You’d better beLEAVE it…

If Britain pulls out of the EU, humanity as a whole would eventually be driven underground… to make a last, valiant but ultimately futile stand against extinction, as the planet’s surface is slowly torn apart by pestilence and natural disaster...

Whatever you make of ‘The Sun’ as a newspaper, you must concede that no one else in the print media world comes even remotely close to it for the sheer sharpness of its headlines. And just to prove the point, Germany’s largest daily came up with its own appeal ahead of the UK’s Brexit referendum later this month… just in time for comparison with The Sun’s take on the same issue.

Der Spiegel’s front-page headline was: ‘Please don’t go.’

The Sun’s equivalent? ‘BeLEAVE in Britain’.

There you have it. Not only does the comparison underscore an overwhelming difference in copy-editing standards between the two newspapers – one choosing a tired and predictable cliché, the other favouring originality and ingenuity – but the headlines themselves also illustrate precisely why the ‘Leave’ campaign seems to be experiencing a last-minute surge in the polls… with only nine days (and counting) until the referendum itself.

I need hardly add that these indications have plunged the Remain camp into spectacular turmoil. As another British newspaper (The Guardian) put it: if this were a Smiths song, it would be ‘Panic’… the one that goes: “Panic in the streets of London, panic in the streets of Birmingham.. Carlisle… Dundee… Humberside, etc.”

Personally, I am mystified by these reactions. It is almost as though none of this was obvious at any point before now… when all along the cauldron has been busily bubbling away, right under our noses, just waiting for the right moment to boil over.

Evidently, however, untold multitudes were surprised to discover that independent polls now predict a comfortable Brexit victory… some by a margin as wide as 12 or 13 points. It fell to another newspaper – The Times (UK) – to capture this mood of perplexed incredulity in a headline.

“Britain ‘really’ could be about to leave the EU”, it stoutly reported… as though any previous report to the contrary can now be safely dismissed as ‘unreal’.

Very aptly put, too. For apart from shock and panic, there is also a vague sense of unreality underpinning proceedings at the moment… as though the ‘Remainers’ can’t understand how they could be losing this war, despite having had enough ammunition to win every single battle.

Interestingly, the sensation that ‘this can’t be happening’ appears to have taken root in all local discussions on the issue, too. Barring distant echoes of the (now largely defunct) ‘Campaign for National independence, it seems that Euroscepticism is dead and buried in Malta. All parties and trains of thought now converge on the basic premise that ‘being in the EU’ is essentially ‘a good thing’ – even (nay, especially) the ones that had railed against the EU from the rooftops just 10 years ago. This leads us to the logical conclusion that any country which chooses, of its own free will, to leave this idyllic Utopia, must perforce be ‘bonkers’.

Small wonder, then, that there is so much panic at the prospect that this unthinkable eventuality might become reality in just over a week’s time. Nothing shakes you up quite like the sudden realisation that all your certainties and convictions are actually built on the crater of an active volcano…

In any case: personally, I think all this lamentation and gnashing of teeth is a little premature. One thing all the above surveys have in common is that a huge percentage of the British electorate (up to one third) still registers as ‘undecided’. To argue that the Brexit referendum is already lost is to simply assume that those voters can’t be swayed… which (like so many other aspects of the Remain argument) smacks heavily of defeatism.

Such pessimism may well be misplaced, however. I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if it turns out that the ‘undecideds’ overwhelmingly end up voting to stay… enough to turn the tables completely in the last week (much like the Scottish Independence referendum last year, only with a good deal more drama).

Still: the polls do indicate that more ‘unknowns’ are falling into the Brexit camp as the referendum looms closer. So for the rest of this article, I shall assume the existence, at this moment in time, of a majority planning to vote ‘Leave’ on 23 June: and also that – even if the Remain camp does catch up in time to overturn the result – we are at present heading directly towards a victory for Brexit.

With that assumption in place… the obvious next step is to ask, ‘why’?

