The curious thing about last night’s TV debate featuring Nigel Farage, David Cameron and a polite and well-informed studio audience was that it wasn’t really a debate at all.
That’s not so much because Cameron wouldn’t be in the room at the same time as Farage; it’s because the two of them agree on pretty well everything except the big one, Europe. And it is not so difficult to imagine Cameron, if he had been a disobliging backbencher rather than prime minister, swapping sides.
They disagree fundamentally about whether Britain should stay in the EU, but at heart they share a worldview. They are both conservatives, both at ease with the world of finance and the City. They both have an innate conviction that the market will always get it right. Neither of them is much of a fan of any kind of state intervention, and neither of them appears to dwell – for example – on the quality as well as the quantity of work available. Both of them think migration and immigration is first a problem and second a problem, to which there is only one answer, which is to have less of it.
The people who will swing the vote in favour of remain on 23 June are most likely to be Labour and, particularly, young. The young are already struggling to register after the website crashed under the weight of twentysomethings who had just woken up to the fact they were about to be auto-disenfranchised. Since only half the under-34s who managed to register at the last election actually turned out to vote, some people might argue it doesn’t matter that much.
But maybe they didn’t vote because they had no reason to think that politics had much to say about their lives. If that was the case, then the way the ITV debate was framed last night won’t have done anything to change their minds.
Any debate between Farage and Cameron is slightly about trade and the economy but mostly about immigration. It is a debate about a Europe of the right, and barely even of the European right but of a kind of Atlanticist Republicanism.
The absence of a Labour voice making the case for the other Europe – the Europe of rights for workers, of cooperation on environmental issues, of a collaborative effort to rein in the excesses of the financial markets – risks handing the campaign to the leavers.
Some senior Labour figures look back at the experience in the Scottish independence referendum and fear collateral damage from being too closely associated with the Tories. But (even if that analysis were true) the answer is not to sit mute in north London. It is to get out to campaign for the Labour version of Europe.
Instead, the party seems transfixed by uncertainty about what it should say on immigration. It is still struggling to escape from the old error of failing to introduce interim arrangements for citizens of the new member states from central Europe in 2005, which saw a big increase in migration.
There is no clear message, no confident decision about how the party responds to this great national anxiety. And every day the Tories and Ukip are out portraying immigration as a costly negative, every time Cameron makes a sympathetic face in response to a complaint, then making a positive case becomes that little bit harder.
But if on Tuesday night Jeremy Corbyn had been there to answer the man in the audience who believed he couldn’t get a doctor’s appointment because of migrant demand, a quite different case could have been put. With the authenticity that is one of his most precious assets, Corbyn could have explained how the incoming coalition government back in 2010 had cut transitional funding to areas feeling migrant pressure.
He might have pointed out that there is a global shortage of GPs, which has much more to do with medical advance and patients’ lifestyles than with migrants, some of whom, as doctors themselves, are more likely to be easing rather than exacerbating the problem.
Labour MPs are coming back from their constituencies alarmed by the support for leave. They know what they need to do; some have been doing it all along.
Today Heidi Alexander, the shadow health secretary, will make the case that the NHS needs a remain vote. Thursday’s ITV debate will feature Angela Eagle, as well as Amber Rudd and Nicola Sturgeon. But with only two weeks to go, there is a real danger that it won’t be enough, and it’s too late.
