives Science, the tongue-map myth arose because of a mistranslation of a 1901 German physiology textbook. Regions of the tongue are just “very slightly” more or less sensitive to each of the four basic tastes, but they each can sense all of them. The translation “considerably overstated” the original author’s claims. And yet the mythical tongue map has endured for more than a century.

One of the paradoxes of zombie ideas, though, is that they can have positive social effects. The answer is not necessarily to suppress them, since even apparently vicious and disingenuous ideas can lead to illuminating rebuttal and productive research. Few would argue that a commercial marketplace needs fraud and faulty products. But in the marketplace of ideas, zombies can actually be useful. Or if not, they can at least make us feel better. That, paradoxically, is what I think the flat-Earthers of today are really offering – comfort.

Today’s rejuvenated flat-Earth philosophy, as promoted by rappers and YouTube videos, is not simply a recrudescence of pre-scientific ignorance. It is, rather, the mother of all conspiracy theories. The point is that everyone who claims the Earth is round is trying to fool you, and keep you in the dark. In that sense, it is a very modern version of an old idea.

As with any conspiracy theory, the flat-Earth idea is introduced by way of a handful of seeming anomalies, things that don’t seem to fit the “official” story. Have you ever wondered, the flat-Earther will ask, why commercial aeroplanes don’t fly over Antarctica? It would, after all, be the most direct route from South Africa to New Zealand, or from Sydney to Buenos Aires – if the Earth were round. But it isn’t. There is no such thing as the South Pole, so flying over Antarctica wouldn’t make any sense. Plus, the Antarctic treaty, signed by the world’s most powerful countries, bans any flights over it, because something very weird is going on there. So begins the conspiracy sell. Well, in fact, some commercial routes do fly over part of the continent of Antarctica. The reason none fly over the South Pole itself is because of aviation rules that require any aircraft taking such a route to have expensive survival equipment for all passengers on board – which would obviously be prohibitive for a passenger jet.

OK, the flat-Earther will say, then what about the fact that photographs taken from mountains or hot-air balloons don’t show any curvature of the horizon? It is perfectly flat – therefore the Earth must be flat. Well, a reasonable person will respond, it looks flat because the Earth, though round, is really very big. But photographs taken from the International Space Station in orbit show a very obviously curved Earth.

And here is where the conspiracy really gets going. To a flat-Earther, any photograph from the International Space Station is just a fake. So too are the famous photographs of the whole round Earth hanging in space that were taken on the Apollo missions. Of course, the Moon landings were faked too. This is a conspiracy theory that swallows other conspiracy theories whole. According to Mark Sargent’s “enclosed world” version of the flat-Earth theory, indeed, space travel had to be faked because there is actually an impermeable solid dome enclosing our flat planet. The US and USSR tried to break through this dome by nuking it in the 1950s: that’s what all those nuclear tests were really about.

 

Flat-Earthers regard as fake any photographs of the Earth that were taken on the Apollo missions Photograph: Alamy

The intellectual dynamic here, is one of rejection and obfuscation. A lot of ingenuity evidently goes into the elaboration of modern flat-Earth theories to keep them consistent. It is tempting to suppose that some of the leading writers (or, as fans call them, “researchers”) on the topic are cynically having some intellectual fun, but there are also a lot of true believers on the messageboards who find the notion of the “globist” conspiracy somehow comforting and consonant with their idea of how the world works. You might think that the really obvious question here, though, is: what purpose would such an incredibly elaborate and expensive conspiracy serve? What exactly is the point?

It seems to me that the desire to believe such stuff stems from a deranged kind of optimism about the capabilities of human beings. It is a dark view of human nature, to be sure, but it is also rather awe-inspiring to think of secret agencies so single-minded and powerful that they really can fool the world’s population over something so enormous. Even the pro-Brexit activists who warned one another on polling day to mark their crosses with a pen so that MI5 would not be able to erase their votes, were in a way expressing a perverse pride in the domination of Britain’s spookocracy. “I literally ran out of new tin hat topics to research and I STILL wouldn’t look at this one without embarrassment,” confesses Sargent on his website, “but every time I glanced at it there was something unresolved, and once I saw the near perfection of the whole plan, I was hooked.” It is rather beautiful. Bonkers, but beautiful. As the much more noxious example of Scientology also demonstrates, it is all too tempting to take science fiction for truth – because narratives always make more sense than reality.

We know that it’s a good habit to question received wisdom. Sometimes, though, healthy scepticism can run over into paranoid cynicism, and giant conspiracies seem oddly consoling. One reason why myths and urban legends hang around so long seems to be that we like simple explanations – such as that immigrants are to blame for crumbling public services – and are inclined to believe them. The “MMR causes autism” scare perpetrated by Andrew Wakefield, for example, had the apparent virtue of naming a concrete cause (vaccination) for a deeply worrying and little-understood syndrome (autism). Years after it was shown that there was nothing to Wakefield’s claims, there is still a strong and growing “anti-vaxxer” movement, particularly in the US, which poses a serious danger to public health. The benefits of immunisation, it seems, have been forgotten.

The yearning for simple explanations also helps to account for the popularity of outlandish conspiracy theories that paint a reassuring picture of all the world’s evils as being attributable to a cabal of supervillains. Maybe a secret society really is running the show – in which case the world at least has a weird kind of coherence. Hence, perhaps, the disappointed amazement among some of those who had not expected their protest votes for Brexit to count.

