EU membership might thus be established in the minds of this audience as a proxy for security and continuity – the natural preference of the sensible majority, as reinforced by every institution that carried cultural authority; the experts would be heeded. A vote to stay is a vote for certainty.” Brexit meant: “Jobs aren’t safe, prices will rise, mortgages will be at risk, and funding for your local school or hospital will fall. So Gilbert would step aside from his job as deputy party chairman and join Populus as a consultant. Written by Stuart Coster. Cameron’s view, expressed to friends in the summer of 2015, was: “I cannot create the impression that we will say ‘Yes’ under any circumstances.”. “They came in with a sense of, ‘Step aside and we’ll tell you how it’s done.’”. Gordon Brown had devised an initiative to bring Labour leaders past and present together for an event – but Corbyn refused to share a platform with Tony Blair. By July 2015, Andrew Cooper, the Conservative peer and chair of the opinion polling company Populus, had been recruited to research public sentiment, with a view to developing a strategy. [23] The Electoral Commission announced the designated campaign groups for the leave and remain sides on 13 April 2016, two days before the official ten-week campaign period began.[24]. On the morning of 7 June, Oliver and Coetzee agreed that it was time to stamp some prime ministerial authority back on to the debate. “They cleared the pitch.” On Friday 27 May, the official period of campaign “purdah” kicked in – the civil service, which was now bound to neutrality, could no longer be used by the remain camp. Lacklustre and poorly led, the Labour Party is letting down the Remain campaign. There were 48 hours to go. As a No 10 source put it: “Every day spent arguing about Turkey and borders was a day leave was winning.”. Even when Blair’s involvement was downgraded to a statement read by someone else, Corbyn would not budge. The ‘Brexit’ Campaign: A Cheat Sheet. There was surely little chance of reversing a generation of cultural suspicion of the EU in a four-month campaign, fronted by a prime minister who had indulged his party’s most Eurosceptic tendencies throughout his career. “We should have killed that letter by hook or by crook.”, It wasn’t really Dave v Boris. The report also trashed the practical alternatives to EU membership – an intervention that was meant to flatten the leave side’s economic arguments, as one source involved in the drafting put it, “like a nuclear bomb”. But, crucially, the Remain campaign’s case was also heard – arguably more so, given the Government’s own £9 million campaign fund and pamphlet sent to every house. Researchers and press officers who had been savaging each other’s work for years now collaborated amicably. An event with Corbyn, his shadow cabinet and trade union leaders on 14 June was overshadowed by an internal Labour row about whether free movement of workers – an axiom of EU membership – should be up for renegotiation. But they had no idea what was about to hit them, Tue 5 Jul 2016 06.00 BST But there was a sense that you could change things.”. “There was a sense that we were bringing knives to a gun battle,” said one Downing Street source. ... by 2016… They knew they needed a chairman from the liberal right of the political spectrum. Was Britain to be more like Norway, Switzerland, Canada, Albania? The pro-Brexit newspapers eagerly exploited that mood. Tusk’s premature briefing ruined that plan. Britons are voting Thursday in a nationwide referendum on EU membership. As a result, had the Remain campaign convinced more than 50% of voters that Brexit would undermine the economy, Britain would most likely have voted to stay in the EU. Before Corbynite radicalism seized the left and Ukip’s vinegary nationalism suffused the right, debate was conducted in shades of difference within a broad consensus. Osborne wanted to use the services of Jim Messina, the former White House deputy chief of staff under Obama and specialist in state-of-the-art digital techniques for targeting individual voters. The financial crisis led not to a redistribution of power and greater economic security but to austerity, coupled with apparent immunity for the elite from any consequences of their prior mismanagement. Three competing applications were submitted for the official "leave" designation. It is a risk not worth taking.”. Using a model similar to the one that had been applied in Scotland, the pollsters analysed and segmented the public along a spectrum of receptiveness to pro-Europe messages. The No 10 team had imbibed from Crosby a belief in the virtues of a relentless, narrow focus on economic security and the risks of gambling on the unknown. Vote Leave was the lead organisation campaigning for a leave vote in the referendum. Why the Remain Campaign Lost the Brexit Vote. close. After all, Jeremy Clarkson’s argument for remaining in the EU doesn’t even remotely touch on the economic scaremongering which is so central to Stronger In’s messaging, which rather calls it into question. It was a peculiar feeling, too, for many of the Conservative junior staffers, scattered across the remain and leave