Time to Emigrate: Pre- and Post-Referendum Britain

By George Walden

Includes a foreword on Boris Johnson and Jeremy CorbynIn these wry fictional letters from a father to a daughter and a son, George Walden paints a pithy and evocative portrait of pre- and post-Brexit Britain and how we got to where we are now.For some time Brits have been leaving the UK in search of sunnier, less crowded lives abroad, with better prospects for themselves and their children. Is it wise to stay or better to emigrate?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gibson Square
• Release date: Aug 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9781783341214

George Walden

A diplomat involved in negotiations with Brussels, as well as with Russia and China, then as an MP, Minister for Higher Education, and occasional speech-writer for Margaret Thatcher, George Walden’s international and political careers make him uniquely placed to confront questions about Britain’s future. He has three children, and is currently a journalist and novelist (under the pen name Joseph Clyde). He lives in South West London.

Book preview

George Walden

Time to Emigrate?

http://www.gibsonsquare.com

Printed ISBN: 9781783341221

Ebook ISBN: 9781783341214

E-book production made by Booqla

Published by Gibson Square

Copyright © 2019 by Gibson Square

Foreword - Johnson, Corbyn, Farage

Foreseeing the rise of fascism, in 1930 the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset warned in The Revolt of the Masses of a rising demand for action and ‘an end to discussion’. The baying for a no-deal Brexit on the Faragista right has taken on a fascistic flavour, while debate on how we became trapped in our descending spiral has closed.

The Tories and Nigel Farage will bear historical responsibility, but that is far from the whole story. Brexit, a breakdown of the national psyche, is a collective enterprise, and the sooner we talk honestly about its origins and likely results the better the chances of an eventual recovery.

In two weeks the man least suited (along with the leader of the opposition) to be prime minister will settle with his suite of cronies into N0 10. How did it come to this? The accepted narrative, replete with dubious assumptions and squeamish equivocation, is wrong on several counts.

The guardians of the Brexit cult see Margaret Thatcher as their guiding spirit, yet though she encouraged Euroscepticism she is unlikely to have been a Brexiteer. Nor was it David Cameron who was ultimately responsible for the referendum; it was Tony Blair, with the waves of mass immigration he triggered after 1997, and from Europe in 2004. When listening to his passionate and persuasive speeches today, no one, neither Remainers nor Brexiteers, reminds him of a point too delicate to mention: that if the post-1997 inflow of non-Europeans had not happened the referendum result might well have been inverted.

Brexit backers voted not so much on the EU itself, or on austerity — though both played their part — as in protest at migration overall, chiefly from beyond the EU, which was larger, harder to assimilate and more unpopular. That is why Farage and his Brexit Party continue to poll well today. In a typically casual, contradictory lie, Boris Johnson recently hailed the huge success of immigration — it has certainly succeeded in helping him into No 10 — while lamenting the lack of integration.

There is another area where discussion is mute. As a result of Brexit, non-EU immigrants are outnumbering Europeans still further (a February Office for National Statistics report showed non-EU net migration at the highest level since 2004). If Brexiteers are happy with this they should say so — as Jacob Rees-Mogg did when he said that preference on immigration should go to the Commonwealth rather than Europeans, ‘with whom we have no connection’. A Catholic, like Rees-Mogg, and no connection with Italy, France and Poland?

Is that what the electorate wanted? I doubt if Rees-Mogg will be explaining his views to Tommy Robinson’s boys in Wolverhampton or Stoke-on-Trent any time soon. As post-Brexit reality dawns on a poorer country faced with a growing burden on public services, extremists — not just Farage but beyond — will find ways to exploit the backlash.

These are not thoughts decent people want to catch themselves thinking, yet they cannot be indefinitely repressed. When a pop-up political party led by a friend and admirer of Donald Trump and apologist for Putin, who appears on both Fox News and Russia Today, triumphs in the European elections, we should reserve the right to make judgements about levels of public knowledge and understanding, as well as their frustrations.

To be clear: I favour immigration, at moderate levels over time. If I were a Pakistani, Bangladeshi or Iraqi I might well seek to come to Britain; if I were a low-paid worker on a council house list in a deprived northern town, I might vote Brexit to keep them out; and if I had enjoyed an expensive education, and my partner and I had jobs in the City dependent on cheap immigrant labour, we would take care to ensure that our liberal, anti-Brexit sentiments were known to all.

