“Those who voted ‘leave’ are often dismissed as dim or racist. But now some of Britain’s top academics and thinkers — from the left and right — have banded together to put the positive political and economic case for independence
Brexit supporters are overeducated toffs who dream of ruling the waves and biffing Johnny Foreigner. Or they are racist proles too dim to see through the lies of the Brexit campaign. Either way, they have one thing in common — they are all, every one of them, as thick as the slowest-witted plant in your garden.
That link between low IQ and a Brexit vote is now an entrenched ideology among many, if not most, remainers. You hear it at dinner parties, you see it on television, you read it in frothing newspaper columns and you can detect it in the fear of professional or private exposure among many “leave” voters.
But, from today, Brexiteers can come out of the closet and hold their heads high. They will know that they have the support of Nigel Biggar, professor of theology at Oxford; Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6; David Abulafia, professor of history at Cambridge; and Sir Noel Malcolm of All Souls, Oxford. In fact, they will have the support of 37 of the brightest people — both from the left and the right — in the land. And soon there will be many more of them.
The list is due to appear because a pair of Cambridge academics, one leftish, one rightish, were sick of the vilification of Brexiteers, the distortions of the remainers and of being “deluged with one-sided propaganda”. In a calm, professional egghead sort of way, they’re mad as hell, and they’re not going to take it any more. “I thought of it during one of those terribly pessimistic weeks,” says the economist Graham Gudgin, of the Judge Business School at Cambridge, “when Theresa May wasn’t going to last until teatime and there was definitely going to be a second referendum. Together we thought, ‘Gosh, we ought to be better organised than at the last referendum.’”
“It was,” says Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history at Cambridge, “the whole tide of propaganda about how awful everything was, how awful everything was going to be, and we didn’t believe this. We realised quite a lot of other people didn’t believe it either.”
They are dismayed by the contempt for Brexiteers shown by remainers. “Graham and I have working-class or lower middle-class backgrounds,” says Tombs. “I do feel you just can’t write off a large part of the population as being unworthy of consideration.”
Together they have designed a website — briefingsforbrexit.com — that will go live in the next few days. The mission statement makes it clear this is an assault on the too-thick-to-vote theory of Brexit. By word of mouth the news got out and, without a word of publicity, they suddenly found they had a pantheon of super-smart supporters. “I’ve been surprised by how many people found out about it and came on board quickly,” says Gudgin. “We would not have known about them unless we set this up.”
They are fully independent: the website is the only cost, and Gudgin paid for that. The anti-Brexit campaign is not independent; it has just received £400,000 from the financier George Soros. “[His] support for the pro-remain campaign shows there is a lot of big money behind hardline remainers, whose interests have little to do with the interests of the country as a whole,” says Tombs. “It shows that independent, self-funded initiatives like ours are all the more important. The other important news is the selective leaking of unsourced statistics; this shows again how much expert scrutiny is needed.”
Sadly, some Brexiteer academics were afraid to join Briefings for Brexit. “They said, ‘I’d love to be part of your group but I haven’t got a proper job yet and I probably won’t if I’m identified.’”
“One of our contributors said he was told by a younger pro-Brexit colleague that his professor had told him that people who voted Brexit were the sort of people who sent his relatives to concentration camps,” says Gudgin.
For the same reason, some of the authors of essays on the site will be anonymous. Tombs says he had one pro-Brexit student who did not dare to say anything to her supervisor because he claimed all Brexiteers were racists. “I thought one thing we academics were paid to do was help explain things to people, but universities have become so simple-minded about this.”
Also self-interested. Tombs points out that universities get a lot of money from the EU, adding: “So many of our colleagues had wrongly taken a corporatist, selfish and narrow view.”
Gudgin and Tombs are an odd couple. Gudgin has the air of a former fast bowler, tall and lanky with a loose suit and tie; Tombs looks like an opening batsman, more buttoned-up, a continental intellectual. Gudgin votes Labour and has some time for Jeremy Corbyn; Tombs voted Liberal Democrat last time around and Tory before that. Gudgin is the economic technician, Tombs the big-picture historical analyst. Both are old enough to have voted remain in the 1975 referendum. Both did so on the basis they were voting for a free trade area. What they got was a nascent superstate hell-bent on absorbing all power into its own bureaucracy.
“To every crisis that comes along, the answer is always more centralisation, never less,” says Tombs.
Gudgin’s anger was driven primarily by economic distortions. At the time of the referendum there were two Treasury reports. The first was short term. It forecast that a vote for Brexit would produce an instant recession; in fact, the only thing that was instant was the refutation of the thesis by reality; we continued to have comfortable growth. The glaring flaw in the short-term report was a figure plucked out of the air. The Treasury wonks simply assumed the loss of business confidence would be 50% of the loss of confidence during the banking crisis. This was ridiculously high.
