In a three part series Atul Hatwal looks at the state of the two EU referendum campaigns and the likely winners and losers from the vote. First up, the Remain campaign.
At the start of the year, the Remain campaign had one job: to make Brexit more scary than Bremain.
It’s a job that they’ve done bloody well.
The brief for this campaign never included a requirement to persuade people of the imminent arrival of a new, fully reformed EU utopia.
Neither did it involve turning around years of frustration about the bureaucratic exigencies of the EU.
Who even thought that would be possible in a campaign of a few months?
But to read the drumbeat of criticism of the In campaign from pro-Europeans (Hugo Dixon, Natalie Nougayrède, Gordon Brown, Alex Salmond and Charlie Cooper to name but a few) is to be trapped in the impossibilist dream of enthusiasts who do not understand their fellow Briton.
These are the people who measure success by the volume of cheers in the hall not the weight of votes outside.
For this category of commentator and politician, Scotland is independent, Ed Miliband is prime minister and this is what a good football manager looks like.
They frequently use that word which presaged defeat for the Scottish pro-independence camp and Labour last year: passion.
Talk is of turnout and their silver bullet, the enthusiasm gap.
Paradoxically it is the utter commitment of the enthusiasts which is their critical flaw.
It robs advocates of empathy, the keystone of any campaign.
Hobby-horse arguments, shrilly pitched dissolve into the irrelevant drone of a Euro-anorak.
In contrast, the Remain campaign has understood the two essential truths of this and any election.
