Staying is ‘more safer’ said Khan, maestro of grammar
TRIPLE whammy yesterday morning: speeches in different parts of London by Sadiq Khan, David Davis and Lord Blunkett. Thus does the EU vortex accelerate.
Late May is normally a time for the first Pimm’s of the year, zeds in a deckchair, a dip into an old Wodehouse.
Instead everyone is in a fearful bate about Brexit, posters portraying Eurosceptics as skinheads and some Brussels henchman saying Boris Johnson would be a ‘nightmare’ as our PM. We’ll be the judge of that, danke schön.
New Mayor Khan headed for a ‘hub for creative entrepreneurs’ near East London’s Brick Lane – tandoori territory, where every other shop is a curry house. The smells! I was already hungry but after walking down those streets, being wafted by delicious kitchen aromas, I could have eaten a wee dog with sore eyes.
The crowd of about 100 was rather more middle- class than the area’s residents. The modernist venue had low ceilings, dim lighting and a circular atrium which had a one and a half ton table suspended from the roof.
We were welcomed by an American in a T-shirt, then by a young woman who said she was more concerned about equal pay for women than she was about the European Union. That may not have been terribly on-message.
Mr Khan, seldom prompt, was 20 minutes late. When he arrived, he, too, distanced himself from David Cameron’s strategy. He disliked the ‘personal and negative attacks’ and said: ‘We would survive outside the EU but I think we would be diminished.’
The same could be said of the large plastic table on which the hub had been serving coffee. A young woman had sat her bottom on it and the table developed a vast crack.
Europe made us ‘ more safer’, said Mr Khan, reading his text. Our maestro of grammar concluded with a lecture about patriotism and hinted that only if we stayed in the EU would we find new treatments for Parkinson’s disease, breast cancer and Alzheimer’s.
In Westminster, Tory MP and former Europe minister David Davis was just starting a Serious Talk about the economic case for leaving the EU.
By the time I arrived, panting, DD had a graph on the wall showing UK exports and job statistics. He was speaking at the HQ of the Institution of Civil Engineers to a room of rather earnest bods. His tone was sober. To show just what a Serious Talk it was, he had some sort of clerk sitting next to him.
After going through various trade options he concluded that it was not so much a case of ‘Little Englanders’ wanting to quit the EU as ‘Little Europeans’ who made it harder for us to trade and cooperate with the rest of the world. The EU was in a ‘1970s-style decline’, he said, and there was a ‘fabulously upbeat’ scenario if we opted to go it alone. DD is not the world’s most exciting orator but the factual underlay to his claims did make them more convincing.
Invited to slag off David Cameron and George Osborne, he changed the habits of a lifetime and declined. ‘We will win this on ideas not by personalities,’ he intoned.
But he did argue that the British Establishment often ‘gets things badly wrong’. The bureaucrats and diplomats were worried about their careers. ‘There are risks on both sides of the referendum,’ said Mr Davis, ‘but I think the risks for the country are much bigger if we stay in the EU.’
WHICH left me a few minutes to hare down to the Royal Festival Hall where David Blunkett, once a Eurosceptic, came out as a Remainer. He dismissed yesterday’s startling immigration statistics, saying that they needed to be counted in a different way.
Seldom have I heard Blunkett less enthusiastic about a case. It was as if someone had told him he had to support Remain. His guide dog seemed to make a bid for freedom. ‘ He’s a Brexit dog!’ cried Blunkett.