“It looks like most of the errors in the short-term report have been repeated in last week’s report from Dexeu [Department for Exiting the European Union],” says Gudgin. This was a leaked paper from the Brexit secretary David Davis’s Dexeu showing massive falls in growth in most regions of the UK. It did not show who had done the work or how it was done; it is uncheckable and, therefore, irrelevant in academic terms. In any case, Gudgin says, the figures are ludicrous.
The second report at the time of the referendum made long-term forecasts, and it has proved more enduring. It was very pessimistic. Gudgin says it is still the source of most remainer claims by television pundits and Europhile politicians. Tombs agrees: “The original paper has kind of coloured the whole debate.”
But Gudgin and a team of four economists — three of them remainers — proved its assumptions wrong back in 2016. They tried to organise a meeting but the Treasury “absolutely refused to meet”. They wrote letters to the Financial Times, but they were not published.
The errors were important but, perhaps, too technical to grasp. One showed the Treasury wonks had failed to take account of the fact that Britain is almost the only EU state that has more trade outside the EU than inside. This distorted downwards the forecast on trade. “They calculated the amount of extra exports to EU countries due to being an EU member, but took an average across all EU members rather than measuring the specific effect for the UK,” says Gudgin. “They then assumed all the gains would be lost on leaving and that no replacement exports would occur via new free-trade agreements. These are extreme assumptions and led the Treasury to an exaggerated estimate of the impact of Brexit.”
The other assumed a close correlation between growth and productivity, but the assumption was based on just two papers that found a link in emerging economies. There was no link in developed economies. Were these errors, I ask Gudgin, or deliberate massaging of the numbers? He says there are issues of civil service integrity and of scientific “sins”.
About the two reports at the time of the referendum, he says: “I was told not to be naive. The chancellor was George Osborne, and he was strongly anti-Brexit. The civil servants were asked to do a major report. What other conclusion could they come to?”
Gudgin, however, does not agree with the strong, ideological Brexiteers on the free-market right when they claim there will be an economic boom arising from our ability to trade freely without EU restrictions. By 2030, he predicts a Brexit fall in GDP growth of about a quarter of 1%, but no effect whatsoever on the much more important GDP per capita — the effect on us individually. But still the voices of Brexit disaster have the microphone. “Nobody who appears on the BBC and says ‘This is going to be a catastrophe’ is ever asked what their view is based on,” says Gudgin.
Tombs’s analysis is more political. A celebrated historian of France, in 2014 he published The English and Their History. It was, among many other things, a rejection of the postwar declinist narrative that has dominated the lives of three generations. “By the standards of humanity as a whole,” he wrote, “England over the centuries has been among the richest, safest and best-governed places on earth, as periodical influxes of people testify. Its living standards in the 14th century were higher than much of the world in the 20th. We who have lived in England since 1945 have been among the luckiest people in the existence of Homo sapiens: rich, peaceful and healthy.”
The postwar, post-imperial decline of Britain — one of the driving forces behind our decision to join the EU — is an illusion. Yet in the 1960s and 1970s it was treated as established fact. When we joined the EU (then the EEC) in 1973 it was in a state of panic. Britain, it was said, was the Titanic and Europe our lifeboat.
“I think, speaking as a historian and as a patriot, that we were taken into the EU on a misunderstanding of our situation,” says Tombs. “It would have been better in the 1960s and 1970s to continue to ask for a free trade agreement. I don’t think most people understood the full implications of what we were signing up to politically.”
Part of that illusion was economic, the belief that growth in the EEC was outstripping ours. In fact that growth rate ground to a halt soon after we joined because it was based on a quarter-century of recovery from the Second World War. We were actually doing rather better than Europe. “We looked at the record of growth in per capita GDP since 1952,” says Gudgin, “and growth was better before we joined the EU than after.”
Politically, Tombs now sees the EU as imperilled by its own mania for centralisation. He had hesitated to vote “leave” because he foresaw the chaos among politicians and the civil servants that would ensue. “But the reason I eventually voted to leave was because I think the EU is either going to break up, and break up very badly, or at least dissolve into a dysfunctional confederation of non-co-operative members, or it will become — and France’s President Emmanuel Macron has stated this very clearly, to his credit — much more centralised, and not through conventional politics. The European parliament is not the way in which it could work or, indeed, is being envisaged to work. It will become a much more bureaucratic system in which power is exercised through banks and government bureaucracies, not through a normal process of political discussion.