And what happens when the world of ideas really does operate as a marketplace? It happens to be the case that many prominent climate sceptics have been secretly funded by oil companies. The idea that there is some scientific controversy over whether burning fossil fuels has contributed in large part to the present global warming (there isn’t) is an idea that has been literally bought and sold, and remains extraordinarily successful. That, of course, is just a particularly dramatic example of the way all western democracies have been captured by industry lobbying and party donations, in which friendly consideration of ideas that increase the profits of business is simply purchased, like any other commodity. If the marketplace of ideas worked as advertised, not only would this kind of corruption be absent, it would be impossible in general for ideas to stay rejected for hundreds or thousands of years before eventually being revived. Yet that too has repeatedly happened.

While the return of flat-Earth theories is silly and rather alarming, meanwhile, it also illustrates some real and deep issues about human knowledge. How, after all, do you or I know that the Earth really is round? Essentially, we take it on trust. We may have experienced some common indications of it ourselves, but we accept the explanations of others. The experts all say the Earth is round; we believe them, and get on with our lives. Rejecting the economic consensus that Brexit would be bad for the UK, Michael Gove said that the British public had had enough of experts (or at least of experts who lurked in acronymically named organisations), but the truth is that we all depend on experts for most of what we think we know.

The second issue is that we cannot actually know for sure that the way the world appears to us is not actually the result of some giant conspiracy or deception. The modern flat-Earth theory comes quite close to an even more all-encompassing species of conspiracy theory. As some philosophers have argued, it is not entirely impossible that God created the whole universe, including fossils, ourselves and all our (false) memories, only five minutes ago. Or it might be the case that all my sensory impressions are being fed to my brain by a clever demon intent on deceiving me (Descartes) or by a virtual-reality program controlled by evil sentient artificial intelligences (The Matrix).

The resurgence of flat-Earth theory has also spawned many web pages that employ mathematics, science, and everyday experience to explain why the world actually is round. This is a boon for public education. And we should not give in to the temptation to conclude that belief in a conspiracy is prima facie evidence of stupidity. Evidently, conspiracies really happen. Members of al-Qaida really did conspire in secret to fly planes into the World Trade Center. And, as Edward Snowden revealed, the American and British intelligence services really did conspire in secret to intercept the electronic communications of millions of ordinary citizens. Perhaps the most colourful official conspiracy that we now know of happened in China. When the half-millennium-old Tiananmen Gate was found to be falling down in the 1960s, it was secretly replaced, bit by bit, with an exact replica, in a successful conspiracy that involved nearly 3,000 people who managed to keep it a secret for years.

Indeed, a healthy openness to conspiracy may be said to underlie much honest intellectual inquiry. This is how the physicist Frank Wilczek puts it: “When I was growing up, I loved the idea that great powers and secret meanings lurk behind the appearance of things.” Newton’s grand idea of an invisible force (gravity) running the universe was definitely a cosmological conspiracy theory in this sense. Yes, many conspiracy theories are zombies – but so is the idea that conspiracies never happen.

 

‘When the half-millennium-old Tiananmen Gate was found to be falling down in the 1960s, it was secretly replaced, bit by bit, with an exact replica’ Photograph: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images

Things are better, one assumes, in the rarefied marketplace of scientific ideas. There, the revered scientific journals have rigorous editorial standards. Zombies and other market failures are thereby prevented. Not so fast. Remember the tongue map. It turns out that the marketplace of scientific ideas is not perfect either.
The scientific community operates according to the system of peer review, in which an article submitted to a journal will be sent out by the editor to several anonymous referees who are expert in the field and will give a considered view on whether the paper is worthy of publication, or will be worthy if revised. (In Britain, the Royal Society began to seek such reports in 1832.) The barriers to entry for the best journals in the sciences and humanities mean that – at least in theory – it is impossible to publish clownish, evidence-free hypotheses.

But there are increasing rumblings in the academic world itself that peer review is fundamentally broken. Even that it actively suppresses good new ideas while letting through a multitude of very bad ones. “False positives and exaggerated results in peer-reviewed scientific studies have reached epidemic proportions in recent years,” reported Scientific American magazine in 2011. Indeed, the writer of that column, a professor of medicine named John Ioannidis, had previously published a famous paper titled Why Most Published Research Findings Are False. The issues, he noted, are particularly severe in healthcare research, in which conflicts of interest arise because studies are funded by large drug companies, but there is also a big problem in psychology.

Take the widely popularised idea of priming. In 1996, a paper was published claiming that experimental subjects who had been verbally primed to think of old age by being made to think about words such as bingo, Florida, grey, and wrinkles subsequently walked more slowly when they left the laboratory than those who had not been primed. It was a dazzling idea, and led to a flurry of other findings that priming could affect how well you did on a quiz, or how polite you were to a stranger. In recent years, however, researchers have become suspicious, and have not been able to generate the same findings as many of the early studies. This is not definitive proof of falsity, but it does show that publication in a peer-reviewed journal is no guarantee of reliability. Psychology, some argue, is currently going through a crisis in replicability, which Daniel Kahneman has called a looming “train wreck” for the field as a whole.

Could priming be a future zombie idea? Well, most people think it unlikely that all such priming effects will be refuted, since there is now such a wide variety of studies on them. The more interesting problem is to work out what scientists call the idea’s “ecological validity” – that is, how well do the effects translate from the artificial simplicity of the lab situation to the ungovernable messiness of real life? This controversy in psychology just shows science working as it should – being self-correcting. One marketplace-of-ideas problem here, though, is that papers with surprising and socially intriguing results will be described throughout the media, and lauded as definitive evidence in popularising books, as soon as they are published, and long before awkward second questions begin to be asked.

