Shouts and whispers

The Gudrina has a short video to day featuring a certain Steve Bray, who dons a composite flag of the Union Flag and the EU banner, a blue hat with yellow stars and carries placards saying things like Save the NHS. He has managed to creep into shot behind the talent in live interviews from Westminster. He shouts 'No Brexit' at Parliament. He has become a TV personality.

So he's obviously passionate about Remaining, passionate enough to give up hours in his cause. What's in it for him exactly? The video is strangely quiet on any positive reasons for Remain:

'[Brexit is] bad for the nation...[he] believe[s] in social justice. Brexit is not social justice'

That's really it. He likes appearing on TV,  outmanoeuvering TV crews, shouting at and talking to politicians. He had one exchange with a UKIP supporter, reminding him there were no UKIP MPs, asking which EU law had oppressed him [no audible answer] and then, after some semi-audible remark about immigration, declaring the UKIP guy was 'nuts' and he had wrongly thought he was 'sane'. A passer-by muttered that there had been a referendum and he shouted 'Yes. In 1975'.

Typically, el GUardino didn't bother to ask him any questions or conduct an interview, so we have no more information about his passion or indeed about him.

Grudniad reasoning*

A marvellous editorial in teh Graun today, part of what seems to be a rising panic. It begins by arguing that the best reason for staying in the EU is that we are not really in it anyway:

[Inside the EU we get] more of the benefits and suffer[ing] less of the burdens of membership. This country is outside the euro, is not part of the Schengen border-free area and gets a hefty rebate from the EU budget.

Of course, if we left altogether, we would get even more of these benefits. The 'hefty rebate' is the Remainer Great Lie about how the EU philanthropically builds motorway flyovers and youth clubs in Northern England, that we heard much about in the early days, and the embarrassment produced by the revelation of the real figures led to the hysterical denunciation of the 'lie on the bus'. The latest figures I can find say that the UK contributes £13.1bn to the EU annually and the 'hefty rebate' is £4.5bn, about 35%. The Gudrina has tactically omitted to mention an outflow of £8.6bn per annum.

The Grudian blackens kettles by blaming the ' self-inflicted blow of historic proportions, [as] enabled by preening fantasists who peddled falsehoods.'  Peddling their own [?] current line about 'realism' that  only Remainer bourgeois had grasped all along (below). They admire  EC/EU politicians, of course, in this case the PM of Luxermbourg's smart arsery of 2016: “Before, they were in and they had many opt-outs; now they want to be out with many opt-ins.”.Many Brexiteers will think that is the right way round, of course.

Brexiters are shocked to discover what was obvious all along: there is no easy, cost-free way for the UK to leave the EU. Theresa May’s blueprint sees Britain being out of Europe but run by it for at least two years.... next two years of Britain’s life outside the EU will see this country subject to the vast majority of EU laws, but with no say in Brussels.

We have a huge say in Brussels now of course. Better to leave now than pay an even bigger price in the future then, Brexiteers might think . But if the EU is so benevolent, what's the problem for Remainers with being run by it for two more years? 

There is a scary prospect for Guarinda seers to add to Project Fear Mk x:

what if Donald Trump chose to restart trade wars with Brussels? The UK would have to follow the EU’s lead, applying sanctions and tariffs that might suit the continent’s economy, but leave ours exposed to retaliation. It might force Britain to choose between allies and friends.

This seems to me to be a problem that can take a general form with EU membership.  Some people think the issue would crop up  if the EU starts a trade war with China over cheap steel. Great reasons for not belonging if you want an (only ever nominally) independent foreign policy. 

The Graun sees no problem with the Chequers proposals for Ireland: 'Letting the EU have a joint say on the backstop is a sensible idea' [!]. This would thwart: 'Conservative Brexiters [who] have long shown they simply could not care less about Ireland. Their wish to leave the single market and customs union was made without reason'. No reason ever reported in the Durgian anyway.

The EU has nothing but benevolent interests and good reasons for weaponising the Irish border, of course.The Graun useful idiots trot out one of the most recent threats, designed to stave off any attempts at renegotiation: 'The reopening of the question of Gibraltar is a sign of things of come.' No doubt if that one is unpicked, Cyprus bases will suddenly re-emerge as an issue?

