Rhetoric heats up as vote on ‘Brexit’ approaches
Former mayor of London slammed for Hitler comparison
A British bookmaker said there’s a 73% chance the U.K will vote to remain in the EU.
European Council President Donald Tusk on Tuesday reprimanded former London mayor Boris Johnson, a Conservative Party politician who wants Britain to leave the European Union, for his “political amnesia” when he compared the EU to Hitler.
Tusk, the EU’s top official, responded to comments made Sunday by Johnson in a newspaper interview with The Sunday Tele
graph. Johnson said the 28-nation political bloc was trying to create a superstate that, like Hitler, wanted to dominate the continent.
“Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically,” Johnson said. “The EU is an attempt to do this by different methods.”
Tusk said Johnson’s remarks were “absurd arguments (that) should be completely ignored if they hadn’t been formulated by one of the most influential politicians of the ruling party.” He said Johnson “crossed the boundaries of rational discourse.”
The public quarrel came as a British bookmaker said Tuesday that there’s a 73% chance the United Kingdom will vote to remain in the EU when it holds a referendum June 23.
Betfair’s odds for a rejection of the Brexit — a British vote to leave the 28-nation EU — were up from 70% in recent weeks.
The bookmaker’s odds arrived on the heels of a series of dire political and economic warnings about any separation’s potential impact on the U.K. from Prime Minister David Cameron, the Bank of England, the International Monetary Fund and other influential voices.
In a blog post citing Stanford University’s Economic Policy Uncertainly Index for Britain, Bet- fair noted, “The Brexit debate has already created more economic uncertainty in the U.K. than the Scottish independence referendum, the eurozone crisis, the 2008 financial crisis and even the September 11th terrorist attacks.”
A telephone poll published Tuesday by ORB for Britain’s Dai
ly Telegraph newspaper found 55% of respondents favored remaining in the EU, up 4 percentage points since last month. Support for leaving the EU fell 3 percentage points to 40%.
“Time may be running out for the Leave camp to make the case for Brexit as the Remain campaign’s position is consolidating,” Lynton Crosby, the election strategist who helped re-elect Cameron, wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
“However, the slightly better news for Leave is this underlying figure does not paint the whole picture. As identified from previous ORB polls, turnout continues to be a major issue for the Remain campaign,” Crosby wrote.
Other polls show the race is essentially tied.
An online survey by ICM released Monday gave a growing lead to those who wanted to stay in the bloc, but a telephone poll on the same day by the same company found almost the exact opposite.
A poll of six polls covering the period April 27 to May 15 by What UK Thinks, a research firm, showed each side on 50%.