***

The conservative mind is not just closed — with no answers on Europe except empty rhetoric — it has ceased to function. That theTimes has endorsed Boris Johnson, a man who is a proven, remorse-free liar — as well as a feckless husband and father — as national leader, in the hope he will magic a Brexit through, is a measure of the desperation that has gripped the country. Responsibility goes wider, but it is Tories who for decades have enticed the nation along the crooked path to the precipice where we stand today.

Historically, Thatcher gave things a shove — though I don’t see her as a Johnson backer. An opponent of referendums (favoured by Napoleon and the Nazis), she is unlikely to have held one. As Peter Carrington’s principal private secretary, I witnessed many an anti-Brussels outburst in private — some justified, such as her fears of an ever-expanding Brussels — but never once did she allude to the prospect of leaving the European Union.

Thatcher would also have objected to the weakening of European security at a time when the Russian shadow is in some ways more menacing than before. Brexit dogma — that the EU was a product of the Cold War, and therefore irrelevant today — was rendered fatuous by the rise of Putin. The easiest way to cut short undesired confrontations with Brexit cultists is to say: ‘Well, you have Trump and Putin on your side, so what could go wrong?’

For Thatcher there was something more personal: her enjoyment of being a top dog at European Council meetings. I recall the likes of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing and Helmut Schmidt listening respectfully to her foreign policy analyses, notably on East-West issues. From Thatcher the queen bee of EU summits to the absence of Theresa May from the first EU meeting on policy towards China in March is a giant step towards isolation — though the idea of Johnson going it alone with Beijing has its tragicomic side.

So while the incubation of the Europhobic germ under Thatcher is a fact (I recall my MP colleagues’ laughter at the very words ‘the French’, and Johnson reportedly calling them ‘turds’ as foreign secretary will have had them laughing again), it was Blair who was to give the ultra-nationalists wings.

Another rarely discussed subject is the political sociology of Brexit. Again, perceptions are far from the facts. A coterie of upper caste Tories are the driving force, yet a closer look at both Conservative and Labour leading figures, their backgrounds and motives, reveals strange parallels. Resigning as chair of the government’s Social Mobility Commission, the estimable former Labour minister Alan Milburn wrote: ‘[The government] is understandably focused on Brexit and does not seem to have the necessary bandwidth to ensure that the rhetoric of healing social division is matched with the reality.’

There is scant evidence of mobility, on right and left. The prominence of Etonians — Cameron, Rees-Mogg, Johnson, Kwasi Kwarteng, Rory Stewart et al — contrasts with the middle-class, aspirational ethos of the Thatcher years. Cameron’s easy resort to a referendum reflected his personality: until now everything had gone smoothly in his public life, so why not again? Ignorant of the fears of ordinary folk that their country was being denatured, he clearly believed the earlier, optimistic polls.

You didn’t have to be clairvoyant to have had doubts. After touring the North and Midlands, I wrote Time To Emigrate?, predicting an eventual crisis over migration. Later I advised City firms that the referendum outcome would be 51 per cent in favour.

The interaction between Rees-Mogg, Johnson and their kind in today’s party with pantomime figures such as Mark Francois — a natural for Farage’s party who would never have passed a Tory selection board in the Thatcher years — is suggestive less of democratisation than feudal regression. In such fag-like relationships the court tumblers sock it to the media on behalf of their betters, and BBC Newsnight and the rest fall for it.

Yet for all his airs and graces, and as his much-derided book on the Victorian era reminds us, Rees-Mogg is essentially an intellectual poseur, while Johnson, incapable of sustained reflection, has a mind of no fixed abode except that of self-promotion. Farage, an estate agent manqué, is another private schoolboy gone rogue. Michael Gove is a commoner, and smarter, though another clever/silly former columnist who can run you up an idea in a twinkling and defend the indefensible with an Oxbridge Union debater’s brio. Such fun — but he too lacks the bottom of common sense the Tory party is supposedly about.

For a clearer view of the social origins of our predicament we should look at both parties, especially the forces in Labour driving the country towards a damaging Brexit, in parallel to their Tory opposites. Corbyn himself we can leave aside. His untutored mind is frozen in Marxist antiquity, and as we are seeing in the anti-Semitic crisis, updating his thinking is hard. An old-fashioned Bennite Brexiteer in a largely Remainer party, politically he is trussed like a spatchcocked chicken.

