In defence of Niall Ferguson | 7 December 2016

Niall Ferguson’s belated decision to back Brexit has aroused a lot of mockery today. Unkind souls are presenting him as a historian in a muddle, but for followers of his writing his new pro-Brexit stance really isn’t so surprising. He says that he had been inclined to support David Cameron and George Osborne, his friends. A noble reason. But it led him into making arguments inconsistent with those that he has been making most of his career. “Brexit woke me up, and reminded me that I needed to pay much more attention to what the non-elite majority of voters were feeling. And on the issue of EU performance, I think they were right,” he said (see video, above).  In backing Remain, Niall Ferguson was doing a very un-Ferguson thing.

His last book, The Great Degeneration, could have been a manifesto for Brexit. Its theme is the importance of institutions (“the rule of law, credible monetary regimes, transparent fiscal systems and incorrupt bureaucracies”) and the danger that emerges when their decay is tolerated. ‘The