Dominic Cummings

Why Brexit, Dom? Theory 1: you’re a racist

Dear Dominic Cummings,

I know. It’s not fair to label all Brexit voters and campaigners as racists. For one thing, you bamboozled thousands of curry house owners into backing leave by (very quietly) promising them relaxed immigration rules for workers from Asia. On the other hand, you’d be hard pushed to find a white supremacist who didn’t swing behind it. The question here is whether it was hatred of foreigners that was driving you.

Shame, cos I was quite proud of this one.

If I’d needed any convincing, by the by, that Brexit was beloved of the far right, the last nine years would have set me straight. I’ve been doxxed, received death threats, and had someone send me a picture of the pub at the end of my street, merely for expressing the view online that the UK might have been better off staying in the European Union. And last time I went on a pro-EU march, a band of Brexit thugs outside Westminster tube station physically attacked me and snapped my placard in two.

I’ll save us time and take it as read that you condemn such behaviour in the strongest possible terms, while taking care to note that those individuals are a tiny minority and not representative of the leave movement as a whole, yada yada.

In our university days, I never got any overtly Ku Klux Klan vibes from you, although Oxford at the time was whiter than a No 10 staffer’s septum and since you never left your room, I never saw you interact with anyone but me.

But people can change, and Oxford is perfectly capable of producing fascists, as attested by the story of another of our Exeter College contemporaries, who attained the giddy depths of leader of Ukip for a few seconds in 2019.

So let’s look at your more recent form.

The Leave campaign was a many-headed beast, but by far the two biggest heads were your bunch, Vote Leave, and Banks and Farage’s Leave.EU. While you were at pains to point out that there was no cooperation between your groups, somehow, your attack lines somehow dovetailed beautifully.

Leave.EU took the low road, spreading egregious falsehoods and obsessively shrieking “immigration”, appealing to people’s lizard brains, their base emotions. Your Vote Leave, meanwhile, took a semi-respectable, pseudo-intellectual approach, avoiding outright deception in favour of half-truths, exaggerations and cherry-picked data.

Ah. Two classic pieces by the Bruegel of Bullshit, Darren Grimes of BeLeave.

Leave.EU’s manure fuelled the motivation – racism – but it was your seemingly rational arguments that gave the shit a patina of legitimacy. So millions of people were free to vote with their gut safe in the knowledge that they could justify it to themselves and others with impressive-sounding but meaningless stats and equally meaningless abstract concepts like “sovereignty”. The bald fact is, you’d never have got over the line without them, nor they without you.

Still. Let’s put that down to coincidence. Because as well as publicly distancing yourself from Banks and co during the referendum campaign, you’ve repeatedly complained since that one of the EU’s problems is its failure to deal with the rise of the far right. You even once expressed the hope that Brexit would permanently eliminate Farage and his ilk from UK politics.

“The EU … [has ] got this combination of free movement, can’t cope with Islamic nutjobs and growing political extremist parties” – Dominic Cummings, 2017

And then, a few months ago, you were sitting down for a cosy chat with the fascist fag-frog. Can you perhaps understand why I’m scratching my head now?

For all that, I’m fairly sure that you, as an educated man, don’t subscribe to the belief that white people are genetically superior to black or brown ones. I’m also sure that you, as a devotee of data, know very well that immigrants are net contributors to the economy; that they are twice as likely as native Britons to set up their own business; that only a small minority of immigrants are terrorists or rapists or scroungers and the crime rate among immigrants is no worse than among the native-born; that the great majority of asylum claims are found to be valid; that the only reason some are a temporary drain on state coffers is because successive UK governments pandering to their perceived xenophobic base have deliberately created an abstruse and arduous asylum process and that the state forbids them from working for a year (compared with six months, for example, in Germany); that much of Britain’s historic wealth and influence was built on immigrant labour and technical skill (as well as on slavery, which is just immigration minus the letting-them-in part); and that in future, without significant levels of inflow, the UK’s population, and therefore growth, will collapse.

I’m sure you also figured out at some point that you can’t just click your fingers and get all of Britain’s young, sick, or recently retired people to fill in for the jobs that immigrants currently do.

You might even admit under light torture that the “problem” with immigration is not the reality of the thing – most people who’ve met immigrants hold no fear of them – but its perception, which has been shaped for years by the Daily Mail, the Spectator, Tommy Robinson, Farage, and, well, you.

