There is an article on the Brexit Central website (HERE) that deserves to be awarded some sort of prize for sheer chutzpah. It has the title: We knew what we were voting for in June 2016 - the Remain campaign made it clear. Stuart Coster, described as a democracy campaigner who previously co-founded the cross-party People’s Pledge campaign for an EU referendum, argues that leave voters knew what they voted for because the Remain campaign were absolutely clear about the consequences. This is logic so tortured and broken it would agree to anything.
What the writer is effectively saying is that when remainers warned about leaving the single market and the customs union, leavers could dismiss it as scaremongering (as Daniel Hannan and plenty of others did) but now claim it wasn't scaremongering at all and therefore voters knew what they were voting for!
This is stunning and turns the whole debate on its head. He quotes:
"Other leading Remain backers reinforced the point. A high-profile campaign press statement fear-mongered about what would occur “if we move to the World Trade Organisation trading rules” and quoted former chancellor Alistair Darling stating that “those wanting to leave the EU want to pull Britain out of the Single Market, which would mean introducing tariffs and barriers to our trade”.
"Even the then Prime Minister David Cameron was crystal clear, telling BBC1’sAndrew Marr Show that “What the British public will be voting for is to leave the EU and leave the Single Market”, which can have left very few in doubt about the Government’s intentions, were Leave to win".
So he concludes:
"That a majority voted Leave anyway, in the face of this fearsome onslaught, makes it plainly perverse for Stronger In’s official successors, Open Britain and its People’s Vote campaign, to now turn around and claim that no-one voted with quitting the Single Market in mind".
But what he fails to point out is that many high profile Brexiteers, faced with what these remain backers were saying, accused them of "scaremongering" or in Coster's case, "fear-mongering".
Witness this from Daniel Hannan on Channel 4 News before the referendum:
"First of all, absolutely nobody is suggesting we would give up our position in the free market in Europe"
And in case there was any doubt about what he meant, with Evan Davies on Newsnight just after the referendum:
"The idea of staying within a Common Market but outside the political integration, I think that is feasible".
And straight from the horse's mouth on You Tube (HERE) and on Newsnight at Huffington Post (HERE). It's tails I win heads you lose stuff isn't it?
If you warn someone against jumping off a cliff, which they think is just scaremongering, and they later go ahead with it, and it turns out disastrously, you assume they knew it was going to be disastrous and were perfectly happy to suffer multiple life threatening injuries. The last thing you would imagine is that they might have made a mistake in dismissing the warnings. Well, you wouldn't would you?
