25/03/2015
Published yesterday was the latest
YouGov poll on EU sentiment, and it does not make good reading. The ten-point lead for the "inners" established
in February is maintained â at 46 percent in favour of remaining in the EU as opposed to 36 percent who would vote to leave in a referendum.
Faced with renegotiations and a recommendation from Mr Cameron that we should stay in, the percentage supporting the EU rises to 57 percent, with only 21 percent wanting to leave â much the same as it was last month.
If there is any consolation to be taken from these figures, one could at least observe that the "Ukip paradox" is broken â the phenomenon where, as Ukip popularity increased, support for leaving the EU declined. As it stands, support for Ukip is currently declining â down to 12 percent according to
YouGov and a mere ten percent according to
ComRes in the
Daily Mail.
If Farage actually knew what shame was, now would be a good time to show it. His tenure as leader of Ukip has delivered what is, on the face of it, an unwinnable hand. Even if Mr Cameron gains a victory at the general election, and gives us a referendum, the chances of winning it must be slight.
Not a little of this must be attributable to Mr Farage's failure to ensure that his party produced a credible exit plan, on top of a clear vision of what a post-exit Britain would look like. Instead, he has ceded the ground to the charlatans of
Open Europe and the like, who are so successfully muddying the waters.
OE is even now fielding its chairman, Rodney Leach, who has come out of the woodwork to tell
Reuters that: "Transforming Britain into the deregulated, free trading economy it would need to become outside the EU sounds easy in theory, but in practice would come up against some serious political resistance within the UK itself", thus knocking down the straw man of
Open Europe's making.
Even
Roger Helmer is beginning to realise that
OE is not batting on the same side but, having given this Europhile think-tank such a head start, it is going to be very difficult to claw back lost ground â even if Ukip was capable of doing it, which does not look to be the case.
The essential requirement, though, is actually relatively simple â to the extend that Ryan Bourne, head of public policy at the Institute of Economic Affairs, has managed to work it out â even if his message is a
tad inconsistent.
He nevertheless
says that, if the outers want to win a referendum, "they need to neutralise the economic issue by showing that Britain would be no worse off outside". He adds: "The evidence suggests that, with broadly sensible policies, this is achievable".
That is actually straight from
Flexcit (and about the only place you will see it), where the "Norway Option" combined with repatriation of the
acquis offers a cost-neutral solution to leaving the EU, and buys time to negotiate a longer-term solution, once we have left.
What we must also do in this context is continually emphasise â as has Owen Paterson been doing - that the Single Market and the political baggage of the European Union are
not one and the same. It is possible to leave the EU and remain in the Single Market â which is precisely what the
Norway Option - or the "Norway Model" if you prefer â aims to do.
By this means, we can easily address the fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), delivered by the likes of
Standard Life Chairman Gerry Grimstone, who on the one hand tells us that, "leaving the European Union would be disastrous for Britain and harm its economy" and then in the same breath declares: "It would be disastrous for London and the UK if the UK were to leave the single market".
But it is a measure of the inadequacy of the "eurosceptic" response that we have Robert Oxley, campaign director of Business for Britain, condemning Grimstone for joining in "the scaremongering that life outside of the EU would be disastrous for the UK" â without any attempt to draw the distinction between EU and Single Market membership.
And, while Oxley bleats about the cost of "EU financial regulation", if he lifted his horizons somewhat, he would see from the
New York Times that the regulatory agenda is global, with the sub-regional EU only marginally involved in primary standard-setting.
This, though, so much typifies the state of the anti-EU campaign. On the one hand we have the incompetence of Mr Farage and, on the other, the London-based think-tanks entertaining themselves with increasingly arcane and irrelevant arguments â much in the manner that climate-change has degraded into a tedious squabble between rival pundits.
Amid all this, too few people are focusing on what it actually takes to win a referendum. Even if some in
Civitas are beginning to steer in the right direct, this is too little, and risks being too late. It leaves us ten points behind in the polls, and still prey to the charlatans who would have us lose the campaign before it even starts. If we are going to win, this is not the way to do it.
