Churchill, his Irish disciple and why immigration swung this vote
LEAVING behind the neoGothic splendour of the Houses of Parliament, heading west, there are a series of little Georgian streets. Looking for my hotel, the street names had to be checked closely as I was using the 21st century guide – Google Maps. I recognised one street name, Lord North Street. Winston Churchill amateur chroniclers, like me, will recognise the street. Here, at 8 Lord North Street, lived the political adventurer and faithful Churchill disciple, Brendan Bracken. During the 1930s, the house of this strange Tipperary man became the centre of operations for Churchill’s anti-appeasement team.
Built in 1722, the elegant Georgian houses are small, but how many other British battles for freedom have they stood through? Looking more closely at No.8, I saw some faded painted signage: ‘Public shelters in vaults under pavements in this street.’ I stood a while, imagining the many nights that Adolf Hitler’s bombs rained down on these houses.
Much derision has been heaped upon Britain since Friday morning. As Jean Claude Juncker sneered and Enda Kenny stood ineffectually by, it appeared to be forgotten that this island once stood alone against the greatest evil Europe has known. A couple of streets away, on Romney Street, is the Marquis of Granby pub. I dropped in there a number of times last week and I met Nigel Farage. That’s not difficult – the Marquis of Granby is known as UKIP’s staff canteen. Farage makes a big show of having a pint. He didn’t seem like some evil genius to me. At the Brexit party I attended on Thursday night, his young supporters enjoyed the pints and the entertainment. A minor 1980s soulster, Alexander O’Neal was the main act. Farage didn’t expect to win.Yet when I spoke to him again on Friday morning, at around 7.30am, on Great College Street after his side’s extraordinary victory, he said he was going to have a coffee to celebrate. He seems an ordinary chap.
But UKIP’s successful campaign for Britain to leave the European Union was blatantly racist. Farage unveiled an advert in the final days of the campaign which showed a long line of darkskinned immigrants and was emblazoned with the words, Breaking Point.
It was reported to the police with a complaint that it incited racial hatred and breached UK race laws. Still, they are not idiots. Yet that is the convenient explanation for Brexit, that the madmen have taken over Britain.
Farage at least appears to believe in something, but he doesn’t represent the huge numbers of voters who forced through Brexit. Boris Johnson ruthlessly exploited the Leave campaign to further his prime ministerial ambitions. He’s almost certainly, privately, a Remain man.
The political elites in London and Brussels underestimated the anger of the ordinary British citizen. Those outside the London elite are not racists because they voted Leave. Immigration was the biggest issue in the Brexit campaign, according to the British citizens and Irish emigrés I spoke to in London this week. Ten Irish professionals I interviewed for a news story had almost, to a man, voted Remain. But they understood the effect that immigration was having on others less fortunate than themselves. They echoed the stories I had heard in the Marquis of Granby
TONY McDonnell, 34, from Swinford, Co Mayo, lives in upmarket borough Maida Vale and works in financial services: ‘I am shocked but I think that the economic arguments were way more important to people like me than they were to other people. But if you are a fisherman or a plumber living up north, the economic situation hasn’t really helped you and you don’t care what the experts are saying.’
He said that 650,000 national insurance numbers were issued to EU migrants last year. National insurance numbers are similar to PPS numbers. The new entrants to Britain are placing massive pressure on schools, hospitals and law enforcement. And the Tory rulers are not investing to improve services. Since Margaret Thatcher decimated the north of England, little has been done to improve its infrastructure.
More than 17 million people ignored the strident advice of the Prime Minister, David Cameron; Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, the Governor of the Bank of England Mark Carney, the head of MI5 and many other establishment figures. The United Kingdom is irrevocably split. Older voters, working-class men and women, voters in the north of England, and in large swathes of rural England – voted against membership of the EU.
In the Palace of Westminster, where I began my stroll on Thursday, among the movers and shakers, establishment politicians and businessmen, there was trepidation. They were heartily and resoundingly in favour of a Remain. On Friday, they were embarrassed.
Around the corner at Downing Street on Friday, Cameron announced he was resigning. Labour MPs were calling for Jeremy Corbyn’s head.
The Irish people have been scorned by the European Union, and the rest of the Troika, forcing a vicious bailout on us. There are no sweetheart deals for Ireland either. We repudiated the Fianna Fáil party that signed that agreement in 2010 and we also gave Enda Kenny a kicking in the 2016 general election. Kenny’s Fine Gael lost 26 seats yet he, unlike Cameron, kept his job.
OUR repudiation of Brussels and Dublin has come in the form of anti-establishment Independent TDs, not an attempt to leave the Union. No other country, besides the UK of course, will be as profoundly affected by Brexit as Ireland. Now we will send Kenny in to negotiate with the EU to defend our interests during Britain’s departure. We cannot negotiate with Britain directly. Kenny’s acquiescent party, and neutered opposition don’t believe he is any good.
And now, with his confidence shattered, few believe, especially after his stunned and stuttering reaction to Brexit on Friday, that he can adequately represent our interests. He has no working majority and no authority to negotiate.
Churchill was no bigot, he came up with the idea of a United States of Europe. He lived as an infant in Dublin and cared deeply about Ireland. And he too was the victim of a vote that seemed, initially, extraordinarily ungrateful and self-defeating. Having won the war in 1945, he was voted out of office, but things worked out.
Although he wrote a lot of his thinking down, we don’t know all his thoughts during those councils before the war in that house on Lord North Street.
But we can be certain he didn’t envisage men like Cameron and Kenny inheriting his legacy.