Simon Heffer
Last week I mused that we were about to have the chance for a moment of greatness. Now we have seized it. It was a supreme, and magnificent, exercise in democracy by a people determined to follow their own instincts, and to distrust elites who had separated themselves from the general public. We still have our Roundheads and Cavaliers after all. To watch, in the early hours of Friday morning, a procession of supposedly democratic politicians coming on television to express horror at the results of democracy says a great deal about what is wrong with our political class, and explains why such savage punishment was meted out to them.
Never mind the Edenesque resignation of the Prime Minister – which some of us consider the least he could do – the dogs are now pursuing Jeremy Corbyn. Tim Farron, who apparently leads the Liberal Democrats, emerged for what seemed the first time in the campaign to castigate the British people immediately after the defeat. At least he had the guts to express his grief and humiliation in public; one waited in vain for the Heseltines, the Majors, the Pattens, the Blairs, the Browns and various other Cavaliers who have supposedly known what is best for us, and have told us so forcefully, to explain themselves. At least we were spared Eddie Izzard and “Sir” Bob Geldof.
Europe must accept the reality I also outlined here last week: that all empires fail. Our exit negotiations – arranging for us to continue to buy BMWs, Parma ham and Pol Roger – should reorientate our European neighbours towards the new bilateral relationships we shall now enjoy with them, which will prosper despite the scaremongering of Remain.
The big concern, though, is trying to unify the country, and trying to reunify two big political parties. When I and others wrote before the referendum of the alienation felt by tens of millions in Britain, we were marginalised, discounted and disdained. I sense now, after the vote, that the alcoholic has begun to recognise he has a drink problem – the first step in the healing process.
One politician at least recognised the requirements of true democracy, and reconnected with the parts of the British public the political process had ceased to reach: Nigel Farage. It was only right and just that so much of the media have given Mr Farage the credit for the restoration of British democracy. There would have been no referendum without him. The official Vote Leave campaign, in spite of which the Outers won the referendum, were largely hopeless at connecting with the masses of disaffected working-class people in the North and Midlands that Mr Farage and Ukip have been listening to and cultivating for the past three or four years. Now we are a democracy again, and we believe so fervently in the concept, Mr Farage should be part of the team that negotiates our exit.
But why were such people – who for the third time in 100 years have saved our nation – alienated in the first place? They were Labour’s natural constituency – but Labour was so obsessed with using immigration, as was famously said in the Blair years, to “rub the noses” of the white middle class in diversity, that it forgot why it was invented.
In obsessing about concepts with virtually no relevance to working-class people – diversity, minority rights, gender issues, the creation of “vibrant” communities – they ignored people with poor jobs, low incomes and bad access to public services (think of how appalling many schools in traditional Labour-voting areas are, for example). They forgot the democratic purpose of a working-class movement. The ready identification of successive Labour leaders since Neil Kinnock with the European elite, and their willingness to jump on its gravy train, pushed the party light years away from its roots.
It is one thing to kick Mr Corbyn out; but who would replace him? If it is to be someone who buys into the same rarified metropolitan agenda that bears no relevance to people in Sunderland, or Blackburn, or Rotherham, nothing will change. Mr Corbyn is unelectable; but Labour should not imagine that some suave operator from inner London, with an impeccable record of box-ticking, would be any better. And Mr Farage will not surrender his new converts easily.
As for the Tories, a senior Ukip figure told me it wasn’t Mr Cameron’s pitiful and failed renegotiation that drove Conservatives into the Farage camp, it was his determination to put same-sex marriage on the statute book. In the same way that Labour took its core vote for granted, so too did the Tories. Not only did the Tory party alienate core voters, it also proceeded to bully them. In a democracy, political parties need to hold their base and then win people over; both Labour and the Tories lost sight of that truth. Democracy is about people having minds of their own: the Remain camp, and the leaders of all parties, treated the public as though their having a mind of their own was an almost impossible concept.
Both parties will be unified only if they show respect for the feelings of those whom the elite has disdained. The Tories may well choose a Brexiteer as their leader. Both Michael Gove and Andrea Leadsom showed enormous class and principle during the campaign, and both avoided hysterical attacks on colleagues: either would be ideal not just for healing internal wounds, but at connecting with the hitherto disconnected in the country. One is loath to intrude into Labour’s private grief, but any party that has Alan Johnson or Liz Kendall in it and chooses to ignore their leadership capabilities, and their deep common sense about core Labour voters, does not deserve to be taken seriously. And Kate Hoey, Gisela Stuart and Frank Field, who all behaved intelligently and with heroic principle in the campaign, must also be brought into the tent.
Unifying the country may be a taller order. One might begin by saying to the minority of Cavaliers who live in London that they must understand the lives of Roundheads in the provinces, since forcing the Roundheads to defer to them has been tried, and has failed. In Scotland, Nicola Sturgeon says she is considering another referendum. Good luck to her. She doesn’t really want one, because she knows she cannot win it. Would an independent Scotland be in the EU? Would it have a currency? Would it have any income, with oil at under $50 a barrel? She will get used to the idea of being out in the world again. Meanwhile a significant minority of Scots are starting to find her and her brand of Bolshevism particularly offensive.
What we have just experienced is a historic moment of democracy – a moment so historic precisely because it showed a nation’s determination to regain its democracy, and to punish a political class that had connived at its loss. It has also punished a self-selected elite – businessmen, pundits, academics and vacuous celebrities – who presumed to lecture people about the exercise of their votes. The result served the lot of them right. If they are miserable about what has happened, they should have the humility to grasp how far they are responsible for it. A period of silence, as Mr Attlee once put it, would be most welcome: in which they can reflect on just how very wrong they were to treat the British people as though they were idiots.