Founder of Remain pressure group backed by Soros attacks ‘guerrilla warfare’ tactics
‘Take back control’ could have been the leitmotif of any one of the billionaire’s campaigns in the Cold War
THE founder of a Remain-supporting campaign group that is seeking to overturn Brexit has accused the organisation of being “undemocratic” and said it must disclose its financial backers.
Gina Miller, who led the court case that determined the Government could not implement Brexit without authority from Parliament, said the public had a “right to know” who was backing Best for Britain as she criticised its tactics.
Her intervention came after The Daily Telegraph disclosed that George Soros, the billionaire known as “the man who broke the Bank of England”, was backing the campaign.
The group is trying to recruit donors to help undermine Theresa May. It plans to target MPS and convince them to vote against the final Brexit deal and trigger a second referendum or even another general election. Ms Miller said: “When I read the coverage I pulled back and thought, this is not where I think this should be going. It was a good decision to part ways.
“It [Best for Britain] is undemocratic. One of the objectives cannot be to bring down a government, not without an election or a referendum.
“This idea of … guerrilla warfare – I don’t agree with any of that. I’m a transparency campaigner. It doesn’t matter which side of the argument you are on. If you are going to have funders getting involved in something that could determine Britain’s future then the public has a right to know who is backing it. This is about the future of our country.”
A leaked memo from a meeting of the group says that the campaign, which begins by the end of this month, must “wake the country up and assert that Brexit is not a done deal”. It is planning a national advertising campaign alongside “guerrilla marketing tactics”.
Lord Malloch-brown, a former Labour minister and chairman of the group, said a dinner event with Tory donors had raised more than £400,000.
He said he was “coming to rescue” the Tories. “We are talking about a defeat [for the Conservative Party] of historic proportions. This argument that somehow what we’re trying to do is antitory… I’m the cavalry. I’m coming to rescue the Tories from their own mistake.
“We are serious about trying to reverse the decision.”
Patrick Gascard, president of Mr Soros’ Open Society Foundations, said: “Human rights, hard-won civil and labour rights, safeguards on key issues such as clean air or food standards are at stake for British citizens. It is essential they are informed and empowered to make decisions about the future relationship between the UK and the EU.”
Mr Soros’s foundation last night said it had committed a further £300,000 to other pro-european organisations.
The group said it reported “all regulated campaign expenditure as and when required by electoral law”.
It’s hard not to feel a bit sorry for George Soros. He has given away most of his fortune and yet he’s still cast as the villain. In Britain, he’ll always be the financier who “broke” the Bank of England just because he (shrewdly) bet against the pound on Black Wednesday. Now he’s back, writing large cheques for the not-wildly-popular cause of a second referendum on Brexit. Anyone joining the Brexit wars can expect flak; an American billionaire can expect an Exocet. Mr Soros likes argument, and he’ll find no end of that. But he also likes democracy, which is why his latest investment is so puzzling.
He has chosen Best for Britain, a campaign group which could have been put together by a committee of sadistic Brexiteers wishing to caricature their opponents as out-oftouch elitists. The chairman is Lord Malloch-brown who, like many vocal anti-brexit politicians, has never been elected.
The sum of the Soros donation – £400,000 – is unlikely to move the dial of British public opinion. The Remain side spent vastly more money in the campaign if you include government spin, but its relentless negativity sent people who had intended to vote Remain (myself included) scurrying to the other side. Best for Britain’s activities will, most likely, further harden support for Brexit.
Why, then, would an investor as shrewd as Mr Soros waste his money? His interest in Britain is natural enough. He arrived here as a teenager, escaping Communist-run Hungary, and became a penniless waiter in Mayfair, living on leftover profiteroles. His break came when he won a place at the London School of Economics, which was then home to two unfashionable free-market thinkers: Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper. He became friends with the latter, and learnt to go against the grain of conventional wisdom. He applied this skill to finance, with sensational effect, in the City and then in Wall Street.
To his immense credit, he wanted to give back at an early stage – hence the politics. He put his own luck down to the democracies he lived in, mindful that their freedoms had to be defended both during and after the war. Margaret Thatcher once slapped down a Hayek book on the table and told her frontbench “this is what we believe”. Soros too wanted to turn argument into action: he took Popper’s book, The Open Society, as the name for his pro-democracy foundation. And put its principles to work, helping those fighting for democracy on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
So yes, Soros has been interfering in politics for decades. But for quite a clear purpose: to help as many people as possible enjoy the liberty he experienced in the West. There’s no point sending aid to Africa if the cash is spent under a corrupt regime. The purest form of philanthropy, he thought, lay in promoting democracy from Afghanistan to Zagreb. Last year he donated $18billion of his fortune to his Open Society Foundation. It has more cash than almost any other charity on earth. But the problem is that it doesn’t, nowadays, have a very clear mission.
This explains his muddle over Brexit. Soros has been an avid supporter of the EU since its inception, seeing it as the surest way of helping post-soviet countries. This made perfect sense after the Berlin Wall came down, even more so when the eastern bloc countries joined the EU at the turn of the century.
But as the EU steadily mutated, things changed. Brussels began to act as a would-be continental government, issuing diktats and being unresponsive to the changing popular concerns. Its inability to respond to the twin challenges of the past decade – the financial crash and mass immigration – created a crisis, and the conditions for a populist backlash.
Soros did his bit fighting populists, for which he was denounced as a traitor by opponents in his native Hungary – where prime minister Viktor Orban has relished portraying him as the wealthy outsider set to corrupt society. Anti-semitic attack lines have been shamelessly deployed, as politicians in Budapest mutter about a “Christian duty” to oppose him.
The tone of the attacks against him have shocked much of Europe, and will have left him feeling at war. It’s possible he looked at Brexit and imagined that the same kind of forces may be at play. And here, perhaps, he might have lost sight of the fundamental question.
Which is: in the Brexit debate, which side to back? Karl Popper himself lived long enough to offer some clues. Shortly before his death in 1994, he said it was tragic how the principles that he and Hayek had stood for during the Cold War seemed to be forgotten afterwards. In Brussels, he said, there was a “bureaucracy without a clear responsibility to any democratic control”. In Strasbourg, a parliament “without any competence to control the all-powerful bureaucracy”.
Which was precisely the message of Vote Leave throughout the referendum campaign: that Brexit is about protecting the institutions of democracy – government, parliament, courts – and bringing them closer to the people. No campaign quotes tracts of philosophy, but the slogan “take back control” could have been the leitmotif of any one of the Soros campaigns which worked to such effect during the Cold War. And afterwards, where his support helped Mikheil Saakashvili become president of Georgia and many others to fight against Moscow’s influence.
As Saakashvili once put it, Soros was at his best in a clear battle between democracy and authoritarianism, “but when he starts to play politics, he’s not that good”.
As we are seeing now. “Many people think the elites have stolen their democracy,” Soros wrote a year ago. Quite so, yet he has now ended up bankrolling a campaign to reverse the biggest vote cast in the history of British democracy.
Soros is a great advocate of doing research before spending money, but failed to do enough before donating that £400,000 to Best for Britain. If he is bored and seeks a political fight, he will not be disappointed. But if he is genuinely committed to democracy and bringing politics closer to the people, then he has just backed the wrong side.