I have been out campaigning on the European Union referendum campaign trail, holding stalls with fellow Labour activists and talking to people on all sides of the EU debate.

‘It’s all so negative’ people kept saying. I agreed. People get tired of negativity. They can’t get away from it. The airwaves are saturated by claim and counterclaim. People like fun and people like winning. So we gave that a go instead – what has Birmingham won from the EU?

So last week we played a Birmingham Euromillions inspired game to highlight all the projects in the city that had benefitted in millions of pounds from EU funding. It seemed to be a good way to engage people. Turn the bingo handle and wait for your winning number to match a flagship Birmingham project like the NEC, or the security of our automotive industry back in 2005 when the EU paid out £176m in emergency funding to prop up the supply chain, get people back to work and ultimately pave the way for our renewed automotive boom. Positive things everyone would want to win.

It seems to be inherently difficult for both sides not to end up dragged into negative campaigning because on both ends of the see-saw there is at least agreement that the oppositions idea is the negative option.

This weekend we were campaigning Moseley at the farmer’s market. After an impassioned debate ended, in which it was clear that the man I was talking to, who wanted to vote leave would do so if it was the last thing he ever did, a old man quietly walked over to our stall.

‘You know the EU was started in my mother’s kitchen,’ he said.

‘What – the EU?’, my mom asked, incredulous.

‘Well, not the EU as it is now of course, it first started as the European Coal and Steel Community and then later became the European Economic Community. But it started around my mother’s kitchen table. We used to live in a suburb in Paris you see and the founders would come over and debate their ideas …’

Wow. This was not a conversation I expected to have.

I hadn’t heard much about the origins of the EU: that it began in 1950 following the end of the second world war, or the changes it went through before in 1973 Britain joined, or that it was only named the European Union in 1993. The Schuman Declaration of 1950 that kickstarted it all set out the aims of the project – to, first, prevent a future war, but also to look at developing  economies together  to the benefit of the people and also to consider developing nations around the world. A peace project that considered collaboration to be at its heart. Those are the positive things to start to talk about. Our values and our vision of the world.

Great ideas have to start somewhere and isn’t it wonderful that they might start in the most mundane of places – round the kitchen table?

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