Brexit backtrack: ‘Leave’ camp promises unravel

Key Brexit proponent Boris Johnson said there was no rush to invoke Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty to signal the separation of the United Kingdom from the European Union. AP FILE PHOTO

LONDON, United Kingdom — Brexit campaign leaders had barely picked themselves up off the floor after their surprise EU referendum victory when they began to back-pedal on a number of promises.

From immigration to NHS spending and second referendums to Article 50, here are five revised pledges — or at least some serious uncertainties — following Thursday’s historic vote in Britain.

NATIONAL HEALTH SERVICE (NHS)

A key pledge of the Leave campaign was embodied in a campaign poster reading: “Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week.”

The slogans have quietly disappeared from the Vote Leave website. Instead it reads: “We will be able to save £350 million a week. We can spend the money on our priorities like the NHS, schools and housing.”

“It wasn’t one of my adverts. I would never have made that claim. That was one of the mistakes I think that the Leave campaign made,” UK Independence Party (UKIP) chief Nigel Farage admitted after the Brexit victory.

Former work and pensions minister Iain Duncan Smith told the BBC: “I never said that during the course of the election … What we actually said was a significant amount of it would go to the NHS.

“We never made any commitments. We just made a series of promises that were possibilities,” he added.

This led to some heavy mockery online — including satirical website News Thump’s headline: “Iain Duncan Smith tells wife: ‘Our wedding vows were just a series of possibilities.'”

IMMIGRATION

Second big promise: a drastic reduction in the number of immigrants arriving from EU countries.

Leave camp MEP Daniel Hannan told the BBC: “We never said there was going to be some radical decline … we want a measure of control”.’

“Frankly, if people watching think that they have voted and there is now going to be zero immigration from the EU, they are going to be disappointed,” he added.

The problem is that Britain’s immigration policy may well depend heavily on Brexit negotiations with the EU, and specifically in trade-offs for access to Europe’s lucrative single market.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel warned Britain on Tuesday that there would be “no cherry-picking” in talks on future relations with the EU.

“I’m nervous, I’m nervous,” UKIP’s Farage told Channel 4 television.

“I’m more nervous than I was Friday morning, I’m beginning to detect that there may be some backsliding and I do not find that acceptable.”

PLANS? WHAT PLANS?

More generally there is growing criticism that the Leave campaigners don’t appear to have planned what would happen after their unexpected victory.

Former Scottish first minister Alex Salmond told AFP: “They have won a referendum and now they have no idea of what to do. They don’t have a plan for what they want to do.”

In comparison he recalled that, for their 2014 independence referendum, his Scottish National Party had prepared “a white paper manifesto of 670 pages” and a series of plans ready for Independence.

There was nothing like this from the Brexiters.

Key Leave figurehead and possible future prime minister Boris Johnson restricted himself Monday, in his first written comments after Friday’s victory, to general comments in the Daily Telegraph, saying Britain was “still part of Europe.”

He even talked about “intense and intensifying cooperation” with Europe, without giving any concrete details.

Small business minister Anna Soubry, a pro-Remain campaigner also from the ruling Conservative Party, cast doubt on Johnson’s commitment.

“I don’t honestly believe he believed what he said to people. He’s never said (previously) ‘I’m for Out’. He did not think that they would win. For his own interest, to become prime minister, he went for Leave,” she told Channel 4.

DIVORCE TALKS TRIGGER

In order to trigger formal divorce talks from the EU, Britain must formally invoke Article 50 of the European Union’s 2007 Lisbon Treaty. It then has two years to negotiate an agreement to become the first ever state to quit the bloc.

In the past, Prime Minister David Cameron has suggested that he would immediately invoke the Article if Britain voted to leave the EU.

But in the wake of Thursday’s shock result, he said he would leave that step to his successor, who is not expected to be in office until September.

“I think it’s right not to trigger Article 50 because that starts a process that within two years has to result in an exit and it might be an unmanaged exit if it started too soon,” Cameron told parliament on Monday.

Within hours of the result of Thursday’s referendum, Johnson said: “There is now no need for haste”.

SECOND REFERENDUM?

In the wake of last week’s shock vote, one suggestion by disappointed — some devastated — Remain campaigners has been for a second referendum. The idea has even been mooted by someone who may have his hand on the levers of power.

Conservative health minister Jeremy Hunt, who has said he is “seriously considering” standing for his party’s leadership and therefore premier, seems unclear.

Writing in the Times on Tuesday, he wrote that before triggering Article 50, “we need to negotiate a deal and put it to the British people, either in a referendum or through the Conservative manifesto at a fresh general election.”

Asked the same question a few hours later on ITV television, he said: “I don’t think it needs to be a second referendum, but I think there needs to be some democratic endorsement of the terms in which we leave.”