Why Brexit Happened

We are now in the Brexit tenth anniversary moment and first out of the trap with a superb BBC documentary is Norma Percy, the doyenne of high level geo-political documentaries recent political moments from Milosevic’s Balkans wars in the 1990s to negotiating with Putin.

She and her team have an amazing ability to get principals to speak about the normally hidden exchanges and discussions that shape modern history.

“A Very British Civil War” going out on the BBC is in the highest tradition of the Norma Percy output..

Unlike her programmes on foreign policy confrontations this one does not seek to ask the Why Brexit Happened question nor examine the occult financing of the lavish spend of the Brexit campaign.

Instead the programme-makers have got nearly every single player in the campaign a decade ago to go over what they said or did in the weeks that culminated in the rejection of European partnership.

The visual footage of the balmy summer of 2016 as the to and fro of the Brexit campaign unleashed its energies is gripping.

For any European observer the decision of a British government to hold a populist plebiscite on the free movement of workers or the decisions of Brussels seemed a fine example of Anglo-eccentricity taken to extreme.

Clement Attlee rejected referendums as a way for Britain to take big decisions calling them a “device of dictators and demagogues”. There are no dictators in the documentary but in Nigel Farage and his Brexit junior partner Boris Johnson two of Britain finest demagogues in 21^st century politics are at the peak of their game.

Every referendum in other European countries this century in which the word “European Union” appeared on the ballot paper had resulted in a No to Europe.

The monolingual insularity of British politics meant that no decider in Whitehall seemed aware that any referendum on the EU was almost certainly to end in a No to Europe.

Instead we have the sad almost pathetic sight of David Cameron, George Osborne, or Gordon Brown now much greyer, paunchier and lined still unable to explain why their arguments and reasoning flopped so badly.

At least we see Jeremy Corbyn who had spent a political life-time denouncing Europe as a capitalist free trade plot to do down the British worker looking the same age as a decade ago explaining along with his press aide the former Guardian comment editor, the cadaverous Seamus Milne, why Labour lined up with Farage and Johnson in refusing to stay linked to Europe.

Denis Healey, Labour’s International Secretary, after 1945 told the Labour cabinet that the proposed European Community of 1950 was a “Catholic, Conservative, Capitalist” plot and Britain should steer clear of continental entanglements.

Labour’s conversion to supporting EU membership only really sunk roots under John Smith, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown though as Europe Minister I witnessed the intense tensions between Downing Street and the Treasury whose mandarins always saw Britain’s future as better ensured by becoming a vassal state of Washington.

So Corbyn refused to join with other party leaders or ex-PMs like Tony Blair, John Major and Gordon Brown in joining Cameron and the LibDems in a common appeal to defeat Farage and Johnson.

For anyone interested in UK political drama and personalities the documentary is utterly gripping.

What is inexplicable is the sheer idiocy of Cameron, Osborne, Brown, or Corbyn thinking that taking part in the documentary would enhance their reputations.

Even Peter Mandelson gets a small walk-on part worried that Osborne and Cameron were so poor in selling Europe. But partnership decisions taken with other countries in Brussels Eurocrats and open borders were unsellable after more than a decade of daily anti-European propaganda in most daily papers – broadsheets and tabloids as well as BBC programmes.

The Today programme – known as Radio Spectator at the time – or BBC Question Time whose editors offered to Nigel Farage scores of appearances to promote his Europhobe populism while at the same time refusing to give equal time to LibDem or Labour MEPs with a more balanced view on the EU.

The stars of the documentary are Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson. They remain irrepressibly cocky and cheerful a decade after their victory even as evidence mounts that Brexit has not worked to Britain’s advantage and there are clear majorities in all polls for some kind of reconnection to European democracies.

The documentary is utterly compelling but still does not answer the question of why Brexit happened or who paid for the lavish, expensive Farage-Johnson campign.

Denis MacShane is the former UK Minister of Europe, In 2015 he wrote “Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe” published by IB Tauris.