I have to be honest, I found yesterday’s launch of the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign deeply uninspiring. They seem to have learned none of the lessons from the Scottish Referendum. It’s not enough to win the vote. You have to win the campaign, too. Setting out a long retail list of facts and figures is not going to cut the mustard. Of course it’s important to know that our bank balances and jobs benefit from being in the EU. Of course it’s important to have former top police officers tell us that the European Arrest Warrant keeps us safer. You need the melody to engage people, though, and there was none of this. It was all bass notes. There was no celebrating of the fact that the EU has meant that our parents, our generation, our children and, we hope, generations to come are not fighting each other on European battlefields.
What was worse was the implication that this campaign was the patriotic one and that those who want to leave the EU were described as “quitters”. That is deeply unhelpful language that does nothing to engage people. I loathe the use of the word “patriotic” in politics at the best of times. It is pure poison and the way it’ll be flung around by both campaigns renders it utterly meaningless. This is all a bit deja vu because I remember being so sickened by Better Together styling itself the “patriotic” campaign that I didn’t go to its launch.
I don’t think for a moment that I am BSIE’s target audience. It really doesn’t matter what this lot do. I’m going to vote to stay in the EU even if Stuart Rose and Karren Brady spend the entire campaign re-enacting the George Galloway/Rula Lenska scene from Celebrity Big Brother. However, our opponents will be well-funded and well organised with a message that is a strong layer of populist froth on top of some deeply negative, divisive and scapegoating message, just like the Yes campaign was north of the border. It’s pretty clear that winning the campaign is important. There needs to be an air of sunshine and positivity about the pro-EU side and the many mistakes made by Better Together must not be repeated. The assumptions they made about their target audience ended up just driving people into the hands of the Yes campaign.
I just hope that BSIE actually produce things that are worth sharing and worth delivering through people’s letterboxes. I rarely shared Better Together’s stuff because it was so awful.
Another thing that I really didn’t like about the messaging yesterday was the buy-in to Cameron’s renegotiation. I’m not sure I want to see any of our rights diminished by him for a start. Also, associating the remain campaign with what will probably be a fairly joyless, overspun outcome is perhaps not ever so wise.
So what’s a campaigner who’s deeply uninspired by BSIE to do?
The Lib Dem Europe campaign
We as a party have always been passionately pro-European and we have to make that case robustly. We also need to be visible about doing it. Let’s get organising street stalls and house parties. We can add positivity and vibrancy to the debate and we should be unrestrained in doing so. I am so glad that the instructions for organising them treat people like adults and aren’t as prescriptive as the David Miliband house party rules which even outlined what you had to say to people when they came in.
This gives us the chance to do two things – to motivate those pro-EU voters and turn them not just into campaigners but to promote the Liberal Democrats to them as well. We can’t afford just to be targeting our efforts at motivating the committed. Once they are onside, we need to go and add some sunshine into the debate. We need to be creative, daring, audacious and bold. We need to acknowledge that the EU is far from perfect and we want to kick its backside to make it more accountable to the people it serves, less bureaucratic and more democratic – but show that it is a good thing that impacts on all of our lives.
Another key difference about the EU campaign is that there are lots of think tanks and organisations like British Influence who will bring facts and cool heads to the debate.
What is certain is that none of us who believes that the EU is a good thing can afford to sit this one out. We need to do all we can to persuade as many people as possible to vote to remain. It’s too important to settle for a sub-standard IN campaign. We learned that lesson in Scotland.
While we’re on the subject of Scotland, Willie Rennie has been criticising the SNP for not taking part in BSIE. If they had, of course, they’d have been absolute hypocrites after the pasting they gave us and Labour for campaigning with the Tories. That approach is not going to get one single vote in ballot boxes for either the EU or Holyrood and we should not be wasting our time with it..
If the only melody on offer is going to be a Liberal Democrat one, we need to get on with creating it and that means integrating it into all our campaigns from now and doing some serious outreach. There is no time to waste..
