While we bicker over a bus, Leavers win the political argument - and drag us ever-closer towards a no deal nightmare.
“It is a grave error to try and use legal process to settle political questions.”
It’s not often I agree with Jacob Rees-Mogg, but on this one he’s right. The legal campaign against Boris Johnson is a mistake and a distraction.
The case hinges on Mr Johnson endorsing the claim on the side of a bus during the EU referendum that ‘We send the EU £350m a week”.
As Full Fact and basically every Remainer pointed out at the time (to little effect, apparently), it was a clear misuse of official statistics, given the large rebate the UK gets from the EU.
“The closest—not perfect—analogy is that £350 million is like the amount a supermarket till displays before the discounts are applied. You never pay it and you never owe it. The number is just one step towards the final bill.
“The UK actually pays around £250 million a week. We also get some money back from the EU, but that isn’t fully under our control,” said independent fact-checkers Full Fact at the time.
Was Johnson’s claim misleading? Yes. Would the referendum result have been any different had the bus said £250m a week? Probably not.
While Remainers bickered over the bus, Leavers continued to get their message of ‘take back control’ and (implicitly) ‘there’s too many immigrants’ out far and wide.
It is easy to forget now that while the Treasury Select Committee called Vote Leave’s claim that Brexit would save £350m a week “deeply problematic”, it also rapped the Remain campaign for saying families would be worse off by £4,300 a year if Britain quit the EU. The claim was branded “mistaken” with the Committee arguing it had “probably confused” voters.
Why? The £4,300 figure related to annual British GDP divided by all the households of the UK. Of course, most voters will have read the figure as referring to disposable income, not the total value of goods and services in the economy.
Referendums are a tricky business, for a number of reasons. Once the campaign is over, it’s over. Campaigners who have misled the public can generally walk away without repudiation.
But that is a problem with both our political culture and our campaign regulations. There is no legal body that can check or correct claims made during a referendum (the Advertising Standards Agency gave up that job in the late 1990s). The best way to punish charlatans in politics however is through the ballot box, not the magistrates.
Meanwhile the spotlight on the Johnson case has simply emboldened his supporters. More than that, it has rallied even his opponents behind him – even liberal Rory Stewart condemned the legal action. Leavers’ bizarre victim complex grows stronger by the day – while Remainers position Johnson as the martyr to represent it.
His whole party have shored up behind him, while the media have had a field day over lead litigant Marcus Ball’s £50,000 of spend of public donations on ‘cupcakes, self-defence classes and a luxury flat with private gym.’
And it has baited Remainers into spouting some dangerous rhetoric, with Labour’s Andrew Adonis saying: “There is a strong case for the BBC to be in the dock alongside Johnson, since it provided the platform for his promises to become common currency.” This is not only absurd, but an overt attack on press freedom by someone in a position of influence.
It was heartening to see the People’s Vote campaign express some sanity over the court case, saying on Thursday: “Our campaign has always been careful to avoid getting dragged back into the disputes of 2016. We’re fighting for a People’s Vote now that we all know so much more about Brexit than in the last referendum.” That is entirely the right approach.
Sadly the case reflects a technical tendency among centrists and Remainers – nit-picking while Rome burns.
As openDemocracy’s Adam Ramsay wrote about the MEP election campaign: “The arguments made on leaflets and doorsteps – and in Tweets and Facebook posts – have largely been about how to game a complex voting system in order to stop someone you don’t like. They haven’t been about people’s lives. They haven’t been about how to transform society…Meanwhile, Nigel Farage is free to take to the airwaves and talk about actual issues, with his simple message: “defend democracy”. And so, while he won’t get a majority of votes, he’s already won.”
Replace Nigel Farage with Boris Johnson, and you get a fair picture of what’s happening now.
There are many reasons to oppose Boris Johnson. He is an egotistical chancer whose politics are deeply pernicious. But we can’t litigate our way out of this quagmire. Remainers have to win the political arguments. That won’t be done fighting old battles in court, but in presenting a positive, emotive vision for why we should stay in the EU.
Until we do that, we will be a merely responsive force, forever on the back foot – while Leavers drag us ever-closer towards a no deal nightmare.
Josiah Mortimer is Editor of Left Foot Forward. Follow him on Twitter.
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6 Responses to “The Boris Johnson court case – and why we can’t litigate our way out of this mess”
Patrick Newman
The action will fail (the judge went to the same school as Boris – oh no I did not really say that!) The elephant in the room with the leave campaign is the unresolved accusations over the source and use of funds and data which appears to be ignored by Labour and Remain parties. Legal processes are going on but appear to be ignored by the media. And as for Aaron Banks…..more later! Since June 2016 about 1.6m people have died overwhelmingly from age-related causes. In this same period, about 500,000 new voters were created but on the other hand, 63% in the 18 – 24 category did not vote in 2016. The result of a new referendum could be very different from that of the one in 2016 where only 35% of citizens supported the biggest constitutional change since WWII.
nhsgp
So Josiah, you can’t tell the difference between net and gross. Boris was talking gross and you want to accuse him of talking net. Tough its not going to work
Now for the cost, which is not the same thing as the payments.
May’s deal costs 80 bn a year.
