Strategic blunders have characterised the campaign since its inception. The most glaring, and the one now pulling the campaign apart, is that it slips between arguing for a second referendum as a democratic necessity – as a means for popular sanction or rejection of the terms of any deal – and for a second referendum because it is the most expedient route to remaining in the EU...{the campaign]...prefers to inveigh against its pantheon of folk-devils, from Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dominic Cummings to Jeremy Corbyn. Quietly, some of its organisers accept that it has struggled to escape its reputation as an establishment mafia; its prominent organisational caste of washed-up spin doctors, political exiles and job-hungry apparatchiks hasn’t helped.
It is astonishing that People’s Vote should have squandered its obvious opportunities: it is well funded, operating with resources that would make most single-issue campaigns sick with envy....The remain campaign in 2016 had the unenviable task of uniting left and right in defence of a political arrangement they liked for different reasons: the right for the EU’s opening up of markets and liberalisation of economies [oh! Was there a right-wing case?] ; the left because of freedom of movement and cultural exchange, and the European court of justice’s tendency to act as a bulwark against the worst excesses of British governments. They settled on an arid defence of technocracy with a healthy dose of fear...[they reveal] the injured outrage of people who believe they ought to have won, marred by snobbery and self-exculpation...[and] uncritical EU boosterism
Butler is quite critical:
[PV relied on a] demographic shift [as] the agent of change: as older leavers die off, a wave of younger voters will flood to the ballot box to smash Brexit for good. Recent political history is littered with failed progressive movements that pinned their electoral hopes on such shifts..
[And] The most notable success of the People’s Vote has been to tar the Labour party with the Brexit brush, and disillusion many of its most ardent remainer voters. It is a rich irony, therefore, that its only hope of success now lies in a Labour government.
J Freedland ploughs a more common Grun furrow
A disgrace? Not at all: we’ll miss this House of Commons
MPs put the country first and stood up to the bullies in No 10. Sadly many of them, especially women, have been hounded out by abuse
He offers one consolation and hope too. Not argument but incantatory magic:
Say it like a catechism, every morning, every evening and twice before meals: no one knows what will happen, no one knows what will happen, no one knows what will happen.This is as unpredictable an election as there’s ever been...
[Meanwhile]...– we already know what’s been lost...Yet in truth, far from waving off the outgoing Commons with jeers and condemnation, we should thank them for their service. The very fact that Boris Johnson itched to see them gone is testament to their achievement. They had done their job – of acting as a restraint on the executive – with unusual ingenuity and even, whisper it, bravery....What held him back? Only the imagination and industry of a handful of MPs – Oliver Letwin, Yvette Cooper, Dominic Grieve, Hilary Benn and others [and the troublemakers who voted with them?] – who were determined to find a way to block no deal, one that a majority of MPs could agree on. They succeeded...Letwin, Grieve and the rest of the 21 Tories who were later purged from their party risked their careers to do that, putting the national interest first
Diffractively read together with Butler above. Pay particular attention to Butler's term 'uncritical EU boosterism'
There's still a chance for Freedland to signal virtue in the old GRunaid way:
[Those MPs leaving are often women, and] their departure points to an uglier phenomenon – the unending vicious and threatening abuse that is inflicted on women in public life....Sometimes the misogyny is combined with racism
Neatly linking the two:
The House of Commons that is closing down for election season was stubborn, independent and more female than ever before. Nobody knows anything – but we might just miss it.
If ever a journalist needed to be urged to speak for themselves...
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