Eu referendum

Thursday

James Delingpole

Fringe benefits | 30 June 2016

‘How do we feel about leaving the EU today? Who doesn’t give a fook?’ yelled Oli Sykes of Sheffield’s Bring Me The Horizon — instantly becoming my favourite act of this year’s Glastonbury Festival. Sorry, I’m just not buying the line put out by the Guardian, the BBC, Damon Albarn and the rest of the wankerati that the crowds were bummed out by the referendum going the wrong way. Most of the 160,000 revellers had more pressing matters to consider like: Adele or New Order; long queue for the shower or not bother; samosa or falafel; cider or reefer or both; and — of course — how to negotiate the

Philippe Sands

Diary – 30 June 2016

Referendum day is as nondescript and wet as the day before, happily spent in Cambridge at my son’s Leo’s graduation. Even here the coming vote intrudes. Some students say that the master of Trinity College has come out for Brexit. Leo’s boyfriend Eddie, newly graduated in German studies and about to head to a job in Berlin, worries about job prospects. Our lunch table is shared with genial and smiling but very divided family. The polling station is equally lively, a place for chat with neighbours. The working day is uneventful. Dinner with friends in the evening, asleep before the first results. I wake in the middle of the night,

The Spectator

Barometer | 30 June 2016

Repeat until fade More than three million voters disappointed by the result of the EU referendum have signed a petition demanding a re-run. — They may have in mind the Danish referendum on the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, rejected by 50.7% of voters. A year later, after exemptions were offered to Denmark, the country voted again and approved the treaty by 56.7%. — Or it could always go like the 1997 Winchester by-election. Having lost his seat by two votes in the general election, Conservative MP Gerry Malone challenged the result. In the re-run, Lib Dem Mark Oaten won with a majority of 21,556. Jam yesterday Concert-goers on the way

Charles Moore Charles Moore

The Spectator’s Notes | 30 June 2016

It sounds logical that Vote Leave should now disband, since the people have obligingly voted Leave, but is it wise? Who else can try to ensure that the Leave cause is not forgotten in internal Tory struggles, or in a war between Ukip and the rest? If it is right — which I think it is — that the Leave vote is the biggest shock ever administered to the main parties and the ruling elites since the collapse of the Munich agreement, then it follows that those parties and those elites will try to reverse or at least neuter the decision. There needs to be an organised resistance to them,

Taki

High life | 30 June 2016

The two most beautiful words in the history of the world, in any language, are ‘Molon labe’, the accent on the second syllable of both words, the ‘b’ pronounced ‘v’ in the second. These two little words were the laconic answer of King Leonidas of Sparta to the offer made by the great Persian king Xerxes of not only safe passage, if the Greeks laid down their arms, but also a settlement of lands of better quality than any they currently possessed. You know what I’m talking about. The Hot Gates, or Thermopylae in Greek. The year is 480 BC, the month is August, and the Persians number more than

Jeremy Clarke

Low life | 30 June 2016

On referendum day, my mother leaned on my arm for support and we walked slowly and carefully up the steps of the village hall, wondering if this was to be the last time either or both of us would be voting in a national plebiscite. Here again was the paper ‘Polling Station’ poster pinned to a five-bar gate. Here again were the weeds flourishing between the paving slabs in the forecourt, and the plaque on the wall commemorating the opening of the village hall by some local mauve-faced grandee in 1952. Here again were the handrails showing signs of rust and the two sets of institutional double doors reminding me

Melissa Kite

Real life | 30 June 2016

We fled Balham after the result, having been outed as the only Leave voters in Lambeth. The builder boyfriend and I packed our possessions into the Volvo and headed for the safety of a friends’ house in Hampshire. ‘Come on, quick, leave the bloody third pair of wellies, just bring the essentials,’ said the BB as he lifted the spaniel into the boot. We took bedding and towels and baskets of tinned goods in case we decided it was too risky to return, and that the only option was to keep fleeing. Maybe we would just keep driving until we found a cottage for sale. We might put in an

