Five things patronising second referendum crowd need to ditch

Cleanse ‘People’s Vote’ from the Remainer lexicon.

Brian Cox, occasional panel member of the BBC’s Question Time programme and actor, said in a video, produced for the People’s Vote campaign and hysterically promoted on Twitter with this tagline “WATCH: Legendary actor Brian Cox on why we need to be ready to fight for a #PeoplesVote”, that the deal should be voted on “by the people, for the people”.

“By the people, for the people” is a phrase lifted from a speech by Abraham Lincoln, which is not entirely unsurprising when you find out that Cox lives happily enough in New York.

But there’s a serious point to be made. “By the people, for the people”, a mangling of the political lexicon taken straight out of Abraham Lincoln Wikiquotes, does not make sense in a country governed by a parliamentary system with substantial devolution to its constituent nations, any more than does the Brexiteer meme of “the will of the people”. So drop it.

Stop using celebrity endorsements.

Using celebrity endorsements illustrates a failure to understand that, post-Weinstein, we live in an era of historically low public trust in the value of celebrity status and an era in which cynicism about the moral pretensions of those who aspire to celebrity is commonplace.

Hardly anyone believes that a point of view is any more valid or truthful simply because a selection of Brexit pub bores – I mean successful actors, Dominic West, Patrick Stewart, Brian Cox, Stephen Fry, etc. – say that it is.

Stephen Fry’s recent effort – a torpid eleven minutes of bogus statistics, quotations lifted out of context and magical storytelling (“Brexit: Facts vs Fear, with Stephen Fry”) – is going to persuade no one beyond the Remain tribe.

And stances that make claims based on their intrinsic truth value – a grounding in ‘enlightened reason’, or facts-based analysis – can sound really quite stupid, even if you only get small things wrong.

Glib references to the 2016 referendum come across badly.

“No one voted to be poorer”, “The people were lied to”, “They did not know what they were voting for” are good illustrations of the way in which continuity Remain still fails to understand that the electoral coalition that voted for Brexit did so because of a complex fusion of identity and ideology, fired by an optimistic programme that made a series of compelling appeals to the value of sovereignty, democratic participation and immigration control.

The persuasive utility of telling someone they did so ‘because of a lie’ or because they wanted less money in their pocket, or that they were just plain stupid, is less than nil.

Get rid of wonky economic predictions.

The pro-Remain youth movement ‘Our Future, Our Choice’ released a study a couple of months ago that claimed to illustrate “the severe and disproportionate consequences of Brexit for young people in Britain”. A WTO-style Brexit would result in “up to £108,000 in lost earnings” by 2050 (32 years in the future!), and an EEA-style deal would leave a ‘young person’ “between £7,000 and £32,000” worse off (between £7,000 and £32,000! That leaves a fair bit of leeway).

Up to £108,000 in lost earnings? A real blow for me in my enormously lucrative career path… as a journalist. I’ve got £40,000 of student debt to pay off – shame about all those hundreds of grands I’m going to lose along the way.

Stop characterising Brexit as a solely right-wing project.

Brexit is “of the right, for the right, by the right”, said Caroline Lucas in ‘The Great Brexit Debate’ on Channel 4 at the weekend.

This is historically illiterate – it was Labour MPs who were among the staunchest in their opposition to Britain’s membership of the Common Market during the lead-up to the referendum on continued membership of the European Economic Community in 1975.

At the Labour Party conference in 1962, then leader Hugh Gaitskell attacked plans to the enter the European Community as a betrayal of “a thousand years of history” and that Britain’s links to the Commonwealth should be “safeguarded”.

New Zealand-born MP Bryan Gould, who stood for the Labour leadership in 1992 on a Eurosceptic, internationalist platform to build up ties with the Commonwealth, went on to resign from Labour’s shadow cabinet over the party’s support for British membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

It is also hugely unpersuasive. There is a large minority of Labour voters who also voted for Brexit. And while young Corbynistas may well be pro-Europe, the party leadership is steeped in Bennite Euroscepticism, opposed to the EU on the basis that it is a capitalist club – as anti-democratic as it is anti-worker.

Corbyn himself has impeccable lifelong Eurosceptic credentials. He voted in favour of leaving the European Economic Community in 1975. In 2008, as an MP, Corbyn voted against the Lisbon Treaty, saying that there was a “strong socialist argument against the Lisbon Treaty”.

For a second referendum to fly, you will need the support of at least one of the party front benches – alienating the Corbyn clan gets you further away from that.