There are days when I could walk away from this whole pathetic show. It's embarrassing. Already the "we can do better than Norway" meme is circulating among Brexit campaigners. In one day of casual thoughtless campaigning, Leave.EU has turned campaigners away from the one solution that can actually win.
To fix that will take careful and time-consuming isolation of key activists and briefing them with the details. As head of communications for Leave.EU, Andy Wigmore takes full and sole responsibility for this glaring ineptitude. Arron Banks doesn't think it matters. He is wrong, it does matter, it does have consequences and if he knew the territory at all he would know.
So now that campaign has landed us with a mammoth task of damage control. Moreover, they are not going to assist in that. They don't even recognise that a mistake has been made so will likely compound the errors in the future.
Meanwhile I have been chastised by some for robust language on Twitter, but when directed at Andy Wigmore, I make no apology for it and make no guarantees that it will not happen again. The man is a dangerous liability to the campaign. He has already created serious work for us and a man of such little talent and strategic acumen will no doubt make even more work for us in the coming months.
If our campaign ever does gets its act together there will be so much Leave.EU branded material in the public domain that the Remain camp will make a huge deal of the inherent contradictions and rub it in our faces. Why do I know they will do this? Because that's exactly what I would do in their position.
In the public domain the intellectual argument matters and I would be rounding on the Leave side showing that these people don't know what they are doing, don't know what they want and don't for a moment understand the complexities of what they are talking about. They will rightly say, if you vote to leave you are putting the fate of the country into the hands of people with a dangerously shallow understanding of the issues, whose own post Brexit solutions have precisely zero impact on any of the problems they are advertising.
Presently Leave.EU is adopting a continuity Ukip strategy in promoting the Australian points based immigration system. This has already been thoroughly dismantled during the election and there is a wealth of material in the public domain for the opposition to recycle, including several pieces of our own that say pretty much the same thing. It won't work for Britain. These are the inherent dangers of not having a strategy and indiscriminately pumping out half understood memes.
So yes I am angry enough to lose my temper over this, and I am seriously angry that people supposedly on my own side are creating work for me and leading the campaign up the same dead end Ukip went up. Moreover, there has been no introspection. They still don't understand why I attack them.
Already I am having the same arguments we had just after the election with campaigners telling me what a marvellous job Ukip did - as they made a laughing stock of themselves and failed to make a Westminster breakthrough. Make no mistake - the election was their high water mark.
Ukip's membership is bleeding, they lose a sizable portion of their vote share every time there is a local poll, and confidence in the ability of Farage has collapsed. Yet the same people who delivered that failure are now the people behind Leave.EU.
This all has a very familiar ring to it and I expect to have the same bitter rows throughout. Moderating voices will tell me to just ignore them but they are impossible to ignore in that they are actively undermining the campaign. They are the source of the effluent leakage. The stop valve needs to be turned.
With Vote Leave Ltd largely being a Westminster Bubble outfit concentrating on the mainstream media and the luvvies within the inner circle of power, there needs to be a people's movement, yet there isn't one. There is just Continuity Ukip leaving us to clean up their mess as they go forth like a bull in China shop.
So yes, I am seething with anger. The campaign is being derailed by those who are ignorant, proud of their ignorance and think it's actually funny that there is little we can do about it. So yes, to say these people are "scum" is something of a measured understatement at times. These people are impervious to reason, won't be told anything and will in due course turn far more hostile that I ever could. Nasty is the only response in kind.
The basic premise is that the campaign must appeal to those who would never vote Ukip in a billion years. Only 14% of the voters did, and half of them wouldn't a second time. Continuing with the same material will isolate Leavers and repel the swing vote.
This is such a simple and obvious premise that it should not need explaining yet for all the repetitions of the same points, the usual suspects seem genetically incapable of grasping it. Twelve year olds could grasp this premise. Why can't Leave.EU?
Consequently I see no other option but to highlight this to everybody who will listen, including the opposition. In my eyes, turning the stop valve is the only fight that matters. I see no choice but to attack these people publicly and without restraint. What other choice do we have? Ignoring it isn't an option.
No comments:
Post a Comment