The main problem for the Graun, evidently not entirely convinced by its own arguments so far is to give the Scot Nats a run out:

If Northern Ireland outside of the EU ends up able to trade, through some [suspiciously?] clever alignment mechanism, with an EU member state via an open border, then it will lend credence to the idea that other parts of the UK could also be in closer orbit to Europe than England and intra-UK trade ought to be unaffected. That might be why Mrs May is refusing to send powers to devolved parliaments.If this continues, it will bruise the UK’s internal institutional relationships. If left unattended, they will end up functioning even more rancorously in the years after Brexit than they do now. In the worst case, the union might be rent asunder. It is Brexit, not the EU, that represents a very real threat to the UK’s integrity.

The Gdurina, the journal of the Unionists (except in Ireland).

A class act*

J Harris in the Guarnida today gets half-way there by concluding that 'Brexit is a class issue, and all else follows from that.', but it is a new petit-bourgeois analysis of class, of course, one in which journalists themselves are somehow classless.

The upper class is 

an alliance of old and new money that has set the basic terms of British politics for the past 40 years. Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson were educated at the same exclusive school as the prime minister whose idiotic decision to hold a referendum gave them their opportunity. Nigel Farage and Arron Banks are archetypal examples of the kind of spivs who were given licence to do as they pleased in the 80s. 

Both groups are contemptible:

Conservative politicians who championed leaving the EU and were then given the job of carrying it out have deserted their posts....key leave campaigners cheated their way to success

The working class appears only as a shadow:

...in some of the most neglected parts of England and Wales, a huge chunk [yes -- a majority] of the people who voted for it did so because they had not been listened to for decades.... In an awful instance of irony [really?], the misery and resentment sown by the deindustralisation the Tories accelerated in the 1980s and the austerity they pushed on the country 30 years later were big reasons why so many people decided to vote leave. 

However, these gullible losers would have carried on regardless, had it not been for

a surreal campaign of lies and disinformation, both during and after the referendum campaign, waged by entitled people with their eyes only on the main chance [to do what?].

Then it gets a lot simpler for Harris who grasps it all in terms of the political parties and their policies:

[The explanation lies] in the failure of successive Conservative leaders to adequately deal with a tribe of uncontrollable Tory ideologues [how would they do this --de-select them?] , and in the ingrained tendency of post-Thatcher Conservatives to play fast and loose with the livelihoods and security of the rest of us.  ...the modern Conservative party... [is]..., but an alliance of old and new money that has set the basic terms of British politics for the past 40 years....[Meanwhile] ...Whatever the explanation, and whatever the levels of support for leave among Labour voters [let's just ignore those and prefer a metropolitan journalist's views] , a supposed party of opposition – and a leftwing one at that – accepting a project birthed and then sustained in the worst kind of rightwing political circles is a very odd spectacle indeed....[From the point of view of what social liberal journalists think a left wing position is, of course] [They should support a PV, even if this]...would involve something to which even these supposed radicals are averse: risk

There is an awful lot of risk aversion among Remainers and all those 'business spokespersons' who endlessly bleat about 'uncertainty' while rewarding themselves bonuses for 'enterprise'.

Meanwhile, we can continue to rubbish as hard as possible the one option that can never be permitted, no matter how popular: 'the chaos of no-deal...the unimaginable chaos of no-deal'

Away with fantasy...*

So May has gone for it and signed up to Chequers in all but name,and, predictably, produced a revolt by Brexiteers and Remainers. The controversial clauses turn on the backstop and how it will provide for the UK remaining in the Customs Union with no ability to leave. I am dismayed (sic) more by the ways in which the whole 2 years have focused on the withdrawal agreement and not on the trade deal which we were promised -- that will occupy the next two years and the problem is that the EC can then delay that, forcing the backstop to apply for ever. Meanwhile what is being called the 'divorce bill' again will be at least £39bn...

