The big picture
George Soros – described as “the world’s most famous currency speculator” – has cast his speculative eye over Brexit and, in a column for the Guardian today, warns it would trigger a sterling fall worse than that seen on Black Wednesday:
Too many believe that a vote to leave the EU will have no effect on their personal financial position. This is wishful thinking. It would have at least one very clear and immediate effect that will touch every household: the value of the pound would decline precipitously. It would also have an immediate and dramatic impact on financial markets, investment, prices and jobs.
Soros’ intervention comes after the pound made its biggest one-day rise for almost eight years on Monday, as markets sensed a shift back towards a remain vote.
My colleagues Larry Elliott and Jill Treanor report on Soros:
He said that, as in 1992, there would be big financial gains for speculators who had bet on the UK leaving the EU but that such an outcome would leave ‘most voters considerably poorer’.
Soros said that unlike after Black Wednesday, there was little scope for a cut in interest rates, the UK was running a much larger current account deficit, and exporters would be unable to exploit the benefits of a cheaper pound due to the uncertainty caused by a vote to leave the EU.
It’s a theme that Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn will repeat – perhaps less dramatically – at a speech in Manchester this morning, at which he will warn wobbly Labour voters that leaving the EU could risk Britain’s economic stability and workers’ rights, hot on the heels of his appearance on Sky News last night (of which more later).
Meanwhile, the leave campaign leans on its own favoured theme: immigration. Steve Hilton, David Cameron’s former adviser, says the prime minister knew four years ago that his pledge – now rephrased as an “ambition” – to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands was impossible:
We were told, directly and explicitly, that it was impossible for the government to meet its immigration target as long as we remained members of the EU, which of course insists on the free movement of people within it…
In the 2015 Conservative manifesto, the prime minister reaffirmed his commitment to the immigration target he had been told was undeliverable. When I saw that, I assumed this was either because he was certain he could negotiate a solution within the EU, or was assuming we would leave.
No 10 told the BBC it “did not recognise Hilton’s account”.
In Westminster, MPs gathered yesterday to pay tribute to Jo Cox, killed last week in her constituency, as the fund set up to raise money for three charities she supported passed the £1m mark. Cox’s friend and Labour colleague Rachel Reeves told the Commons:
It is ironic that after travelling the world to some of the most damaged, war-ravaged places, Jo died so near to her home. But she died doing the job that she loved, in the place that she loved, representing the people she loved.
Leave.EU, the Ukip-backed campaign group, came in for criticism after its biggest donor, Arron Banks, admitted commissioning polling on whether Cox’s death would affect voting intentions. Banks told LBC:
We were hoping to see what the effect of the event was. That is an interesting point of view, whether it would shift public opinion … I don’t see it as very controversial.
Jeremy Corbyn on Sky News: what we learned
The Labour leader underwent his first – and only – TV showpiece on the referendum on Monday evening and told us why he’s not a “lover of the European Union”:
I’m opposed to the Transatlantic Trade Investment Partnership, which is being negotiated, largely in secret, between the European Union and the US because it would import the worse working conditions and standards from the US into Europe. I am also opposed to the way in which Europe shields tax havens – this country as well shields tax havens – and the way in which systematically big companies are exploiting loopholes in employment law.
But voting remain is the “rational decision”:
If we are to deal with issues like climate change, like environmental issues, you cannot do it within national borders, you can only do it across national borders. The refugee crisis has to be dealt with internationally not nationally.
Which isn’t to say he’s happy for things to stay as they are:
If we remain, I believe Europe has got to change quite dramatically to something much more democratic, much more accountable, and to share our wealth and improve our living standards and working conditions all across the whole continent.
And Europe – and Britain – needs to do more on the refugee crisis:
Every government across Europe has got to play its part in housing those refugees because Syrian refugees are just like all of us in this room. They are fleeing from a war looking for somewhere safe to go to, surely there has to be a humanitarian response, not the bigoted response of putting up a 32-sheet poster that says a group of desperate people are somehow or other a threat to us. No they’re not, they are no threat at all, the threat is the hatred that is put towards those people by those people that put up that poster …
I want to be there to argue that Europe has to have a different response. Look, if there was no European Union and instead you had 27 member states would there be any co-ordinated response or not? Probably not. Would there be any route out for those refugees? Probably not.
He isn’t arguing for restrictions on free movement (as some Labour colleagues have done):
If you restrict movement of labour across Europe then you are defeating the whole point of there being one market within Europe.
He doesn’t think voters are fed up with the campaign:
There are a couple of days to go and my experience, and I have been involved in lots of elections over my life, that in the last two or three days when all the politicians have become exhausted with the campaigning, the public finally catch on and get interested in it. So we have got two days of intense interest, I hope.
If Britain votes to leave, it won’t be Corbyn’s fault:
I’m not going to take blame for people’s decision … I am hoping there is going to be a remain vote, there may well be a remain vote, there may well be a leave vote. Whatever the result, that is the result of the referendum, we’ve got to work with it.
What we didn’t learn
What on earth “the establishment” is if it doesn’t include the leader of Her Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition:
I’m not a member of the establishment, I’m a member of the Labour party, I’m the leader of the Labour party and I’m a Labour MP.
The key exchange
Sky News political editor Faisal Islam: On this issue you have some strange bedfellows now. The chancellor, George Osborne, told Sky News last week it’s the people on the lower incomes who will be hit first if there’s a recession, Brexit is for the richest in our country. Do you agree with the chancellor?
Corbyn: That’s a very odd statement coming from George Osborne, I confess it’s the first I’ve heard of it so … Can I reflect on that?!
