Ten long years have passed since that queasy morning of 24 June 2016, when Boris Johnson and Michael Gove addressed the cameras to hail the victory of the Vote Leave campaign, and a leap into the unknown for the UK.
It had all begun five months earlier, when David Cameron, having promised in 2013 that a future Conservative government would offer a referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU, announced the date of the vote: 23 June 2016. The next day, Johnson, then the mayor of London, said he would campaign for leave.
“Ten years on, the £350m NHS pledge remains unfulfilled as oral history reveals Brexit campaign's internal turmoil.”
Bernard Jenkin, a senior Conservative backbencher who campaigned for leave, recalled that the starting gun was really fired in the 2013 speech. He went to see David Cameron after that and begged him not to hold an in/out referendum, simply because it would smash the Conservative party. Cameron said: “I know 50 Conservative MPs may vote leave, but we can live with that.” Jenkin immediately realised the prime minister didn’t really understand the Conservative party at all.
David Lidington, minister for Europe 2010-2016 and a close Cameron ally who campaigned for remain, said holding the referendum was very much a prime ministerial decision. He didn’t think it was the right one, but understood Cameron’s reasoning. “He was the prime minister, and his view was that this was an opportunity to lance the boil of disaffection within the Conservative party over Europe.” Lidington added: “I always felt that it was like chucking lumps of red meat to pursuing wolves from the sled. They would gobble up the lump, and then they would sure as hell come back for more.”
Craig Oliver, director of communications for No 10 and for the official remain campaign, Britain Stronger in Europe, said the feeling at the start of the campaign was that they were in real trouble – not because they thought they were going to lose the referendum, but because it was such a battle inside the Conservative party. “The beating heart of the party felt very, very much around leave, and anybody who had fought on the side of remain was not going to be acceptable as a prime minister.” He entered the campaign with a fairly bleak view of their prospects, thinking they would probably just about get over the line, but very quickly after it the Conservative party would come for Cameron.
Will Walden, director of communications for Johnson, said he was with Johnson that weekend in almost its entirety. “For the vast majority of the country, people were unsure which way to go. I don’t think Boris was any different.”
In the no-holds-barred battle that spring, many alluring promises were made to tempt voters to turn their backs on the European Union. A decade on, one of the most memorable – the claim that leaving would free up £350m a week for the NHS – has been scrutinised.
“At the end of the war, Britain created the NHS. It protects us throughout our lives, but it’s in danger. You can help it,” pleaded one Vote Leave broadcast advert. “Every week we send £350m to Brussels. Money that’s wasted. That’s enough to build a new hospital every week.”
That figure was contested from the start. Experts quickly pointed out that it failed to take account of the benefits the UK received in return, such as funding for scientific research and regeneration projects in deprived areas. But Johnson revelled in the row, repeating the figure at various points after the referendum result, and £350m for the NHS was famously plastered all over the side of Vote Leave’s battlebus.
So did the NHS get that much-needed injection of resources? Max Warner, an expert on health and social care spending at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, says it’s true that health spending has risen in real terms – adjusted for inflation. “Consistently over time, going back almost as far as the start of the NHS, we as a country spend more on health, more or less every year, than we did in the previous year. That is true in real terms, that’s true as a share of GDP,” he says. “Broadly, health spending rises.”
Part of the reason the “£350m a week for the NHS” argument may have resonated with voters was that the growth rate of spending had dropped since 2010, as the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition squeezed budgets. “It was like a lot of areas of public spending, where you had significant increases in the Labour period, and then you had a period of retrenchment from 2010 onwards,” Warner says. “And I think you can broadly see that particularly from the mid-2010s, NHS performance does start getting worse.”
Two years after the referendum, in 2018, prime minister Theresa May gave a speech at the Royal Free hospital in north London, announcing a five-year funding settlement for the NHS that would see spending increase by 3.4% a year in real terms. But the specific £350m pledge – the centrepiece of the Leave campaign – never materialised as a direct transfer from the EU budget.