08/03/2016
If the horror stories about Brussels were sufficient to win the referendum, then we'd already be a mile high in the polls, on our way to a famous victory.
Nevertheless, it seems to have escaped the attention of the campaign organisers for the noise-makers, and sundry self-important pundits, that despite forty years or more of telling people what a bum deal we're getting from of Brussels, the remains are ahead in the polls. And that's despite Mr Cameron coming home empty-handed after promising "full-on" treaty change.
Much of the Prime Minister's success
is attributed to him pushing a single message, based on fear: don't take the risk of leaving â epitomised in the slogan that leaving is "a leap in the dark".
Thus, says
Matthew d'Ancona, if the leavers are to prevail on 23 June, they have to be able to deliver straightforward, compelling answers to the obvious questions.
Referring to Mr Johnson's "testy and decidedly wobbly performance on the Andrew Marr Show" on Sunday, d'Ancona argues that, in answer to an inquiry about the impact of Brexit upon the economy, it is not enough to say, as Johnson did, that the level of employment "might" fall ("Well, it might or it might not").
If the nation is to cut its ties with the world's largest single market, d'Ancona adds, there must be a plan in place to reassure those who fear for their livelihoods, for whom the bottom of Johnson's "Nike tick" â the image he deployed to illustrate his economic projection, in an earlier interview â could mean the dole.
And there we have it from yet another source â to reassure (note the use of that word) those who fear they might be adversely affected when the UK leaves the EU, "there must be a plan in place".
On the other hand, there are those who also say we must also fight fear with fear. In this respect, the opinionated Paul Goodwin of
Conservative Home thinks that we should be highlighting the risks of staying in the EU, in common with others who argue that there is no
status quo.
This is a line taken by Owen Paterson, who often asserts that we are not leaving the EU â it is leaving us. It is only a matter of time before the "colleagues" agree a new treaty which brings them closer to the creation of a new country called the United States of Europe, a destination to which we cannot travel.
This is a good tactic but â as we have been pointing out for
so long - you cannot fight a negative wholly with a negative. We must also have a positive object â a vision for a post-exit UK. And then, we must have that plan as a reassurance.
That much has been rehearsed so many times on this blog â and so evident a requirement for a successful campaign â that we could scarce imagine that we do not have that plan in place. Yet, on the threshold of a mighty campaign, the noise makers are nowhere close to adopting anything credible.
It is particularly apposite, therefore, that we should see Janan Ganesh in the
Financial Times who writes that leavers, having craved the referendum for decades, now expect to be wet-nursed through it.
Asking what Eurosceptics been doing all these years, if not preparing, Ganesh argues that, although leavers and Scottish nationalists deny any likeness, the parallels between the two movements increasingly insist on being noticed.
Both sides, he writes, spent so much time and energy securing a referendum that none was left over to hone their arguments when it came. They bonded among themselves during those years in a way that cloaked material disagreements on basic questions of detail.
But, he asserts, "they are so sure of the rightness and historic inevitability of their missions that practical quibbles seem tawdry and beside the point to them â a vice that mars the work of European federalists too, and designers of the single currency especially".
At least, he says, Scottish nationalists had the excuse of the euro crisis, which stole their best answer as to which currency their putative state would use. No external shocks have discombobulated "leavers" in the same way.
Picking up on some of the points that we have made, Ganesh goes on to say that the complacency of the "leavers" and their irreconcilable world views are responsible for the failure to even agree whether Brexit should denote total liberation from the EU and its
acquis communautaire - if such a thing is attainable - or continued membership of the single market. This mush, he says, cannot survive the white heat of a referendum campaign, and does not deserve to.
Having set up his stalking horse, Ganesh then argues that â in effect â passion is getting in the way. Those that rage against the media, business and government with the conspiratorial certainty of Montana survivalists will mobilise Eurosceptics of a populist bent but, more likely, they will turn off voters, he says.
In this, the man may have a point, but he's not totally on top of the reasons why the "leavers" are making such a mess of things. There is much more to it than simply what amounts to the "kipper" tendency blurring the campaign. The failure to define a post-exit UK goes much, much deeper.
At its heart is a great measure incompetence, arrogance and miscalculation. All that and more will come out in the wash when the history of this campaign comes to be written. But, if we lose, the one thing there won't be is any excuse. And we'll know where to come looking.