13.5 bn a year in payments. No rebate.
100 bn to pay EU debts. Then send a bill, we pay it. No right to dispute it.
30 bn a year subsidising low paid EU migrants. A min wage migrant pays 13.11 a week in tax, cost 14.5K a year in state services. We have to pay that for their entire life. No right to say, sorry you aren’t good for the UK. No right for the people forced to fund thgat
8.8 bn tariffs, paid for by the mugs
Regulations come with cost. The lowest cost I have seen in 33.3 bn a year, the largest 240 bn.
The CAP costs
….
To put that in context the schools funding shortfall is 1.4 bn a year.
There needs to be a spending bill where remainers get to specify what gets axed to pay the EU.
If we remain, the costs are higher
Julia Gibb
30 May, 2019 at 12:39 pm
UNDERSTANDING BREXIT AND THE TORY PANIC ABOUT INDYREF2
https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/top-stories/the-problem-with-the-english-england-doesn-t-want-to-be-just-another-member-of-a-team-1-4851882
Published in Jan 2017 and written by Nicholas Boyle, who is Emeritus Schröder Professor of German, University of Cambridge, and author of ‘Who are we now?’ (1998: University of Notre Dame Press; and, 2014: ‘How to Survive the Next World Crisis’ )
This article must be one of the most significant pieces of diagnostic information written in the past ten years. It is truly compulsory reading for everyone in Scotland, as well as the rest of the UK, although it is unlikely to be accepted by those suffering from English exceptionalism, like the three main Unionist parties, Tory, Labour and LibDems, and the Loyalist movements in NI and Scotland.
Here are some excerpts :-
“Brexit is the result of an English delusion, a crisis of identity resulting from a failure to come to terms with the loss of empire and the end of its own exceptionalism. ”
“Those who voted Leave in the referendum were not voting about globalisation or stagnating living standards or austerity and declining welfare payments, they were voting about the EU, and it is condescension to pretend otherwise. But they were not being asked by the Leave campaign to express a preference for a particular rationally argued and practically feasible economic and political alternative to membership of the EU – that is evident, for none was offered before the referendum and none has emerged since. They were being asked to express an emotion about membership, and the English, but not the Irish or Scots, felt so urgent a need to express it that they threw reason and practicality to the winds.
The emotion central to the Leave campaign was the fear of what is alien, and this trumped the Remainers’ Project Fear-of-wholly-foreseeable-damage. The true Project Fear was the Leave party’s unrelenting presentation of the EU as a lethal threat to national identity, indeed as the stranger and enemy who had already stolen it: give us back our country, they said, our sovereignty, our £350m a week, let us control our borders, let our population not be swamped by immigrants or our high streets by Polish shops – and to vote against the EU was to vote to recover what we had lost. The voting pattern, however, revealed that appeal to that emotion, and that vision of the EU, worked only in England.”
” For the English, the United Kingdom occupies the psychic space once filled by the empire: it is the last guarantor of their characterlessness, it is the phantom which in the English mind substitutes for the England which the English will not acknowledge is their only home. They will not acknowledge it lest they become just another nation like everybody else, with a specific, limited identity, a specific history, neither specially honourable nor specially dishonourable, with limited weight, limited resources, and limited importance in the world now that their empire is no more.
That is the terrifying truth that membership of the EU presents to the English and from which for centuries the empire insulated them: that they have to live in the world on an equal footing with other people. From that truth they seek shelter in the thought that really they belong not to England at all but to something more imposing, or at least different: the UK, or, less accurately, ‘Britain’, within which they can cocoon the non-identity they took on in 1707 as the imperial adventure was beginning.”
” England has never wanted to join in the process of growing together, not because it rejects the goal of a ‘super-state’, which exists only in England’s fearful imagination, but because it rejects the idea of collaborating with equals – it doesn’t want to be just another member of a team, for then it would have to recognise that it has after all an identity of its own.
The referendum vote does not deserve to be respected because, as an outgrowth of English narcissism, it is itself disrespectful of others, of our allies, partners, neighbours, friends, and, in many cases, even relatives. Like resentful ruffians uprooting the new trees in the park and trashing the new play area, millions of English, the lager louts of Europe, voted for Brexit in an act of geopolitical vandalism.
Two pillars of the unwritten British constitution collapsed on June 23. The sovereignty of the Westminster parliament was seriously challenged, and possibly overturned, by a referendum that should never have been called. And the attempt of the Unions of 1707 and 1800 to create a single British nation to rule a global empire was finally shown up as a self-deceptive device by the English to deny the Scots and the Irish a will of their own.”
Do read the entire article and share it widely – you’ll be so glad you did.
Patrick Newman
So let’s just ignore the 17.4 million then! Who is this professor? I am not impressed as he appears to be sponsored by the manufacturer of tyre valves! Does not emeritus mean he has been put out to graze?
Julia Gibb
Patrick
I love the way the 17.4 is quoted and the Remain number ignored.
If we had a Referendum on hanging I’m sure it would have a far bigger majority but I would hope we are never asked.
You do not think that false information was used. You do not think that dark money was deployed?
As for your attack on the article – why go for the man instead of the article? Why no challenge to the content?