camps, to find themselves in battle with people who had been their comrades in arms during the general election. Mandelson, Alexander and Green mined their contacts to recruit a board with no single party allegiance, which would include representatives from the business and voluntary sectors. Polls showed that many voters were unaware that a remain vote was the party’s official position, a confusion exacerbated by Jeremy Corbyn’s manifest ambivalence about the entire European project. The official campaign period for the 2016 referendum ran from 15 April 2016 until the day of the poll on 23 June 2016. Final terms were to be settled at a European summit meeting two weeks later. But the battle was not, in any case, marked by dispassionate evaluation of the benefits and costs of EU membership. It ended with him achieving the ambition that he had pursued for decades: a UK vote to leave the European Union. A poster featuring the latter as a captive pet in Nigel Farage’s pocket was shared with the media and then retracted at the last minute. Sainsbury was still closely involved. Gilbert was warm, and Oliver more aloof. Residual tensions stayed below the surface. Membership gave the UK unfettered access for both goods and services to a large single market of over 500 million people. But the Eurosceptic press and Conservative backbenchers did not wait. That weekend, someone in the remain campaign texted me: “We’ve got them where we want them on the economy. It’s unfair to pick on Will Straw, the head of pro-Remain group Britain Stronger In Europe: Despite his managerial inexperience, insiders speak admiringly of his ability to keep the peace between the campaign’s different factions, and of his work with strategy chief Ryan Coetzee. The public were not unaware of that in the end,” Coetzee said. Straw mobilised his Labour contacts. Some kind of defence had to be organised, but Downing Street could not be seen to be involved. Despite its name, it was started by politicians from a mixture of political parties, including Peter Bone, Tom Pursglove and Liam Fox from the Conservatives, Kate Hoey from Labour, Nigel Farage from UKIP, Sammy Wilson from the DUP and George Galloway from Respect. Messina had worked with the Tories in May but the chancellor was reluctant to see his powerful methods deployed outside the Conservative family. Watching this unfold from their Cannon Street headquarters, the Stronger In architects of the fightback were appalled. Leave.EU campaigned for a Leave vote, and tried to become the lead campaigner. “[The media] were obsessed with blue-on-blue and they weren’t even getting that right,” said one No 10 strategist. Paul Marshall, a hedge fund manager, gave £100,000 to Vote Leave.[28]. They all agreed that there was no point raising questions about immigration without credible answers. The killing stunned the political world. The electorate were asked "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union", with 52% of the voting electorate answering "Leave" … Labour’s deputy leader Tom Watson told the BBC that the issue should be “looked at again”. As had always been the plan, Stronger In tried to strike an upbeat tone for the final days, and true to its original strategy, used a non-political voice. Share. The campaign had scheduled a speech by David Cameron in Leicester for the following Monday – and now it made a last-minute switch. So rather than smash facts over people’s heads, we thought it would be much better to use experts as conduits.”. This had been an instrumental part of the Stronger In strategy devised the previous summer. As one put it: “We were the pluralist, liberal, centrist force in British politics.” Pro-Europeanism became a proxy for the fusion of economic and social liberalism that had been a dominant philosophy of the political mainstream for a generation, although its proponents were scattered across partisan boundaries. What’s next? But Cameron was committed to a public position of agnosticism until the renegotiation was complete. Posted on 14/02/2016 by Grahame Pigney. Cooper’s early polling had shown that around two-thirds of Labour voters were likely to support EU membership. But the political establishment has not actually been deposed: the Conservative party will continue governing, only with changed leadership. Cooper and Coetzee were supportive. The Electoral Commission announced the designated campaign groups for the leave and remain sides on 13 April 2016, two days before the official ten-week campaign period began. It was this undefended flank that the leave side was targeting with promises to control immigration and divert EU subscription payments to the NHS. In February 2016, Cameron announced that the UK Government would formally recommend to the British people that the UK should remain a member of a reformed European Union and that the referendum would be held on 23 June, marking the official launch of the campaign. We knew what we were voting for in June 2016 – the Remain campaign made it clear. Ed Miliband’s hopes of becoming prime minister had been shredded by that approach. Regulations 2016, The European Union Referendum (Conduct) Regulations 2016, European Communities Act 1972 (Repeal) Bills, Terms of Withdrawal from EU (Referendum) Bills, UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Legal Continuity) (Scotland) Bill 2018, European Union Withdrawal Agreement (Public Vote) Bill 2017–19, Trade negotiation between the UK and the EU, EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), Post-Brexit United Kingdom relations with the European Union, UK Withdrawal from the European Union (Continuity) (Scotland) Act 2020, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Campaigning_in_the_2016_United_Kingdom_European_Union_membership_referendum&oldid=1008786980, Articles with unsourced statements from May 2016, Articles with unsourced statements from September 2016, Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License. Some have argued that they have lost the argument on the economy and are dropping back to their comfort zone. The cause was not mysterious. Andrew Cooper’s research appeared to support that view. “We underestimated their willingness to be mendacious and xenophobic,” he said. Here is a brief guide to the issues, personalities, and policies involved in … “We did not expect leading members of a Conservative government to turn up offering themselves as an alternative government,” a Downing Street aide said. Cameron was seen as evasive and tetchy. In between were the “disengaged middle” and “heart v head” groups. These were people who would never love the EU, but could be persuaded to stick with it for safety’s sake. People had many motives to vote leave, but the most potent elements were resentment of an elite political class, rage at decades of social alienation in large swaths of the country, and a determination to reverse a tide of mass migration. When the Johnson clip ended, one woman sighed: “Oh, I could have listened to that for ages.”, Johnson’s well-known ambition to become prime minister also guaranteed that political journalists, addicted to Westminster gossip, would crowd the news with items about the Tory leadership instead of arguments about the merits of EU membership. In his 2016 book "What next: How to get the best from Brexit", Conservative MEP and Leave campaigner Daniel Hannan looked back at the most audacious claims of the Remain campaign… But the blue-on-blue issue was not exclusively a problem of external media management. [38][39], On 21 April 2017, the Electoral Commission announced that it was investigating 'whether one or more donations – including of services – accepted by Leave.EU was impermissible; and whether Leave.EU's spending return was complete', because 'there were reasonable grounds to suspect that potential offences under the law may have occurred'. The unique opportunity of a referendum was to give voters the option of punishing a generation of politics, regardless of party allegiance. The evening began with Nigel Farage conceding defeat to the Remain campaign. “When we came back in May 2015, there was a sense that we had to get on with it,” one Downing Street strategist recalled. On Thursday 16 June, Cameron was flying to a remain rally in Gibraltar. Having rewritten the schedule so Labour could ride to the rescue, they saw the very people who were supposed to be shoring up the remain message drawing attention to their biggest weakness. The personality contest between Tory big beasts also obscured what Downing Street felt was the culmination of a long-nurtured plan by backbenchers to destroy Cameron. This posture of neutrality was thought necessary to keep a Europhobic Tory insurrection at bay and to avoid compromising Britain’s negotiating position in Brussels. Anyone who expressed a view on the hazards of leaving the EU was painted as the hostage of a corrupt Brussels-worshipping establishment. The Left Leave campaign was chaired by Robert Griffiths, the General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britain. A number of politicians, public figures, newspapers and magazines, businesses and other organisations endorsed an official position during the Referendum campaign. They promised it would be an easy victory. He was well liked by many undecided voters. He claimed that he would only support membership of the European Union if he could wring the right concessions from other continental leaders. (“Everyone involved in Better Together seemed to be suffering from some kind of post-traumatic stress,” notes one senior member of the team.) On the 20th February 2016, then Prime Minister David Cameron announced that there would be a referendum in June on the UK’s continued membership of the European Union (EU). Help us improve this site. [40][39], Jamie Doward, Carole Cadwalladr and Alice Gibbs, ', Campaigning in the United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, 2016, 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, United Kingdom opt-outs from EU legislation, Opinion polling on the United Kingdom's membership of the European Union, R (Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, Continuing United Kingdom relationship with the European Union, European Union (Future Relationship) Bill, Trade deal negotiation between the UK and EU, EU-UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA), Proposed second