Well, it’s obvious to me, at any rate. As it happens, however, one of the simplest answers is that the Remain campaign never actually asked itself that question before. That is in fact one of the intrinsic problems with approaching a referendum on the basis that you’ve already won: you only start questioning your own strategy when the extent of its failure becomes visible… which is nearly always far too late.

Not so the Brexit campaign, which has been pointing out these flaws – virtually uncontested – for months. Recently, Boris Johnson even gave a speech in which he credited the ‘Remainers’ with being more ‘Eurosceptic’ than himself: “The most depressing thing is that there is not one shred of idealism in their argument. Not a single one of them […] will say ‘you know what, I rather love the idea of a federal Europe’ […] what they keep saying is ‘I’m a eurosceptic of course – we’re all eurosceptics – but we’ve got no choice’.”

As with The Sun, one’s personal opinion of the man himself is irrelevant. Whatever you make of the rest of his arguments… on this one, Boris Johnson was right on the money.

I listened closely to arguments from both sides, and it was often surprisingly hard to actually tell them apart. By my count, the grand total of Remain campaigners who tried to sell EU membership on its own merits – i.e., because ‘being in the EU’, as earlier intimated, is a ‘good thing’ – was… Zero. Not a single high-profile campaigner had even a single semi-decent word to say about the European Union at all. Some were clearly uncomfortable about having to ‘defend’ it in the first place.

It’s a bit like saying “Yes, I know the food and service is lousy at this restaurant… but hey, it could be much worse anywhere else, so we may as well stay here and pretend to enjoy it (and who knows? If we eat here often enough, it might get better)…”

How are people expected to warm to an approach like that, exactly? The whole raison d’être of a political campaign is to energise, enthuse and motivate voters… so step one is presumably to give people something to actually be enthusiastic about.

Nor is it particularly reassuring that the same British prime minister now campaigning to stay in the EU has only just done everything in his power to transform the institution into something he feels more comfortable staying in. If even the ‘Remain’ leader reasons that the EU is so utterly flawed that it has to be reformed from the ground up… what hope is there of convincing a majority of British voters of its benefits?

And therein lies the cardinal flaw: the Remainers hardly ever mentioned any ‘benefits’ at all… and when they did, they quantified those benefits in monetary terms (forgetting that hardly any of that money trickles down to the vast bulk of the electorate’s pockets). Instead, it was all about the disadvantages of leaving, while offering no actual incentive to stay.

This points towards another colossal strategic error with which any local voter would instantly relate: the often grotesque overuse of the ‘Fear Factor’ card.

Following this debate, I lost count of truly Apocalyptic predictions on the subject of ‘life after Brexit’. Among the least alarmist was that the UK “would suffer an economic blow from which it would never fully recover” (says a lot about the extent of Remainers’ confidence in their own country’s resilience, doesn’t it?). More imaginative versions also involved ‘shockwaves’ that might even result in the fragmentation of the United Kingdom… possibly even the EU itself.

This, from a campaign that projects itself as ‘the voice of reason’. More like the mindless ravings of a paranoid lunatic, I’d say. Why not take that argument to its next logical phase while you’re at it? If Britain pulls out of the EU, humanity as a whole would eventually be driven underground… to make a last, valiant but ultimately futile stand against extinction, as the planet’s surface is slowly torn apart by pestilence and natural disaster... 

Meanwhile, arguments on the other side may be equally fanciful… but the overall message strikes out in the clean opposite direction. Again, The Sun headline embodies the basic motif perfectly. Regardless of one’s own personal views on Brexit, it is undeniable that the Leave argument appeals to a sense of national pride and civic aspiration that is entirely absent on the other side of the debate.

Paradoxically, this marks the exact reverse of how Malta’s own campaign for EU accession had fared, way back in 2004. Back then, it was the campaign that mapped out a positive, forward-looking direction for the country – no matter how misleading this vision proved to be – that emerged victorious, against a campaign whose only strategy was to harp on the fear of the unknown, while urging them to accept the existing status quo as the only conceivable reality.

There is a lesson in there somewhere for all other types of political campaign, local or international… even (or especially) the one that will start in earnest some time over the next year.