EU referendum: a fight to the finish?
Sunday 23 June 2013
However, an EU referendum is very much back on the agenda, even if the timescale is unknown. Most people, though, agree that at some time or other there now will be a referendum, and that gives new life and meaning to this blog.
Effectively, even without a referendum being declared, the campaign has already started. And it is a given that, if we fight such a campaign, we do it with the intention of winning – and for no other reason.
Clearly, it is also the case that we cannot win this on our own. This is quite obviously the case but it needs to be stated as it underlines the fact that the campaign is going to be fought and won by a coalition. Each of the players, to maximise their own effect, will have to forge alliances.
The other side of the coin is that we will have to focus our attention and efforts on the opposition, and spend less time attacking each other. A common, unified message is clearly better that a discordant jumble of arguments, spat out by groups without reference to what others are saying.
With that, the point that I made in my earlier piece is that we need to unite around a winningmessage. Unity for unity's sake is not a winning strategy, if the underlying message is wrong.
And it is here that I am less confident than ever more that we have within the eurosceptic community the capability of winning, as there seems no prospect of unifying behind a single, coherent message, gauged exactly to drawing in the maximum number of people in a referendum to support leaving the EU.
Some of the problem I would diagnose as the inward-looking nature of euroscepticism, where the "little Englander" epithet does have some force, and where a huge constituency is content to rest on breaking clear of the EU as a sufficient objective of any campaign. It believes that freedom from the EU is, in itself, sufficient to motivate the majority to want to leave.
However, outside the circle of hard-core eurosceptics, it is true to say that many people, if not indifferent to the idea of leaving the EU, are lukewarm about it. It really is not an issue that drives public debate. You rarely, if ever, hear the issue emerge spontaneously in a pub discussion – the litmus of public opinion.
Such sentiment as is recorded in the polls is soft, and there is every reason to believe that the status quo effect will dominate in any referendum, on which basis the current poll showing suggests that we would lose an "in-out" referendum.
To win, therefore, needs a massive change in how we fight this battle. Unity of purpose is one requirement, getting the message right is another. Avoiding giving the wrong messages is also important, and vitally so.
And it is here that one wonders whether some eurosceptics have a death wish. They may be entertained and greatly heartened by talk of the "Fourth Reich", of the "EUSSR", of quislings, traitors, betrayal and Bilderbergers, of jackboots and Gestapo. But are they conscious of how this plays with the ordinary public?
In the world of professional politics, political messages are framed with reference to their target audiences. Increasingly, they are tested by focus groups and by even more sophisticated measures, all to ensure maximum impact with minimum negative consequences. How would the stock phrases of euroscepticism measure up?
For my part, I would maintain that much of the standard fare of euroscepticism is a complete "turn-off" for the public at large. Unless the language is moderated, I fear we will drive away the public rather then recruit it to the cause.
This, though, is only part of the problem, and we can only scratch the surface in one short blog post. What is needed, I think, is some broader discussion on what precisely we need to do, in order to win a referendum.
And that, to me, seems to be the real problem. The latest breed of eurosceptic doesn't "do" discussion. It plants "vote UK", hundreds of times on comment threads, across the online media, worships its leader and chants its simplistic mantras about tearing up the ECA and signing new trade deals.
However, if we don't start to look seriously at what it takes to win, when it comes to the time when the fight steps up, we will be dangerously ill-prepared. And then, we are unlikely ever to see the finish line - at least, not as victors. And voting UKIP is not necessarily part of the solution. It may even be becoming part of the problem.
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Richard North 23/06/2013
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