The Times has a comment piece by P Collins (behind its subscription wall) developing a line that was sketched yesterday by the BBC. Brexit was never going to work in the real world.Brexiteers were ridiculous idealists to think it would. Makes a change from being ignorant racists I suppose,but a clear claim for the superior commonsense (and hindsight) of the professional middle class journalist, for pragmatism rather than howling contempt for the elderly or proletarian. We need to be brought together by Daddy standing for the Law rather than childish fantasy (or phantasy).Two other themes have been prominent:

• Brexiteers have come up with no alternative. The oft-mentioned Canada plus or no deal do not count as alternatives because they will never get through Parliament -- of course, probably neither will Chequers.

• No deal,'crashing out' or ' disorderly Brexit', in particular will be catastrophic,and there are predictions of a new Project Fear on steroids. May thinks she now has no need to prepare for no deal, of course.

I examined the Collins piece for my interest in what makes Remainers want to remain. In this case it was: 'As a risk-averse voter, I cast my ballot for Remain, not out of love for the unlovable EU but because the status quo is better than change, as we now know to be true'. Again , quite a different take on the view that only Brexiteers are conservatives. 

Collins also has some fears and anxieties about a People's Vote:

I have been, until now, opposed to a second referendum. The impact of leaving was, and still is, vastly exaggerated by the Remain side. Leaving would be detrimental but the sky won’t cave in. I feared taking the verdict of the people in vain and I am wary of the cynicism that will accompany a repeat of the vote. It is also probable that a second vote will then prompt a Tory manifesto demand for a third. Unless, of course, Leave wins again and dumps us back into the impasse, which is entirely possible.

I think this is the framework for the emerging liberal worldview. We must NEVER have disorder, so 'no deal' is to be banished as unthinkable. That leaves Chequers or PV. Maybe PV will be a threatened alternative if Chequers is rejected, which is what May herself seemed to imply. PV still remains the choice for C4 news, but liberal upholders of the status quo seem to be rallying behind Chequers,maybe to avoid disorder again. This might be combined with playing the EC long game -- delaying March 29th.

So to the Guardian.

There is quite a reasonable analysis of the options which include a May Parliamentary win, a general election or a PV, with suitable caution about all of them.

There is also a tedious 'long read' by F O'Toole on the line about Brexit as a paranoid fantasy. Strangely, most of it seems to be about the 1975 campaign to join the EEC. This may be because O'Toole has a book out and this is an edited extract from it. Could have brought it up to date but,itmust have taken simply ages to hone it. O'Toole operates beneath mere conscious argument to locate:

...a deeper structure of feeling [literary liberals love them -- saves all that pedantic stuff about evidence and only nice sensitive people can uncover them]  in England. One is the fear of the Englishman turning into the “new European”, fitting himself into the structures of German domination [a Len Deighton novel and TV serialization is the evidence here]...building on real historical memories [can't be many real rememberers left?] of the appeasers...This idea of a treacherous elite would later ferment into a heady and intoxicating brew [nothing rational] of suspicion that the Brexiteers would both dispense to the masses and consume themselves...[Then]...the vertiginous fall from “heart of Empire” to “occupied colony”. In the imperial imagination, there are only two states: dominant and submissive, coloniser and colonised. This dualism lingers... German reunification is perhaps the greatest missed opportunity for the English finally to have done with the war....[novelists like Deighton and R Harris expressed]...profound national anxieties...in the English reactionary imagination, dystopian fantasy was and is indistinguishable from reality....[where do you start with this?]... Hitler tried to unite Europe, so does the EU, therefore the EU is a Hitlerian project [apparently Johnson implied this]...[Thatcher also had]... fears that monetary and economic union in Europe will become the tool of German domination rather than the means of containing a united Germany. [Not a bad assessment]

Let's deal with some evidence now. O'Toole lives in Ireland, I gather,so he has no vox pops from small traders in midlands markets to relate. We may have to manage evidence, of course, if it seems to disagree with us:

...In 1990, while Germany was being reunified, there was very little depth to anti-German feeling in Britain – surveys at the time showed that most British people were in favour of German unity and trusted the Germans a lot or somewhat. The imagining of a German-dominated Europe through the evocation of Hitler was not an authentic popular prejudice against an old enemy. It was a way – albeit one that still seemed to have few real-world consequences – of thinking about the European Union itself...[We have imperialism and racism demonstrated in the Falklands War]  The Falklands was a kind of make-believe England with no black and brown immigrants

Before we go any further, the idea of a treacherous elite seems to me to be very well grounded not just in appeasement but in most current British history. And German economic domination has been supported in The Left Case Against the EU, written by an economist not a racist paranoid. .Only a fiendish set of nasty right wing manipulators could have brought this off this fantasy, which is not even authentic -- and sold it to 17m voters.

