Peter North is the rabble-rousing son of Dr Richard North. I am sure you will recall they were both tireless advocates of Brexit. The opinionated father was once a UKIP MEP and acted as their research director in the European Parliament. His son is anarchic and describes himself on Twitter as a professional dolphin exterminator. He tweets as @peternorth303. Pre December 2021 Dr North had a blog, EUreferendum.com which was required reading for anybody on either side of the debate, but both he and his son (and daughter I believe) have abandoned that and started a new family business in stoking anger at Turbulent Times. I think am bound to say the times perhaps wouldn’t have been so turbulent if they hadn’t helped to make them so.
I mention all of this because Peter tweeted on Sunday basically claiming that (a) Brexit hasn’t had any impact (“it’s done bugger all”) and (b) it wasn’t the real problem anyway. Peter says, without any self-reflection or reference to his family’s part in it: “We are locked in a decline spiral, primarily because of our moribund political class. A trend that existed well before Brexit, and in fact caused it, and is accelerating by the day.”
Here it is:
Horsehit. The dismal truth about Brexit, is that it's done bugger all. Most people can't name one thing outside of work that has changed as a result of Brexit. The economy has proven stubbornly resilient to shocks, including Covid lockdowns, defying all the doomsayers - myself… https://t.co/FpBcmHDanK
— Pete North (@PeteNorth303) February 4, 2024
The “moribund political class” he speaks of is the one he and his old man thought (and still think) should have unrestrained power over this country. And is that a Freudian slip when he says our spiral of decline is "accelerating by the day." If he ever spent a millisecond in a bit of introspection he might want to consider Brexit and his own role in it.
As for most people being unable to name one thing outside of work that has changed as a result of Brexit, I suggest he has a look at the Yorkshire Bylines' Davis Downside Dossier.
Peter is not alone, I also had a look at Turbulent Times for the first time in years. Dr North has his followers no doubt but his opinions aren’t as popular as they were.
They both seem to be exhibiting the same sort of reaction to Brexit’s inevitable aftermath as various other leading Brexiteers, not necessarily that it hasn’t been done properly, although that is certainly part of it, but that somehow our present unhappy state is exactly what they have spent years campaigning for.
On Sunday the father wrote a post on a familiar theme (for him): Brexit: the shallowness of debate.
He has always portrayed himself as intellectually above mere mortals, watching us with barely disguised impatience and disdain for speaking about things we don't really understand and it's reassuring to see he hasn't changed a bit. In fact, this whole idea that Brexit is being debated at a shallow level is a constant one with him and has been ever since he started blogging. Only Dr North is privy to the whole truth on Brexit - and everything else it seems.
His effort on Sunday was a tour de force of muddled thinking mixed with his usual arrogance and claim to omnipotence.
He lays into Bill Cash for suggesting that the "heart of the referendum was the simple question of who governs us, reflecting the Vote Leave slogan, enjoining us to 'take back control'." North argues that our own government isn't actually doing very much controlling. In passing he says compared to Westminster the EU is a "beacon of transparency." Quite something, eh?
He now wants to quit the ECHR and says: "There will be no significant legislative autonomy until we sweep away the accumulation of international agreements and redefine our relations with the rest of the world. To that end, Brexit is the start of a long process – not the end." God help us all.
Taking aim at remainers he attacks The Observer for a recent piece about Brexit which claimed that it was perhaps the most dishonest political movement this country has ever seen. He says all the paper can remember is the Vote Leave mantra, which was "disavowed by a huge number of grassroots activists who found it embarrassing and unhelpful. Many refused to touch the Vote Leave literature, or deliver its leaflets, and went about quietly arguing their own case." He goes on:
"The thesis here is that, In the run-up to the 2016 referendum, Conservative campaigners sold Brexit as the answer to all of the country’s problems. The paper’s interpretation of that narrative is that campaigners claimed that leaving the EU would transform the UK’s economic prospects, making us all richer.
"While the media watched the visible campaign – from a largely London perspective – most of the real campaigning was being carried out, away from the spotlights, at grassroots level, on the blogs and social media, unnoticed and unremarked."
Sad isn't it? It appears he wants to take personal credit for Brexit while rejecting all the lies that were actually responsible for winning the referendum.
I think while not all of our problems can be traced to Brexit - and to an extent, Peter is right about our political class and relative decline - the sheer amount of time spent on Brexit over the last eight years has prevented any of our real problems being addressed. Northern Ireland is a classic example.
Amazingly, Dr North hails this as a good thing:
"The absence of the pressure continually to engage in European politics, and the release of the huge amount of ministerial bandwidth that such engagement would otherwise absorb, is in fact one of the great – if unrecognised – benefits of Brexit."
None of it even offers the slightest hint at the huge shift in public opinion on Brexit and nowhere does he concede he is now on the wrong side of the argument. The North's star is on the wane.