* Caron Lindsay is Editor of Liberal Democrat Voice and blogs at Caron's Musings. You can find her on Bluesky at caronmlindsay.bsky.social
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20 Comments
UKIP have lost control of their only council, in Thanet, Kent, by defection to Independents. They aimed to be boring, but failed.
Caron I think your right on regards Willie Rennie moaning about the SNP but I urge you to please not stop Willie because everytime he moans the SNP Membership increases as does the the support for Scotlands Independence.
Whatever we do about the BSIE umbrella campaign, in places where we are already campaigning about other things as part of normal political life, we can put forward on our leaflets a full-blooded Lib Dem case for claiming our European heritage. Our Liberalism always begins to shine through when we make it clear that life is more than economics.
As the Sketch writer in the Guardian pointed out, the initials BSE have an unfortunate ring to them. Better make sure we keep the ‘I’ in there, then. Don’t give up just yet, Caron. What did Mao say? “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Mind you, if this is what we will have to put up with for the next year or so, following the Rennie theme, we might be in for the Proclaimers’ version of “Five thousand miles” instead!
Caron is quite right, the In campaign needs to step beyond this. Will’s Scotland digression reminds me of the situation that the Scottish Referendum had, where the official Yes campaign, with all its ‘pay for the green socialism by subsidising oil and cutting corporation tax’ hypocrisy was backed up by a more enthusiastic, energetic and if I may say so, intellectually honest Radical Independence Campaign.
In this referendum, we Liberal Democrats have the potential to be that smaller group not just calling for the middle of the road ‘nothing will change but things will get better’ sales pitch, but also articulating what we’d do differently with Europe. We have a ready source of good ideas for what the European Project needs next, in the person of Guy Verhofstadt. We should not be afraid to call on him and his ideas to make our point.
Quite agree, Caron. Getting four fat cats : Rose, Brady, Branson and Reed to front the campaign hardly fills me with enthusiasm.
Rose has been criticised over employment rights at the Swindon M&S distribution depot with long service workers paid £2 per hour less than permanent workers and no guarantee of pay (See the Scotsman report) and M & S hardly shone under him in the long term.
Brady fails to inspire on the Apprentice and has long business associations with Sullivan and Gold the porn brokers. The West Ham/Olympic stadium deal may well come back to haunt her and Boris. Branson’s empire is of course off-shore and smoothie founder Richard Reed recently sold out for £ 100 million to American Coca Cola.
Lord Rose admitted his support for Business for Britain and his belief that there needs to be reform of the EU, but it seems that we voters are expected to vote to remain in the EU without knowing whether this reform will take place and what form it will take if it does take place.
Crazy.
I too cringed when Stuart Rose started calling people who disagreed with him “quitters” and “inward looking”. After a good start talking about a hard headed decision he now just comes across as another EU fundamentalist with prejudices about those on the other side.
It is perfectly reasonable and outward looking to want to consider the case for leaving the EU. The problem is leaving the EU would not achieve this and lead to a country arguing with itself and leaving Europe to the Europeans like we largely did hundreds of years ago, besides the odd battle here and there to keep the balance of power.
I agree with some of Caron’s analysis. Just a quick look at In/Out websites and the Out campaigning style/messages are punchier and have resonance. The IN site is dreadful. Dry, boring and negative. No doubt as it’s led by Rose and corporates who no doubt would love to see the Social Chapter rolled back, there is no mention of the benefits employees got from EU membership. People need to see the benefits of being in the EU – refusing to outline benefits in employment law, Health & Safety and environment law arising from the EU, for me, misses perhaps the biggest reasons for voting to stay in.
The political party websites are no better. The Labour Movement website, though more informative, is hopelessly out-of-date. The LibDems website site really frightens me. The material seems to presuppose a support for an IN vote and is aimed at using this simply to recruit LibDem members. In one suggested draft letter it explicitly seeks to make political capital about Tories/Labour being split. Ahhh!
