The In campaign will pay a price for having treated people like fools
Telegraph columnist Charlie Brooks has spent the past six weeks meeting the paper’s readers and canvassing their views on the EU. Here he presents his conclusions
For the last six weeks I’ve been canvassing Telegraph readers to gain an understanding of how they have responded to the referendum campaign. Irrespective of whether they come from Bradford or Burford, Surrey or Suffolk, their reactions have chimed.
The strongest sentiment is that they have not appreciated being carpet bombed by Project Fear’s foreign agents. It’s left them with a sense of being patronised. “Why should Obama tell us to sign up to a deal that he wouldn’t go near?” was a typical reaction. Stronger emotions resulted from Christine Lagarde’s lecture, which was met with scepticism. “She’s telling us to vote for what’s good for her, not what’s good for us.”
Then there was the reaction to the constant propaganda being churned out by government departments. The Treasury’s predictions prompted the most anger. “They have proved in the last six years that they are incapable of accurate predictions. And yet they are now trying to scare us with bogus forecasts presented as facts,” was one reader’s observation. It also didn’t go unnoticed by
Telegraph readers that the Remain campaign have been ruthlessly disingenuous with their use of figures such as “using current population numbers to predict that GDP will fall when they know full well that there will be mass immigration if we Remain”. This is in stark contrast to the measured and informed contributions of Messrs Bamford and Dyson who have created more jobs than the Whitehall scaremongers. The catastrophe that is the euro has been central to readers’ thinking. “Economists and bankers have been wheeled out by Downing Street to remind us that we’re a bunch of morons that should listen to our ‘intellectual betters’.” But Telegraph readers aren’t
stupid and they remember that it was the very same geniuses that told them we should join the euro and then failed to see the crash coming in 2008. One reader went as far as to suggest that Vote Leave’s slogan should simply be “Goldman Sachs want us to Remain”.
Whether we Remain or Leave, there is a strong feeling that “the euro is going to collapse because it’s unsustainable for the Mediterranean countries”. There is concern that these countries will swing violently to the Left or Right as “the inevitable austerity imposed by being tied to the German economy kicks in. And that will be a bigger threat to peace in Europe than us leaving a sinking ship”. Six weeks ago the expectation was that Leave had to explain what a future outside the EU would look like, because leaving was perceived to be the risky option. But that has been turned on its head.
“Remain preach that we will be better off inside an EU that we help to reform. And yet they have failed to convince us that we have any influence, as demonstrated by the PM’s renegotiation, and there hasn’t been a word about what a reformed Europe looks like.”
The reality is, I kept hearing, that we’ll be put on the naughty stool and told to shut up if we Remain. The message from
Telegraph readers is clear. We are not mavericks. The risk is Remain.