China’s memory manipulators



It would be sensible, for a start, for us to make the apparently trivial rhetorical adjustment from the popular phrase “studies show …” and limit ourselves to phrases such as “studies suggest” or “studies indicate”. After all, “showing” strongly implies proving, which is all too rare an activity outside mathematics. Studies can always be reconsidered. That is part of their power.

Nearly every academic inquirer I talked to while researching this subject says that the interface of research with publishing is seriously flawed. Partly because the incentives are all wrong – a “publish or perish” culture rewards academics for quantity of published research over quality. And partly because of the issue of “publication bias”: the studies that get published are the ones that have yielded hoped-for results. Studies that fail to show what they hoped for end up languishing in desk drawers.

One reform suggested by many people to counteract publication bias would be to encourage the publication of more “negative findings” – papers where a hypothesis was not backed up by the experiment performed. One problem, of course, is that such findings are not very exciting. Negative results do not make headlines. (And they sound all the duller for being called “negative findings”, rather than being framed as positive discoveries that some ideas won’t fly.)

The publication-bias issue is even more pressing in the field of medicine, where it is estimated that the results of around half of all trials conducted are never published at all, because their results are negative. “When half the evidence is withheld,” writes the medical researcher Ben Goldacre, “doctors and patients cannot make informed decisions about which treatment is best.”Accordingly, Goldacre has kickstarted a campaigning group named AllTrials to demand that all results be published.

When lives are not directly at stake, however, it might be difficult to publish more negative findings in other areas of science. One idea, floated by the Economist, is that “Journals should allocate space for ‘uninteresting’ work, and grant-givers should set aside money to pay for it.” It sounds splendid, to have a section in journals for tedious results, or maybe an entire journal dedicated to boring and perfectly unsurprising research. But good luck getting anyone to fund it.

The good news, though, is that some of the flaws in the marketplace of scientific ideas might be hidden strengths. It’s true that some people think peer review, at its glacial pace and with its bias towards the existing consensus, works to actively repress new ideas that are challenging to received opinion. Notoriously, for example, the paper that first announced the invention of graphene – a way of arranging carbon in a sheet only a single atom thick – was rejected by Nature in 2004 on the grounds that it was simply “impossible”. But that idea was too impressive to be suppressed; in fact, the authors of the graphene paper had it published in Science magazine only six months later. Most people have faith that very well-grounded results will find their way through the system. Yet it is right that doing so should be difficult. If this marketplace were more liquid and efficient, we would be overwhelmed with speculative nonsense. Even peremptory or aggressive dismissals of new findings have a crucial place in the intellectual ecology. Science would not be so robust a means of investigating the world if it eagerly embraced every shiny new idea that comes along. It has to put on a stern face and say: “Impress me.” Great ideas may well face a lot of necessary resistance, and take a long time to gain traction. And we wouldn’t wish things to be otherwise.

In many ways, then, the marketplace of ideas does not work as advertised: it is not efficient, there are frequent crashes and failures, and dangerous products often win out, to widespread surprise and dismay. It is important to rethink the notion that the best ideas reliably rise to the top: that itself is a zombie idea, which helps entrench powerful interests. Yet even zombie ideas can still be useful when they motivate energetic refutations that advance public education. Yes, we may regret that people often turn to the past to renew an old theory such as flat-Earthism, which really should have stayed dead. But some conspiracies are real, and science is always engaged in trying to uncover the hidden powers behind what we see. The resurrection of zombie ideas, as well as the stubborn rejection of promising new ones, can both be important mechanisms for the advancement of human understanding.

Brexit - An Alternative Narrative

 John Pilger in The Hindu

The majority vote by Britons to leave the European Union was an act of raw democracy. Millions of ordinary people refused to be bullied, intimidated and dismissed with open contempt by their presumed betters in the major parties, the leaders of the business and banking oligarchy and the media.

This was, in great part, a vote by those angered and demoralised by the sheer arrogance of the apologists for the “remain” campaign and the dismemberment of a socially just civil life in Britain. The last bastion of the historic reforms of 1945, the National Health Service, has been so subverted by Tory and Labour-supported privateers it is fighting for its life.


Nothing but blackmail

A forewarning came when the Treasurer, George Osborne, the embodiment of both Britain’s ancien regime and the banking mafia in Europe, threatened to cut £30 billion from public services if people voted the wrong way; it was blackmail on a shocking scale.
 
Immigration was exploited in the campaign with consummate cynicism, not only by populist politicians from the lunar right, but by Labour politicians drawing on their own venerable tradition of promoting and nurturing racism, a symptom of corruption not at the bottom but at the top. The reason millions of refugees have fled the Middle East — first Iraq, now Syria — are the invasions and imperial mayhem of Britain, the United States, France, the European Union and NATO. Before that, there was the wilful destruction of Yugoslavia. Before that, there was the theft of Palestine and the imposition of Israel.

The pith helmets may have long gone, but the blood has never dried. A nineteenth century contempt for countries and peoples, depending on their degree of colonial usefulness, remains a centrepiece of modern “globalisation”, with its perverse socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor: its freedom for capital and denial of freedom to labour; its perfidious politicians and politicised civil servants. All this has now come home to Europe, enriching the likes of Tony Blair and impoverishing and disempowering millions. On 23 June, the British said no more.

The London class

The most effective propagandists of the “European ideal” have not been the far right, but an insufferably patrician class for whom metropolitan London is the United Kingdom. Its leading members see themselves as liberal, enlightened, cultivated tribunes of the 21st century zeitgeist, even “cool”. What they really are is a bourgeoisie with insatiable consumerist tastes and ancient instincts of their own superiority. In their house paper, the Guardian, they have gloated, day after day, at those who would even consider the EU profoundly undemocratic, a source of social injustice and a virulent extremism known as “neoliberalism”.