Surely this is not the time for party politics. The In campaign is fragmented enough as it is. Turning it into a political football is only likely to antagonise those who may lean, perhaps somewhat half-heartedly towards the IN campaign and who are not LibDem supporters. If the LibDems want to use the IN campaign to mark clear water between themselves and the Tories and Labour, they could jeopardise the result. LibDems are a pretty toxic brand still and Farron bashing Tory and Labour with the ‘We are the party of Europe follow us” message will not be helpful, though admittedly he may pick up a handful of members. “Winning the battle and losing the war” comes to mind.
To be honest I find both sides uninspiring and the debate has so far been very poor. I am leaning more towards a yes vote than a no vote but issues like TTIP and how the EU handled the Greek situation alarmed me. However we also need to recognize that the EU does protect many of our rights, esp ECHR which is vital given the Tories want to strip most of our remaining rights away. I actually think the SNP have made the correct choice to campaign alone and would have preferred the Scottish Lib Dems to do the same. As a Lib Dem I am very uncomfortable in any partnership with Labour or the Tories and feel that it will continue to backfire badly on the party in the Holyrood elections next year, Willie is wrong on that one.
The problem is that the referendum could well be treated as a protest vote against the current Tory government, rather than on its own merits. There is still a large repository for “anti politics”, whether it is Corbyn, UKIP, EU exit or the SNP.
Many on the traditional “working class” left will be attracted to EU exit – the rail and prison officers / probation unions are advocating exit for starters. TTIP is universally hated due to half truths by the left and also the libertarian / kipper right, not to mention the mentions of Greece, Goldman Sachs and any other establishment bogeymen. Like it or not the pro-EU position is broadly associated with George Osborne, global bankers, the chattering classes, the “politically correct” liberal left and big scary foreign multinationals.
The Lib Dem voice needs to be out there, united but putting a positive view, rather than resorting to scare. I am personally a big fan of Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander, but they are toxic to the voters, so I would respectfully wish they were kept out of the spotlight. The same goes for Peter Mandelson, a figure which will drive plenty of Labour supporters to vote for exit. Farron or Lamb are probably the highest profile Lib Dems who aren’t “tainted”, and they should maybe consider working with Caroline Lucas on this one.
A pro corporate campaign appeals to me, but will put the voters off.
Dave Orbison – ‘People need to see the benefits of being in the EU – refusing to outline benefits in employment law, Health & Safety and environment law arising from the EU, for me, misses perhaps the biggest reasons for voting to stay in.’
Two problems there. Firstly if the campaign is going to focus on the trading relationship then it’s going to have a corporatist lean. What one makes of that is another matter.
Second, and most important, we can have advances in employment law, H&S and the rest without being in the EU. Unlikely under the present government of course. But I don’t think a campaign can be built around things that could (stress, COULD) be done outside the EU. Switzerland got as far as a referendum on 12:1!
The problem is easier to state than is the solution of course. But I have to be honest and say that 18 months ago I couldn’t see any result other than an IN win. I’m not nearly as certain now.
Stimpson – ‘Like it or not the pro-EU position is broadly associated with George Osborne, global bankers, the chattering classes, the “politically correct” liberal left and big scary foreign multinationals.’
Well….The pro-EU position is associated with those who stand to do well out of the EU’s brand of, ‘the open agenda.’ Now obviously that’s not a small number. The two problems from a campaigning perspective are, I think, two-fold. Firstly, this is probably not really on classic left/right lines. That will make for some uncomfortable alliances and difficult appeals at best. Secondly, any attempt to reach those who do well out of, ‘open,’ will probably be somewhat provocative to those that do not do well. ‘Outsource jobs to Latvia – Granny gets to sell her bubble-priced house to a French banker and go to live on the Costas out of the deal,’ likely won’t go down well with some.
As I said earlier, from an IN perspective there are no easy solutions. But I just can’t see where the campaign itself is going at the moment.
One thing that I think is highly important, is highlighting how much the EU helps some of the most deprived areas with regeneration funding. I have not heard much mentioned about this.
I think this sort of thing is key to winning over those traditional Labour or UKIP voters who are likely to see the EU as an establishment corporate conspiracy which wants to destroy their livelihood with outsourcing or cheap labour.
