The Leave campaign have had their best week of the campaign this week. After months of being battered by the Whitehall machine, they’ve taken advantage of purdah silencing government departments to get themselves onto the front foot.
As I write in The Sun this morning, even IN supporting Cabinet Ministers admit that Leave have had a good week. But they argue that they won’t be able to ride the immigration issue to victory on June 23rd. One argues that you can’t focus on immigration week after week, or ‘By week four, you end up sounding like Nigel Farage’.
But Vote Leave think their trump card is the link between immigration and people’s pay packets. That is the economic argument they are confident they will win. ‘What people want to know is what it will mean for their wages’, one influential member of Vote Leave tells me.
Intriguingly, polling done by a group close to the debate, which I’ve seen, suggests the Leave strategy could work. It shows that less than a quarter of voters think that their family will be significantly worse off if we leave the EU. This suggests that the IN campaign’s main message on the risks of leaving, bolstered by various Treasury reports, hasn’t cut through yet or that the public is simply dismissing these warnings as scaremongering.
Even more worryingly for IN, when forced to choose, 60 percent of those polled opt for Britain regaining control of its immigration policy even if it means problems for trade, the economy and jobs. Now, this goes against the conventional assumption that voters ultimately vote on the economy.
But if this finding is correct, and holds in other polls, then the IN campaign has a real problem. This referendum could be far closer, and a lot more dramatic, than Westminster expected.
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