The fact that he has got away with his devious dualism for so long is due to his Wykehamist mentor, Seumas Milne, a manic Brexiteer and Stalin apologist who lamented the demise of the GDR. Alongside him are Andrew Murray — rich, privately educated and until recently a full-blown communist — and James Schneider, a fellow Wykehamist with Milne.

For the Tories the Brexit Wunderkind was Dominic Cummings, another public schoolboy variously described as an eccentric genius and (by Cameron) as a ‘career psychopath’. His ‘brilliant’ slogan, ‘Take back control’, was a piece of cynical top-down speculation on public ignorance; most immigration was under UK control already. Like Milne, Cummings has a soft spot for totalitarian revolutionaries, such as Lenin, and it is here that the weird social symmetry on Europe between left and right comes into play.

I have worked with remarkable public school men and women, though I confess to a prejudice. Having spent much of my pre-political career in the Cold War working on communist China and Russia and seen much suffering and many broken lives, I am wary of expensively educated upper-class afficionados of figures such as Stalin, Lenin and Mao. At school Milne was a Maoist and, like his boss, never moved on: hence Corbyn’s suggestion in an interview with Andrew Marr that the Great Leap Forward, in which up to 45 million died, was an economic success. (In Cultural Revolutionary China, where I was a diplomat from 1966-69, a mere two million were killed.)

Britain’s absence of much in the way of an elite of merit spares Cummings, Milne, Rees-Mogg, Johnson et al too much competition. Milne’s aim is to create a revolutionary situation then a general election that would sweep Corbyn to power. Chem khuzhe, tem luchshe — the worse the better — was his hero’s slogan, and to hell with the collateral damage. In Lenin’s case this was a Russian Civil War (see Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’sLenin in Zurich), in Milne’s an economy trashed by Tories, via a no-deal Brexit if possible.

For Cummings the Brexit revolution was to lead to a global Britain; for Milne, to a modernised version of Stalin’s socialism in one country. Today grown-up Labour politicians such as Tom Watson, Hilary Benn and Keir Starmer are getting in his way, though given Tory self-destructiveness Milne’s Leninist strategy was not so crazy.

From the playing fields of Eton to the impending shipwreck of Brexit Britain, the UK’s independent school sector has perverse reasons to be proud of its political potency. As politicians on all sides drone on about the sacred will of the people, the drivers of our Brexit suicide lorries on both sides of the House represent a privileged elite who stand to suffer least if national impoverishment follows.

Contortions over Europe can corrupt intellectual life itself. A coterie of pro-Brexit academics, lawyers etc cite the 52 per cent in their cause, though in many cases their pre-referendum pronouncements reveal scant sympathy with the motives of the Brexit-voting masses. This is intellectual mendacity on many levels: they know that practical issues — housing, the NHS, wage rates, drastic cultural change in vulnerable places — drove people to vote ‘out’. Yet anti-EU academics flinch from association with such rough political trade. Instead, like Johnson, they invest Brexit voters with higher motives — reclaiming sovereignty, national independence and the rest.

It’s depressing to find intellectuals playing a part in Brexit’s bullshit Britain. Presumably they are now edging into line behind Johnson, accepting his boasts that being mayor of London entitles him to run the country. More bullshit. In his first election as mayor, around 80 per cent of London voters did not vote for him, and between the London Assembly and parliament there can be no comparison.

Film of the assembly proceedings shows nondescript members elected on low turnouts putting questions to which Johnson replied in a playful or offhand manner. Anything less like a House of Commons grilling, where evasive quips are no substitute for answers, is impossible to imagine.

Nor does the London mayor have serious responsibility for money-raising; that tiresomely contentious function is dealt with automatically through a levy on council tax or national subsidy. Then there is the media. As mayor Johnson faced few pressures, and when he was doing the jollies he knew that his journalistic friends would write them up in the Evening Standard.

In No 10 his reliance on a coterie of adoring chums and touchiness about criticism will guarantee a staff of slavish-minded apparatchiks. Already we can see his spokesperson telling us with a laconic shrug that Boris is just being Boris. Which is, of course, the problem.

