EU Referendum


EU politics: developing a winning strategy


07/04/2014



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Despite the headline on the screen-grab, this is not about Farage. Rather, it is about one of my favourite subjects, stupidity - my own and, in this case the extrusions of Mr Andrew Rawnsley in this weekend's Observer.

Cutting to the chase, he is analysing the Clegg-Farage debates, and their implications for "pro-Europeans". The central conclusion he draws is that it is "hard to defend the status quo in the current climate and it is an unwise politician who tries to do so when elements of the status quo are anyway pretty indefensible".

Mr Clegg's worst mistake in the first debate, Mr Rawnsley tells us, was to answer a question about what the European Union would look like in 10 years' time by saying he thought it would be "pretty much the same" as now.

That, he says, may be an honest answer. It might even turn out to be an accurate prediction. But it came over as insouciance that was dismissive of public concerns. To win this great argument, we are told, "pro-Europeans will have to demonstrate a much better grasp of what makes people angry and a convincing commitment to reform".

It would be silly, Rawnsley concludes, "to read too much into the Clegg-Farage debates, but it would be equally foolish to ignore their lessons. Pro-Europeans should give up making excuses and start working on their arguments. It may be later than they think".

And it was worth spelling all that out just to be able to demonstrate how wrong Mr Rawnsley really is. Like Clegg, he doesn't even understand the battle he is fighting (and winning).

The point, of course, is that no one needs to defend the status quo. It has a habit of looking after itself. Those who challenge, those who are seeking change – they have to do the heavy lifting. Otherwise the status quo just goes rolling along, unchanged.

In the hands of the enemy, the most powerful weapon is the "elephant in the room" – the fact that so few people are aware of how much the European Union affects their daily lives. And in this, the pro-Europeans have the willing compliance of the legacy media and the establishment politicians. All they have to do is say nothing, and they win.

But the other weapon they have is FUD. Virtually, since Mr Cameron's January 2013 speech, the FUD has been pouring into the media, and it works – not that Rawnsley has begun to appreciate it.

Rawnsley's problem here is that he is just another metro-muppet. Like so many of his ilk, he's trapped in the Westminster village bubble, and actually thinks the Clegg-Farage debates were important. He's taken his eye off the ball.

The ball, in this case, is the EU "in-out" referendum polls. If Rawnsley really understood what was happening, he would have realised that his "pro -Europeans" were winning hands down.

With the leader of the ostensibly anti-EU UKIP having reinvented his party as the all-purpose "dustbin" for protest votes, having focused on Hoovering up anti-immigration BNP votes, the biggest player in the game is in the process of vacating the battlefield, one where the remaining forces are ill-equipped and unable pick up the slack – as yet.

Thus, would that he knew it, when Mr Clegg said that the European Union would look "pretty much the same" in 10 years' time, he wasn't very wrong. Ten years brings us to 2024. By then, a new treaty will have been in force, to replace Lisbon, for only a couple of years.

Only by some miracle will the UK anti-EU forces have built up enough momentum to have fought the referendum of 2018-19, and won the "no-out" vote. More probably, at the rate we are going, the UK will have fiudged the issue and we will be looking down the nose of another 50 years of EU membership.

And that really is the irony of people like Rawnsley. They are too stupid to even realise that they have won. All the have to do is keep pumping out the FUD, and the so-called "eurosceptics" will do the rest, failing through decade after decade to dent the opposition, or even understand why they are failing to dent the monster.

In ten year's time, therefore, they'll still be splatting "vote UKIP!" on Telegraph comment threads and not reading EU Referendum. We'll still be be writing "I told you so", as we celebrate our 20th anniversary, preparing to write yet another analysis of the latest treaty, and waiting for another referendum that will never come.

On the other hand, we could actually exploiting the stupidity of people like Rawnsley, develop our own winning strategy and then start rolling it out. Breaking habits of a lifetime and starting to win could prove addictive.

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