The Arron Banks delusion

What do people mean when they say Arron Banks ‘bought Brexit’? That phrase is everywhere. It’s a New Statesman headline: ‘The man who bought Brexit.’ He ‘bought Brexit’, the Observer informs us, with his ‘funding of the populist, social media driven Leave.EU campaign’. OpenDemocracy, like many others, wants to know where Banks’ money comes from, so that we can finally answer the question: how could he ‘afford Brexit’?

This vision of Banks ‘buying’ one of the largest democratic votes in British history, as if it were a second-hand car or something, is weird. And very revealing.

What it reveals is the alarmingly low esteem in which voters are held by the Remain-leaning section of the chattering classes. For make no mistake: when these people bash Banks for ‘buying’ Brexit, what they’re really saying is that the little people, us, we pesky plebs who were foolishly given the right to vote, can be easily bought off.