This EU referendum campaign has been truly awful. The tragic death of Labour parliamentarian Jo Cox, slain by a lone far-right extremist, with a history of mental health issues, occurred just as the campaign was reaching fever pitch.
Last week we saw that despicable poster launch by Nigel Farage and UKIP, showing a line of desperate migrants spilling across Europe’s southern frontier last summer.
To link this humanitarian disaster to Britain’s membership of the EU was beyond the pale. Only a wretched political party would deploy such a tactic.
For those of us trying to make the progressive and democratic case for leaving the EU, it was an exasperating and dark moment.
But equally wretched has been the way some Remain politicians, at times, have deployed their project of fear, insult and outright doom.
In the end it’s a plague on all our houses. The British people deserve better. We need a new politics in this country that campaigns for hope instead of fear.
I really hope in the final hours before polling opens on Thursday, that the tone and execution of this campaign demonstrably changes.
All of us are currently involved in the purist form of democracy. Each vote is valued the same as the next. Every opinion counts. By definition, if we are democrats, this requires that we show one another mutual respect and better understanding.
The branding of Brexit supporters, as one prominent Green Party politician has called them, “little Englander, xenophobic, racists” is just as vile a slur on the integrity of the democratic process as a Leave campaigner questioning the patriotism of those that wish to remain in the EU.
A fellow Labour councillor (not from Brighton and Hove) recently labelled Leave supporters as “less intelligent” than those for Remain.
In short, sneering and identity politics should play no further part in this referendum. The real choice before the British people is not about nationality. It is a decision about two competing visions of how the country can prosper and make its way in the world in future.
I have no doubt that Remain campaigners feel passionately that Britain’s best interests are served by staying in the club we joined 43 years ago. They have an intellectually strong and moral case to underpin the status quo. We should respect them for it.
But where it all goes wrong, in my view, is when these fervent beliefs become translated into first, veiled, and then direct threats.
How else can you explain a so-called “Brexit budget” last week, fronted by Chancellor George Osborne and former Chancellor Alistair Darling, in which the population was told we will all go to hell in a handcart if we vote to leave?
Pensioners were threatened with the scrapping of the “triple-lock” – a landmark piece of cross-party legislation that guarantees protection of their living standards.
Working people were threatened with a 2p rise in the standard rate of income tax. And undecided voters were messaged that if we leave the EU the economy will tip into recession.
Yet all these claims are just scaremongering. No one can predict the future – not even experts.
The Prime Minister, David Cameron, likens the warnings about Brexit to a driver that is ignoring the advice of a mechanic about a car’s faulty brakes.
But hold on a minute: is this the same leader of our nation that proposed the referendum in the first place? What responsible mechanic do you know that would be actively making the case for you to get in the car, only to order you to bail out at the last minute?
Why can’t Cameron and Osborne just be honest with the British people: they are levelling these threats at people wanting to the leave the EU because they are so desperate to save their own skins from being fired.
Leave or Remain, these two are finished in the Tory party.
Both sides need to get back to making arguments from a more rational and solid evidence base. If truth is told there are risks associated with staying and leaving the EU. It’s for people, in the privacy of the ballot booth, to decide.
Threats masquerading as reliable economic forecasts should cease. Dog-whistle politics, blaming immigrants for the ills of the EU, must have no place in our polity.
I’m voting to leave the political aspect of the European Union on Thursday, because deep in my heart I feel that Europe, of which Britain is intrinsically a part, should remain a continent of sovereign nation states.
A vote to remain in the EU risks our country being dragged, eventually, into a federal super state. We won’t get another referendum like this again that’s why every vote counts.
The centre-left vision of Britain outside of the EU is of a country more socially just, less divisive, more internationalist and open to a global economy of 7 billion people.
That is what is on the ballot paper on Thursday so please make sure you go out and vote.
Tom Bewick is a Labour councillor on Brighton and Hove City Council and chair of the official Vote Leave campaign in the city.
Tom, I am not sure that you get Cameron’s metaphor about the faulty brakes.
The referendum itself is not the vehicle in question (are you suggesting we shouldn’t be having one?) but Brexit is the faulty vehicle.
The benefits of the EU are many and manifest. The benefits of Brexit are murky and suspect. We won’t save money, we won’t cut immigration and above all we will not address the democratic deficit in our own country with its unelected House of Lords and its government with 37% of the votes.
It’s pleasing to see politicians come close to apologising for some of the inflammatory and untrue statements they made a month or so ago. Talk of ‘unsustainable mass migration that places a huge burden on our local public services’ was ‘project fear’ then and I’m glad it’s not being repeated now.
The charge that “unsustainable mass migration places a huge burden on our public services” is and will continue to be repeated, because it is obviously mathematically and logically true. How could it be otherwise? There has been “project fear” deployed by both Remain and Brexit camps, but discussing the strains that unlimited immigration will put on the nation’s infrastructure, schools, medical services and housing shortages (in the places people actually want to live) is NOT part of that.
Anyone who votes on Thursday should be voting to leave. I will explain. If you think that it is right that you should have a say in the future of this country then you should think that you and succeeding generations should continue to have a vote. A vote to remain, is a vote to no longer have a vote. But you will say, I vote for my MEP and I vote for my government and the head of that government has a vote. But hold on, we have seen of recent times that the commission has the power to impose a government on a member state and the Parliament is unable to propose law and is only allowed to amend. The commission does not have to abide by those amendments.
Therefore, if you believe that you should vote on Thursday, then you should be voting out.
We do not face mass immigration. Immigration helps the economy and sustains public services while the same services are near breaking point because of the policies of those who believe the NHS and our schools should be privatised and denied adequate funding. The maths and logic are not with the leave campaign.
Tom Bewick has every right to take a different view than the consensus of the centre left in the city, but I think he showed poor judgment in agreeing to chair the local vote leave campaign. He has in effect become the mouthpiece of Michael Gove and Nigel Farage in Brighton. A good example of why this was a poor decision comes from this Saturday, where Cllr Bewick correctly called off vote leave campaigning, but several activists defied the ban proudly on Twitter (calling their own leaders traitors!) and showed up anyway, handing out materials which were using Tom’s name and status as a Labour Councillor to give legitimacy to their message. I’m quite sure that Labour voters didn’t anticipate this when electing Tom as Councillor.
Mr Bewick should look to himself before calling on others to change the tone. Every time anyone points out how the city benefits from the EU, Cllr Bewick lazily dismisses it as project fear, even when those views have been expressed in a balanced way and even when they come from local small businesses who have no political interest in scaring anyone. Even mainstream Tories have defected from the leave campaign when they realised the nasty agenda they were actually serving. Poor judgment from the Councillor–he should consider his position when this referendum is over.