The big picture
Leave campaigners will be starting their Tuesday with a spring in their step, in the wake of polls putting Brexit ahead and an unambiguous page one from the Sun: “BeLEAVE in Britain.”
Tomorrow's front page. We're backing Brexit - and here's why: https://t.co/3dDiHvwP1E pic.twitter.com/k0Xl55MXZf
— The Sun (@TheSun) June 13, 2016
The front-page editorial reads:
If we stay, Britain will be engulfed in a few short years by this relentlessly expanding, German-dominated federal state. For all David Cameron’s witless assurances, our powers and values WILL be further eroded …
The Remain campaign, made up of the corporate establishment, arrogant europhiles and foreign banks, have set out to terrify us all about life outside the EU. Their ‘Project Fear’ strategy predicts mass unemployment, soaring interest rates and inflation, plummeting house prices, even world war …
Nonsense! Years ago the same politicians and economists issued apocalyptic predictions about our fate if we didn’t join the euro. Thank God we stopped that.
Interested in the background to the declaration? Read what Trevor Kavanagh, the paper’s associate editor, said in March when asked who would make the decision. (Spoiler alert: it’s Rupert Murdoch.)
The bad news keeps coming for the Bremainers, with new polls putting them behind leave. Two Guardian/ICM polls on Monday gave Brexit a six-point lead in both phone and online surveys, with 47% for stay and 53% for go.
An ORB poll for the Telegraph concurs, albeit with a smaller lead for leave, on 49% to remain’s 48% among those certain to vote.
And a new YouGov poll for the Times has leave on 46%, remain on 39%, undecideds on 11%, and abstainers on 4%. Excluding those last two groups takes the result to 54%-46% in favour of leave.
That poll also found majority support for Brexit among female voters and those aged 25-49, a twist on previous surveys.
The result of all this? Panic in the remain camp – or so says Boris Johnson, Vote Leave champion, anyway. He told the Sun:
What we have seen in the last few days in particular is more and more panic by the In camp … They are panicked about people suddenly looking up, lifting their eyes to the horizon and feeling a sense of confidence and excitement about what Britain can do.
A remain campaign source also told the Guardian that No 10 had shifted from being “utterly convinced” of victory to “blind panic”.
It’s not all back-slapping in the leave camp either, though, as Leave.EU – the non-official, Ukip-leaning campaign group – already lambasted for a tasteless tweet linking the massacre in Orlando to EU membership, persisted with another (grammatically poor) attempt to entwine the two:
— LEAVE.EU (@LeaveEUOfficial) June 13, 2016
You should also know:
- The European Court of Justice will rule this morning on whether Britain has the right to limit benefits for EU migrant workers. My colleague Alan Travis says the court is expected to rule in the UK’s favour.
- Sterling seesaws as Brexit fears grip investors.
- EU farming, science and culture grants would be protected if UK leaves, Vote Leave claims.
- Ed Balls, writing in the Mirror, urges voters to back remain, but with a large caveat:
We need to press Europe to restore proper borders, and put new controls on economic migration.
Poll position
So where do these new polls leave us? With leave two points ahead, according to the FT’s poll of polls:
The FT's poll-of-polls on the UK's EU referendum has Leave on 45, two points ahead of Remain https://t.co/rrqTCNqqWB pic.twitter.com/QZkwNkO29E
— Financial Times (@FT) June 14, 2016
What UK Thinks, based on the six most recent polls, has leave on a four-point lead, 52% v 48%.
Diary
- That ECJ ruling on benefits for EU workers comes at 9.30am.
- At noon, Jeremy Corbyn addresses the shadow cabinet; and at 12.30 the Labour leader makes a speech to the TUC on why the NHS is safer in the EU, alongside TUC general secretary Frances O’Grady and other union chiefs.
-
Ken Livingstone appears in front of MPs on the home affairs select committee on antisemitism at 2pm.
- A run of debates this evening sees Boris Johnson and Priti Patel for leave take on Alex Salmond and Liz Kendall for remain in a Telegraph/YouTube event at 7pm.
- At the same time, education secretary Nicky Morgan and Ukip MP Douglas Carswell take part in a Jewish News Europe debate in London.
- And at 9pm in Birmingham, it’s a BBC Newsbeat/1Xtra debate in front of 80 young voters.
Talking point
The vexed question of who exactly is the establishment has dogged this campaign. Are the elites the politicians and business figures who want the UK to stay in the EU, or the politicians and business figures who want it to go? Boris Johnson (Eton, Oxford), for one, has banged on about the “elites” backing In, presumably including the prime minister (Eton, Oxford).
George Osborne has now taken aim, too, declaring that:
Brexit is for the richest in our country – they can afford recessions.
(Osborne also suggested Brexit could lead to cuts to support for disabled people – something he’d hate to do, of course.)
Vote Leave also has the rich in its sights, querying why Brussels officials have been spending so much on private jets, luxury hotels and a chauffeur service.
A new poster from Operation Black Vote, designed to encourage turnout on 23 June, is, though, a stark reminder that many of those at the head of both campaigns literally are in the same (Bullingdon) club.
Read these
Stephanie Bodoni at Bloomberg says the timing of today’s European Court of Justice ruling on benefits for EU workers in Britain “couldn’t be more delicate”:
A defeat for the UK government on such a red-hot topic would be a shot in the arm for the Leave camp days before a referendum on the country’s European Union membership. Even a victory would remind Eurosceptic voters that judges in Luxembourg rather than London call the shots …
‘Clearly if the court were to rule against the UK on this subject, the Leave side would, to use colloquial English, try to make hay with it,’ said [Professor John Curtice at Strathclyde University]. ‘They will say that is just the kind of thing that the EU does, it goes to show we can’t make our own rules, etc. It would be rather embarrassing for the Remain side, if that were to happen.’
Henry Mance and George Parker, in the Financial Times, have this profile of Dominic Cummings, Vote Leave’s campaign director:
It was Mr Cummings who coined the catchphrase ‘Vote Leave, Take Control’. The group’s initial legal name was Vote Leave, Get Change, but Mr Cummings realised that control was a more seductive message. ‘He came to one meeting and said, we’re going to push this,’ said a colleague …
His slogan has now been swallowed almost whole by [Boris] Johnson, previously one of Britain’s least-scripted politicians. In a TV debate last week, the former mayor of London used the words ‘take control’ no fewer than seven times in his one-minute opening statement.
Baffling claim of the day
The 9% of Ukip voters who don’t back Britain leaving the EU are an … interesting demographic:
Tonight's YouGov poll claims 35% of Labour voters and 31% of Lib Dems back a Brexit .. 54% Tories and 91% UKIP (presume Arron's an Inner)
— steve hawkes (@steve_hawkes) June 13, 2016
Celebrity endorsement of the day
George Osborne has nabbed David Lloyd George for the In team, claiming that – according to museum staff at Llanystumdwy – the Liberal chancellor “would definitely have been for Remain”. Only if he signed up to register before midnight on 9 June, mind …
The day in a tweet
ITV political editor Robert Peston on that Sun front page:
What will worry @David_Cameron & Remain is @rupertmurdoch does not typically back the loser - & this is his call pic.twitter.com/VRFqfmGj97
— Robert Peston (@Peston) June 13, 2016
If today were a Smiths song ...
It would be Panic. Could life ever be sane again?
And another thing
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