EU Referendum


EU Referendum: second-class citizens


26/07/2015



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Booker has picked up on the recent indications that the EU is planning a new treaty, following which the UK may be offered "associate membership", making us (in the historical context) "second-class citizens".

There can be little dispute that, should this be offered by Mr Cameron just before the referendum poll, it could transform the campaign, although nothing of this has yet percolated the deeper reaches of Channel 4 News.

From there, political editor Gary Gibbon tells us there's "a riff you hear around the top of government that the referendum on Europe is won". You hear, he says, "'60/40' thrown around as a plausible if not easy margin of victory for the yes campaign for staying in the EU. You heard it in the run-up to the Scottish referendum too".

The thing is that, with the arrival of associate membership, public sentiment could go either way. If Mr Cameron ambushes us at the last minute, and the offer is heavily spun, it could look attractive enough for the majority of voters to give it a punt, especially if there is to be a second referendum, when the terms can be put to the vote.

If, however, the "no" campaign is ahead of the game and we have been discounting any idea of association as the second-class citizenship that Booker highlights, then we're in with a chance. The weight and longevity of the propaganda might be sufficient to neutralise the Cameron game plan, making leaving the EU a better proposition.

Certainly, Mr Gibbon is upbeat, informing us that on the "no" side there is serious work being undertaken to try to make sure that the referendum doesn't go to the government, even if currently there seems to be a three-way split.

On the one hand, we are told, there is Dominic Cummings and Matthew Elliott, "old hands from the campaign against the euro over a decade ago". They are coordinating efforts to recruit, strategise and fundraise. On the other, there is Richard Tice and the theknow.eu campaign and then there is Ukip's Nigel Farage, cast as the wild card, in the manner of John Prescott as deployed by Tony Blair.

Outside this "golden triangle", of course, nothing else exists and, as long as we rely on the London-centric media, nothing ever will.

These are the "experts" though who still believe to this day that Mr Cameron vetoed an EU treaty, who forecast that Ukip would get "at least five seats" in the general election – and that there would be a hung parliament. These are also the people who were predicting that we wouldn't get a referendum and, more recently, that Greece was going to drop out of the euro.

Despite many of them convinced that the referendum was to be in May next, that turns out not to be, but one of the self-same "experts" who was so convinced that we would have a hung parliament is now telling us on the basis of an anonymous "senior source" that Mr Cameron will hold the poll in June. The Prime Minister will, we are reliably informed, announce the "fast-tracked date" as the centrepiece of the party conference in October.

Doubtless, we are so lucky to have these experts to keep us in the loop - even if the Electoral Commission wants nine months from the passing of the referendum legislation before there is a poll. Thus, when it comes to acting on the "intelligence" of these "experts", we might perhaps reserve judgement, even sparing a thought for Nigel Farage who talks of the "small-minded Westminster types" who are seeking to tell us how the campaign should be run.

What is desperately worrying though is that the scent of Mr Cameron's great turn-round on associate membership has been with us for at least a month, and the fact that the possibility hasn't been officially acknowledged by a government which is seeking to abolish "purdah" suggests that there might indeed be plans to spring the news on us at the last minute.

That "last minute" is most likely to be in September 2017, as the timing is not in his hands. It is then that the "colleagues" will be making a Laeken-type declaration, with a treaty convention to follow in the spring of 2018. And it could hardly be the case that Mr Cameron could hold a referendum in June next year, only then to announce the following year that there was a new treaty to follow, with another referendum to come.

The possibility of a 2017 referendum and a second "treaty-lock" referendum needs to be at the centre of any "no" strategy, which is going to have to be intelligence-led and highly innovative if it is to make a dent in the status quo. Yet, not only is there little sign that the danger is being recognised, all three campaigns are promising to launch in September, presumably in anticipation of a June poll.

The point here is that if the ballot actually takes place in or around October 2017, the campaign will have over two years before the voters trudge to the polls to cast their votes. If campaign peaks early and then the poll comes at the end of two years-worth of the leaden arguments that are currently on offer, the public will have long-since lost interest.

To my mind, intensive campaigning should be confined to the three months before the poll. Any activity now should be carefully targeted, aimed specifically at weakening the opposition's case rather than seeking to change minds.

When we do hit the streets in force, we have – as Owen Paterson's "ExCom" tells us – the big need to reach out to centre-left voters, and the need for 50 percent plus one. That will need a positive vision on the lines of the Stokes precept, which none of the campaigns so far seem able to offer.

As long as the campaign is in the hands of the "experts" though, it would seem that such basic principles have little traction. The beauty of being an "expert" lionised by the London media is never needing to know what you're talking about it, and never having to apologise when you're wrong – which is most times.

Fortunately, there are other types of "second-class citizens" out there – ordinary people who have an instinctive feel for campaigning and who don't need the "experts" to tell them what to do. With access to the net, and a reach that collectively meets and exceeds the legacy media and its dying news titles, they have to capability to confound the pundits and deliver another result that none of them expected.

In those "second-class citizens", who are so obviously ahead of the game, we have probably our best and only chance of engineering an upset.