The aim of this extremism is to install a permanent, capitalist theocracy that ensures a two-thirds society, with the majority divided and indebted, managed by a corporate class, and a permanent working poor. In Britain today, 63 per cent of poor children grow up in families where one member is working. For them, the trap has closed. More than 600,000 residents of Britain’s second city, Greater Manchester, are, reports a study, “experiencing the effects of extreme poverty” and 1.6 million are slipping into penury.

Little of this social catastrophe is acknowledged in the bourgeois controlled media, notably the Oxbridge dominated BBC. During the referendum campaign, almost no insightful analysis was allowed to intrude upon the clichéd hysteria about “leaving Europe”, as if Britain was about to be towed in hostile currents somewhere north of Iceland.

On the morning after the vote, a BBC radio reporter welcomed politicians to his studio as old chums. “Well,” he said to “Lord” Peter Mandelson, the disgraced architect of Blairism, “why do these people want it so badly?” The “these people” are the majority of Britons.

The wealthy war criminal Tony Blair remains a hero of the Mandelson “European” class, though few will say so these days. The Guardian once described Mr. Blair as “mystical” and has been true to his “project” of rapacious war. The day after the vote, the columnist Martin Kettle offered a Brechtian solution to the misuse of democracy by the masses. “Now surely we can agree referendums are bad for Britain”, said the headline over his full-page piece. The “we” was unexplained but understood — just as “these people” is understood. “The referendum has conferred less legitimacy on politics, not more,” wrote Mr. Kettle. “…the verdict on referendums should be a ruthless one. Never again.”

The kind of ruthlessness Mr. Kettle longs for is found in Greece, a country now airbrushed. There, they had a referendum and the result was ignored. Like the Labour Party in Britain, the leaders of the Syriza government in Athens are the products of an affluent, highly privileged, educated middle class, groomed in the fakery and political treachery of post-modernism. The Greek people courageously used the referendum to demand their government sought “better terms” with a venal status quo in Brussels that was crushing the life out of their country. They were betrayed, as the British would have been betrayed.

Perpetual forgetfulness

On Friday, the Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was asked by the BBC if he would pay tribute to the departed Mr. Cameron, his comrade in the “remain” campaign. Mr. Corbyn fulsomely praised Mr. Cameron’s “dignity” and noted his backing for gay marriage and his apology to the Irish families of the dead of Bloody Sunday. He said nothing about Mr. Cameron’s divisiveness, his brutal austerity policies, his lies about “protecting” the Health Service. Neither did he remind people of the war mongering of the Cameron government: the dispatch of British special forces to Libya and British bomb aimers to Saudi Arabia and, above all, the beckoning of world war three.

In the week of the referendum vote, no British politician and, to my knowledge, no journalist referred to Vladimir Putin’s speech in St. Petersburg commemorating the seventy-fifth anniversary of Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union on 22 June, 1941. The Soviet victory — at a cost of 27 million Soviet lives and the majority of all German forces — won the Second World War.

Mr. Putin likened the current frenzied build up of NATO troops and war material on Russia’s western borders to the Third Reich’s Operation Barbarossa. NATO’s exercises in Poland were the biggest since the Nazi invasion; Operation Anaconda had simulated an attack on Russia, presumably with nuclear weapons. On the eve of the referendum, the quisling secretary-general of NATO, Jens Stoltenberg, warned Britons they would be endangering “peace and security” if they voted to leave the EU. The millions who ignored him and Mr. Cameron, Mr. Osborne, Mr. Corbyn, Mr. Obama and the man who runs the Bank of England may, just may, have struck a blow for real peace and democracy in Europe.

How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down

Geoffrey Robertson in The Guardian

It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.

It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.

Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.

It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.

Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated


Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.

Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.

In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership.

So how should MPs vote come November, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduces the 2016 European Communities Act (Repeal) Bill? Those from London and Scotland should happily vote against it, following their constituents’ wishes. So should Labour MPs – it’s their party policy after all.

By November, there may be other very good reasons for MPs to refuse to leave Europe. Brexit may turn out to be just too difficult. Staying in the EU may be the only way to stop Scotland from splitting, or to rescue the pound. A poll on Sunday tells us that a million leave voters are already regretting their choice: a significant public change of mind would amply justify a parliamentary refusal to Brexit. It may be, in November, that President Donald Trump becomes the leader of the free world – in which case a strong EU would become more necessary than ever. Or it may simply be that a majority of MPs, mindful of their constitutional duty to do what is best for Britain, conscientiously decide that it is best to remain.

There is no point in holding another referendum (as several million online petitioners are urging). Referendums are alien to our traditions, they are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy. The only way forward now depends on the courage, intelligence and conscience of your local MP. So have your say in the traditional way: lobby him or her to vote against the government when it tries to Brexit, because parliament is sovereign.

Perilous times for progressives

Opinion of The Guardian

Britain’s 27 erstwhile European partners will meet next week to discuss the UK’s future with the country itself locked outside the room. The constitutional ground-rules of our democracy are in contention as never before, with arguments raging about whether or not Westminster can block Nicola Sturgeon’s mooted Scottish referendum, or Ms Sturgeon can deploy procedural weaponry at Holyrood to frustrate the UK-wide referendum decision. Meanwhile the grave economic consequences are coming into view, with the Institute of Directors suggesting that a quarter of companies will cease hiring and a fifth may shift operations overseas.

