The EU Referendum - The campaigns

The tone of the EU Referendum campaign was unpleasant at times, neither camp seemed to be able to produce a decent, coherent campaign and often ended up making this about internal party squabbles and not about the real issues that needed to be discussed. The general public seemed to want to know more facts but at the same time seemed unwilling to go out and find them or trust what many of the politicians were saying. Why did the campaigns seem so bad? Was it really a battle of Project Fear vs Project Hate? What does this say about our politics and our politicians?

The Remain Campaign

The official Remain campaign was fronted by David Cameron and George Osborne. The approach they took was to, almost exclusively, focus on the economic impact of of a Leave vote, anything from the collapse of the markets, to companies fleeing the country, to more personal impacts saying everyone would be £4,300 worse off after a Leave vote.

The Project Fear approach, seemed to work (just) in the Scottish Independence Referendum in 2014, by appealing to the pockets of the voters and their own financial self-interest. Yet, throughout even the Scottish Independence Referendum, Project Fear seemed to be losing ground to a more optimistic, more emotional campaign.

The campaign seemed to cede ground on many other issues, on proposing an optimistic view of the UK in the EU, of accepting that the Leave campaign had a point when it came to migration.

David Cameron and George Osborne may well have been the wrong people to front the campaign as they are seen as The Establishment and there is a lot of resentment in the country towards them, they were never going to appeal to the Labour voters who have been angered by the language of austerity.

Labour did not really help the situation, with an issue as divisive and as important as the EU Referendum, if the parties were all in agreement they should have provided a united front and shared a platform to tell the UK that this was beyond party politics. As it was, from my view of the campaign, Jeremy Corby was a reluctant supporter of the Remain campaign and that did not help.

It was only in the final days, at the Wembley Debate, where Ruth Davidson and Sadiq Khan stood up to provide a positive and passionate view of the EU. They provided a more emotional argument for Remain campaign, something that had been sorely lacking, but maybe this is too little, too late.

All in all, the people did not appear to trust the Remain campaign, they did not connect with it in the same way as they did with the Leave campaign. The Remain campaign did not motivate enough people to go to the polls with many of the Remain areas having a lower turnout than the Leave areas, they did not do enough to persuade people to put aside protest votes or even sway those who were undecided, who chose not to vote, that the safest way to vote was to Remain as the option to leave would always be there.

The Leave Campaign

The official Leave campaign was fronted by Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, who are just as much a part of The Establishment as David Cameron and George Osborne but Boris has carefully crafted a different image of himself, as an aristocratic eccentric, as a lovable buffoon and a man of the people.

Many of the claims of the Leave campaign were rather odd coming from the people who were making it. They claimed that we would get £350m per week for the NHS but this was a claim that had been debunked rather quickly but it becomes a balievable truth if people repeat it often enough. I found it odd that the people saying this, they are mostly on the right of politics and several are on the record saying that we should move more to a private healthcare model. Just after the result was announced the people who had led the campaign were back-tracking on this, claiming that it was not a promise but a possibility.

However, the issue of immigration loomed the largest, in my opinion, in the Leave campaign. The impression given off by the Leave campaign was that we were going to take back control of our borders and adopt an Australian-style points based system and to many in the country this meant we are going to significantly reduce immigration. Come Friday, after the result, there were many people on the Leave side saying that immigration was unlikely to change, or may even increase, that we may end up in the Schengen zone by having to adopt a Norway-style deal to become part of the EEA.

One of the most revolting acts of the unofficial Leave campaign was Nigel Farage's breaking point poster that had echoes of similar posters that were used by the Nazi party in the 1930s. The people in this picture were refugees fleeing the war in Syria, they were not part of the EU and were not part of any free movement of people and they were also Muslim. This was pandering to racism in the most horrific way possible. However, it is an effective campaign tactic.

Conclusions?

In the end the two campaigns were awful, they did not really present a reasoned and balanced debate instead focusing more on single issues that they thought would win, by manipulating the fears of the population. It came down to an issue of economy vs immigration and it appears that immigration connected more with the English and Welsh voters.