Allister Heath:
If anything, support for Leave is edging up, despite it facing the full might of the political establishment
Goliath wants to annihilate David, and do it in style. Day after day, the massed forces of the global establishment are delivering their bloodcurdling warnings, with one simple mission: stop Brexit at any cost. The plan is ruthlessly efficient, the roll-out beautifully choreographed, the elite troops perfectly briefed. Generals, diplomats, company bosses, economists, entertainers, assorted virtue-signallers: they are all rigidly on-message with their grotesque claims that Britain could not possibly cope with standing on its own two feet.
It is like nothing the UK has seen before, a display of raw power and political professionalism that makes the Referendum of 1975 and even the Scottish campaign of 2014 look like amateur theatrics. The next six weeks will see total war, with all weapons and tactics fair game.
Yet something remarkable is happening – or rather, isn’t. Goliath’s weapons of mass destruction aren’t working, and David is not just surviving but standing tall. The opinion polls are not moving. If anything, support for Leave has crept up a little. The latest ICM poll puts Leave at 46 per cent and Remain at 44 per cent; YouGov estimates Remain at 42 per cent and Leave at 40 per cent.
It wasn’t supposed to turn out like this. By now, the Remain camp should have emerged triumphant, its lead in the opinion polls unassailable, the referendum’s outcome a foregone conclusion. In a classic case of cognitive dissonance, the Westminster establishment, in awe at the massive numerical and financial superiority of the Remainians, is finding it difficult to accept that this isn’t happening.
Despite the evidence, the elite narrative in recent weeks has been that Remain has been doing all the running; but that is to confuse headline-grabbing activity with results.
Some readers may be tempted to dismiss the polls: they spectacularly under-estimated the nation’s lack of appetite for change at the general election, so why not this time around? I disagree. After being humiliated last year, the polling companies have made huge efforts to fix their broken models. This is paying off. YouGov’s final call on the London elections was spot on: it predicted perfectly Sadiq Khan’s final 57-43 per cent victory after second preferences, using its sophisticated online panel.
It also performed well in Scotland and Wales, though of course there will always be a margin of error. The industry in general and online polls in particular have thus earned the right to be listened to again – and their findings are that the race is remarkably close, that the Remainians’ onslaught of propaganda has had no overall impact to date and that a small minority of undecided voters will determine the outcome.
Behind the scenes, there is now real worry on the Remain side. But it is so wedded to its elite-driven fear campaign – getting powerful people or institutions to warn of Armageddon – that its answer is simply to do more of the same, albeit even more aggressively. It hopes and believes that most people haven’t switched on yet, and that they eventually will as the referendum nears and the volume is turned up ever further.
This is a dangerous strategy. Apocalyptic claims from endless grey-suited figures may come to sound like old news. Hysteria only works when it is seen as plausible and dispassionate. Barack Obama’s heavy-handed intervention backfired, while the Prime Minister’s claim that a Brexit would increase the risk of war was so over the top that it will have encouraged many undecided voters to switch off altogether.
That said, one scare campaign to have cut through was the Treasury’s dodgy dossier on the economic costs of Brexit. The Government is planning to roll out more editions of this nonsense: it will say that tens of thousands of jobs will be lost in the City and that wages would fall by thousands of pounds if we leave. This will frighten some undecided voters into backing Remain.
The pro-Brexit strategy will be to try to neutralise these attacks by focusing on the public’s other worries, something that it has been doing with increasing success in recent days. The key to the referendum will be which of these countervailing forces prevails.
The Government’s biggest problem is that it can preach and bully, but can’t do real populism. Its tone oozes a certain class-based disdain: how dare these uppity Leavers defy us? It’s almost as if they thought that everybody who matters is on the Remain side, and that anybody else, by definition, is a non-entity unaware of their lowly station in the world. There are few real arguments, endless appeals to authority and a nasty assumption that elites and international technocracies are always right, a faulty approach in our non-deferential, post-Iraq and post-economic-crisis age.
Leave has also played the establishment card, of course, wheeling out its own senior figures. But the core of its strategy is traditional campaigning and messaging, focused around value for money, control (including of migration), and highlighting the dangers of staying in.
Crucially, such claims aren’t rooted in appeals to acronymed institutions or large multinationals. Boris Johnson’s great strength is that he can call the Government’s bluff, dismiss its threats and simply say that he would do better.
While Remain has been campaigning flat out for the past month or so, Vote Leave has kept much of its powder dry. Its digital campaign will be good. Boris’s national bus tour is likely to be highly effective, including on TV: this is a defining moment for the former Mayor of London, and I suspect that those of his critics who thought that he didn’t have it in him to seize the moment will soon be eating humble pie.
This won’t be enough, on its own, to ensure that Boris, Michael Gove and their band of merry men defeat their hugely powerful and highly disciplined opponents. They will also need lots of luck and a lowish turnout. But while Remain are still favourites, only a fool would now dismiss Leave’s chances. The global establishment has gone nuclear but, astonishingly, it’s still all to play for.