Alexander Chancellor

Long life | 30 June 2016

The Brexit vote has thrust this country into chaos. It has left it with neither a government nor an opposition and no clear purpose in the world. And if our country has been freed from the control of interfering continental bureaucrats, as the Brexiteers wish, the likely price of this achievement is the United Kingdom’s own tragic dismemberment. We also face years of wrangling negotiation and of endless parliamentary work breaking our legal ties with the European Union. Soon, I suppose, we will all have to be issued with freshly designed passports and driving licences. Can it all really be worth it? It can be said, however, that Britain hasn’t

The Spectator

Portrait of the week | 30 June 2016

Home David Cameron, standing in the middle of Downing Street with his wife Samantha alone near him, announced his resignation as prime minister after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union by 17,410,742 votes (51.9 per cent) to 16,141,241 (48.1), with a turnout of 72.2 per cent. The result surprised the government. Mr Cameron said he’d stay on until a new Conservative party leader and prime minister could be chosen, before the party conference in October. In Scotland, 62 per cent of the vote was to remain and in London 59.9 per cent. The area with the highest Leave percentage was Boston, Lincolnshire, with 75.6, and the highest

The Spectator

A vote of confidence

During the referendum campaign, it seemed at times as if a competition was on to issue the most hyperbolic claim of what might happen should the British public vote to leave the European Union. Now politicians and commentators are competing to come up with the most hysterical assessment of the British decision to leave. Leading the field is Mark Rutte, the Dutch Prime Minister, who declared that ‘England has collapsed: politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.’ In other words: without us, you’re nothing. Politics in collapse? We do not want to intrude on the private grief of the Labour party but the Tories are heading into a leader-ship contest with as

Dot Wordsworth

Referendums

‘One referendum, two referenda,’ chanted my husband. ‘No, no, it’s a gerund. The English plural is referendums,’ interrupted Veronica, red in the face. It’s odd no one can agree — not about the politics, but about the word. Part of the trouble is that it’s newish, never used in English before 1817. Since then, like foot and mouth, it has come in spikes. One spike was in 1898–99, when the six colonies of Australia tried to federate. Referendums held in 1898 failed, because New South Wales had required a minimum of 80,000 votes in favour, and only 71,595 were forthcoming. So in 1899 everyone wore ribbons printed with ‘Federation Yes!’

Bruce Anderson

A summer evening with Cameron

Journalists are chronic exaggerators. Strong words are always being thrown away on trivial events. ‘Whitehall was shocked last night as a bitter new row broke out…’ Translation into truth-speak: ‘There was a certain amount of interest in some quarters of Whitehall yesterday as an exchange of memoranda between the department of string and the ministry of candle-ends revealed…’ Now we truly are in shock and bitterness. Nation divided, party divided, Union in peril, City under threat, entire economy under threat. Europe weakened, the West weakened: Putin delighted, Trump delighted. A great nation has turned itself into a music-hall act for the gratification of domestic and global cretinism. I am sure

Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

A game of chicken with the electorate

I have worked in advertising for 28 years. In that time I have seen many briefs for communication campaigns, but none contained the line ‘It is important to insult the target audience, or at least treat them with barely disguised disdain.’ So I wonder whether the referendum result might have gone the other way had Remain supporters refrained from using social media in the days before the vote. Impossible to enforce, of course. The problem with the self-righteous is that they are so eager to virtue-signal to each other that they will go on doing it even when it is completely counterproductive. One American expert has written a blog post

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

The pollster who called it wrong. Again

A few hours after voting started in the European Union referendum, Populus released its final opinion poll showing a ten-point lead for Remain. This carried weight because the founder of Populus, Andrew Cooper, was also pollster for the official Remain campaign. His findings had been passed to 10 Downing Street earlier, leading David Cameron and his team to become very confident. There were reports that the Prime Minister was not even going to stay up for the result: he intended to go to sleep early and wake up to victory. The vote for Brexit, by 52 per cent to 48 per cent, confounded the financial markets and wrongfooted most opinion

James Forsyth James Forsyth

So will it be Boris?

