Remember: it's austerity, not Europe, that broke Britain

[Denzil_DC]

It is hard to credit Johnson’s appeal to ‘left-behind’ voters when it was his party that chose to leave them behind

In 1970 the prime minister, Harold Wilson, called a general election he expected to win and lost. In the 1974 “who governs Britain?” election, called by prime minister Edward Heath, opposition leader Wilson expected to lose – and won.

Heath had successfully negotiated the UK’s entry to the European Economic Community in 1973, in which venture premiers Harold Macmillan (in 1963) and Wilson (in 1967) had failed. In 1974 Wilson was faced with a Labour party divided on the European question – plus ça change – and successfully went over the heads of his party to win a referendum in 1975, with a majority of two to one in favour of what we would now call Remain.

The politicians of those days were a different breed. Wilson was a skilled strategist and tactician. Whether or not David Cameron – less serious, and essentially a public relations man – was consciously trying to emulate Wilson (in going over the heads of his Eurosceptical wing, John Major’s “bastards”) I have no idea. But he made a real mess of it, and we are where we are: not to put too fine a point on it, we are the laughing stock of the world, and the British polity is up the creek.

As that great New York Times commentator Roger Cohen put it recently: “Britain is stuck … The fantasy voted for in 2016 is not the reality of 2019 … Democracies are exercises in constant reassessment. The core reason nobody has been able to deliver Brexit is it makes no sense.”

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/nov/03/austerity-not-europe-broke-britain-left-behind-voters