Back to O'Toole, with more amateur Freudianism:

The war imagery filled a hole. England had no deep imaginative commitment to the European project. As an idea, the EU had a distinctly weak grip on English allegiance...[Iwonder why?]...The war was – and remains – crucial in structuring English feeling about the European Union. In 1975 [a long section this -- O'Toole wants to revisit 1975 -- for 'lessons' no doubt]  many of the leading advocates on both sides were veterans, as were many voters [quite unlike the millenials shrieking for a PV]...[In 1975's]... hysterical rhetoric the outlines of two notions that would become crucial to Brexit discourse. One is the comparison of pro-European Brits to quislings, collaborators, appeasers and traitors....[and weirdest of all]...the other idea is the fever-dream of an English Resistance, and its weird corollary: a desire to have actually been invaded so that one could – gloriously – resist. And not just resist but, in the ultimate apotheosis of masochism, die. Part of the allure of romantic anti-imperial nationalism is martyrdom...Europe’s role in this weird psychodrama is entirely pre-scripted.

Then there is 

The lure of self-pity, the weird need to dream England into a state of awful oppression [and, more amateur Freud] The new German invasion, cloaked in the guise of peaceful cooperation, is more damnable because it does not give the English Resistance a proper physical target. Hostility to the EU thus opens the way to a bizarre logic in which a Nazi invasion would have been, relatively speaking, welcome. This is a deeply strange kind of displacement – a victor learning to think like the vanquished. But it makes a kind of sense.[he has read abit abot proejcetion too] ...the proto-Brexiteers came up with a counter-factual truth that was at the same time highly satisfying: they hate us because we saved them. [1975 shows us]a masochistic rhetoric that would return in full force as the Brexit negotiations failed to produce the promised miracles.

Well-- long and tedious but also quite revealing. Let's do amateur Freud right back and see all this as a symptom of Irish remainer feeling. Everything is explained as the result of war, anti-German feeling, racism and the jackboot of English imperialism. Evidence is found typically in novels and TV plays as representing structures of feeling. Leaver voters are never actually consulted but have their lines provided for them: remainers know better than they do what they are really thinking. The only problem for the EU was that it failed to attract the right sort of feelings from the Brits. Vicious, fantasist, masochistic and paranoid feelings drove Brexit.

We could even be more amateur Freudian than O'Toole in suggesting that all this is a projection, a mirror image of remainers fears and hatreds which can never be expressed openly but have to be coded. It is vicious hatred of the British, of the military campaign against Irish nationalists, of the mob, of silver-tongued demagogues. Of self-pity and a sense of oppression and martyrdom, typical of the new left, rejected both by the ignorant mob and by contemptuous upper class English barbarians. Of a search for a forgiving Father to make it all safe again and stop the nastiness.

Still hurt then?

Dear me! Brexit still stings the EC it seems. An article in teh GUardian today reports a speech by M Barnier that shows a interesting mixture of personal spite and calculating self-interest:

there is now “a Farage in every country”...the EU project was “under threat” [so we'd be pretty stupid to stay in it then?] ...“We will have to fight against those who want to demolish Europe with their fear, their populist deceit" [He's not the only one in a huff]...Senior EU politicians see little political capital in Brexit and one senior European source told the Guardian they would now cancel a trip to the UK if their agenda was too full. “I would prefer to go to Prague or Warsaw than London, because I cannot build anything with the UK.”