You should also know
- The Guardian says vote remain, while the Telegraph comes out for Brexit.
- Andy Burnham defends role of immigrants in NHS in Guardian referendum debate.
-
Ireland’s taoiseach Enda Kenny issues border warning over Brexit.
-
Vote Leave board member Arabella Arkwright quits over anti-Muslim retweets.
- People have been tweeting about their #CatsAgainstBrexit because Twitter.
I asked @RealGrumpyCat what she thought of #CatsAgainstBrexit. She wasn't impressed. pic.twitter.com/Gb4Sj2UGr5
— Daniel Hannan (@DanHannanMEP) June 20, 2016
Poll position
Contradictory polls all over the place this morning. An ORB poll for the Telegraph puts remain back in front for the first time in almost a month on 53% to leave’s 46%, among those certain to vote. A Times/YouGov poll, however, sees leave retain a lead of two points over remain, 51% to 49%. Which leaves the FT’s poll of polls precisely where it was yesterday: 44% apiece.
Meanwhile, a survey by the Electoral Reform Society reveals that 16% of people – that’s one in seven – haven’t been contacted at all about the referendum: no leaflets, no phone calls, no emails, no door-knocks. Failure of democratic engagement or blessed relief?
Diary
You can’t move for Labour politicians making the case for remain today, but the big set-piece comes this evening, with the BBC’s “great debate” at Wembley Arena.
- Jeremy Corbyn makes his speech in Manchester at 10am, alongside Labour colleagues Alan Johnson and Kate Green.
- Nigel Farage is in Clacton from 11am, at the same time Ed Miliband pitches up in Luton.
- Also at 11am, another Brexit flotilla sets sail, this time up the Humber.
- Noon sees Neil Kinnock in Cardiff. Then Miliband is back again, this time with Harriet Harman in Birmingham at 3pm.
- Alan Johnson switches to Derby for an event with Margaret Beckett at 3.30pm, and Tom Watson is in Brighton at the same time.
- At 5pm Gordon Brown speaks in Glasgow.
- Grassroots Out rallies in Stafford at 7pm, with Bill Cash, Owen Paterson, Chris Grayling and Ukip’s Steven Woolfe.
- It’s the BBC debate from 8-10pm, hosted by David Dimbleby, Mishal Husain and Emily Maitlis, and featuring (for leave) Boris Johnson, Gisela Stuart and Andrea Leadsom; and (for remain) Ruth Davidson, Sadiq Khan and the TUC’s Frances O’Grady.
- Then you can probably go to bed.
Read these
BBC World News presenter Katty Kay writes of five common factors that could link a Brexit win to a Donald Trump victory:
The forces of globalisation are causing havoc for European workers as they are for American workers. If you are a white working-class man (in particular) the combined effects of immigration, free trade and technology have made your job and your wages less secure.
Policy-makers in the UK and the US have singularly failed to address these issues in any meaningful way. If the Brexit camp wins next week, it could suggest the global anti-globalisation mood (if such a thing is possible) is stronger than we realised.
In the Wall Street Journal, James Mackintosh also considers the possibility of a sterling crisis:
If a fall in the pound turns into a downward spiral, the Bank of England could appeal to foreign central banks to help. But coordinated intervention would surely require the Bank of England to raise rates to help support sterling, too. This would be an extreme outcome, a true loss of confidence in the UK. Even those who worry about it think it unlikely, just not as unlikely as markets suggest …
There is a far more likely outcome, which is also being ignored: The Bank of England might raise rates sooner than the market expects if Brexit happens – not because it is forced to by a sterling crisis, but because leaving the EU damages investment and restricts immigration, making Britain more inflationary.
Rachel Sylvester in the Times argues that “if the Remainers have played the politics of fear, the Leave camp have dabbled in the politics of hate”:
The Leave campaign has wrapped the monster in a myth that Brexit will deal with voters’ every concern, from immigration to inequality, struggling public services to unaccountable elites. It can’t and it won’t, which means that whatever the outcome of the referendum the anger will only grow. This isn’t just about Europe. Politicians have too often fuelled an incendiary and divisive atmosphere. The Conservative campaign against Sadiq Khan in the recent London mayoral election deliberately sought to play up differences between communities in London by linking him to Islamic extremists … In the Labour party, the politics of division are all too clear in antisemitism and ill-disguised misogyny among some on the hard left …
Far from appealing to our better instincts, the referendum campaign – like too much of our politics – has sought to unleash the nastiest side of ourselves.
Baffling claim of the day
Worried about the possible consequences of Brexit? Don’t trouble yourself, says a column in Australia’s Herald Sun about the “sheer and utter rubbish” of the warnings issued by those opposed to leaving the EU. And why? Because:
Global warming hysteria has demonstrated all too clearly how (supposedly) very clever people can say (unqualifiedly) very stupid things.
Shame about the Great Barrier Reef, though, eh?
Celebrity endorsement of the day
Paula Radcliffe, who knows a thing or two about marathon campaigns, has tweeted her backing for staying the distance: “One of many reasons I am proud to be British AND European. #VoteRemain.”
The day in a tweet
The Guardian’s own Tom Clark pops up in this podcast from Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight, but you might just enjoy the sentiment of the tweet:
🎧 British referendum polls are a mess: https://t.co/e8ZTMwEuBE pic.twitter.com/wVW56WCair
— FiveThirtyEight (@FiveThirtyEight) June 21, 2016
And another thing
Would you like to wake up to this briefing in your inbox every weekday? Sign up here.
