Bernard Ingham: Failed elites of politics and finance feeding Brexit anger

How dare Neil Kinnock lecture Britain on the EU, argues Sir Bernard Ingham.

It is sad to see David Cameron and George Osborne wrecking their political careers, with the compliant help of assorted elites, businessmen who want a quiet life and economists who always get things wrong, by trying to frighten us to death if we choose the freedom of Brexit from the EU.

With Sir John Major, they have made Private Frazer – “we’re all doomed” – sound like an optimist.

It is pitiful watching Jeremy Corbyn go through the motions of supporting the “Remain” cause.

He may well have a welcome on the mat for EU migrants, but the Brussels bosses would never indulge him if he tried to put his Marxism into practice.

It is, however, surely self-destructive for half a dozen former Labour leaders to claim that only Labour can save Britain from Brexit.

Would you buy a used car in this context from Lord (Neil) Kinnock who is in hock to the EU as a former Commissioner?

Would you buy anything in any context from Tony Blair who tried his damnedest while our Prime Minister to become president of the EU and may still harbour the ambition – unless it is now below his pay grade?

Who would repose any confidence in the judgment of Gordon Brown, even if he did stop Blair taking us into the euro, when his largesse with our money up to six years ago still hangs around the current Government’s neck in the form of a £70bn budget deficit?

As for Ed Miliband, we rejected him as our governor in 2015 along with Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman.

To put this lot up to advocate remaining in the EU raises the question as to whether the political establishment secretly wants us out of Europe.

They have plainly forgotten Rudyard Kipling’s lines on a Norman’s advice to his son on how to handle Anglo Saxons.

“… he never means anything serious till he talks about justice and right.

When he stands like an ox in the furrow with his sullen set eyes on your own

And grumbles ‘This isn’t fair dealing’, my son leave the Saxon alone”.

Labour’s intervention has come  with the polls moving towards our  leaving the EU because the modern Anglo-Saxon, steeped in freedom  and democratic government, can distinguish personal advantage in the referendum campaign from fair dealing a mile off.

At a recent lunch with old media friends, one boldly claimed that public sentiment was now seriously on the move. He implied that a vote for Brexit was distinctly possible.

This is where the awkward questions come thick and fast.

Given the devastation that such a  vote would wreak on our politicians, who is there left responsibly to exercise our new found sovereignty and independence, crucially restore trust in our institutions and make Britain a better place to live?

This is all the more pertinent  because of the way business – from  City to cold caller – is currently  behaving.

The shift in popular sentiment  is not just because our politicians  are found wanting when they are not masters in their own house.

It is how our money men and professions, not least the legal and accountancy wide boys, abuse the public.

We ignore at our peril the external evidence of public revolt in Donald Trump being the likely US Republican presidential candidate; the remarkable performance of Bernie Sanders, a socialist, in the US Democrat primaries; Austria’s near election of an ultra right-wing president; and the discontent across France and southern Europe.

For myself, I am clear that the first item on the agenda after Brexit, once we have set a clear economic course, is to reform our financial and professional services, the source of much mistrust over where the nation is going.

For example, Canada Life are proposing to charge me a minimum of £1,200 a year to manage an old annuity fund with £6,000 left in it and 6.25 per cent a day over base rate if they let me fall into arrears.

I have copied my outrage to the Commons Treasury select committee and asked the greedy graspers – Canada Life not the committee – to send me what is left in the fund. I doubt whether I shall get my lump sum.

It is this sort of extortion that make us sullen-eyed with resentment.

If Labour were not so sullen-eyed about the old British Empire and knew more Kipling, it would ensure its former leaders left us alone.