Tom Goodenough Tom Goodenough

The PM boils his entire referendum campaign into a single word. But will it convince voters?

David Cameron has boiled down his entire EU referendum campaign into a single word: together. The Prime Minister made one of his final pitches to Britain on the Today programme just now. But despite doing his best to put forward the positive case for staying in, he still came unstuck on the age-old issue of migration. He was repeatedly quizzed on his net migration target to reduce numbers to the tens of thousands. We knew before that this is, to say the least, a tricky subject for Cameron. And he didn’t offer much in the way of substance to salve voters’ worries. Instead, when immigration came up, he flipped the discussion to being one about the economy. He said:

‘We shouldn’t leave the EU on the basis of it (migration) because we’d do untold damage to our economy, to businesses, to jobs and to family finances… As we meet the challenge of immigration, do we want to meet it by leaving the single market, taking our economy..or do we want to actually find smart ways of managing migration?’

It seems that the Prime Minister wants voters to trade off their fears about migration with worries about what might happen to the economy if Britain leaves the EU – and then side with the status quo. During the interview this morning, John Humphrys did a good job in holding the Prime Minister to task. In particular, he had Cameron on the ropes when the PM suggested that net migration could decrease because the ‘Eurozone economies are recovering’. Cameron went on to say: ‘You see Spain growing, you see France growing, Germany growing.

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