At some stage in the early hours of Friday 24 June when all hope had vanished, when any positive Remain declarations were being greeted with an ironic cheer, one of the local Britain Stronger In Europe campaigners said to me in despair: ‘I don’t understand. We had all the facts on our side’. It still seems extraordinary that a campaign that had overwhelmingly won the economic argument against opponents who did not have the faintest clue about what would happen if we did leave the European Union, ultimately ended in failure. The full post mortem will doubtless take up volumes – but here are some initial thoughts on Labour’s role in the campaign.
In the weeks leading up to 23 June, I spent a lot of time on a large council estate in West London with other local members, trying to talk to as many Labour voters as we could. The majority told us they would vote Remain. But too many times the door was opened by someone who had little idea that the party had an opinion. There were many people we did not get to speak to or leave a leaflet with, so that just within the constituency where I live, there must have been thousands of Labour voters who would have gone into the polling booth without knowing Labour supported Remain.
Of course the psycho-drama at the top of the Tory party – a compelling mash-up of House of Cards and Game of Thrones – was always going to make for a better media story than set piece speeches from the opposition. Nevertheless it was worrying that only two days before the referendum, I was asked on the doorstep ‘Where’s Labour been? Why do you only ever see Tories on TV?’ This matters for two reasons. Firstly, there may have been hundreds of thousands of Labour voters throughout the country who were undecided about the referendum and who might have been persuaded to vote Remain if they had been clearer about Labour’s views. Secondly, it was in the traditional Labour heartlands of England and Wales, that the referendum was lost. Labour’s absence from the stage meant that the Remain message was only coming from the likes of David Cameron and George Osborne – the Oxford-educated representatives of globalised big business, who those voters had every reason to distrust.
It was these sorts of voices that provided the ‘facts’ supporting the Remain side. Logically, it seemed like the right approach to keep repeating the views of a staggeringly wide range of experts, who stressed that Brexit would be economically disastrous. But by the end of the campaign I had started wincing every time an ‘expert’ was quoted, because I could already hear the putative rejoinder: ‘But the experts got it wrong before’. And those seven words could instantly reduce months of work by some seriously knowledgeable people to the same level of plausibility as the opinion of a random punter in the pub. When facts seem so unreliable, then people will understandably rely more on gut instinct to make decisions. Yet Remain made little attempt to appeal to emotion. If the Labour leadership had made more of a passionate and positive case for the European Union then this might have been different.
The most emotional of subjects for Leave voters was immigration. Leave successfully portrayed support for Remain, not as a vote for the status quo, but as a choice to accept future waves of migrants which would make existing problems in public services and housing, much, much worse. How many voters genuinely believed that 76 million Turks were about to arrive on our shores is debatable, but the claim made it more believable that slightly lower (but still frighteningly large) numbers of people were on their way. Yet Remain had nothing to say about immigration. Collectively we shuffled our feet, looked guilty and tried to change the subject back to the economy. Neither of the main parties had the nerve to make the case that migration has made a significant economic, social and cultural contribution to the United Kingdom. The silence from the Tory Remainers was understandable. As believers in unfettered free markets, they had no reply to the legitimate fears of British people who have suffered from the downsides of migration. But Labour could – and should – have had those answers.
Overall, the Remain side underestimated the power of the Vote Leave slogan ‘Take back control’. We failed to understand its appeal at a more fundamental level, than just as a reference to political sovereignty. The citizens of post-industrial towns who voted Leave in such large numbers, were often people who knew that their entire livelihood could be taken away by the flourish of a director’s pen in a foreign boardroom. Many of them lived in areas which were dependent on EU money, but who felt that there was little dignity in such dependence. These are the people that Labour exists to stick up for, these are people on whose behalf Labour should have done more to challenge the Vote Leave untruth that Brexit would give them greater control over their lives, rather than less.
I had expected to be writing this article in the wake of a narrow Remain victory. However, the victory for Leave ironically means that the needs to persuade the British people of the merits of the European project must go on, for it we are to limit the damage which will be done to our country, we must be aiming to maintain as close a relationship with the EU as possible. This time Labour needs to go about the campaign in the right way.
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Christabel Cooper writes a regular column on the Progress website
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This analysis from Loughborough CRCC may be of interest, because it indicates the bias and selective reporting in the mass media. In the print media, weighted by circulation, this bias was 80% in favour of Leave!
