Interesting email from the Whig Party!
The Whig Party statement on the EU referendum
The outcome of the EU referendum was not the fault of Nigel Farage, or Boris Johnson, or the 17.4 million people who voted Leave, or the 12.9 million registered voters who didn’t vote at all on Thursday. It certainly wasn’t Jeremy Corbyn’s fault. It was the fault exclusively of David Cameron. This was Mr Cameron’s referendum, and he blew it.
The referendum was lost long before Mr Cameron announced the date of the referendum on 20th February. His renegotiation with the European Council was a disaster, and it was obvious that the superficial ‘deal’ he finally secured on 19th February fell far short of what he had promised in his 2013 Bloomberg and 2014 JCB speeches. He relied on non-Tory voters to go out and vote to endorse a status quo that much of his own party opposed. That was his first error. Mr Cameron’s decision to be the public face of the Remain campaign was his second error – he is blind to just how unpopular he and George Osborne really are. His third error was to trust in ‘Britain Stronger in Europe’, a campaign group run by New Labour exiles, who ran a campaign based on discredited New Labour tactics.
All of this was clear by the middle of January. A referendum on Europe might have been an enlightening conversation about the kind of country we want to be, and the kind of future we want to build for ourselves, but that wasn’t the referendum that Mr Cameron offered. Mr Cameron’s referendum could only ever become a Tory civil war, with himself personally identified with ‘Remain’, and dependent on the likes of Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, and Jack Straw’s son to deliver a veneer of bipartisanship. All ‘Leave’ had to do to win was to fan the flames of anti-immigrant, anti-Europe, and anti-Establishment sentiment that the popular press have been stoking since 2008.
Mr Cameron thought he could blag this referendum in the way he had blagged his 2005 leadership election, the 2014 Scottish referendum, and the 2015 General Election. But his luck ran out, and his referendum exposed and inflamed terrible divisions in our society – divisions that a Prime Minister should seek to contain and heal. The referendum set young against old, immigrants against the indigenous working class, Scotland against England, Nationalists against Unionists, the cities against the regions. And for what?
The outcome is that an MP is dead, Farage has been free to preach hate, and the electorate has voted for Brexit. The damage that this referendum has caused will take years to resolve, even if the UK does not actually, in the end, leave the European Union. The referendum has also revealed the deep malaise in British political life. The Tory and Labour parties are divided and dysfunctional, the Lib Dems are condemned to irrelevance, and the SNP are determined to partition our country. Meanwhile Ukip and the far right have been handed a massive victory that Mr Cameron could easily have denied them by not holding his wretched referendum in the first place.
Mr Cameron is one of the many victims of his own referendum, and when he steps down he will leave the country in a worse condition than it was when he became Prime Minister. The Whig Party was refounded in 2014 in response to the Coalition government and an ineffective Labour Opposition under Ed Miliband. Now that the Tories and Labour are both incapable of responsible government or Opposition, we believe there is an even greater need for an independent political voice to argue for free markets and individual liberty. The Whig Party remains pro-EU and pro-immigration, and we offer a home to people who want to stand for election against the bitterness that Mr Cameron’s referendum has aggravated in our United Kingdom.