Mindful of their jobs, how many journalists in the right-wing press will have the courage to sigh and say, as sensible parents do, that his behaviour is neither clever nor funny?

Whatever happens, his backers will herald a brand new, statesmanlike Johnson; a political magician whose foibles should be forgiven. But at 55 few of us change, nor can evolution occur in the mind of a man with no convictions. He will be the last to see that, just as blind devotion to market forces can destroy conservative traditions, communities and institutions, so a hardline Brexit puts the Union at risk.

Already, long-standing political structures are being shattered, yet so impervious are many Tories that they are ready to face the end of the United Kingdom itself and endure serious economic damage to see Brexit through. In a similar way traditional left-wing voters are swearing allegiance to a malign far-right demagogue after years with solid Labour leaders. Anti-Brussels sentiment alone does not explain this wholesale junking of beliefs on right and left: what do are the racial and cultural insecurities in our tight little island that Farage plays on like a fiddle. Here indeed is ‘a revolt of the masses’.

In the average English man or woman there is a yen to stop the music and go back to where we were, a hazy historical memory of times when we enjoyed minimal global competition and splendid isolation, and could smile down on the world from our island fastness. For those who fall for it, Johnson’s appeal relies on two things: patriotic nostalgia and the illusion of effortless ascendancy. Whether rural retirees or workers under international pressures, his supporters don’t want to live in the world as it is, with its chaotic globalism, market ruthlessness, shifting populations and emergent nations. They want to be somewhere else, preferably the past.

Closed Tory minds drift backwards, and Johnson’s showmanship has an old-time, end-of-the-pier feel, with his pseudo-aristocratic persona, replete with eccentricities and Wooster impersonations, while straight-man Hunt (an alumnus of Charterhouse) tries to outdo him by promising a return to the tormenting of foxes.

To deal with all this turning back, Johnson has no strategy or social imagination. Instead there is an irrepressible light-mindedness and patrician impatience with detail, best left to the little folk. As his involuntary, self-regarding smirk suggests, he can never be a serious person, and the country he will lead will not be taken seriously either. Playing with words is different from playing with jobs, incomes, welfare or lives. As with Trump in the White House, Johnson in No 10 will be egocentricity enthroned. It will be no consolation to know that our problems are transatlantic, and that the Anglo-American mind is being barred and shuttered too.

The truth is that our most prominent political figures — Johnson, Corbyn, Farage — are not politicians. They are not just men without qualities in the Musil sense, they are men of no substance. Cynical and disillusioned voters may shrug off the prospect of such shrunken specimens taking over, yet apprehension is growing.

In what Johnson describes as ‘the best country in the world’ (Trump would have added ‘ever’) the smell of fear is encroaching: parliamentarians’ fears of losing seats to Farage or being deselected for their moderation. Fear of trouble on the streets if we stay in Europe, and of economic collapse — houses included — if we crash out. Fear of social violence and ethnic confrontation. And fear of discussing things I have alluded to here. Even if Johnson stands on his head, pushes through a May-type deal with bells attached and defeats Corbyn, there can be no good Brexit. All we shall be left with is the Johnsonian smirk.

Everything is in the name. Where the Conservative Party was once led by Margaret Hilda, now the Prime Minister is Alexander Boris de Pfeffel - from the soundly English to the almost comically cosmopolitan. From somebody home-grown with nothing to prove, to someone wilfully quirky and ultra-patriotic; from a Prime Minister you took on trust, to somebody yet to earn the country's respect.

I worked alongside Thatcher, first as principal private secretary to her Foreign Secretary Lord Carrington, then as a Minister and occasional speech-writer. Would she have cheered the new Prime Minister's knockabout in the House of Commons? Like me she would have warmed to Johnson when he laid into Corbyn, a phoney messiah and a scheming simpleton who gets away with far too much.

Yet the deeper question is this: who is the bigger patriot? The earnest, conscientious lower-middle-class grammar-school girl, whose roots were deep in her country and who restored our prestige abroad? Or a showman novice, gesticulating at times like a South American general when he delivers his nationalistic bombast, grinning as if it were all a school play? For some, it was exhilarating; for others as uplifting as a pound-shop brassiere.

