Rather like the 2015 General Election campaign, the EU referendum campaign feels as though it has been going on rather a long time. And yet today is in fact only the start of the official ten-week campaign.
There may be some in Westminster who are filled with great excitement at the thought of another ten weeks of bickering about who has the most negative campaign. But the campaigns do have the difficult challenge of motivating those who back them to get out and vote on the day, and endless fighting and negativity about negativity won’t quite do the trick. So today Boris Johnson is giving a speech in Salford in which he’ll announce that ‘it’s time to believe in Britain again’ (a slogan borrowed from Nigel Farage), while Alistair Darling is making the patriotic case for worrying (i.e. he’s arguing that there is ‘nothing patriotic about turning a blind eye to credible warnings of economic disaster’).
One of the key groups that both sides wants to woo is Labour-minded voters, which is why Jeremy Corbyn made his own effort yesterday to argue in Labour-ish language about the risks of Brexit. He and his party colleagues such as Alan Johnson need to enthuse Labour voters and ensure they turn up in large numbers to the polling stations in order to secure a ‘Remain’ vote. For them, warning about the risks of what the Tories could do with the protections offered by the European Union is easy – and perhaps wise given Labour isn’t in any shape to win power in 2020. But for the next ten weeks at least, David Cameron needs help from the man he usually mocks across the Commons: if Labour doesn’t deliver the voters, then the Prime Minister could be out of a job.
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