EU Referendum: the stupidity of the politics

08/04/2016

Nor can any but the most naïve of campaigners ever have imagined the Mr Cameron wouldn't pull this stunt. It's a variation on the ploy which Wilson ran in 1975. It worked then and it was thus reasonable to expect it to happen again. We predicted as much last year.

Actually, what we thought might happen was the distribution of a White Paper. But we can see why Mr Cameron wasn't tempted by that move – that would have exposed his "dodgy deal" to further scrutiny. Instead, he took advantage of the open goal created by the "leave" noise-makers when they refused to get behind a coherent exit plan.

Through filleting the pamphlet, it is easy to see the main thrust of Mr Cameron's attack. "Remaining inside the EU guarantees our full access to its Single Market. By contrast, leaving creates uncertainty and risk", the narrative starts.

Then we are told that, "Losing our full access to the EU's Single Market would make exporting to Europe harder and increase costs", following which we treated to the "killer" argument that:

Voting to leave the EU would create years of uncertainty and potential economic disruption. This would reduce investment and cost jobs. The Government judges it could result in 10 years or more of uncertainty as the UK unpicks our relationship with the EU and renegotiates new arrangements with the EU and over 50 other countries around the world.

Predictably, the usual mantras are then trotted out: "No other country has managed to secure significant access to the Single Market, without having to follow EU rules over which they have no real say, pay into the EU and accept EU citizens living and working in their country".

And then again, we are told: "A more limited trade deal with the EU would give the UK less access to the Single Market than we have now – including for services, which make up almost 80 percent of the UK economy. For example, Canada's deal with the EU will give limited access for services, it has so far been seven years in the making and is still not in force".

There are no less than six separate mentions of the "Single Market", around which, as the Financial Times remarks, are woven around the main themes, "that remaining in the EU benefits Britain and that leaving would create uncertainty and almost certainly be bad for the country".

Says this newspaper: "Since the Leave campaigns cannot agree what Britain's relationships with Europe or the rest of the world would be after Brexit, these points are well made".

This exactly mirrors the point made in the second edition of a book from the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS). In an otherwise terrifyingly superficial account, it tells us:

Plan B, or the terms of secession, in the immortal words of Sherlock Holmes, is "the dog that did not bark". The ‘leave’ choice is unknown territory, since it has not been specified by the secessionists beyond vague statements like regaining freedom from Brussels and being able to engage in freer trade with the world at large. Since the posing of a choice between a "known" and an "unknown" is a big hazard in democratic deliberations, this study does some homework that the secessionists have been unable or not wanted to do.

The absence of a plan is then the focus of an opinion piece in The Times. Barely a day goes by without an economist prophesying doom should the UK vote to leave, it says. Yet Oxford Economics modelled nine plausible Brexit policy packages, from which "the most striking conclusion is that, far from being inevitably catastrophic, Brexit has almost no ill-effects in some scenarios".

It also notes that "there is no agreed blueprint for post-Brexit Britain", but remarks that such an agreement would require – amongst other things – the repudiation of free movement.

Striking an economically good deal with the EU "would reek of betrayal to the majority who voted to leave". We're told that the problem with Brexit is the economics, it concludes, but: "In reality it's the stupidity of the politics that would hit the UK hard".

Interestingly, the CEPS came to the conclusion that the "only risk-free economic scenario would be to join Norway in the EEA, but that is also rejected by the noise-makers.

Thus, while the likes of Hannan whinge about the government leaflet, it is his refusal, and the refusal of all the main "leave groups" to endorse a credible exit plan, than has given Mr Cameron an opening to play exactly the scare card that we warned he would.

The way then to have dealt with the government's leaflet, therefore, was to head it off at the pass – pushing our own plan with an intensity that so undermined Mr Cameron's claims that he dare not make them.

Furthermore, no one in the leave campaigns can say they were not told about this. In June last year, I wrote to Dominic Cummings, warning him that the pro-EU side intended to rely mainly on fear. More specifically, I wrote, "it is using FUD - fear, uncertainty and doubt - powerful tools which act in favour of the status quo". Therefore, I said:

… in addition to our negative pitch, and our positive vision, we need a FUD neutraliser. When the enemy argues that leaving the EU is a terribly dangerous venture, we have to counter by illustrating that leaving the EU is a perfectly practicable proposition, entirely reasonable and safe. That is the purpose of an exit plan. It is not to second-guess the government. It's primary purpose is to demonstrate to the wavering voter that leaving the EU is possible and safe.

To that, I didn't even get the courtesy of a direct reply – not that much different from the way Arron Banks's has handled matters, agreeing to my face to adopt a plan and then, month after month, doing absolutely nothing about it.

When we come to analyse the high points and the low points of this campaign, we will most definitely see in it "the stupidity of the politics", where a succession of very stupid and malign people refused to commit to that vitally necessary exit plan.

There are no excuses for this. There is an informal, unspoken consensus that the EFTA/EEA option is the only sensible move, in the context of a structured, multi-phasic exit plan that has this as a compromise answer, opening the way for a longer-term solution once we are out of the EU.

The wilful rejection of a stratagem that would have given us the initiative and put us in the lead has now put us on the back foot, with no answers to an attack that could so easily have been neutralised before it got under way.

As a result, what was always going to be difficult just got immeasurably harder. The "stupidity of the politics" has created new, unnecessary burdens that we will have to fight to overcome. The sad thing is that we can so easily deal with the enemy. If anything is going to bring us down, it is indeed the stupidity of our own side.