There is no doubting Johnson's oratorical potential and, by God, we shall need it when the time comes. Meanwhile, his excesses have helped bring sterling to its knees and our country into disrepute. Currently, our only international backers are Messrs Trump and Putin - not something Mrs Thatcher would have applauded. We should remember, too, the make-up of the Cabinet in her time, which featured serious names like Keith Joseph, Geoffrey Howe, Norman Tebbit, Peter Carrington and Willie Whitelaw. In contrast, Johnson has surrounded himself with over-promoted figures such as Priti Patel and Gavin Williamson. I fear that a more Blair-style sofa government is on the way.

Worse, while Thatcher relished combat with colleagues and high-grade officials, today the No 10 machine will be dominated not by professionals but an intellectual whizzkid, Dominic Cummings. Was 'Take Back Control' a masterly referendum slogan — or a lie?

A lie, because most of the mass immigration that troubled a fundamentally non-racist country was non-European and under our control already. With Cummings in No 10, and Seumas Milne the key man in Corbyn's office, we now have perfect symmetry. The nerve centres of both Left and Right are controlled by a pair of precocious private schoolboys who venerate revolutionary heroes like Mao and Lenin, and whose anarchic instincts could combine to push the country over a cliff. Why? Because for different reasons these ideologues yearn to 'smash the system'. The Germans have an ugly word for this: zerstörungslustig - the joys of destruction. The danger is that the indolence and indecision of Johnson (try saying that of Thatcher) could give unelected advisers a field day. With experts now derided, are we to listen to the untested theories of 'creative destroyers' instead?

As a Cold War diplomat in Russia and China over many years, I saw a lot of that, and the results weren't pretty. Boris is right that we all need cheering up, but he is wrong to dismiss nearly half the population as gloomsters when we are up the creek without a paddle and the water is up to his neck. He would be a fool not to be afraid, and believe me he is.

Britain has painted itself into a corner and we need Johnson to find a way out. I agree with the Brexit-ultras that the present May deal is unattractive, though ultimately they are to blame for the mess. There must be concessions from Europe matched with plausibly disguised concessions from us. As the arch-realist Thatcher would have said: ‘There is no alternative.’ Damage limitation is the name of the game. But remember, too, the opportunities that will come when some sort of agreement is reached. If Johnson uses his clever men constructively and engineers an EU deal, the relief across the country and the markets will be immense. That would be the moment for him to pounce on the pestilential Corbyn in an election, distributing the savings earned by Philip Hammond as he goes. Margaret Hilda would most certainly have applauded that.

The ship of English fools, captained by an egomaniacal amateur, will sail, with Seumas Milne cheering incognito on the quayside. There is much talk of Johnson’s force of character, though it depends what you mean. I know him, and can confirm what canny observers have begun saying: that as he gets closer to No 10, this man, too, is afraid. Not for his country, of course, but for himself.

(Exit from Brexit?) Dear Emma,

‘Families torn apart by Brexit.’ Everywhere you hear it, yet in our case it seems to have had the opposite effect. You being a human rights lawyer with politics to match, and me, a lapsed Conservative MP, father and daughter have had their battles over the years, but Brexit has brought us together.

During the campaign we had a stand-off. You suspected that I was a clandestine Brexiteer, because some years back I’d warned about the consequences of mass immigration. It was a time when you were beginning to take on asylum cases, and were probably embarrassed at the idea your MP dad putting his head above the parapet when everyone except right-wingers were keeping theirs firmly down.

The ice broke, you remember, when I rang to console you the day after the referendum result. After I unleashed a string of curses, you said:

‘So you didn’t vote Brexit?’

At first I thought you were joking, and I can’t remember my reply. Something along the lines of ‘Vote for a Pantaloon? Of course I was a Remainer! That was the whole point of what I was saying about immigration! To warn that if we didn’t listen to decent Brits on the rough side of it, then God help us. Well, we didn’t, and He hasn’t.’

You had the grace to say you must have got the wrong idea of what I was saying. Not surprising, since such discussions as we had at the time on the subject had a parliamentary flavour, with more sound than significance and more heat than light.

Never mind, we’ve both come out on the losing side, and our defeat has brought us closer. It isn’t often that politics are a healing agent. I can’t tell you how relieved I am that our spat is over, and how nice it is to be absolved by your lawyer daughter from a racism charge.