“We’ve seen how that works in Italy and Greece: a political choice is defeated by sheer weight of economic pressure — if you do this, your currency or economy will collapse. I don’t think that would last and I don’t see how it could have a good end. I don’t think we either want to be, or ought to be, a party to that.”
Gudgin adds — and the left should pay attention — that a fully united Europe would have a hopelessly poor social security system as the Germans and others would not be willing to support welfare for the Greeks and southern Italians.
Both despised the way each side conducted the referendum campaign and how lies and manipulation contributed to the current rancorous social and political divisions. The dishonesty left a persistent residue of anger and mutual contempt that poisons and obscures debate.
So there you have it. A Brexit vote is not a symptom of low IQ any more than it is of racism. Brexiteers should wave the list of names on briefingsforbrexit.com the next time remainers sneer at them.
On a personal note, I voted to remain, having been unsure to the last minute. I disbelieved the economic arguments; I thought them rigged. I just believed that, maybe, the EU could ensure peace in Europe for another generation. Briefings for Brexit has knocked that one down. Tombs points out that Nato and nuclear weapons have done more to keep the peace than the EU, and a paper on the site will show that the EU has stirred up more wars than it can ever have stopped.
“Instead of peaceful integration,” writes Philip Cunliffe, a senior lecturer in international conflict at Kent University, “the eastward expansion of the EU has disproved its claim to reunify the Continent and shattered its legitimacy as a peacemaker.”
In a new referendum I would vote “leave”. It’s the smart option.
It’s right to leave: the great minds thinking alike
ECONOMISTS
Dr Graham Gudgin, Judge Business School, Cambridge
Paul Ormerod, visiting professor at University College London
PHILOSOPHERS/THEORISTS
Nigel Biggar, regius professor of moral and pastoral theology, Oxford
Paul Elbourne, professor of the philosophy of language, Oxford
Dr Tom Simpson, associate professor of philosophy and public policy, Blavatnik school of government, Oxford
LAWYERS
Sir Richard Aikens, QC, former member of the Court
of Appeal
Baroness (Ruth) Deech, former chairwoman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority
Dr Richard Ekins, associate professor in law, Oxford
Carol Harlow, QC, emeritus professor of law, London School of Economics (LSE)
John Tasioulas, professor of politics, philosophy and law at the Dickson Poon School of Law, King’s College London
Guglielmo Verdirame, professor of international law, King’s College London
FOREIGN POLICY/DIPLOMACY/DEFENCE
Dr Philip Cunliffe, senior lecturer in international conflict, University of Kent
Sir Richard Dearlove, former head of MI6
John Forsyth, former member of the council of the Royal Institute for International Affairs
Dr Lee Jones, reader in international politics, Queen Mary University of London
Sir Peter Marshall, formerly deputy secretary-general of the Commonwealth
Gwythian Prins, emeritus research professor at the LSE
Dr Philip Towle, emeritus reader in international relations, Cambridge
Sir Andrew Wood, former ambassador to Russia and a fellow at Chatham House
SOCIAL POLICY
David Coleman, emeritus professor of demography, Oxford
Jonathan Rutherford, emeritus professor of cultural studies, Middlesex University
Dr Joanna Williams, author/academic
PSYCHOLOGY
Dr Terri Apter, former senior tutor, Newnham College, Cambridge
Robin Dunbar, emeritus professor of evolutionary psychology, Oxford
BUSINESS
Alexander Darwall, Jupiter Asset Management
Sir Paul Marshall, chairman of ARK Schools
Rory Maw, Bursar of Magdalen College, Oxford
Dame Helena Morrissey, Legal & General Investment Management
Edmund Truell, chairman Disruptive Capital Finance
David Abulafia, professor of Mediterranean history, Cambridge
Sir Noel Malcolm, fellow of All Souls College, Oxford
Dr Daniel Robinson, fellow of Magdalen College, Oxford
Dr Peter Sarris, reader in late Roman, medieval and Byzantine studies, Cambridge
Robert Tombs, emeritus professor of French history, Cambridge
NATURAL SCIENCES
Dr Ian Winter, senior lecturer in the department of physiology, development and neuroscience, Cambridge
POLITICAL SCIENCES AND GOVERNMENT
Lord (Maurice) Glasman, Labour peer and director of the Common Good Foundation
Robert J Jackson, professor at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada, and emeritus professor at the University of Redlands, California
Richard Tuck, professor of government, Harvard University”
In Ireland:
FDI here is global and FDI won’t leave because of Brexit alone again contrary to claims of the contrary.
We need Irexit.
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