What is so damaging for the orderly conduct of business is not only the prospect of a messy divorce from the continent, but an immediate political crisis. After David Cameron’s post-dated resignation, nobody knows who is in charge, still less what happens next. The Brexit brigade stormed to victory without a manifesto, or even agreement on what “leaving the EU” involves. Some, including Michael Gove, would cut loose from the single market, and damn the vast economic cost; others now concede the UK will have to stay in the market, even though that would betray the campaign promise to “take control” of regulation and migration. Wider pre-election promises have turned to dust at great speed. At sunrise on Friday, while the final few votes were still being counted, Nigel Farage conceded that it had been “a mistake” for Vote Leave to pretend that there would be an extra £350m a week for the NHS; at sundown, leading leaver Daniel Hannan MEP killed the other central campaign promise by conceding free movement of labourmight continue. Lesser gimmicks, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove’s promise to scrap VAT on energy bills, were always going to be hard to honour with an economy that is set to slow; they seem entirely irrelevant when we don’t know who will be presenting the next budget.

A country in peril, without a functioning government, needs an office-ready opposition – to ask the awkward questions, warn against wild swerves, and force somebody on the government side to explain what is going on. Britain, however, is saddled with a second party so beset by schisms, that – even as the union strains, the government crumbles, and the economy teeters – the thing making the headlines is Labour’s disintergation. Hilary Benn’s “sacking”, a dubious description seeing as the shadow foreign secretary constructed his own dismissal, was followed by the self-sacrifice of no fewer than 11 shadow cabinet ministers by late evening on 26 June, a run of career suicide bombs all detonated with the single aim of forcing Jeremy Corbyn out, just nine months after the leftwinger secured an almighty mandate from party members, taking more than thrice the votes of any of his three rivals, from the party’s centre and right.

This is a dismal pass that Labour was always likely to reach, because the overwhelming bulk of MPs have, from the off, been convinced that Mr Corbyn would drive them off a cliff. Many members are understandably furious with parliamentarians who never allowed him a chance. But there is no escaping that the day-to-day work of a party leader is fronting the efforts of a team of MPs. And when he was initially backed by fewer than one in 10 of that team, and not much interested in compromises to win more over, it was a job he was always going to struggle to do effectively. After the attempted coup, Mr Corbyn may attempt to fill his top team with other MPs. But there is now a real question about whether he can function in the job at all.

The PLP putsch looks shoddy for various reasons. For those MPs who have done nothing but plot since September, moving against him now is opportunism pure and simple. For others, it is an emotional spasm, made in rage against the painful loss of Britain’s place in Europe. But Mr Corbyn did not ask for this referendum, and it seems perverse to blame him for David Cameron’s loss. While Labour’s pro-Europeans were convinced they would win, many rather admired his qualified call for a remain vote, hoping that it might win do more to win over Eurosceptics than EU cheerleading. Even now, they should pause and ask whether a smooth-talking Europhile would have done more harm or good in Newport and Barnsley last week. One can argue that either way, but now – with the votes counted – anything that looks like pro-European regime change could appear disdainful of the public. Even more fundamentally, third-way social democracy has been in crisis ever since the crash. After the spectacular failure of the “mainstream” candidates last year, Labour’s centre-right should have earned its way back into contention with a fundamental rethink. Sadly, it hasn’t done that.

Set against this is the continuing failure of Jeremy Corbyn to look serious about becoming prime minister. There are fair-minded MPs who despair at the fact that so many constituents can never envisage their leader in No 10. It becomes harder to ignore such concerns after the Brexit vote, amid speculation that the next general election, which had not been scheduled until 2020, may now be brought forward to this autumn. This is the context in which deputy leader Tom Watson, who has his own mandate, is demanding talks about “the way forward”.

These are perilous times for progressive politics, perhaps the most perilous since the 1930s. It is incumbent on everybody to think before acting. Jeremy Corbyn needs to look into his soul and ask himself if he really wants to be PM, and get out of the way if not. His critics need to get on the phone and establish whether or not they can build the strength in the grassroots to topple him. Some say members are moving post-referendum; others dispute this. If the members remain loyal, then the mutineers could wound but not kill. The result would be to split the parliamentary party and the movement asunder, which would give the Tories a free run on a Brexit plaform.

Make the wrong call, and the results could be as ruinous as in 1931, when Ramsay MacDonald clung to office by giving up on the Labour movement, and a party of government was reduced to a rump of 52 seats. A half-complete coup would be worse than a clean defenestration or uniting behind Mr Corbyn. If the activists have moved, his time is up; if not, it is the MPs who must back off. Labour has sometimes failed dismally at moments of national crisis, as in 1931. But at others – think 1940 – it has proved equal to the hour. With an intolerant right wing on the rise, every progressive must be hoping that, whoever prevails in the left’s faction fighting, it will be finished soon.

W ill article 50 ever be triggered?

Jon Henley in The Guardian




 

When David Cameron delivered his resignation speech outside No 10 on Friday, he said he would leave the task of triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty – the untested procedure governing how an EU member state leaves the bloc – to his successor.

This has prompted much speculation – and a glimmer of hope for those who want Britain to remain in the European Union. Cameron, they argue, had repeatedly said during the campaign that article 50 would be triggered immediately if Vote Leave were to win the Brexit referendum.

By not doing so, the theory is, and by bequeathing the responsibility to whoever succeeds him, Cameron has handed the next prime minister a poisoned chalice. Given the dramatic reaction to Brexit – on world stock markets, on the foreign exchanges, in Scotland, across Europe – and with the enormity of the consequences of leaving the EU now plain, who will dare pull the trigger?