I came round to your office after work to take you for a drink. Champagne for you, an Old Fashioned for me. A couple, in fact, to celebrate a father/daughter reconciliation and drown our Brexit sorrows. But I took you to the wrong place: a poncy hotel bar full of loud, well-heeled old parties, who turned out to be a bunch of cavorting Brexiteers, while we sat in our corner echoing each other’s sighs and lamentations.

In fact it was troubling how much we agreed. We’d independently decided that the defeat was a turning point for the country, in the wrong direction, and that life was not going to be like it was before. Not in the short term, maybe never.

Over-dramatic? Not when your daughter casually informs you that she and her husband were thinking about emigration. For us it was a double shock. It’s beginning to look as though we lose a child to foreign parts with every setback the country faces: first the recession, when your brother went, now Brexit, and you contemplating going as well. It was before we came to France on holiday that you told us, and with anyone else we might have suspected that it was an over-hasty reaction, but not you, with your lawyer’s cool.

When you came round and we discussed it over dinner we could see you were serious. By then you knew there could be less work coming your way (cutbacks in legal aid), and if things turned sour Robert’s work could also be affected. When Guy was thinking about going, I wrote to him about ‘the flimsiness and precariousness’ of the economy, and it’s even less predictable now.

We know you both well enough to understand that with you it’s a ‘state of the nation’ issue, as well as jobs and cash. Which worried us all the more. We took your news with us to the South of France, and it’s pointless to pretend it hasn’t troubled our holiday. It’s eerie to find myself writing to you about it from our French friend’s house – the same place I wrote my letters to Guy. I wasn’t so much trying to dissuade him – parental pressure tends to backfire – as to set out the pros and cons, because ultimately it’s a personal thing.

He went anyway, to Canada, and has never regretted it. As well as skipping the worst of the recession (less severe there than here) he missed the referendum’s nationalistic hogwash, and the Brexit backwash that’s got us clinging to our canoes while we shoot the financial rapids, grinning with inane optimism as we go. Your brother was a big loss to us, but at least it’s a comfort that, as you know from your visits, he’s secure and happy.

After the vote he sent an email quoting back at me a remark I’d made in one of my letters about Arthur Koestler saying that Britain was a cross between a lion and an ostrich: a country with its head deeply buried, though capable of rising to a challenge. ‘If ever you hear the sound of an ostrich wrenching its head from the sand and of a lion roaring,’ I wrote, ‘you could always come back.’

Post-referendum, his response was, ‘The ostrich’s head has just gone deeper, and your blond-maned lion roaring away about Brexit making Britain greater than ever has a mangy look about him.’

*

Obviously I’m bound to say it, but what I wrote to your brother stands up pretty well today, notably about immigration. I warned him that ‘over-abrupt changes could provoke an extreme response,’ and together with austerity, by Jesus it has.

I also promised that I would never again write or speak about it, and till now I haven’t. Given the level of public discussion, with its evasions, taboos and hypocrisies, simply to be involved gives you a shoddy feeling. But your thoughts of leaving the country have forced my hand. It’s an ignoble sentiment, I admit, but an irresistible one, so if you detect a whiff of ‘I told you so’ in some of what follows, so be it.

You may not agree, but I suspect that our heads are still in the sand about why people voted the way they did, particularly in the North and Midlands. Partly it was economic: blind, anti-austerity rage, which after the tour your mother and I made of the regionI can understand. And socially? We are asked to believe that the vote was a backlash against Polish plumbers, Bulgarian fruit-pickers and the like, because ethnic etiquette means that no-one can admit that a lot of it was about fear and resentment of minorities from outside Europe, and far more difficult to assimilate.

Neither of us can prove our point: who knows what’s in the mind of the average voter when they’re alone in the booth, and the politically correct factor is left at the polling station door? Analysts are not going to enlighten us. Nobody’s going to tell a pollster that they voted ‘leave’ because Muslims give them the heebie-jeebies, and make them feel insecure. But the increased hate attacks against them after Brexit, of which you’ve seen examples in your work, point that way, don’t they?

A lot of voters must have bought the UKIP line about the EU being behind Muslim immigration, and our less clued-up fellow citizens probably believed that a ‘leave’ vote would force them out. A slur on the working classes? Remember that Google recorded large numbers of Brits googling ‘What is the EU?’ in the hours after the referendum. How dumb is that? Answer – as dumb as their social betters for holding the bloody thing in the first place.