A
warning to Gove and Johnson - we won’t forget what you did
Jonathan Freedland
Friday 1 July 2016
20.10 BST
Though
events are moving fast, it’s crucial to hold on to our fury at the
selfishness that caused this crisis
It’s gripping, of
course. Game of Thrones meets House of Cards, played out at the tempo
of a binge-viewed box-set. Who could resist watching former allies
wrestling for the crown, betraying each other, lying, cheating and
dissembling, each new twist coming within hours of the last? And this
show matters, too. Whoever wins will determine Britain’s
relationship with Europe.
And yet it can feel
like displacement activity, this story of Michael Gove, Boris Johnson
and Theresa May – a distraction diverting us from the betrayal
larger than any inflicted by one Tory bigwig on another. Now that the
news cycle is measured in seconds, there’s a risk that 23 June
might come to feel like history, that we might move on too soon. But
there can be no moving on until we have reckoned with what exactly
was done to the people of these islands – and by whom.
This week’s antics
of Gove and Johnson are a useful reminder. For the way one has
treated the other is the way both have treated the country. Some may
be tempted to turn Johnson into an object of sympathy – poor Boris,
knifed by his pal – but he deserves none. In seven days he has been
exposed as an egomaniac whose vanity and ambition was so great he was
prepared to lead his country on a path he knew led to disaster, so
long as it fed his own appetite for status.
He didn’t believe
a word of his own rhetoric, we know that now. His face last Friday
morning, ashen with the terror of victory, proved it. That hot mess
of a column he served up on Monday confirmed it again: he was trying
to back out of the very decision he’d persuaded the country to
make. And let’s not be coy: persuade it, he did. Imagine the Leave
campaign without him. Gove, Nigel Farage and Gisela Stuart: they
couldn’t have done it without the star power of Boris.
He knew it was best
for Britain to remain in the EU. But it served his ambition to argue
otherwise. We just weren’t meant to fall for it. Once we had, he
panicked, vanishing during a weekend of national crisis before hiding
from parliament. He lit the spark then ran away – petrified at the
blaze he started.
He has left us to
look on his works and despair. The outlook for the economy is so
bleak, the governor of the Bank of England talks of “economic
post-traumatic stress disorder.” The Economist Intelligence Unit
projects a 6% contraction by 2020, an 8% decline in investment,
rising unemployment, falling tax revenues and public debt to reach
100% of our national output. No wonder George Osborne casually
announced that the central aim of his fiscal policy since 2010 –
eradicating the deficit – has now been indefinitely postponed,
thereby breaking what had been the defining commitment of the Tories’
manifesto at the last election, back in the Paleolithic era known as
2015.
Perhaps headlines
about Britain losing its AAA credit ratings don’t cut through.
Maybe it’s easier to think in terms of the contracts cancelled, the
planned investments scrapped, the existing jobs that will be lost and
the future jobs that will never happen. Or the British scientific and
medical research that relied on EU funding and European cooperation
and that will now be set back “decades”, according to those at
the sharp end.
And what was it all
for? For Johnson, it was gross ambition. Gove’s motive was
superficially more admirable. He, along with Daniel Hannan and
others, was driven by intellectual fervour, a burning belief in
abstract nouns such as “sovereignty” and “freedom”. Those
ideas are noble in themselves, of course they are. But not when they
are peeled away from the rough texture of the real world. For when
doctrine is kept distilled, pure and fervently uncontaminated by
reality, it turns into zealotry.
When doctrine is
kept distilled, pure and fervently uncontaminated by reality, it
turns into zealotry
So we have the
appalling sight of Gove on Friday, proclaiming himself a proud
believer in the UK even though it was obvious to anyone who cared to
look that a leave vote would propel Scotland towards saying yes in a
second independence referendum. The more honest leavers admit – as
Melanie Phillips did when the two of us appeared on Newsnight this
week – that they believe the break-up of the union is a price worth
paying for the prize of sovereignty. But what kind of patriotism is
this, that believes in an undiluted British sovereignty so precious
it’s worth the sacrifice of Britain itself?
Just look at what
this act of vandalism has wrought. There has been a 500% increase in
the number of hate crimes reported, as migrants are taunted on the
street, told to pack their bags and get out – as if 23 June were a
permission slip to every racist and bigot in the land. And for what?
So Boris could get a job and so Gove, Hannan and the rest could make
Britain more closely resemble the pristine constitutional models of
the nation-state found in 17th-century tracts of political
philosophy, rather than one that might fit into the interdependent,
complex 21st-century world and our blood-drenched European corner of
it.
They did it with
lies, whether the false promise that we could both halt immigration
and enjoy full access to the single market or that deceitful £350m
figure, still defended by Gove, which tricked millions into believing
a leave vote would bring a cash windfall to the NHS. They did it with
no plan, as clueless about post-Brexit Britain as Bush and Blair were
about post-invasion Iraq. They did it with no care for the chaos they
would unleash.
Senior civil
servants say Brexit will consume their energies for years to come, as
they seek to disentangle 40 years of agreements. It will be the
central focus of our politics and our government, a massive
collective effort demanding ingenuity and creativity. Just think of
what could have been achieved if all those resources had been
directed elsewhere. Into addressing, for instance, the desperate,
decades-long needs – for jobs, for housing, for a future – of
those towns that have been left behind by the last 30 years of
change, those towns whose people voted leave the way a passenger on a
doomed train pulls the emergency cord. Instead, all this work will be
devoted to constructing a set-up with the EU which, if everything
goes our way, might be only a little bit worse than what we already
had in our hands on 22 June.
This week of shock
will settle, eventually. Events will begin to move at a slower pace.
We will realise that we have to be patient, that we need to wait till
France and Germany get their elections out of the way, and hope that
a new future can be negotiated – one that implements the democratic
verdict delivered in the referendum, but which does not maim this
country in the process. But even as we grow calmer, we should not let
our anger cool. We should hold on to our fury, against those who for
the sake of their career or a pet dogma, were prepared to wreck
everything. On this day when we mourn what horror the Europe before
the European Union was capable of, we should say loud and clear of
those that did this: we will not forget them.
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