Bruce, I’ve just been thinking about how the SNP might pitch their EU Referendum campaign. My guess is that it will help to deliver a Remain vote in Scotland, but they could pitch it in such a way as to alienate a section of English voters into voting “Leave.” If it’s tight, that could push us over the edge to an unhappy Brexit. A pro EU vote in Scotland and an anti EU vote in England would give the SNP all its Christmases at once. That would be my tipping point.
Caron – Not getting at you or anyone else here.
I hear an awful lot that Scotland is some sort of pro-EU hotbed. Is it?
It has been some time since I spent any serious time in Scotland so I’m somewhat out of date, but the best I could say is that my feeling is that it was, ‘less anti,’ than elsewhere. And, frankly, not that much less.
Is there some sort of polling or similar – I’ve not seen anything specific to Scotland and the EU that actually backs up this Scotland loves the EU line I hear so often.
Caron
I’m still friends with many in the SNP and it certainly isn’t what they are saying. They see it as very important that Scotland remain in the EU and many feel that English voters when push comes to shove will vote to remain. I am not so certain on that one but I personally don’t think the SNP will secretly hope that English voters will vote to leave, if they do vote to leave and we are out of Europe then I would imagine that many, not just the SNP, will open the debate to another referendum but whether that takes place is anyone’s guess. I would say that my SNP friends are more pro EU than myself as I do have many misgivings even though right now I am a soft yes.
Looking at this thread I think Dave Orbison is nearest to getting it right, especially this bit – ” If the LibDems want to use the IN campaign to mark clear water between themselves and the Tories and Labour, they could jeopardise the result. LibDems are a pretty toxic brand still and Farron bashing Tory and Labour with the ‘We are the party of Europe follow us” message will not be helpful, though admittedly he may pick up a handful of members. “Winning the battle and losing the war” comes to mind.” Amen to that.
I too was not over-impressed with the BSIE launch but there is plenty of time between now and the referendum, even if it takes place in 2016. Let’s get it straight – BSIE is going to be the officially recognised “Remain” campaign organisation. If we seriously think that the right approach for Lib Dems who have reservations about the approach adopted by BSIE is to ignore it or even rubbish it and rely on a separate Lib Dem campaign then we are in denial as to the realities of the situation. As a fervent pro-european I was all for our “We are the party of “In” strategy in the 2014 EU parliamentary election. However look where it got us – hanging on to only one of our seats by the skin of our teeth. And if we had any doubts as to what that meant in terms of our standing in the country our performance in the 2015 general election should have hammered it home. I am as much a part of the “fightback” as anyone else but let’s not have any illusions as to the abysmal position we are fighting back from.
The approach of our leadership towards BSIE should be to openly support it, to be involved in it and to supply the undoubted knowledge and expertise our party has in matters European to help it get the message right and bring the Remain campaign to a successful conclusion.
Denis the election in 2014 is no guide, very few active Lib Dems campaigned on Europe at all. There were local elections in many places and the candidates just did not want to talk about it on the doorstep. Where we did though we polled significantly higher than elsewhere – that is how and why we got Catherine re-elected in the South East. Did you see Sophie isn’t Veld’s speech at Conference?
Agree with Caron, launch on Monday dire – alarm bells hopefully going off everywhere. I don’t think we should be accepting they are going to be the nominated campaign – after that performance it would be a huge mistake. We should seek to lead an alternative – we would at least attract headlines and get our message heard.
Sorry Mike. If you think the Lib Dems are in a position to lead the official “Remain” campaign then you are in denial as to our standing in the country. As I said above I was not over-impressed with the BSIE launch but it was not “dire” by any means. For example it did no harm at all for it to be known that Stuart Rose was to a degree eurosceptic before he considered the totality of the situation and is now convinced that the UK must stay in. A strong united campaign (all party and no party) which appeals to the many “don’t knows” on this issue is what we need – not an approach which merely reassures euro-enthusiasts like me.