The seemingly endless Brexit campaign has now entered its final month and, after a week of seriously scary forecasts of major recession, falling house prices and collapsing lifestyles, the Remain camp is beginning to forge ahead.
The polls are now showing it – the Financial Times's poll of polls puts Remain on 47 per cent and Leave on 40, a significant swing from 44/42 at the end of last week. An ICM phone poll over the weekend put Remain ahead by 10 points, and Ipsos Mori showed Remain in the lead by a 13 points, and by a staggering 18 points when undecided voters were asked which side they would be most inclined to support.
Anecdotal evidence – some of it, I admit, taken over the Long Table at the Garrick Club – supports this. A month ago a majority of people I talked to seemed to be either siding with Brexit or leaning towards it. Since then the fear campaign run by David Cameron and the Remain camp appears to be working and those same people, me included, are more and more concerned at what an exit from the European Community would actually bring.
The big deciding factor is, of course, the economy and the impact of Brexit on all our lives. Yesterday, the Treasury published a detailed paper showing that Britain would be plunged into a year-long recession, with growth 3.6 per cent lower after two years, if it votes to leave the EU. That was followed up immediately by warnings from the prime minister and chancellor of an immediate hit to jobs, interest rates and house prices. That, they hope, will be the clinching argument for undecided voters on June 23. And they may be right.
“The British people must ask themselves this question: can we knowingly vote for a recession?” George Osborne said yesterday in a speech on the south coast. “Does Britain really want this DIY recession?”
The latest, and very effective, Treasury contribution to the debate follows its paper published a month ago, which showed that households could be on average £4,300 (Dh22,966) worse off if Britain exited. The Brexiteers have hit back hard at this growing alarmism, but over the weekend both sides of the debate agreed that the economic arguments had made the “cut through” with voters. The economy is visibly slowing with increasing proof that the threat of leaving is having, in Mr Osborne’s phrase, a “chilling effect” on GDP growth. The warning from Mark Carney, the governor of the Bank of England, that the uncertainty is causing “a more marked slowdown” is more and more widely quoted.
The economic debate can be quickly reduced to its most simple and effective, which every voter understands: jobs, security and house prices. As the campaign has gone on – and on – the issue of immigration has long been overtaken and sovereignty has barely entered into it.
The economic arguments for leaving are much more complex and debatable, and the exit camp has run out of new arguments. Boris Johnson, the former mayor of London, has emerged as the chief Brexit campaigner but his rhetoric has become more bizarre by the day. He has toured the country in a battle bus for all the world as if he were the prime minister fighting a general election – as he hopes one day he will be of course. Two weeks ago he compared the EU to Europe under Hitler (or Napoleon) and last week his arguments became even more odd as he claimed that bananas cannot be sold in bunches of more than three because of EU regulations.
"This is typical of Mr Johnson's campaigning style," said the FT, "saying something that is not exactly true but sounds great and people do not seem to mind". But actually, away from the battle buses, they do mind and Mr Johnson looks more batty by the day.
Nigel Farage, then leader of the UK Independence Party, makes a more serious point: if the Brexits don’t win this referendum, he says, then we’ll have another one. Mr Cameron insists this is a one-and-only vote but he still faces the prospect of disillusioned Conservative MPs and activists continuing the fight, turning the whole affair into what one witty commentator described as the “EU neverendum”. After four months of campaigning, many people now feel like that.
The Brexit campaign increasingly has a feeling of fatalism about it, an acknowledgement that they are not going to win this time but might just be able to have another go at it. The economic argument has already been lost and they have nothing, other than immigration, to put in its place. The fact is people don’t really care how many bananas are in a bunch, although they shiver at the thought of Turkey joining the EU and being flooded by yet another wave of itinerant workers.
But overall, they have concluded that immigration, with or without the Turks, is something they are going to have to live with, in or out of the EU. And in any case it’s not all bad – they like being served by polite and pretty foreign waiters or waitresses or being treated by nurses and doctors whose English wasn’t learnt in south-east London.
But they care most about jobs, interest rates and house prices – those are the swingers. And they are swinging the argument decisively Mr Cameron’s way.
Ivan Fallon is a former business editor of The Sunday Times.
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