Why the Brits Ignored How 'Leave' Rigged the Brexit Referendum

The Leave campaign had its thumb on the scales in the Brexit referendum. Through various devices it was a rigged outcome. Now the national crime agency is investigating some of the culprits. The list of suspects includes a number of shady Brits but also a few prominent Americans and perhaps even a Russian or two.

Last week, the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower, Canadian computer whiz Chris Wylie, put it bluntly:

“The thing is that there was such a huge weight of evidence which has now all been proven,” says Wylie. “Vote Leave broke the law. I can say that out loud now. Vote Leave broke the law. But nothing happened. It’s insane to me that people get more upset by doping in the Olympics, when the consequence of this is an irreversible change to the constitutional settlement of the country.”

It is insane but why, how?

The best answer I've come up with is from an article in the Irish Times from July, 2018. Everyone, the Conservative government, the opposition Labour Party, the media including the vaunted BBC, even the British public simply chose to ignore it. Evidence of criminality and other wrongdoing - mountains of it - doesn't matter. The country is tearing itself apart, its parliament a hopeless shambles, over a rigged vote - and the corruption doesn't matter.

In a stinging report, the Electoral Commission found that Vote Leave had broken the law by failing to include Grimes’s spending in their return. 

The official Leave campaign breached spending limits by almost half a million pounds. That’s a significant amount in British politics, especially in a knife-edge referendum like Brexit. 

Nor is this the first time that the British elections regulator has found serious irregularities in how the campaign to leave the EU was won.
In May, another pro-Brexit campaign, Leave.EU, was fined £70,000, again for breaking electoral law. Leave.EU was bankrolled by Arron Banks, a controversial businessman who emerged from obscurity to become the biggest donor in British political history, giving more than £8 million to pro-Brexit groups. 

Russian ambassador 

The extent and source of Banks’s fortune has been under discussion, as have his political connections. Recent reports revealed that Banks had extensive, previously undisclosed meetings with the Russian ambassador in London in the run-up to the Brexit vote. 

Then, on the night of the referendum former Ukip leader Nigel Farage twice conceded defeat live on British television. When the results came in sterling’s value collapsed, and a number of prominent pro-Brexit hedge fund managers made millions.

So, what has been the response in Britain to all this? A parliamentary inquiry? Politicians on all sides demanding changes to electoral law to protect the democratic processes?

Not exactly. On Tuesday, Conservative MP Nadine Dorries accused the Electoral Commission – an independent regulator – of being biased. 

News that the largest Brexit campaign broke the law has provoked hardly a peep from the party of government. 

The opposition benches have scarcely been much louder. With a few honourable exceptions, Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party has been largely silent, no doubt wary of being seen to oppose “the will of the people”.

...But it is not just Britain’s parliament that has been incapacitated by Brexit. Almost every aspect of British public life is now refracted through the simplistic slogans of June 2016. 

Take the media. Ordinarily news that the largest campaign in British political history had broken the law would be met with headlines excoriating Boris Johnson and Michael Gove – both senior figures in Vote Leave – and calling for full investigations. 

But these are not ordinary times. In a climate where some newspaper front pages have declared judges “the enemies of the people” and called on May to “crush the saboteurs”, there is a marked reluctance to pose awkward questions about how the referendum was won.

Democratic poverty 

Brexit has revealed the poverty of the system that regulates British democracy. The Electoral Commission itself only looked in depth at Vote Leave after internal emails released under Freedom of Information legislation showed that the watchdog was deeply uneasy about the campaign’s spending but was wary of launching a full investigation.

...Remarkably, unlike a general election, the victory in the referendum cannot be challenged in an election court because the vote was not legally binding. 

Brexit means Brexit. But does Brexit mean ignoring mounting evidence that the democratic process was compromised during the 2016 referendum? If that’s the case, then Britain could be living with the consequences of the vote to leave the EU long, long after March 2019.

Bear in mind that everything you've read from this Irish Times report was before the UK's National Crime Agency launched a criminal investigation into the Leave campaign and its officials, an investigation that's still underway.

Add it all up. 1. Brexit was a "non-binding" referendum. There was nothing carved in stone. At best it was a loose effort at testing the waters. By virtue of being non-binding there must have been many people who simply gave voting a pass, content to leave the issue to parliament. 2. Evidence surfaced of financial chicanery by the Leave campaign that was confirmed by the country's Electoral Commission. 3. Evidence emerged of the covert role played by an American-owned Cambridge Analytica, a company developed to manipulate public opinion for electoral purposes.  A company that was owned by American far right billionaire, Robert Mercer, and directed by noneother than Steve Bannon. A company that was exposed by hidden camera video promising to rig an African election. A company that was thrown into liquidation quickly upon being exposed. 4. With all this evidence of corruption, Leave won the non-binding referendum by a very narrow, 52-48 margin, hardly a conclusive result. Nobody went to the polling station believing such a result could plunge Britain into a deal that even today cannot be defined that could plunge the UK and the EU into a no-deal "hard Brexit."

Despite all of these problems, 1, 2, 3, and 4 above, the Tories treated this dodgy result as a binding obligation to tear the UK out of the European Union and the opposition Labour leader and his caucus went along with it.

Hard as this is to believe, nobody in Britain is willing to defend the country's democracy and its institutions. They would rather sweep the dirt under the carpet and get on with leaving the European Union, even if that wrecks their economy.

