Some of the UK’s best and brightest have banded together to form a new pro-Brexit group to counteract the propaganda that Leave supporters are dim-witted, ‘low-information’ voters.
‘Briefings for Britain’, which has launched a new website, is backed by over 40 distinguished former civil servants, historians, legal professionals, philosophers, scientists, and others — and claims there are more like them who are still afraid to stick their heads above the parapet.
“They said, ‘I’d love to be part of your group but I haven’t got a proper job yet and I probably won’t if I’m identified’,” explained Dr. Graham Gudgin, an economist at the Centre for Business Research and Judge Business School, University of Cambridge, in comments to The Times.
“One of our contributors said he was told by a younger pro-Brexit colleague that his professor had told him that people who voted Brexit were the sort of people who sent his relatives to concentration camps,” he added.
In fact, the Remainer groupthink in British academia is so strong that some of the material published by Briefings for Brexit will have to be anonymous, with popular historian Professor Robert Tombs — who will be editing the site along with Dr. Gudgin — explaining how one Brexit-supporting student had to hide her views from her supervisor because he believed all Brexiteers were racists.
“I thought one thing we academics were paid to do was help explain things to people, but universities have become so simple-minded about this,” Tombs lamented.
Tombs was not afraid to point out that many academics receive money from Brussels, declaring: “So many of our colleagues [have] wrongly taken a corporatist, selfish and narrow view.”
Indeed, the bloc funds some 1,700 academics to act as Jean Monnet professors, “disseminating the values of European integration” to roughly a quarter of a million students every year.
Professor Tombs was also at pains to point out that the building efforts by the so-called ‘Remain Resistance’ to sabotage Brexit have made it imperative that groups like his continue to put the case for Leave — especially now that 87-year-old billionaire George Soros has thrown his considerable financial weight behind the EU loyalists.
“[His] support for the pro-Remain campaign shows there is a lot of big money behind hardline Remainers, whose interests have little to do with the interests of the country as a whole,” he said.
“It shows that independent, self-funded initiatives like ours are all the more important. The other important news is the selective leaking of unsourced statistics; this shows again how much expert scrutiny is needed.”