Vote Leave’s campaign director Dominic Cummings – a man who managed to spend two and half years in an underground bunker but just eight months working for Iain Duncan Smith – had a very enjoyable star turn at the Treasury select committee last week. He did not take much with him, including clear answers or cufflinks. This is a man who is determined to show the world he is held down by neither Brussels nor cufflinks.
Cummings is not an unintelligent man. His essays on dysfunction in Whitehall are worth the time it takes to get through them, he has said Michael Gove would be a bad leader, and before his current incarnation as campaign director for Vote Leave he wrote a thoughtful strategy on how to mobilise an ‘out’ vote.
Part of this strategy was to realise that immigration does not need to be a focus, and the Leave campaign should focus on neutralising economic fears instead. It seems a sensible line of thought: people make up their own minds on immigration – you might need a dog whistle here and there – but it does not need to be front and centre of a Leave campaign.
But reducing immigration is to Brexit what nationalisation is to the left – too tempting a solution in the face of complex problems.
So it was that Gove argued on Monday against a ‘free-for-all’ on immigration because it would be a ‘direct and serious threat to our public services’.
This championing of public services does not stop at immigration. Vote Leave is ferociously demanding fully funded public services at every turn.
I have helpfully made a list of just some of the things we could fund just by leaving the European Union, according to Vote Leave: a seven day National Health Service, school places, better patient care, and 14 new submarines (every year).
Who knew that, after decades of the left’s best efforts, all it would take to convert some of Britain’s most erstwhile free-marketers to the cause of well-funded public services was a referendum on the EU?
Of course, this is too good to be true. Vote Leave’s only strategy now is to align the Brexit cause in a fight against the unfairness of an elite ruling class. It is a tactic employed by populists of varying motive: the Scottish National party’s fight against Westminster, the United Kingdom Independence party’s fight against immigration, and Donald Trump’s fight against everyone.
This strategy has motivated some of the most ridiculous events in a generally unedifying campaign. Wherever there is an elite to be blamed against the plucky Brexit underdogs, they will be.
Barack Obama’s part-Kenyan ancestry was at fault for talking Britain down, according to part-American, part-Turkish Boris Johnson. Nigel Farage first accused the president of attempting to influence the campaign, then attacked him for weakness in falling for a No. 10 attempt to get him use the word ‘queue’.
Hours and hours of media appearances were spent on Vote Leave campaigners denouncing the £9m spent on a government leaflet after campaigning for years for the right to hold a £50m referendum.
It is also why you cannot watch a Brexit speech without thinking you have accidentally wandered into a Syriza or Podemos rally when the speaker starts railing against high unemployment in the eurozone. It is nothing but deceit.
This strategy of aligning with a loose collection of underdog causes is probably Vote Leave’s only hope, but it is a deeply insincere strategy. Most of the campaign’s big names seem to have had a Damascene conversion to the needs of underfunded public services, or of the prospects of an unemployed teenager in Greece. They are not really interested in these things – once the polls close on 23 June, so will Vote Leave’s crusade against inequality.
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Alex White is a member of Progress. He tweets @AlexWhiteUK