You have been vocal in recent years about the EU’s inability to reduce immigrant numbers. (Though if this were a genuine worry of yours, one would think you’d prefer the UK to be on the inside, since even though we take in fewer souls than almost any other country, it’s just as much our concern as the other 27 states’, and it might be useful to have access to Europol, Frontex, the Schengen Information System and the European Arrest Warrant.)

Perhaps, though, you’re not a full-blooded racist, but merely a patriot: a believer in sovereignty and self-determination.

But here again, I can’t imagine that you, a self-professed philosopher king, haven’t twigged that membership of an economic bloc – impossible without some shared standards and values – involves surrendering a barely measurable fraction of national sovereignty in return for enormous benefits to commerce and culture and opportunities for its citizens. It’s a trade-off that 27 other advanced, wealthy countries have been more than happy to make.

I’m sure you’re also aware that Brussels never really dictated anything to the UK, because the UK was a full and equal partner in all decisions (some would say, thanks to the concessions won by Margaret Thatcher’s bullying, a more than equal partner). Indeed, many of the most unpopular laws “inflicted on” Britain, such as the measures to promote energy-efficient lightbulbs, were British proposals.

And if, as I will discuss in a future post, you hoped one of the bonuses of Brexit would be closer alignment with (ie subservience to) the US, can the notion of sovereignty really be so precious to you?

All of which leads me to near certainty that you, as a literate and numerate man, will have known full well that leaving the EU would do nothing to alleviate the immigrant crisis, so there’s no way you’d have inflicted such deep and lasting damage on Britain’s economy, its relations with its allies, and its global soft power, for that reason.

On balance, then, I’ll grant you the benefit of the doubt and conclude that racism was not your chief motivation for Brexit. While taking care to note that you collaborated with racists, used methods favoured by racists to win the hearts of racists, caused a massive rise in racially motivated attacks, and handed more political power to racists than they could have dreamed of 20 years ago.

Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a communist?

Dear Dominic Cummings

Dominic Cummings looking surprised and old outside his enormous Islington townhouse in 2022 — ‘Humanity has produced few true visionaries. But it’s produced plenty of arseholes who thought they were visionaries.’ Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters

Andy Bodle here. Remember me?

It would be wrong to say we were close at university, except in the strictly geometric sense. You were my neighbour on Staircase 9 in Exeter College in 1991/2 – my fourth year, your first. We didn’t hang out much, because you didn’t really hang out with anyone, but on the occasional Sundays you would invite me into your room for a glass of port and a game of chess. I think I managed a draw with you once.

But as this was the extent of our social interaction, we didn’t exchange details when I graduated, and we lost touch.

So it came as quite a pleasant surprise when, about 14 years ago, you turned up in my office as the guest speaker at our morning meeting (I believe you were an adviser to Michael Gove as education secretary at the time). We exchanged brief pleasantries and I think we might even have mooted meeting for a drink one day. We didn’t.

It was a rather less pleasant surprise when, four years after that, you appeared again, at the forefront of the insane clown posse that was Vote Leave, the official campaign group advocating the UK’s exit from the European Union. And to widespread surprise, you won.

In case you hadn’t guessed, that’s why I’m reaching out after all this time.

Initially, I was angry – very, very angry, to the point that I found out where you lived with the firm intention of knocking on your door and punching you in the face. Nine years on, I’m still extremely angry – because my life is no less ruined by Brexit, and the nation no less fucked – but since it’s neither healthy nor physiologically possible to sustain that level of hatred for more than a few years, I’ve now calmed down enough to address you with what I hope is some measure of restraint.

So here’s my question. Why? Why were you so determined to drag the UK out of the EU?

Millions of businesses, millions of livelihoods, hundreds of thousands of relationships, 4% of GDP, the fishing industry, the NHS, social care, UK farming, household budgets, Jo Cox, Makram Ali, Duncan Keating, Arek Jozwik, the freedom of movement of 68 million people across 30 countries, were all acceptable casualties in the pursuit of what, exactly?

For most of the Brexit cabal, the answer is not hard to fathom. They’re racists, they’re nostalgia-driven Thatcher loyalists, they’re business leaders looking to slash costs by slashing workers’ rights, they’re grifters, they’re short sellers, they’re Hayek/Friedman free-market loons, they’re idiots.

