EU Referendum


EU Referendum: old politics to the fore


03/07/2015



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Having taken no end of hassle from multiple sources for not being a "team player" – or words to that effect – in the anti-EU movement, it must by now occur to even the most ardent proponents of unity that Euroscepticism, and therefore the "no" campaign, has something of a problem.

It was only a couple of days ago that Lord Tebbit was commenting on this essential problem and now, from the other side, we have Lord Hannay making similar observations. But this follows on from my earlier piece on 2 June – exactly a month ago – when I wrote of the shambles in the anti-EU movement which, if anything, is further now from a unified stance than it has ever been.

Even yesterday, I heard reports of plans for a coup within the parliamentary Conservative Party to wrest control of the agenda from the recently formed Exploratory Committee, while it is an open secret that there are major differences between various factions in Westminster. With Farage mocking the lack of unity, there is not the slightest possibility of there being agreement.

If it wasn't for the fact that the putative "yes" campaign was almost as divided, and certainly its equal in incompetence, our multiple bidders to lead the "no" campaign would be in even more serious trouble than they are now.

The great difficulty for us, though, is that why a "yes" campaign can maintain a level of incompetence and still win, we can't. Already behind in the polls, and fighting against our own government and the representatives of the biggest trading bloc in the world, the default position of the "no" campaign is that we lose.

Putting this in a different way, in order to win the referendum, we are going to have to run an inspired campaign. And since Euroscepticism – with the possible exception of the anti-euro campaign – has a record of unmitigated failure, what went before becomes an unreliable guide as to how we should fight the coming campaign.

In short, if there is to be any chance of winning, we must try something different. And while that has inherent risks, innovation is less risky then following the tried and test route. In that direction lies certain failure.

However, there is another element here, which I am increasingly beginning to perceive as a crucial issue and one which over the next few weeks may dominate arguments on the planning process and the shape of the campaign. This is the mistaken belief that the referendum can be fought on the same lines as a general election.

Understandably, political pundits are homing on the similarities, and relying on their experience of campaigning to suggest ways of fighting the referendum, but they are being caught out by failing to realise that there are crucial and irreconcilable differences.

The interesting thing here is that it wasn't always this way, but a facet of campaigning that emerged with Blair's "New Labour" revolution. Up until then (although we can argue about the timing), we were dealing with conviction politics, where political parties held certain fixed principles.

In this political environment, the job of campaigners was simply to sell the party message. But, as Labour was perceived increasingly to be unelectable, it ditched its principles (as in Clause 4) and reinvented itself. Focus-group driven, the strategy became to find out what messages the electorate (and in particular the "swing voters") wanted to hear, and to give them precisely those.

This was possible because party leaders were in control and could define their manifestos. They were able to dictate what should be laid in front of the public and what should be hidden from sight.

If this can be described as "new", conviction-free politics, later to be adopted by David Cameron who has long since abandoned traditional Conservatism, it may still prove the winner for general elections. But it is not going to work for referendums – at least, not this referendum. This one has to be fought on "old politics" lines.

The essential difference in this "old politics" model is defined by the inability to change the message to suit the audience. We were putting to the public the question of whether we should withdraw from a supranational, treaty-based organisation called the European Union. Attendant on that, there are certain fixed events and consequences which cannot be changed.

The first of these fixed points is that the initial period of an Article 50 negotiation is set by treaty for a period of two years, a period which can be extended but only with some difficulty in a process that is uncertain and carries considerable hazards.

Planners, therefore, need to work on the basis of concluding negotiations within a two-year period. Yet, we learned yesterday, for instance, that Mercosur and the EU appear set to reach a formal agreement on tariffs and are close to concluding talks on a trade deal which have been ongoing since 1999 – 16 years so far to cover less ground than the Article 50 negotiations will be expected to agree on.

To agree at all, therefore, is going to take some inventive concessions if there is to be an acceptable outcome. There is no room for messing here. The reality of the treaty provisions cannot be altered. The message is unchangeable – to get through the process, we are going to have to accept a sub-optimal deal. There simply isn't time to negotiate an ideal solution.

Another unchangeable message is that, in order to win a referendum, we are going to have to preserve our participation in the Single Market. And, in order to achieve that, we will have to concede freedom of movement.

These two issues alone will have to define the way we fight the campaign, and there is no scope whatsoever for taking the easy way out and offering voters something more palatable. Old-fashioned skills will have to be re-learnt – the art selling political realities as they are, and not how you would like them to be.

Neither is this the extent of the differences. In a general election, a party can win office with a vote, in percentage terms, in the mid- to high-thirties. To win a referendum, we need more that fifty percent of those who vote, preferably on a high turnout. And to win convincingly, we need to be in the seventies.

Then, in general elections, we see the bulk of the campaigning energy focused on swing voters in marginal seats. In this fight, we have to carry the nation with us. Every vote counts, no matter where it comes from. That alone demands a different strategy. 

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Most of all, though, the campaign is about confronting inconvenient truths, and providing convincing answers to them. Lord Hannay avers that we haven't "heard a cheep from the Eurosceptics about how they would propose to support British agriculture or Britain's poorer regions or how Britain's scientific research would fare in the absence of the substantial net benefits our universities get from the EU's research programme".

Like the rest of his ilk (and much of the Eurosceptic community), he ignores Flexcit. This Hannay has to do in order to assert that: "Perhaps those questions are just too difficult to answer, or perhaps the Eurosceptics cannot agree on the answers to give".

He's actually right on the second part, and he's also right when he says: "But answers there would have to be if we withdrew". The strategy of the diverse Eurosceptic groups at the moment, in the absence of answers, is to ignore the problem and/or to deny the consequences of their choices - like, for most of their choices, we see repeats of the scenes above, as trade grinds to a halt. Or they seek weak, anodyne non-solutions around which the movement could coalesce, in the hope that the difficult questions will not be raised.

The trouble is that Hannay is right. Answers will have to be given, and if we don't raise them, the opposition will. There is no possibility of a fudge, and no opportunity to alter the political realities to produce more palatable messages. We either grasp the nettle, or give up now and stop wasting our time.

This is "old politics". Then as now, they don't compromise, and they don't take prisoners.