Interestingly, despite claims to the contrary by some of the PLP, it appears that Jeremy Corbyn was the most covered Labour Politician (at number 7 overall among politicians) during the EU referendum campaign. Gordon Brown manages to just sneak in, at number 9 but a long way behind. Angela Eagle scarcely featured and Alan Johnson received less than one-sixth of the coverage of Jeremy Corbyn.
Key findings
Seven of the top ten people and half of all people in the top thirty are Conservative politicians. In all, they account for 73% of the total number of appearances in the top thirty.
The most frequently reported Labour politician was Jeremy Corbyn (7th). Only ten Labour politicians made the top thirty. They account for 15% of the total number of appearances in the top thirty.
Only two representatives from other UK political parties made the list: Nigel Farage (4th) and Nicola Sturgeon (16th).
No representative of the Liberal Democrats made the top thirty.
The top seven people are all men.
Nine of the thirty people are women, but only one woman (Priti Patel) made the top ten.
Only three non-UK based people made the list: Donald Tusk (=14th), Jean-Claude Juncker (20th) and Angela Merkel (=26th).
http://blog.lboro.ac.uk/crcc/eu-referendum/uk-news-coverage-2016-eu-referendum-report-5-6-may-22-june-2016/
The John Curtice analysis is also very interesting because the conclusion is that Jeremy Corbyn was not responsible for losing the EU referendum but the demographics and internal divisions within the PLP were a far more significant factor. As this was prior to the coordinated mass resignations and attempted coup, then this appears to indicate that dissent from Progress MPs was a significant factor, in contributing to the loss of this referendum.
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/staggers/2016/06/dont-blame-jeremy-corbyn-polls-show-only-tory-voters-could-have-kept-us-eu
I agree that maintaining some ‘independent’ nation relation to the EU is important to the and some European nations. But this time in needs to be with transparent consent and not subterfuge. It also needs to develop some sense of accountability with a removal of distance, criticism, and excessive ‘back – room’ deals. Part of the EU image problem is that it was never offered or projected as a cooperative democratic liaison, but something that had to be masterminded through over and above every reservations in every nation state. It would also help if some of the lavish bureaucratic benefits could be cut out and some of the overblown sense of importance of the leaders was made humble.
When’s Progress going to lose its hard-on for this wasteful, anti-democratic empire? It doesn’t exist for the benefit of Mr and Mrs Public (or Monsieur et Madame Publique, or Herr und Frau Publik). It’s there to persecute us. Let’s see some pro-Brexit pieces to give at least some balance.
It’s truly astonishing that there are still those who fail to appreciate that with our precious public services being crushed by sheer weight of numbers, unlimited immigration has already begun to unwind of decades of struggle for the survival of the public sector. And equally surprising that the non-democratic desire for the EU to impose by proxy the failed policy demands of the Labour party…on a country which, rightly or wrongly, has rejected them…grossly ignores the will of the people.
My experience was that Labour did say that ‘migration has made a significant economic, social and cultural contribution to the United Kingdom.’ It may not have been reported, but I heard it more than once from Jeremy Corbyn. I agree though that the Remain campaign failed to address the key issue – immigration – which made it look dodgy. There were a zillion answers on immigration – both emotional, that it is a ‘good thing’ for our economy and we should be proud of it, and technical (no-one can claim benefits until they have been here for a while, immigrants pay far far more in taxes than they receive in any sort of benefits, there’s more Brits in Spain, the House of Commons majority want as close as possible to a Norway deal so whatever Gove/Leadsom may promise, we will sign up to free movement in some form anyway to keep our access to the European market that gives us millions and millions of jobs_
Unfortunately the political class still don’t ‘get it’, why so many of our fellow citizens voted to leave the European Union. This article from a German magazine, Der Spiegel, – http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/brexit-the-era-of-the-angry-voter-is-upon-us-a-1101438.html – clearly identifies a number of reasons, and patently they don’t just relate to the UK. It’s primarily the impact, since WW2, of Western nations rush towards globalisation, coupled with a disenchantment with political elites from both sides of the spectrum patently unable to improve the lot of the average ‘guy on the street’. Until anything changes you will always have this, perhaps in your view, irrational anger of those who feel, and are, being left behind but who within a liberal democracy have the ultimate weapon, the power of the ballot box. A sobering thought?