Scottish independence referendum, Endorsements in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, List of campaign organisations supporting Remain in the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum, National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers, Unlawful campaigning in the 2016 EU referendum, "Andy Burnham pushes Labour to set up separate pro-European Union campaign", "Alan Johnson to head Labour Yes campaign for EU referendum", "Nick Clegg: Pro-Europeans are the real reformers now", "EU Referendum: Greens to Make Progressive Case for Membership", "Nicola Sturgeon warns of EU exit 'backlash, "Alex Salmond: I'll campaign with Tories to stay in EU", "Conservative Party to stay neutral during EU referendum", "Dickson – An EU referendum will threaten jobs and investment in Northern Ireland", "Alliance expresses concerns over referendum idea", "Statement from the Ulster Unionist Party on EU Referendum", "EU referendum: DUP gives backing to UKIP Brexit campaign, blasting David Cameron's 'pathetic demands, "Lexit: why we need a left exit from the eu", "EU Membership is a Matter for UK Citizens, Not US President", "Feetham urges joint strategies with Govt on key issues", "Garcia flags constitutional reform and Brexit in New Year message", "EU referendum: Leave campaigns face left-wing rival", "The people hoping to persuade UK to vote to stay in the EU", http://www.electoralcommission.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0004/200857/designation-summary-of-assessment-scores-for-leave-outcome.pdf, "Biggest Brexit donor urges May to guarantee EU nationals' rights", "Gruff Rhys: hear his song I Love EU – and find out why he wrote it", "Ukip's anti-EU Three Lions parody song 'Britain's Coming Home' wins backing of David Baddiel for being 'brilliantly naff, "A parody of Pink's "Get The Party Started" to support the campaign to Leave the EU", "Brexiting Britpopper Mandy Boylett releases second single supporting Vote Leave", DATA PROTECTION ACT 1998 SUPERVISORY POWERS OF THE INFORMATION COMMISSIONER MONETARY PENALTY NOTICE, EU campaign firm fined for sending spam texts, Watchdog to launch inquiry into misuse of data in politics, The great British Brexit robbery: how our democracy was hijacked, Electoral Commission statement on investigation into Leave.EU. On one side were the “ardent internationalists”, “comfortable Europhiles” and “engaged metropolitans”, while “strong sceptics” and “EU hostiles” occupied the other pole. However, during the referendum polls and surveys consistently found that well under half the public believed that Britain’s economy would suffer if the UK left the EU. Certainly when the leave campaign are throwing around £350million a week like so much confetti. 13 June 2016. “There was nothing new about the [idea of introducing an] Australian-based points system, but the papers just gave it a free pass.”, More infuriating still was the amount of air time given to claims from the leave campaign that were either grotesque distortions or flagrant lies – the fiction that EU membership cost £350m per week; the pretence that Turkey was close to EU membership and the denial that the UK had a veto on that point. Labour Leave campaigned within the Labour Party against the United Kingdom's continued membership of the European Union and was led by Labour MPs including Kate Hoey, Graham Stringer, Kelvin Hopkins, and Roger Godsiff. A phone call from Osborne finally persuaded him with barely a week to go before the official Stronger In launch. On 2 February, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, released a letter containing a provisional response to Cameron’s renegotiation proposals. The Labour leader’s semi-detachment was, in any case, a secondary problem compared to the stories that were coming in from MPs of leave sentiment spreading like wildfire in their constituencies. The following day there was a sombre meeting between Coetzee, Gilbert and Tara Corrigan, representing Jim Messina’s team, to talk through the grim practicalities of steering a campaign into its final week in the shadow of a horrifying crime. They could be identified, profiled and targeted by the technical wizardry of professional pollsters. Even as the schism widened, Tory advisers on both sides maintained an old WhatsApp group, making bets over the referendum outcome that would become increasingly extravagant on boozy Friday evenings. It was not clear what realistically could be delivered on free movement without European endorsement, and vague talk of re-engaging with continental leaders was a non-starter. Share. Attack lines targeting public perceptions that “Boris” was unreliable and motivated by ambition more than principle were drafted inside No 10, tested in focus groups and then shelved. [36][37], On 4 March 2017, the Information Commissioner's Office also reported that it was 'conducting a wide assessment of the data-protection risks arising from the use of data analytics, including for political purposes' in relation to the Brexit campaign. A script, circulated for use by remainers appearing in the media, highlighted concessions on migrant access to benefits that Cameron had won in his renegotiation, pitched