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.