Why Project Sneer was doomed to be rejected
Brits voted with common sense and courage this time around
I’VE never felt more proud to be British. Think of the sheer weight of the forces lined up to keep us in the EU.
All the main parties. The CBI, the TUC and virtually every Brussels-funded trade association or lobby group.
Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley and the other megabanks and multi-nationals.
Every foreign leader who owed David Cameron a favour.
Think of the threats and the scare stories: recession, unemployment, environmental disaster, World War Three, “the end of Western civilization”.
How did British voters react? With calm, common sense and courage.
We are not impressed by threats of Armageddon.
Nor are we surprised when one group of tax-free international bureaucrats supports another.
The more shrill the Remainers became, the sillier they sounded. We know when we’re being taken for fools.
We sensed what lay behind these horror stories.
We were being patronised. We were supposed to defer to the experts.
Virtually every week, a letter would appear in one of the broadsheets signed by a collection of hoary-headed grandees: industrialists one week, green activists the next, actors the next.
The message was always the same: “Little people! We’re terribly important, and we’re ordering you to vote Remain!” It wasn’t Project Fear so much as Project Sneer.
Well, we saw what voters thought of that when the first big Leave tally was declared in Sunderland.
The cheers from the Vote Leave HQ, where I watched the results, could probably be heard in Sunderland.
It’s worth taking a moment to salute the team who delivered yesterday’s victory.
Put together by Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, these young people have, in many cases, worked solidly since Christmas without so much as a weekend off.
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When they started, Leave was 20 points behind in the polls.
But they stuck to a simple message: that the British people should be able to control their own affairs.
It’s amazing how often that message was deliberately distorted.
Listening to the other side, you’d think that the Leave campaign was anti-foreigner or anti-immigrant.
What Remainers didn’t, and still don’t, understand is that it was precisely this snotty attitude that pushed many waverers into backing Leave.
I have spent the past seven months campaigning virtually full-time.
Indeed, I have been working towards yesterday’s vote since 1990 when, as a 19-year-old, I promised myself that I would make British independence my life’s work.
I’ve spent a lot of time with Leave supporters.
Enough time, certainly, to know how absurd the other side’s caricature is.
Yes, Leavers are patriotic. Yes, we believe in Britain.
But we’re not anti-Europe. We just want to be able to run our own affairs.
A century ago, the poet and theologian G.K. Chesterton wrote some eerily apt words about his countrymen.
We hear men speaking for us of new laws strong and sweet,
Yet is there no man speaketh as we speak in the street.
Smile at us, pay us, pass us. But do not quite forget.
For we are the people of England; and we have not spoken yet.
Yesterday, we finally spoke.
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