Meanwhile, back in the world of realpolitik:

Barnier, a former French foreign minister with a long career in centre-right politics, also issued veiled criticism of the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who is seeking to present himself as a defender of Europe’s liberal and multilateral values... [And all the hoo-hah about the Irish border?]...The EU’s concerns about ensuring European firms are not undercut by British rivals operating under laxer rules on environment, workers’ rights, state aid, and health and safety, are not new. But they have come to the fore, as both sides seek to break the deadlock on the Irish backstop, which is hindering a November deal.

Apparently, there has been some sort of contest to elect a new European President. It seems candidates are selected by parties in the European Parliament. For the German-led 'centre-right' EPP:

While the contest [in the major parties]  has the paraphernalia of a campaign – badges, T-shirts, a Barack Obama-style poster of Weber, a Stubb hot-dog stand – it remains an insider affair 

That seems to be no problem for the Gudrian. What happens then is not clear:

EU leaders dislike the system and have insisted there is no instant link that means the lead candidate of the biggest group after the elections is propelled to the top job. Proponents argue that it is more democratic, because the electorate – some 445 million after Brexit – get to choose. “The key question now is what the people think,” Weber said. “No one in the European council [of EU leaders] can say I don’t care.”...That argument has been rejected by national governments. “It is bullshit,” said one senior European source, arguing there was nothing undemocratic about democratically elected governments choosing people to run the EU’s institutions.

Saying that the electorate of 445 million people 'choose' the President is a bit misleading. According to Wikipedia, 

The European Council [heads of  member states plus two EU presidents of other bodies] votes by qualified majority for a nominee for the post of President, taking account of the latest European elections. This proposal is then put before Parliament which must approve or veto the appointment. If an absolute majority of MEPs support the nominee, he/she is elected. The President then, together with the Council, puts forward his team to the Parliament to be scrutinised. The Parliament normally insists that each one of them appear before the parliamentary committee that corresponds to their prospective portfolio for a public hearing. The Parliament then votes on the Commission as a whole; if approved, the European Council, acting by a qualified majority, appoints the President and his team to office

Back to Brexit, the two candidates from the EPP also see where their advantages lie:

“Brexit is one of the biggest travesties we have seen in international history,” said Stubb, who has a British wife and children with joint nationality. “Leaving the European Union is a bit like leaving the internet. You can do it, but it’s kind of stupid.”...Weber [the eventual EPP nominee] said the EU had to show European voters at the 2019 elections there was a benefit to membership. “If you don’t show the difference between being member of the European Union and being outside that will have a huge impact on the election campaign and that is why we have to be clear,” he said. “It must make a difference when you are leaving the European Union.”

Scratch a liberal...

Outrage in the Guardian about an interview with A Banks on the  telly (Andrew Marr Show) on 4th Nov. I didn't see it myself, but it seems Banks was not skewered as easily as many liberals hoped. Typically, this has led Guardianistas to demand changes to the media!

That open-minded and tolerant person Lord Adonis had a piece yesterday:

Andrew Marr’s handling of Arron Banks was pathetic – and damaging

I don’t criticise the BBC lightly or with any joy. But its policy of Brexit ‘balance’ has led to catastrophically bad decisions

As predicted by myself, by Carole Cadwalladr and by many others the interview failed to land a punch. Instead, it provided Banks with a platform from which to attack his accusers and muddy the waters. This was not public interest journalism, it was carnival. And it did a great deal of damage...The BBC is consistently manipulated by Brexiteers into providing them with false parity in arguments where their views add nothing, represent nobody [!] and are demonstrably and factually wrong. Nigel Farage – the former leader of a party that polls in single figures and has no MPs – has appeared on Question Time disproportionately often. Brexit campaigners are paraded constantly across the airwaves to spout nonsense and lies about the single market, the customs union and – most unforgivably – the Irish border...[T]he BBC’s institutional determination [is] to declare the existential questions of Brexit answered. 

The specificf beef is:

Farage gets more coverage for a stunt throwing fish out of a boat – accompanied by a couple of fishermen and an entire school of journalists – than the People’s Vote campaign does for any of our many regional events and action days that attract volunteers in their hundreds.