One consequence of this, as a below-the-line commenter argued on the Guardian website, is that Cameron has effectively snookered the Brexit camp: they may have won the referendum, but they cannot use the mandate they have been given because if they do so they will be seen to be knowingly condemning the UK to recession, breakup and years of pain.

This could mean, as lawyer and writer David Allen Green has suggested in a blogpost, that “the longer article 50 notification is put off, the greater the chance it will never be made ... As long as the notification is not sent, the UK remains part of the EU. And there is currently no reason or evidence to believe that, regardless of the referendum result, the notification will be sent at all.”

Is this feasible? Certainly, leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson and Matthew Elliott, who ran Vote Leave, have said very clearly they are in no hurry to push the button.

They argue it is far more sensible to hold informal talks with Brussels, and other member states, in order to arrive at the outline of a possible settlement before locking Britain into the strict two-year timeframe within which article 50 negotiations must be concluded (and if they are not, Britain risks having to leave the EU with no deal at all).

In Brussels and other EU capitals, the UK’s heel-dragging is already causing great frustration. European foreign ministers and EU leaders have lined up this weekend to impress on Britain the need for urgency. Brexit talks must begin “immediately”, they said, so as to avoid a sustained period of uncertainty and instability that, with Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, could do great damage to the already weakened bloc.


© Reuters 

Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, expects Cameron to formally announce Britain’s EU exit on Tuesday evening.But there seems to be no immediate legal means out of the stalemate. It is entirely up to the departing member state to trigger article 50, by issuing formal notification of intention to leave: no one, in Brussels, Berlin or Paris, can force it to. But equally, there is nothing in article 50 that obliges the EU to open talks – including the informal talks the Brexit leaders want – before formal notification has been made.

“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University. “Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”

The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, has said he expects Cameron to initiate the process on Tuesday evening, making the formal announcement that Britain intends to exit the EU at the summit dinner he is due to address before going home and leaving – for the first time – the other 27 member states to discuss Britain’s situation without him the following day.

The European council has confirmed that notification does not have to be in writing, but could be in the form of a formal statement to the summit – so Cameron had better be careful about what exactly he says.


© PA 10 highest votes for LeaveBut reports in German newspaper 

Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others, that an increasingly frustrated EU could, if push comes to shove, decide to consider the referendum result itself as “an official wish to leave” seem unreliable. “The notification of article 50 is a formal act and has to be done by the British government to the European council,” an EU official told Reuters.

“It has to be done in an unequivocal manner, with the explicit intent to trigger article 50. Negotiations to leave and on the future relationship can only begin after such a formal notification. If it is indeed the intention of the British government to leave the EU, it is therefore in its interest to notify as soon as possible.”

Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, has said “de facto ejection” is a possibility unless Britain gets a move on, but it is unclear on what grounds that could happen. Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty allows the EU to suspend a member if it deems it to be in breach of basic principles of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law. But that would be the nuclear option.

The situation could get quite nasty, quite quickly. Politically, the pressure on Cameron – and on his successor, whoever that may be – could be extreme. But legally, there does not appear to be any easy way out. If Britain so chooses, this could become a standoff that could drag on for years.

The EU will treat Britain like Greece

Matthew Holehouse The Telegraph

I arrived in Brussels as the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in early June, 2015. A fortnight later, Alexis Tsipras snubbed Brussels, and called a referendum on the third bailout that was designed to save the Eurozone from collapse.

The terms he was later given - €50bn of assets sold and a de facto control of economic policy surrendered - were so harsh they were later denounced as a "coup".

It taught me two things: that in the cause of its salvation the European Union can be profoundly flexible and exceptionally brutal, and that events can swiftly take a momentum that is hard to control.

Nothing of that experience gives me hope for the years that now await our country.

Britain is almost certainly out the European Union

As far as Brussels is concerned, Britain has left.

At home on Friday morning, Britons were dumbstruck, agog at the result, or chuffed at having taught Brussels a lesson.

We now see street protests to overturn the result, internet petitions, suggestions that the UK or Scottish Parliament could revoke it or somehow make it go away. Westminster is occupied by Labour coups and Tory successions. Few seem to believe we are going.

In Brussels, they have been ready to say goodbye for a long time. Britain had been half-way out the door for forty years. David Cameron had announced this referendum in January 2013. He had won an election on the back of it, and many expected him to lose it. He, and they, repeated many times that it was final and binding. Patience is exhausted.

On Friday there was grave sadness, but no panic. The timetable for the talks was announced days before the vote. Martin Schulz, the president of the Parliament, spoke at dawn; Donald Tusk, the president of the Council, delivered a statement at 07.40 GMT. The founding members' foreign ministers met on Saturday; sherpas for the 27 remaining states will meet today to sketch out the months ahead.

Leaders have demanded Article 50 is activated immediately, to create certainty. Realistically, Mr Cameron has until Christmas.

Scotland is ready to quit, and diplomats are quite open to welcoming them into the EU club.

The treaties say that all Britain’s rights and obligations must remain for two years once Article 50 is activated. But Lord Hill, Britain’s commissioner, quit yesterday, and Downing Street said it had no plans to replace him, and Jean-Claude Juncker told Ukip MEPs to pack their bags. Is the legal order fragmenting? What other clauses in the treaties - which protect British expats on the continent, among other things - will now be ignored without consequence?

Can it be halted?

The European Council has offered a narrow window, saying that Britain has not left until Article 50 is activated formally by the Prime Minister, “if it is indeed the intention of the British government.”