The Tory party is in a deeply emotional state. Remain-supporting MPs cry tears of rage when they discuss the referendum. Bitter emails and text messages have been exchanged. Leave-supporting MPs have been accused of unleashing dark forces that they cannot control, of putting immigrants in Britain at risk. Yet the leadership candidates who have so far emerged seem strangely united in their vision for post-Brexit Britain. All want to heal the divide between rich and poor that the referendum has exposed. It is tempting to concentrate only on the division in the party, the fear that David Cameron’s resignation has injected even more poison into the Tory system than either

Iain Martin

Sturgeon’s bluff

It ought not to be a surprise that Alex Salmond, Scotland’s former First Minister, has declared that the vote to leave the European Union is the trigger for a second referendum on Scottish independence. Salmond thinks everything is an excuse for another go. If a new Bay City Rollers album suffered poor reviews south of the border, or an English football pundit failed to declare Archie Gemmill’s wonder goal for Scotland against Holland in the 1978 world cup the best ever, Salmond would be right there on the UK’s television screens, chortling at the brilliance of his own wit, before intoning gravely that this insult is surely the final straw

The Spectator

Reasons to be cheerful | 30 June 2016

Noel Malcolm It may sound both Pollyannaish and paradoxical to say this, but leaving the EU will enable us to have stable, friendly, cooperative relations with all our EU neighbours. Being cooped up in a dysfunctional system, where so much depends on backroom arm-twisting and competing for favours in a zero-sum game, doesn’t produce stable friendships. For those of us who feel (as I do) like real Europeans, it will be so much better to be the friendly next-door neighbour than the unwanted in-law in the quarrelling family home. Noel Malcolm is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. Tony Abbott I was one of those overseas worthies

Nicholas Farrell

La bomba Britannica

In Italy, media coverage of the triumph of Brexit has been wall-to-wall as Italians worry about the collateral damage and wonder if they too dare… So far La bomba Britannica has hit the Milan stock market much harder than the London one. On Friday, Milan fell by 12 per cent against the FTSE-100’s 3.5 per cent. Italy’s banks — too numerous, too small, undercapitalised and saddled with alarming levels of toxic debt — took the biggest hit. New eurozone rules that ban government bailouts for big depositors have turned them into sitting ducks. Shares in Monte Paschi di Siena (bailed out once already in 2013 by Italy’s central bank) fell

Liam Halligan

Project Hope

Boris Johnson famously said that Winston Churchill would have voted for Brexit. The wartime leader’s grandson — staunch Remainer and Tory grandee Nicholas Soames — dismissed such claims as ‘appalling’ and ‘totally wrong’. This bad-tempered referendum rift between two traditionalist, Old Etonian Conservatives symbolises, somewhat incongruously perhaps, the broader state of the nation. Deep and traumatic divisions have been drawn between friends and families everywhere — and, of course, within political parties. David Cameron’s dignified resignation speech has quickly given way to a grim determination to ‘Stop Boris’ from taking the Conservative crown and the Premiership. Labour, meanwhile, is in self-destruct mode, the parliamentary party in full rebellion against Jeremy

Kate Chisholm

Refuge from the referendum

A brief encounter with Radio 4’s Any Questions to gauge the measure of opinion in the shires after the referendum result was enough to convince me we are entering even more torrid times than during the campaign. For some mysterious reason both Harriet Harman and Alex Salmond, billed in Radio Times to appear on the panel alongside Ken Clarke and Chris Grayling, had reneged on their promise and been replaced by Emily Thornberry, the Labour MP who got into trouble in 2014 for her white van man tweet, and Steven Woolfe, an oxymoronic Ukip MEP. The audience, judging from the applause, were pretty much balanced between the Leavers and Remainers