You, though, as far as I’ve been able to ascertain, are none of the above. You have no employees to strip rights from, no CEO bonus to swell, no colossal hedge fund likely to be further inflated by relaxed regulations, no willingness to spout populist bollocks born of a burning desire to be in the public eye, and your college room was relatively light on Nazi memorabilia.

You have offered us a few nuggets over the years, most notably the arguments you put on buses and full-page newspaper adverts – £350m a week for the NHS, Turkey joining, etc – but as half of us knew then and most of us know now, they were bullshit.

There have also been some possible pointers in your public statements, usually in evidence to various parliamentary committees, and I’ll touch on those as they come up, but none of them really stand up to any sort of scrutiny either.

There’s probably something buried in one of your interminable screeds on Substack, but first, I don’t have enough time left on this earth to be trawling through a quintillion words of vicious, poorly structured, self-aggrandizing jabber, and second, I don’t see why I or anyone else should have to find out why you made us poorer by parting with yet more cash.

So I wondered if, as a courtesy to an old acquaintance, whether you might for once in your life, with minimal evasion, divagation and tu quoque, provide a succinct and direct answer to my question?

I realise that a life spent on the extreme fringe of rightwing politics, in the company of (by your own admission) charlatans, fools and professional propagandists, will have caused irreparable damage to your relationship with the truth. But for once in your life, Dom, please try to include at least a smattering of it in your reply. Because I really, really want to know why you did this.

One of your guiding principles seems to be that the end justifies the means; that any amount of collateral damage is acceptable in pursuit of your goals; that you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. Which raises the question: how fucking big and delicious is this omelette to merit the violent destruction of so many millions of eggs? And where the fuck is it?*

This was originally intended to be a single blogpost, but I don’t believe modern attention spans will relish everything I have to say at once.

So over the coming weeks, I’ll list, in more or less reverse order, all the explanations I’ve been able to conceive of: the ideological, the cultural, the economic, the personal. Some are more plausible than others, but literally none of them, as far as I can tell, seems valid enough to justify the massive historic damage you’ve inflicted on your country.

*Sorry. I did warn you there was still some residual anger. But courtesy and diplomacy have never really been your thing anyway, have they?

Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a Nazi?

It’s a game to them. And you’re just a piece

How does it feel to be written off by a vampire onion with a fake CV?

Something pinged when I watched this interview. A connection was made where before there had only been a fuzzy proximity. And in that moment, one of the fundamental and perennial problems of politics crystallised.

“Low-value people”? Who defines people in terms of their value? As if it were some predetermined, unchangeable quantity? People who don’t see people as people, that’s who; people who see people as pieces in a game. Their game.

Look at yourself through Iain Duncan Smith’s eyes for a second. What are you? A pawn? A bishop? A king? Are you worth sacrificing for guaranteed mate in four?

Perhaps Risk is a better analogy. Up to six can play, diplomacy and chance have a greater role, and troops can be replenished. (There’s probably an even better one in the world of video games, but since I’ve been out of that world for a good 15 years now, I’ll leave that to the fancy of the digitally minded.)

The metaphorical link between politics and games has always been strong. Games started out, after all, as simplified simulations of life. Military commanders have long used counters on boards to represent troops. Game theory, under the right conditions and parameters, has been revealed as one of the better approximators of human behaviour. And increasing computer processing power means that the gap between simulations and reality is fast dwindling to nothing. It should come as no surprise that the opposite transformation sometimes occurs.

Iain Duncan Cunt — “And then I ate him. Artists are a bit … stringy”

But when it comes to real policies, which affect real people – people you know, people you love – is it really acceptable to think, and legislate, in terms of pebbles or pieces of plastic? How does it feel when a vampire onion with a fake CV writes you off on the basis of a report drawn up by a prematurely balding double-barrelled nanny’s boy straight out of Oxford via Harrow? Who made this fucking loser God?

I can’t shake the image of Duncan Smith, and sundry shadowy halitotic sepulchraves like Dominic Cummings, releasing silent farts in their Soho club, cradling a brandy and sniggering as they dispatch five infantry and two cavalry from Japan into Kamchatka. And then your disability benefits are stopped. Kaboom.

I like to think, if more people kept this image in their skulls as they walked into the polling booth, that our governments would look very different from the way they do today.