In 2016, I had had a very uneasy feeling for many months that Leave, under the joint leadership of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, was going to win. Not a single other British journalist in Brussels agreed with me.
Matt Tempest
This is a story of how journalists get things wrong.
On the night of 23 June 2016, after the day of voting in the Brexit referendum in the UK, I assembled in the Brussels pub The Funky Monkey with the ‘BritPack’ of Brussels correspondents for UK newspapers.
Naming no names – just their publications – but it comprised The Guardian (x2), The Times, The Telegraph, The Sun, The Express, The Economist, the Financial Times and quite possibly a few others I can’t remember. Drink was taken.
I was working then for Euractiv, as their Brexit (from the Brussels end) correspondent, plus EU foreign policy.
Anyone who was in Brussels that night will remember the weather – an ominous summer storm blew in, with thunder and lightning.
I had had a very uneasy feeling for many months that Leave, under the joint leadership of Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson, was going to win.
I put this down simply to the fact that – unlike most of my British colleagues – I came from the north of England. I had seen, for many years, how hill top farmers’ placards on the top of the Pennines had gone from “No to Windfarms” to “No to the EU” – and this, when it was still a pretty meaningless slogan, as no referendum had at that point been seriously mooted.
I had seen very well-educated northern grammar school boys I had been at school with fall for Farage, and his poisonous “Blame the immigrants, blame the Brussels bureaucrats” mantra. (One of them has since recanted, and became a more Centrist Starmer fan – the other, sadly, has gone the full Tommy Robinson white English nationalism route of radicalisation.)
Northern depression
I had seen – going further back – how the depressed former mill towns of Lancashire and Yorkshire had waited 17 years for a Labour government to reverse at least some of the poverty,j desperation and unemployment caused by Margaret Thatcher (1979-1990) and John Major (1992-97). Only to be let down by Tony Blair, and his Peter Mandelson-inspired dogma that “They [traditional Labour voters] have nowhere else to go”, as the party shifted to the centre-right of the middle ground.
Blair received a 170+ majority in 1997, but stuck to Conservative spending plans. He kept a whittled-down but triple-figure majority at two subsequent elections, 2001 and 2005, leading London media pundits to believe he was still a popular vote-winner, despite the Iraq war.
But I had noticed Blair was right – just not in the sense he meant. Northern Labour voters indeed “had nowhere else to go”. So they stayed at home. Turnout dropped from 71 percent in 1997 to 59 percent, as voters were offered a version of Coke vs Pepsi. Turnout has never recovered to that 1997 level in the 29 years since.
But journalists didn’t notice, and nobody cared.
I thought – and in this I was in very rare agreement with Thatcher – that referendums are “a device of dictators and demagogues,” as it is easy to slant a yes/no question in the direction you have primed people for. And in any case, most voters vote in referendums to kick the incumbent government, not to follow the minutiae of the ballot paper.
(A detailed pre-referendum questionnaire weeding out any voters who didn’t know the difference between the customs union, the single market, and the European Economic Area model would have disbarred at least 95 percent of Britons from voting at all.)
That voter disappointment had turned into apathy.
Now, a decade after the referendum, with Brexit costing an estimated six to eight percent of Britain’s GDP (small percentages, gigantic sums), and with a mix of social media, it has turned into an angry, nay furious, form of nihilism, contempt and anger – with little outlet or direction.
And yet on that stormy, sweaty, anxiety-ridden night in June 2016, I let my journalist colleagues convinced me I was wrong.
“The polls are wrong”, they told me. “Remain will win by at least five percent” said another. “I think the actual win will be around 15 percent” confidently confirmed a third.
For half an hour, walking home in the rain, I believed them. And then the exit poll hit.
