Cummings ran Vote Leave, and during the referendum campaign said that senior figures in the ERG had
been too busy “obsessing over the 8.10 slot on the Today programme” or “shooting, skiing or chasing girls
to do any actual work”.
Remainers don’t like the ERG, and so these words, now spiked with the new reality that they’d been said by
the No 10 chief of staff, caused no shortage of delight. But Remainers might find they have a lot more in
common with the ERG than they do with Cummings.
Fundamentally, the beef between Cummings and the Tory party’s veteran Eurosceptics was simple. They
felt they had been at it for years, they knew how to do it, knew all the arguments about sovereignty. They
wanted to rerun the old campaigns, about “Global Britain”, about “out, out and into the world”. Cummings
was, not wholly unreasonably, aware that all these campaigns had failed, and so he demanded to do things
his way. He got his way. He did things his way. He won.
But his way – and no one should be in any doubt about this at all – was a straightforward, amoral disgrace.
Cummings’ way was to use social media and data analytics to relentlessly target voters who micro-profiling
told them would be susceptible to what can only be described as racist messaging.
Cummings’ way was shadowy footprints, sneaking into Britain’s back door, under the straightforward lie of
a headline: “Turkey is joining the EU.”
And it was even more cynical than that. Turkey is not joining the EU: the UK has a veto. But it was at the
peak of the migrant crisis, in which Turkey played a crucial role. And Michael Gove, as a member of the
Privy Council, knew that Turkey had a crucial security relationship with the UK, which meant that David
Cameron was prevented from stating publicly that he would always veto Turkish accession to the EU.
The UK is struggling to contain forces that have not come upon it by
accident or by inevitable socioeconomic pressure
The loathing between Cummings and the ERG leadership is mutual. Senior ERG figures, several of whom
played key roles inside Vote Leave, will happily confide in private that they were utterly appalled when
Vote Leave moved into the blatantly Islamophobic phase of its campaign.
Whether these tactics were necessary to win is a question that cannot be answered. They were used, and
they did win.
And three years later, where are we? At the weekend, a police medic was filmed being attacked by a
protester on a Tommy Robinson march. Robinson is in prison for seeking to collapse the trial of Muslim
grooming gangs, for no greater reason than to boost his own profile.
Anyone who has even the vaguest social link to actual, working-class communities knows beyond doubt that
Britain was radicalised by its EU referendum. Robinson and his ilk – the far right – have never had a
recruiting sergeant like it. Cummings is far too clever not to know this, not to know the stunningly
inevitable consequences of his actions. But he went ahead and did it all the same.
They were only tactics but, as Cummings so loves to say, actions have consequences.
The world is burning. There is a madman in the White House who has now blamed migrant communities
for their own execution.
The UK is struggling to contain forces that have not come upon it by accident or by inevitable
socioeconomic pressure. They were wilfully wished upon it by the players of a degenerate Tory power game