And the response:

If the BBC expects to continue to enjoy public funds and public trust it needs – urgently – to examine its conscience and its output. It is not “balance” to invite contributors to mislead your audience. It isn’t “public interest journalism” to offer Banks a platform to attack his accusers and investigators. And it is not the responsibility of progressives and liberals to keep quiet in the face of such terrible judgment – either out of loyalty or from fear of what might replace the beloved BBC. It is our job to call it out [and go further?]

Similar sentiments today with the egregious S Moore:

Something is wrong with journalism – look at Andrew Marr’s Arron Banks interview 

The ground between truth and lies has become increasingly muddy. Marr’s failure to press Banks shows the media has not caught up with this reality

Journalists claiming to know the difference between truth and lies! Not at all playing his allotted part, apparently 'Banks got his 30-second soundbite in first and, once again, the BBC was played. Something has gone very wrong with my profession in this country, as it has in the US'

Moore has spotted one problem at least:

that there is truth and there are lies and that the job of a journalist is simply to reveal the lies and – hallelujah! – everything will change. This is patently not working. [I wonder why?] Trump supporters know he lies and they don’t care. They will counter this by saying the media lies about him...Remainers keep banging on to leavers that they were lied to, that a slogan on a bus was a lie. Again, they believe the reciting of this fact will change minds. But no. Of course, people who have lived in Russia have warned us about this for a long time [very old smear here]. It is possible to exist in alternative realities, to muddy the ground between truth and lies. It is possible to think two things at the same time. It is possible to know you are being lied to and not to mind that much, as it is par for the course.

An enticing alternative is on offer:

To counter this, we have to hit back at the level of emotional truth; after all, this is what Facebook ads were said to be doing [said by Guardian journalists mostly]  – appealing to people’s emotional understanding of the world. The BBC, in particular, has been completely unfit for purpose and the Ukippy right wing has run circles around it [how come if they are all simplistic liars?] ...The mantra of impartiality has permitted the amplification of untruths. We need to think again.

In an example of the self-referential citing of fellow believers, the link goes to a piece in the New York Review of Books, written by N Cohen, which has almost identical material which Moore has recycled. Cohen also sings the praises of a colleague of his on the Observer, the legendary C Cadwalladr:

Cadwalladr makes no claim to neutrality (and no one would believe her if she did). A few weeks ago, I urged her to take time off from exposing the corruptions of the Brexit campaign to write a book about her investigation. It would be a bestseller at home and abroad, I assured her....Cadwalladr looked appalled: “But I can’t stop the journalism, Nick. I can’t let them get away with it.” No one has done more to expose how the axis of technology, demagoguery, and oligarchy operates in Britain. She is everything BBC journalists are not.

Cadwalldr does do her homework better than most. We need to better train BBC journalists (especially Newsnight journalists) to properly research people they interview, of all political stripes, instead of just moralising at those outside the bubble and being appalled and frightened when those people answer back. Cohen might agree,but Moore wants us to look forward to more emotional and partisan banging on and on. That will not muddy the ground between truth and lies, of course. Leavers will repent, deeply affected by emotional appeals -- to what exactly is unclear though, and haven't we had all the personal stories about exiled German journalists and worried EU nurses? Guardianistas need to learn about passion fatigue and posture cramp and the contempt lots of people feel for that?

Last ditch?

While the Sunday Times leads with a story that a secret deal has been achieved between the UK and the EU,the Observer still bangs its old drum. New investigations into the activities of A Banks, prominent Brexit supporter and funder of Leave.eu are taking place. The Electoral  Commission has referred to the National Crime Agency its suspicions that the funding has involved a holding company on the Isle of Man (ineligible for some reason as a donor) and even Russian money.

