From the Sunday Times the Mail on Sunday and The Sun
Brexit supporters are overeducated toffs who dream of ruling the waves and biffing Johnny Foreigner. Or they are racist proles too dim to see through the lies of the Brexit campaign. Either way, they have one thing in common — they are all, every one of them, as thick as the slowest-witted plant in your garden.
That link between low IQ and a Brexit vote is now an entrenched ideology among many, if not most, remainers. You hear it at dinner parties, you see it on television, you read it in frothing newspaper columns and you can detect it in the fear of professional or private exposure among many “leave” voters.
Nearly 40 leading intellectuals have launched a campaign to back Brexit, demanding an end to patronising “propaganda” that dismisses “leave” voters as “idiots”. The group, which includes those who voted “remain” in 2016, is led by the historian Professor Robert Tombs and the economist Dr Graham Gudgin, both of Cambridge University. Among the group are Nigel Biggar, professor of theology at Oxford; Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6; fertility expert Baroness Deech, leading businesswoman Dame Helena Morrissey, and eminent historians including Sir Noel Malcolm of All Souls, Oxford and David Abulafia, professor of history at Cambridge;The Mail has the full list.
Tombs and Gudgin are also behind a website, briefingsforbrexit.com, due to go live in the next few days. By word of mouth the news of their stand got out and, without a word of publicity, they suddenly found they were attracting some super-smart supporters.
Mr Gudgin told the Sunday Times: ‘I thought of it during one of those terribly pessimistic weeks when Theresa May wasn’t going to last until teatime and there was definitely going to be a second referendum. Together we thought, ‘Gosh, we ought to be better organised than at the last referendum’.’
The project is unashamed about its desire to confront the idea the only people who voted for Brexit are less educated. Professor Tombs said: ‘Graham and I have working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds. I do feel you just can’t write off a large part of the population as being unworthy of consideration.’
Mr Gudgin and Professor Tombs said they had been left furious by the Project Fear-style reports that forecast economic disaster from Brexit.
They are fully independent: the website is the only cost, and Gudgin paid for that. The anti-Brexit campaign is not independent; it has just received £400,000 from the financier George Soros. “[His] support for the pro-remain campaign shows there is a lot of big money behind hardline remainers, whose interests have little to do with the interests of the country as a whole,”
Sadly, some Brexiteer academics were afraid to join Briefings for Brexit. “One of our contributors said he was told by a younger pro-Brexit colleague that his professor had told him that people who voted Brexit were the sort of people who sent his relatives to concentration camps,” Gudgin said. “They said, ‘I’d love to be part of your group but I haven’t got a proper job yet and I probably won’t if I’m identified.’”
Tombs says he had one pro-Brexit student who did not dare to say anything to her supervisor because he claimed all Brexiteers were racists. “I thought one thing we academics were paid to do was help explain things to people, but universities have become so simple-minded about this.”
For the same reason, some of the authors of essays on the site will be anonymous.
The comments from the Mail are largely supportive. If you can’t access the Times comments then I can tell you that a quick skim suggests the very sneers that the group is hoping to combat, then a filter to ‘most recommended’ is more positive. This is most heartening.
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One Response
The Brexit debate is in danger of drawing us all away from the real issues that are best described, perhaps, by Yanis Varoufakis in his account of the Grexit debacle: ‘Adult In The Room’. We need to get back to the underlying issues here, and not return, as the remainers are currently apparently wishing, to a new round of Project Fear (and therefore Project Anti-Fear). We have been there. The democratic instincts of Brits will see through all this and vote accordingly, in particular if they feel driven into another vote by an abject and discredited political class. We can all see that there is something wrong with the status quo in the EU and in the Britain within which we must all negotiate our lives. Given that the UK is perhaps the most mature democracy in Europe, we should not be surprized if Brits of every kind doubt the democratic instincts of the EU and fear how entirely distant its management of our lives is becoming. It should not surprize anyone who knows his/her European political history of the last century if we are developing the sneaking feeling that there are authoritarianism forces emerging that don’t ring true here in the hearts of the people of the UK. Perhaps we should welcome this scepticism as a dose of healthy British self-interest and the quite natural desire to bring everything crashing down if we don’t like it.