free movement as a price worth paying for access to the single market, and struck a positive tone on labour movement: “Over 100,000 EU citizens work for the health and social care sector … EU citizens have contributed £20bn more in taxes than they have taken out in benefits. Downing Street was saddled with the promise Cameron had made in 2010 to limit annual migration to “tens of thousands” – a failed proposal that could not apply to EU nationals. But instead of forcing the other side to defend its claims, Cameron’s attack fed an atmosphere of general detachment from rational argument and empirical evidence. However, there were a number of other groups that were involved in leading more specialist campaigns. The Stronger In founders hired Straw as director and, at Nick Clegg’s recommendation, Coetzee was taken on as strategist. The official campaign for Britain to stay in the EU ... 18 April 2016. Being part of a continent-wide free market is good for Britain. These centrists were the ruling class of an unrecognised state – call it Remainia – whose people were divided between the Conservatives, Labour and Lib Dems; like a tribe whose homeland has been partitioned by some insouciant Victorian cartographer. Again, the remain side was taken aback by the effectiveness of this scorched-earth approach to evidence-based argument and by the media’s complicity – deliberate in the case of many newspapers, unwitting on the part of the BBC which was bound by impartiality rules to present the claims of both sides as equally valid. The advantage went the other way. In doing so, they infer that in contrast the Remain campaign … Referendum campaign activity was suspended. Vote Leave was created in October 2015, and was a cross-party campaign, including members of Parliament from the Conservatives, Labour and UKIP. They were also supported by the Liberal Party. The centrepiece of the Remain campaign in the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union was that it was in the country’s economic interest to stay a member (Behr, 2016; Oliver, 2016). “Who do EU think you are kidding, Mr Cameron?” asked the Sun on its front page, with the prime minister and his allies mocked up as a hapless Dad’s Army platoon. Cameron worried that the whole Stronger In approach reeked of a metropolitan europhilia that would not chime with the public mood. Leave had no answer. Stronger In’s strategy of highlighting economic risk was portrayed as a hysterical fear-mongering plot, no more anchored in reason than the leave side’s mobilisation of anti-immigration feeling. Cameron’s people were kicking the tyres to check that this unproven vehicle would give safe carriage to the fortunes of their government. Founded in July 2015 as The Know, the campaign was relaunched in September 2015 with its present name to reflect altered wording in the referendum question. They had defied pundits and opinion polls to win a narrow Tory majority in May. Leaders Jun 11th 2016 edition. The leave side exploited this dynamic, making provocative statements about the prime minister and the chancellor, trashing their economic record, for example, goading them into retaliation in the knowledge that stories damaging to Cameron – and, by extension, to the remain cause – would fill the headlines. There was anecdotal evidence, hard to substantiate, that this was mobilising pro-European voters. On Friday 10 June, five men charged with keeping Britain in the European Union gathered in a tiny, windowless office and stared into the abyss. In parliament, the Tory MP Steve Baker described Europe minister David Liddington’s defence of the draft deal as “polishing a poo”. The findings were expected to be published sometime in 2017. People in the Remain campaign may have tried so hard to be persuasive that it backfired. Most Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru, the Scottish National Party, Sinn Fein in … In response, the leave side pursued a strategy of undermining the very idea of independent authority. Corbyn, meanwhile, was retreating back into non-cooperation. Those forces overwhelmed expert pleas for economic stability. But the contrast with the Leave campaign is telling. The No 10 communications team thought that Tusk’s letter would be an opportunity for expectation management – “rolling the pitch” – and they planned their big effort to sell the final deal at the end of February. First, its members wanted to get the pesky referendum out of the way in order to crack on with a legacy-building second term of domestic reform. They stood for a cause that became emblematic of a system that was alien, arrogant and remote – and they had no answer. A series of interventions in the weeks after the renegotiation stumble gave every impression that leave were outgunned. Ed Miliband, the man Cameron had beaten in the general election of 2015, helped to persuade Corbyn to lend his voice to a trade union event already planned for the following week. Just as the 2015 General Election has been characterized as the first ‘digital election’ in Britain, so the 2016 EU Referendum could be characterized as the first ‘digital referendum’.
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