The Observer claims they have been told that:

Eldon and Rock Services staff contacted companies for material for apparent use in the Brexit campaign, and discussed sharing data. ... “If Eldon employees were being paid to work on the campaign during the regulated period, it should have been a declared expense. We asked him directly if he’d used his insurance employees to work on the campaigns and he said they didn’t.”...One email chain that appears to have come originally from a Rock Services employee to staff at the stock photo agency Getty Images, dated 10 March 2016, shows the insurance company’s staff member requesting the right to use a series of photographs of refugees walking through eastern Europe. The Rock Services employee explains the image is to be used for an “advertisement talking about the issue of immigration and the refugee crisis”...Another former Eldon worker alleged that they were frequently asked to help Leave.EU’s pro-Brexit campaign..t there were always these urgent requests coming in. You were told to stop what you were doing and do something for Leave.EU,” they said...Brittany Kaiser, who worked for Cambridge Analytica [excellent implications of dodgy practice here] , the defunct data firm at the heart of the Facebook scandal, told the same committee that she saw “with my own eyes” employees of Eldon Insurance staffing a call centre working for Leave.EU... ....one senior Eldon employee appeared to have promoted themselves in their – since deleted – online profile as working for both Eldon and Leave.EU at the same time.

There is even a fashionable example of bullying by rich and powerful men [employers as they are known] : ' One ex-Eldon Insurance employee told the Observer: “I made it absolutely clear that I didn’t want to work on the political stuff. I wasn’t comfortable with it. I didn’t want to be complicit in it. There were quite a lot of spats about it. People were frozen out if they refused to work on it.” The legendary C Cadwallader also has a story:

Threats, bullying, vindictiveness: how Arron Banks repels charges against him 

Banks launched vitriolic social media attacks on 12 MPs including Anna Soubry for being “traitors” and “enemies of the people”. And a week after I revealed that the Russian embassy had written to the Observer calling me a “bad journalist” who had “shown my true colours”, he posted a spoof video of me, beaten up and threatened with a gun, as the Russian national anthem played....he reported us both to two different police forces. Since then, he and his sidekick, Andy Wigmore, posted more or less daily attacks....

Naturally, there is a matter of high principle at stake: 'It’s our institutions – our press, our parliament – under attack. How we treat Banks, how we report on him, how we deal with the multiple probes into him and the other referendum campaigns is how the future will judge us.'  Ah yes -- the future generations,all hanging on the words of a journalist.

There may be something in all this. Brexiteer organisations have obviously worked with some pretty dubious characters in both business and Parliament. No doubt, so have Remainers, who include in their number upright bloodstained citizens such as Blair and Campbell. Blair has TWO articles (here in the news section, and here in the comment section)  in today's Observer in the cause of the PV. 

The whole UK ruling class/elite is commonly perceived as rotten and corrupt. The Observer only comes to the same tired old partisan points at the end:

Remain-supporting MPs from all the main parties said the latest revelations raised serious questions over how the referendum had been won – and strengthened the case for another public vote. The Tory MP Phillip Lee, said: “The more we hear about the risks of Brexit and the way it was sold to the public by people who had little or no interest in the truth, or following rules, [from a Tory MP!]  the stronger the case becomes for suspending or revoking article 50 until all of these irregularities are cleared up.”...The former shadow business secretary Chuka Umunna said: “These latest claims, if proven, call into doubt the entire validity of the referendum result.”

Brexit voters were gullible and easily fooled by advertisements and junk emails. Irregularities in the funding process invalidates the whole referendum with no further evidence required. The subsequent General Election, where people voted for parties that all said we should leave, is not to be counted. Any People's Vote would be free of any such dubious practices. Campaigners for the PV are motivated only by a commitment to upholding the truth and 'rules' -- and so on ad naus.

PS P Lee felt strongly enough about Remaining to have quit a Government post rather than vote for the Withdrawal Bill. What fuels his remainerdom? It must surely be something really cogent and strongly argued. According to the Daily Mail,[!] Lee said:

'It's about the virtual signalling of essentially being closed off to the world, because for most young people the world is just “Amazon”, it's just “there”, and it seems retrograde to being seen to be putting up barriers. It's like Trump's wall.

'So, single market access or not, I don't think it's what young people are talking about. I think what this is about is closing off, turning away from Europe, and also having controls on migration.'

And later on Twitter, according to the same source:

'the evidence and rational consideration indicate [Brexit] would be damaging.'

He added: 'It’s time for evidence, not dogma, to show the way. We must act for our country’s best interests, not ideology & populism [!], or history will judge us harshly. Our country deserves no less.'