Jones herself, a Dublin-born journalist with Leftie credentials, was a Remain voter. But she makes it clear, early on, that she was never a fan of a second referendum. \u201cIf you\u2019re of the second-vote persuasion,\u201d she writes in her introduction, \u201cyou may disagree with me, perhaps violently, but tough. It\u2019s my book.\u201d<\/p>\n
The only real issue with said book, in my opinion, is how deeply it gets into the weeds. Even for the politically obsessed reader, whether you\u2019re a self-flagellating Remainer or a gleeful Leaver, this tangled web of leaders, influencers, hastily launched parties and saboteurs can become dizzying. I encountered someone whom I knew from my time as a student activist at the University of Sussex; I\u2019m almost certain the rest of Britain is unfamiliar with them, and could happily stay that way.<\/p>\n
Ten years on from the referendum, I fear that 2026 will see tons of misty-eyed Remainer nostalgia. Although Johnson, when prime minister, completed our exit from the EU in January 2020, and People\u2019s Vote soon dissolved, many Remainers have refused to let go. Sir Keir Starmer\u2019s Government, full of politicians who wince at the B-word, has never hidden its desire to form some kind of reconnection with the EU. Everyone knew that Jeremy Corbyn was a cowardly Leaver, too chicken to stick to his principles when it mattered, but his Euroscepticism did at least exist, deep down. Not so for Sir Keir. Jones recounts, in detail, the moment of his famously ad-libbed line at the 2018 Labour Party conference in which he outed himself as a second-referendum man: \u201cIf we need to break the impasse, our options must include campaigning for a public vote, and nobody is ruling out Remain as an option.\u201d<\/p>\n
Jones refrains from passing judgment on why the Remainiacs never mustered enough support for a re-run, but to others it\u2019s obvious. Brexit was never simply about its component parts \u2013 the customs union, single market, trade tariffs and so on \u2013 rather it represented a revolutionary surge of interest in national self-control. This genie, once released from the bottle, has proven impossible to imprison again. It has reared its unpredictable head in all sorts of ways, not least in the 2019 general election, where working-class Labour diehards fell in behind a Tory Old Etonian, and now in the surge of interest in Reform. To this day, finding out whether someone is a Leaver or Remainer is a bit like knowing their political horoscope: one little vote can tell you rather a lot.<\/p>\n
It\u2019s easy to forget just how David-and-Goliath, at the cultural level, the battle for Brexit was. As Ben Chambers, the host of a Remainer radio programme called 16 Million Rising, told Jones: \u201cWhen you look around you and\u2026 see people like David Attenborough and Gary Lineker and pretty much every prominent, credible celebrity and politician advocating for Remaining,\u201d it\u2019s a genuine act of defiance to vote Leave. No Second Chances shows us a rich, resourceful, resentful bunch of people who demanded the chance to bend the will of the people to their desires. They failed. The \u201csecond referendum\u201d, like the first, bears the greatest lesson of all for any government: beware the pleb<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2605\u2605\u2605\u2605\u2606<\/p>\n