Thursday 22 October 2015

Don't get your hopes up. We're staying in the EU.


I suppose now that the idiot Dominic Cummings has decided to ignore the expert advice of eureferendum.com, and lying in the process by saying Matthew Elliott would not be an active campaign player, I suppose our chances of leaving the EU now are nil. If Lord Lawson's witless prattle is the best they've got then we are going to lose two-to-one as some predicted. If deregulation is what they're going with then we have lost the credibility we needed to win.

Not only is deregulation highly implausible, and in many respects undesirable, to say that we will depart from single market rules means that we have lost the ability to reassure the public. Our side is sending out mixed signals and a wholly incoherent message. That's what happens when you don't have a plan and no message discipline.

I have said just recently that the job we have instead is to ensure the loss is not as severe so we can at least keep the movement alive after the referendum. That may not now be possible - and it might be our fault.

As much as we have criticised Ukip for not having a Brexit plan, and wasting so many years, I am starting to think it's our fault for not doing Flexcit sooner. We saw all this coming and it is all unfolding precisely as we predicted, with a lame duck leave campaign that is little better than Ukip. Given the time it takes to get our message out from our obscure little corner of the internet, we should have acted long before now.

We are now seeing kippers latching on to our work, having had no intellectual leadership from their own party or the main campaign, and predictably, they are getting it wrong. We haven't factored in the time it will take for them to get it right. They're saying stupid things like "Britain doesn't have a seat at the WTO". We have never said this, and now we're getting flack as if we had said it because of Kippers. We have said something that could be interpreted that way but as with everything we do there is a small but important distinction to make. I'm going to run a series of explainers during the week that should clarify this.

The truth be known, we needed Flexcit years ago and we needed to be a lot more prepared than we are now. It was always going to be that the scummy SW1 set would hijack the Leave campaign, and it was always a safe bet that Ukip would take their moronic bleating to an entirely new level of stupidity. Going into this unprepared means that despite our best efforts with our small team of bloggers, we will still lose by a massive margin. We totally deserve it too.

Kipppers want to blame eureferendum.com for overcomplicating things and confusing people. We've been told oh-so-many times that we are over intellectualising and that we have to dumb it down for their benefit. Actually it's all very simple once we explain it. It's just that kippers don't want to engage in anything that doesn't speak to their various preconceived bigotries. God forbid they should actually have to think about what they are saying and coordinate a coherent message. We are, however, flattered that they recognise our influence.

While we do not have the presence of any of the big campaigns, it is interesting to note that the entire edifice of the Remain campaign is focussed on the the Norway Option specifically - because it is we who work round the clock, never taking a day off to ensure that our solution is THE solutions on the lips of every serious Leaver. No big budget campaign can rival the power of ideas in the hands of a committed few.

We don't get the hits because kippers have conspired to ignore us, and the SW1 crowd are too busy stuffing their wallets with campaign cash to notice anything we have said, but the Norway Option is the one proposition that frightens the Remain camp because it exposes the global governance they would prefer was hidden from view. It exposes the EU as a redundant middleman and a taker of law, not a maker of it. More than that, the Norway Option has multiple fallback positions in that the option is part of the leaving process, not the destination in itself. They haven't seen this coming yet.

Even though the new EU treaty proposal takes the Norway Option off the table, the debate still lodges the globalisation argument. We have anticipated the game plan of the real opposition - David Cameron, who will attempt to sell us the new EU treaty proposal as a reformed EU, in which he has supposedly insisted on certain concessions. The validity of this claim will be the real referendum debate. It doesn't take much to reframe the argument in that there is still global law making process outside of the EU and we are not a full participant while we are members of the EU. It will be a choice between EU subjugation or global engagement.

By this point, the kippers will have no idea to what I am referring, because they have spent all this time grunting about foreigners, but you who I am speaking to know full well the potency of the globalisation argument - and that's what we have to run with however "complicated" the part timers think it is. If you've used our arguments in a live fire environment then you already know how well it works.

You might ask why I'm even bothering since I am so convinced the Leave campaign is going to screw the pooch for us. It's a good question I've been asking myself a lot lately. Ultimately, the two year long debate gives us the opportunity to raise the profile of global governance. We may not be leaving the EU this time around, but the loss will kill the eurosceptic movement stone dead. It will be disarmed and discredited. That's a good thing.

The thirty year old arguments that don't work will be flushed down the toilet. From the ashes will rise a new breed of Leaver, armed with the knowledge that the EU is seeking to replace the nation state in the global governance mechanisms in all those places where it hasn't already. A movement decoupled from the dinosaurs whinging about bent bananas and dark skinned Muslim folks could well succeed where eurosceptics have failed. If we were to win this time around, we needed to have realised this much sooner.

But the bottom line is I never walk away from a fight. We are throwing everything we have at this and we still need you to get the job done. We have a very short time to re-educate Leavers and at the very least get them to ignore the main campaigns and Ukip. It's down to us now and we're not going to get any help from anyone. I still need more bloggers. We have a few good ones lined up and ready but we need more, and we need you to be up to date, and up to scratch.

Meanwhile, I will be working on a new campaign website that contains condensed versions of the Flexcit arguments and much of what you have seen on this blog. I'm doing it on a very limited budget and I'm going to struggle to make it as slick as Leave.EU, but we live by the rule that content is king - and by that measure I can make the promise that when I am ready to launch, it will be the best.

It may be that Arron Banks wakes up and gets in the game. There is still a dialogue going on there and we may yet support their efforts, but on current form, Leave.EU is a non-starter. We don't have time to waste and have to assume the worst because thus far, we have not been wrong about our gloomier predictions. Even though we are going to lose, this is still a fight worth fighting.

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