Introduction
Look through the National Security Strategy and Strategic Defence and Security Review of 2015 and you see a recurring theme, a central presumption of Britains role in the world that has permeated foreign policy through the whole post-war period. Britains moral purpose, its sense of identity, is to be a force for stability in the world.
Not any more.
On 23rd June 2016, the UK voted to cast aside the central international relationship of its day-to-day politics, some forty-three years after it first signed up to pool sovereignty with the Common Market.
Seismic political change doesnt happen very often and it takes a long time to work out its true significance. We are still in the foothills of knowing the full impact of the 2008 Banking Crisis. Each year, each month, another ripple effect is revealed and we get a better idea of the true scale of the original events.
So with 23rd June.
I write this in Berlin as Theresa May makes her first overseas visit as Prime Minister to meet Chancellor Merkel. A conversation now begins on what Britain wants to become post Brexit, with some bafflement in Germany that we hadnt worked that out before we voted to leave the EU.
The conversation in liberal circles rampant in the UK in recent weeks has been much more focused on what we have left behind. Since the vote, theres been a mournful threnody of pain from those who wish we were staying in. Paul Theroux once wrote: Travel is only glamorous in retrospect. The same, it has seemed in recent weeks, could be true of EU membership. Theres been an outpouring of grief for something which few had previously shown a deep attachment. But some deep flaws in the international club we have left helped to make this moment possible.
They were vivid and clear to Dominic Cummings, the guiding force behind the Vote Leave campaign, when I spoke to him back in December 2015 while we were sitting having coffee on the terrace of St Ermins Hotel in Westminster. Mr Cummings told me that Michael Gove would probably never betray his friend David Cameron and come over to the Leave side as he placed too much attachment to loyalty. It was at this exact location 7 months later that Boris Johnson would crash out of the leadership contest to succeed David Cameron after Michael Gove decided he wasnt going to run his campaign after all but was going to run himself as candidate.
Dominic Cummings central point back in late 2015 was that in the 1970s Europe was something to aspire to, a better performing economy and a more stable polity. It was the shiny, enviable BMW to the UKs rusting and spluttering British Leyland rust-heap. Now, he said, a Briton looking across the Channel would see a continent in a mess. The Eurozone crisis wasnt at its most febrile, but its inherent problems had been patched up and not fixed. Austerity was building resentment and feeding populism in southern Europe. The refugee crisis spurred by the Syrian tragedy had shown Europe had precious little outer-border security and was open to massive waves of people in search of a better life.
The third creation of the EU, the Single Market, was in better condition, but what an intangible benefit to set against the very audible creaking failure of its other two great pieces of supranational machinery. There had never been a better time to take on the Leviathan, Mr Cummings thought.
Britons didnt seek out the role of being a destabilising force in the world but, it seems, they had grown tired and frustrated with the constraints of looking outwards. In June 2016, something snapped. The voters, just over half of them at least, lashed out against the prevailing view of the establishment, discarded its warnings and the advice of allies from the United States to Germany, and chose a very different direction. Theresa May is here in Germany in the second week of her premiership, still exploring what it is that the British people were trying to say and what solutions can unite the two halves of a deeply divided Britain. On my way out here yesterday, a senior Whitehall official told me that, right now, the Brexit plan is a completely blank sheet of paper. No wonder Chancellor Merkel acknowledged in the meeting with Mrs May that Britain might need some time to sort itself out.
Reporting for Channel 4 News, I glimpsed some of the tensions that exploded in that referendum vote. I visited areas dominated by white, working-class citizens where Remain voters were an endangered species. Many who turned out to vote in these communities were not regular voters. But on June 23rd, they made the effort and they made the difference, driven to the polling stations by anger, a sense of injustice, grievance.
Recalling the Suez Crisis many years later, Lord Franks said: It was like a flash of lightening on a dark night. What it did was to light up an unfamiliar landscape everything was different from then on a great many people in Britain perceived at that point of time that what they might have thought before was no longer valid. The EU Referendum was a similar flash of light.
On the surface, just a year before, the British electorate was reverting to type in the general election, doing what it has so often done, electing a Tory majority government. But only 24% of the total eligible electorate voted for the Tories. Beneath the surface things were stirring, core votes were fracturing, new political forces were emerging and disenchantment was growing.
On the morning of 16th June, Nigel Farage stood in front of a poster showing refugees, mainly Muslims, walking through Slovenia, most probably heading for Germany. The caption on the poster was: Breaking Point. It stoked the fires of anger over immigration and doused a bit of petrol on them for good measure. The specific impact this poster had has been challenged by Nigel Farage amongst others. It was only a short while in the headlines before news of the murder of Jo Cox MP, later that same day, supplanted it. But it captured a campaign that seemed to be going outside the normal rules of political exchange and importing a more aggressive rhetoric into mainstream British politics than we had known. Two parts of the country were shouting over each other with growing rage and utter incomprehension as Britain was approaching a breaking point with Europe and something was cracking inside the nation itself.