Dippers, Beware of a Left Wing Insurgency

Britain's Labour Party may offer a cautionary tale for today's Blairified New Democrats.  Layton and Mulcair have been Harper's handmaidens in His quest to shift Canada's political centre far to the Right.  In fairness, the Libs have done their share of the heavy lifting too, transforming the party of Laurier, St. Laurent, Pearson and Trudeau (the real one) into the Conservative-Lites.

It's probably less seismic for the Libs than the New Dems, the former "principled" party, the "conscience of Parliament."  However, like their Labour colleagues before them, the abandonment of the Left has been accepted as the price of power.  And how has that worked out for the Brits?

Blair, with his lap dog support of America, his lies and his illegal war, was Labour's wrecking ball. The party found no salvation in Blair's successor, Brown, leaving the way clear for the Conservatives to come to power.  Labour's Ed Milliband tried to revive his party's fortunes but, in a surprise election outcome, David Cameron scored a solid majority win.

Milliband stepped down and Labour licked its wounds, hoping a new leader somewhat to the Right of Milliband would restore the party to its former glory. Instead, the Cameron victory laid the groundwork for a civil war in the Labour ranks led by dark horse, Jeremy Corbyn.

His lead in constituency nominations, the flow of endorsements from union executives, the jumpy responses of rival campaigns, the rising panic among many Labour MPs and the enthusiasm he is generating at the leadership hustings increasingly suggest that Jeremy Corbyn has become the candidate to beat. A man whose previous highest public office was chairman of the Haringey council planning committee three decades ago might, in six weeks’ time, be leader of the opposition and Labour’s putative candidate for prime minister. With hindsight, the surprise is that we have been surprised. We should have seen this coming. The stresses induced by austerity and a revolt against political elites have been splitting the left all over Europe. From Greece to Spain to Germany, the traditional governing parties of the centre-left are being challenged by insurgent populist movements from the redder end of the spectrum. In the case of Greece, the old order has been supplanted by the new, though not with positive results for that unhappy country.

...Since its birth, British Labour has been a rainbow coalition of socialists, social democrats and social liberals. It has been a church broad enough to encompass those on the most leftwing side of the aisle who think there is a lot to admire about the thinking of Karl Marx to people on the far side of the other aisle who might call themselves liberal centrists or even Christian democrats if they were in a different country. The Labour church has a history of doing the splits. It did so in the 1930s. Again in the 1950s. And again in the 1980s. You could almost say we were due for one.

...Those with a vote in the contest who are still unsure which Labour party they should be backing have been provided with a clarifying test by Dave Ward, the general secretary of the Communication Workers Union. Announcing the CWU’s endorsement of the MP for Islington North, Mr Ward declared that the union’s executive had acted on medical advice: “There is a virus within the Labour party and Jeremy Corbyn is the antidote.” “The virus” being the Blairites.

...The big truth that is being exposed by this battle is that Labour is really two parties and they can no longer stand each other’s company. The social democrats despair that those to the left always pull Labour into suicidally unelectable positions from which it takes years to recover before the party sees power again. The socialists rage that the pragmatists make so many compromises in the pursuit of power that it ends up not being worth it. Really, they’d be happier if they could go their separate ways. Then the electorate could choose between an offer from the centre-left and one from further left.

A Timely Scottish Warning for the New Democrats

There's a price you pay for abandoning the Left.  The latest party to learn that lesson is Scotland's Labour Party.  The "Blairification" of the Labour Party has sent a good part of Labour's base in Scotland over to the SNP.

Scottish Labour is suffering from a ...to some extent self-inflicted – process of attrition. The process began in the mid-1990s, as Blair and Brown exchanged Labour's post-war interventionism for a programme of liberalised markets and finance-led growth. In response, Salmond carefully manoeuvred the SNP into the vacant left-of-centre space. The strategy worked. Research from the period confirms that Scots started to view the SNP as a progressive alternative to Blairism.

The first big break came at the 2003 Holyrood election: Labour lost 250,000 constituency and 225,000 list votes, the single biggest fall in its vote share at any point over the devolutionary era. Left-leaning voters – notably Catholics, trade unionists and public sectors – bled-away from Labour, moving first towards smaller, more radical parties such as the Greens and the SSP, and then towards the SNP, resulting in ever-larger electoral gains for Salmond.

The decisive rupture occurred last year, when traditional Labour strongholds such as Glasgow, North Lanarkshire and Dundee rejected the party line and voted in favour of independence. Appalled by the flaccid conservatism of the Better Together campaign, large numbers of working-class Scots (although by no means all) embraced constitutional radicalism. On 18 September, Scottish Labour won the referendum and saved the Union, but it did so at the cost of Labour Scotland.

The only appropriate term for what is happening to Scottish Labour is "Pasokification". Just as Greek voters abandoned PASOK, the established party of Greek social democracy, for Syriza, so Scottish voters are abandoning Labour for the SNP (albeit more gradually and under less acute conditions). Clearly, neither Salmond nor Sturgeon is Alexis Tsipras, and the current Scottish government can be frustratingly cautious in its approach to reform. But the overarching trend is unmistakable: in Scotland, the old left hegemony is breaking down and a new one forming in its place.

So play silly bugger centrist all you like, Mulcair, but keep an eye over your shoulder - the left one.