Mr Cameron has left it to his successor to activate it. Mrs Merkel is in no hurry. Senior EU sources say they can wait until Christmas, but prevarication would trash Britain's credit-worthiness.

There are two problems. Firstly, to not activate Article 50 would be a rejection of democracy on a scale that could only be described as a coup, and would poison British public life for generations.

Secondly, a wave of movements demanding referendums on the terms of membership, given a huge boost by Mr Cameron, is tearing across Europe – in France, Denmark, the Netherlands, Slovakia, Italy, Hungary. Marine Le Pen could well run rampant in French elections in the spring.

Leaders anticipated that Boris Johnson would pursue a 'vote leave for a better deal' strategy, and ruled it out from February, precisely to prevent this scenario.

Jean-Claude Juncker said on Friday: “The repercussions of the British referendum could quickly put a stop to such crass rabble-rousing, as it should soon become clear that the UK was better off inside the EU.” Britain simply has to go, on bad terms, pour encourager les autres.

Britain has very few friends

In European eyes, David Cameron has had a remarkably generous lot: already out the euro, ever closer union, justice and home affairs obligations and Schengen, he was offered an enhanced deal that confirmed the perks of membership with scant obligations.

Yet he attacked Brussels for years for domestic advantage. Mr Cameron campaigned hard against his appointment. Stories about Mr Juncker's alleged drinking and the war record of his father, a conscript in the Wehrmacht, emerged. Yet Juncker offered an olive branch by giving Jonathan Hill the financial services portfolio Mr Cameron craved, in order to preserve the City. He is profoundly angry.

In his brutal negotiation, Alexis Tsipras had a number of cards to play. There was the “solidarity” that EU states are obliged to show each other, the pity and guilt at the plight of the Greek people who had been punished through no fault of their own, and the €83 billion of German taxpayer cash in Greek banks that risked going up in smoke. Their referendum had been hasty, the question unclear, Mr Juncker said; Greeks made plain they wanted to remain Europeans.

No such goodwill exists for Britain, now an ex-member. Mr Johnson, the possible next prime minister, caused genuine and grave offence by likening the European project to the ambitions of Hitler. His declarations that Brexit will trigger events that unravel the entire project is, in effect, a declaration of war that must be met.

Recall how inflexible European leaders were during Mr Cameron’s attempted renegotiation, when he put a gun to their heads and threatened to leave unless they submitted to his demands. He has fired that gun in the air, and locked himself out the room. Britain’s only leverage is how much damage a messy Brexit would inflict on European economies.


Time is not on our side

Once Article 50 is activated, events will move frighteningly fast. It took Mr Cameron seven full months to secure his meagre renegotiation. He will have just two years to get an exit deal covering every facet of British life, and a trade deal that will do the least harm to the fragile, debt-laden economy.

The government is in disarray, the Labour party in meltdown, and the imminent exit of Scotland means it will be unclear with who or what, exactly, the EU is negotiating with. The French foreign minister yesterday implored Cameron to find a successor to take charge.

A ban issued from Downing Street on Brexit preparations – lest it boost the leave campaign – meant Britain’s most senior officials were permitted to “think” about a Brexit, but not allowed to write anything down.

Several take their guide from Flexcit, a book by a blogger Richard North that advocates a Norway-style deal as a half-way house under a “soft” exit. The crucial weeks ahead of polling day were spent in purdah, tending the garden.

The UK has next to no trade negotiators, and will need hundreds, to replicate the market access it currently has with 50 states around the world .

But the EU is ready. Talks in Jean-Claude Juncker’s in house think-tank began months ago. Foreign ministries have been preparing position papers. Lawyers are busy: Brussels has had 70 years of practice in writing treaties, signing trade talks, fixing accessions and bailouts, making and breaking nations.

We don't get to be Norway

The Leavers’ best hope – a Norway deal that means EEA status, retained rights for the City and immigration - is almost certainly off the table.

Britain has made clear it doesn’t want free movement – and so any deal on those grounds would be so impossibly fragile as to be a waste of time. Frankfurt and Paris would certainly like our banks. Mr Juncker is determined to undo Britain's attempt to create a multi-currency union, meaning clearing houses that trade in Euros and generate billions for the Exchequer will have to be domiciled in the Eurozone.

Leaders have made clear, before and after the vote, that Britain is not getting access to the single market.

“Out is out,” said Wolfgang Schaeuble, the German finance minister, some weeks ago.

“There will certainly be no cherry picking,” confirmed Mr Juncker, saying it will be a "clean" divorce.

More likely is a Canadian-style trade deal, that will set tariffs on imports and exports. That may be fine for German manufacturers. But Britain’s service economy will be cut up like an old car. British graduates are about to learn what it's like to use an Australian-style points system.

We do not control this process

Article 50 is designed so that it leaves any state that activates it is a supplicant.

The remaining EU states will negotiate between themselves and deal with the UK as one, just as they would for Albania or Turkey.

If a deal covering trade arrangements isn’t struck once the two-year period expires, Britain is simply released from the EU treaties and left on crippling WTO terms - something the Treasury terms a "severe shock scenario" and which it envisages would likely result in a cut in GDP of six per cent and increase unemployment by 800,000, not including the risks presented by emergency spending cuts, or the "tipping points" presented by the crystallisation of financial stability risks.

It means the government will effectively be forced to take any fait accompli presented at the last minute, or face ruin.

Even then, any further trade deal will require ratification by EU parliaments, meaning Belgian MPs, amongst others, can veto it.

The Leave campaign is fond of a quote attributed to Churchill: “Each time we have to choose between Europe and the open sea, we shall always choose the open sea.”

Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee, For those in peril on the sea.

There are liars and then there’s Boris Johnson and Michael Gove

Nick Cohen in The Guardian

The Brexit figureheads had no plan besides exploiting populist fears and dismissing experts who rubbished their thinking

‘Prospered by treating public life as a game’: Boris Johnson leaves his home in Oxfordshire on Saturday. Photograph: Peter Nicholls/Reuters




Where was the champagne at the Vote Leave headquarters? The happy tears and whoops of joy? If you believed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, the Brexit vote was a moment of national liberation, a day that Nigel Farage said our grateful children would celebrate with an annual bank holiday.

Johnson and Gove had every reason to celebrate. The referendum campaign showed the only arguments that matter now in England are on the right. With the Labour leadership absent without leave and the Liberal Democrats and Greens struggling to be heard, the debate was between David Cameron and George Osborne, defending the status quo, and the radical right, demanding its destruction. Johnson and Gove won a dizzying victory with the potential to change every aspect of national life, from workers’ rights to environmental protection.

Yet they gazed at the press with coffin-lid faces and wept over the prime minister they had destroyed. David Cameron was “brave and principled”, intoned Johnson. “A great prime minister”, muttered Gove. Like Goneril and Regan competing to offer false compliments to Lear, they covered the leader they had doomed with hypocritical praise. No one whoops at a funeral, especially not mourners who are glad to see the back of the deceased. But I saw something beyond hypocrisy in those frozen faces: the fear of journalists who have been found out.

The media do not damn themselves, so I am speaking out of turn when I say that if you think rule by professional politicians is bad wait until journalist politicians take over. Johnson and Gove are the worst journalist politicians you can imagine: pundits who have prospered by treating public life as a game. Here is how they play it. They grab media attention by blaring out a big, dramatic thought. An institution is failing? Close it. A public figure blunders? Sack him. They move from journalism to politics, but carry on as before. When presented with a bureaucratic EU that sends us too many immigrants, they say the answer is simple, as media answers must be. Leave. Now. Then all will be well.

Johnson and Gove carried with them a second feature of unscrupulous journalism: the contempt for practical questions. Never has a revolution in Britain’s position in the world been advocated with such carelessness. The Leave campaign has no plan. And that is not just because there was a shamefully under-explored division between the bulk of Brexit voters who wanted the strong welfare state and solid communities of their youth and the leaders of the campaign who wanted Britain to become an offshore tax haven. Vote Leave did not know how to resolve difficulties with Scotland, Ireland, the refugee camp at Calais, and a thousand other problems, and did not want to know either.

It responded to all who predicted the chaos now engulfing us like an unscrupulous pundit who knows that his living depends on shutting up the experts who gainsay him. For why put the pundit on air, why pay him a penny, if experts can show that everything he says is windy nonsense? The worst journalists, editors and broadcasters know their audiences want entertainment, not expertise. If you doubt me, ask when you last saw panellists on Question Time who knew what they were talking about.

Naturally, Michael Gove, former Times columnist, responded to the thousands of economists who warned he was taking an extraordinary risk with the sneer that will follow him to his grave: “People in this country have had enough of experts.” He’s being saying the same for years.

If sneers won’t work, the worst journalists lie. The Times fired Johnson for lying to its readers. Michael Howard fired Johnson for lying to him. When he’s cornered, Johnson accuses others of his own vices, as unscrupulous journalists always do. Those who question him are the true liars, he blusters, whose testimony cannot be trusted because, as he falsely said of the impeccably honest chairman of the UK Statistics Authority, they are “stooges”.

The Vote Leave campaign followed the tactics of the sleazy columnist to the letter. First, it came out with the big, bold solution: leave. Then it dismissed all who raised well-founded worries with “the country is sick of experts”. Then, like Johnson the journalist, it lied.

I am not going to be over-dainty about mendacity. Politicians, including Remain politicians lie, as do the rest of us. But not since Suez has the nation’s fate been decided by politicians who knowingly made a straight, shameless, incontrovertible lie the first plank of their campaign. Vote Leave assured the electorate it would reclaim a supposed £350m Brussels takes from us each week. They knew it was a lie. Between them, they promised to spend £111bn on the NHS, cuts to VAT and council tax, higher pensions, a better transport system and replacements for the EU subsidies to the arts, science, farmers and deprived regions. When boring experts said that, far from being rich, we would face a £40bn hole in our public finances, Vote Leave knew how to fight back. In Johnsonian fashion, it said that the truth tellers were corrupt liars in Brussels’ pocket.

Now they have won and what Kipling said of the demagogues of his age applies to Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage.


I could not dig; I dared not rob:
Therefore I lied to please the mob.
Now all my lies are proved untrue
And I must face the men I slew.
What tale shall serve me here among
Mine angry and defrauded young?


The real division in Britain is not between London and the north, Scotland and Wales or the old and young, but between Johnson, Gove and Farage and the voters they defrauded. What tale will serve them now? On Thursday, they won by promising cuts in immigration. On Friday, Johnson and the Eurosceptic ideologue Dan Hannan said that in all probability the number of foreigners coming here won’t fall. On Thursday, they promised the economy would boom. By Friday, the pound was at a 30-year low and Daily Mail readers holidaying abroad were learning not to believe what they read in the papers. On Thursday, they promised £350m extra a week for the NHS. On Friday, it turns out there are “no guarantees”.

If we could only find a halfway competent opposition, the very populist forces they have exploited and misled so grievously would turn on them. The fear in their eyes shows that they know it.