Eu referendum

We now have to take seriously the possibility that in the EU referendum Britain will vote to leave. I had hardly contemplated that. At the time (in January 2013) I saw the Prime Minister’s pledge to consult the electorate as a tactical move, designed to conciliate his party. It may well have helped David Cameron hold off the Ukip at the last general election, and secure the winning edge his party achieved. But those of us who supposed (as did I) that the electorate would never vote to leave, so a referendum was a pretty low-risk gamble with our membership of the EU, may wonder now if we were right.

Britain Stronger in Europe launched yesterday at a packed event in East London introducing a range of our Board members including Karren Brady, June Sarpong, Richard Reed, and Caroline Lucas. Since then, I’ve been asked repeatedly what sort of campaign we plan to run. In particular, people ask: 1. Will ours be a re-run of the ‘project fear’? 2. Is ours the campaign of ‘the establishment’? I will deal with each, but first, here’s a description of the campaign we will run: we will make a positive, patriotic case that it is in our national interest to remain in Europe because Britain is stronger in Europe and we will provide

Nigel Farage appears to have u-turned about backing one Brexit campaign. At the party’s recent conference in Doncaster, the Ukip leader said he would be standing ‘hand in hand’ with Arron Banks and his Leave.EU group. But on the Sunday Politics yesterday, he gave equal weighting to Vote Leave, the other Brexit effort which launched on Thursday evening out of the Business for Britain campaign group: ‘I support both of them. I listened to what Vote Leave had to say last week. They’re a Westminster based group, making business arguments. Arguing, as I’ve done in this interview, for us to be free to make our own trade deals. That is of value.

The cross-party ‘Vote Leave’ campaign launches today, with an impressive list of backers from politics and business. It is run by Matthew Elliot and Dominic Cummings, and has MPs from across the spectrum supporting it. This is what it needs to do next: 1. Get the official designation from the Electoral Commission. Vote Leave is the favourite to get the Commission’s funding, free mailing and campaign broadcasts. It is trying to underline that it is the better of the two campaigns – the other being Arron Banks’ Leave EU campaign – by showing off how many people from across the political spectrum it represents. 2. Work out what to do

Philip Hammond this evening hinted he doesn’t think Britain is going to get any fundamental reforms on freedom of movement. The Foreign Secretary, appearing alongside Tory grandee and Peter Lilley at a Demos fringe event, argued that Eastern European countries have an ‘emotional ownership’ to their EU membership in a way Britain does not: ‘Because of the emotional linkage with their own freedom from Soviet slavery and the ability of people in Eastern Europe to travel for the first time in their lives, a deeply emotive thing, no political leader in Eastern Europe is going to support the end of freedom of movement. It would be domestic political suicide.’ Despite

There were no announcements in Philip Hammond’s speech to the Tory party conference. He used a chunk of it to contrast the Conservatives with Labour under Jeremy Corbyn, telling the members listening that the Conservatives would this week ‘show the British people what a real party of government looks like’. But what was more interesting was what he didn’t mention in his speech, particularly in the passage on Europe. Hammond did say that Europe is ‘seriously in need of reform’. And he did say that ‘reform is possible’. But his list of what Britain would say no to as part of that reform didn’t include some of the things that

As the Tory tribe prepares to gather in Manchester, the chatter is about two things: who will succeed David Cameron and what will happen in the EU referendum. These two issues are, obviously, inextricably linked. If Britain votes Out in the EU referendum, a prospect which while still unlikely has become more likely in recent weeks, Cameron is unlikely to be succeeded by someone who campaigned for In—as Fraser points out in the Telegraph today. But, so far, none of the expected leadership candidates have indicated that they will campaign for Out. George Osborne is one of the lead figures in the renegotiation and has always been clear that he

Eurosceptic Tories have a new voice to herald their cause: Nigel Lawson. The former Chancellor and Spectator editor announced in an op-ed he is becoming the president of Conservatives for Britain, a group working with the Matthew Elliott-Dominic Cummings Out campaign. Lawson explains his explains his red lines for Britain remaining in the EU and suggests the government is unlikely to achieve them: ‘I am not party to the negotiations between ministers and the EU but it is clear that now is the time for David Cameron and George Osborne to set out some red lines. My priorities would be fourfold: the end of the automatic supremacy of EU law over UK law; the ability for

Nigel Farage claimed at Ukip’s conference yesterday that all Eurosceptic groups were being brought together under the Leave.EU umbrella organisation, headed up by Ukip donor Arron Banks. However, the other Leave campaign, run by Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings, was notably absent and its representatives did not appear at the conference yesterday. Elliott’s Business for Britain group, which aims to give a voice to Eurosceptic businesses, was also not mentioned as part of the umbrella group. When I asked Farage about this, he said ‘they don’t want to leave, they want to wait and see what the Prime Minister has come back with’. Banks also told Coffee House he had approached the

Nigel Farage’s keynote speech to the Ukip conference was duly lapped up the 1,500 attendees in Doncaster. The Ukip leader was keen to give himself a new job: the de facto leader of the Leave campaign. In the absence of someone heading up the Leave campaign, the Ukip leader said it’s time for the party to prioritise the referendum over its own future: ‘I want us to summon every resource of energy we can find in our bodies and our minds. I want to dedicate us wholly to winning that referendum. This is the moment to put country before party.’ Farage stated the Eurosceptic movement has ‘very often been fractured, it has very often

The Conservative Party board has agreed that CCHQ will remain strictly neutral throughout the EU referendum campaign, Coffee House understands. Sources report that this afternoon’s meeting concluded that it was in the best interests of the party that its campaign machine be inaccessible to either side in the campaign. MPs had warned of a split if Tory party resources had been made available, particularly if they were made available for the side of the campaign that David Cameron ends up backing, which is expected to be ‘In’, while many Tory members are in favour of leaving. Earlier, Coffee House revealed that David Cameron was in favour of neutrality. But there will

Harold Wilson’s remark that ‘a week is a long time in politics’ has never been more apt than at the beginning of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership. The hopey-changey rhetoric that lead him to victory last Saturday has inevitably given way to a more traditional form of compromise politics. While Corbyn’s debut at the Dispatch Box was the high point of his first week as Labour leader, the rest of his time has been devoted to fighting fires — literally in one incident. Women in the shadow cabinet: Sky News’ Darren McCaffrey revealed how the first Corbyn shadow cabinet was put together last Sunday and how the Labour leader attempted to deal with a lack of