In a series of three pieces, Atul Hatwal sets out how hard Brexit can be fought in the coming years. Today he looks at why Remain lost and the implications for the battle to shape Brexit

Why did Remain lose? Since the referendum Brexiteers have been assiduous in asserting their narrative: immigration trumped the economy, emotion won over facts and these are the new rules of the political game.

The Brexiteer version of history is now the accepted consensus at Westminster, virtually unchallenged by pro-Europeans, often meekly accepted.

The state of the pro-EU camp feels very familiar, certainly to a Labour member. All very mid-1992 when following a fourth electoral defeat, the best that many senior leaders of the party had to offer by way of strategy was “one more heave.”

It wasn’t good enough then, it isn’t now.

The starting point for pro-Europeans is to ask the right question.

Not just why Leave won but why a Remain campaign built around familiar economic beats failed when the same backing track had proved so persuasive at the general election and the 2014 Scottish independence referendum.

At the election and referendum, campaigns targeting concerns about the economy had convincingly defeated Scottish nationalism in 2014 and crushed Ukip’s English anti-migrant nationalism in 2015.

The conventional wisdom is that immigration was more potent as an issue in 2016.

Fortunately for those who want to prevent a hard Brexit, this is wrong.

The British Election Study (BES), which surveyed a huge panel of 30,000 voters before and after the referendum, sheds some light on what actually happened.

Before the vote, 65% thought that after Brexit the economic situation would get better, stay the same or didn’t know, versus 35% who thought things would get worse.

In comparison, 55% felt that immigration would be lower if we left the EU.

For the majority, voting for Brexit didn’t hurt the economy but would reduce immigration and also give a whack to the establishment.

This is the view of eminent academic John Curtice, whose article was cited by Dominic Cummings, architect of Vote Leave’s strategy, as the best analysis of the referendum result.

These BES numbers suggest that Leave might have been on track for a bigger win but that worries about the economy did cut through on polling day, for those who wanted lower migration (which included roughly half of Remainers) but were risk averse on the economy.

After the referendum, the post-vote BES survey underlined the close alignment between views on the economy and final voting decision.

93% of those who thought that Brexit would make Britain worse off voted to Remain while 90% of those who thought it would make Britain better off voted to Leave. These findings prompted John Curtice to comment, “Rarely do survey data show so sharp a divide between two sets of voters.”

Compared to the 2015 general election and Scottish independence referendum, the difference at the EU referendum was that the economic threat was simply not believed by enough people. Where it was seen by voters as credible, they voted to Remain. Where it wasn’t, they voted to Leave.

Research is sparse on the reasons for this but three factors are evident to anyone with a scintilla of experience in political campaigns: David Cameron’s late conversion to the EU cause, the absence of alternative leaders to make the case and the pro-EU campaign’s collective failure to offer voters any upside on immigration.

Imagine if David Cameron had spent his five years in Downing Street, preceding the 2015 general election, making speeches about how the Conservative party was fundamentally flawed and the cause of many of Britain’s economic problems.

Or if he had prepared for the Scottish independence referendum with several years of speeches and press releases setting out that Scotland could quite easily separate from the UK without serious consequence.

Would voters have viewed his statements in those campaigns as credible? Flip flops and muddled messages are not commonly acknowledged as a winning attributes in a close campaign.

Yet, this is exactly what happened with the EU referendum.

For six years as prime minister, from 2010 to the start of 2016, David Cameron’s statements were clear: the EU was a problem and Britain could happily exist outside of it. This position was largely congruent with the tenor of British politics over the past four decades.

Then for six months, from January through to June 2016, David Cameron said the exact opposite

For those predicting, or more accurately, hoping for Brexit redux with anti-EU victories in the French and German elections in 2017, it’s important to understand just how differently the EU is regarded, both in political debate and public esteem, in France and Germany.

With the benefit of hindsight, it’s understandable why voters doubted Cameron’s sudden conversion or the credibility of his threats.

But if the leader of the Remain campaign, the politician charged with convincing the public of the economic peril of Brexit was so compromised, the public might yet have been persuaded if an alternative champion had made the case.

Unfortunately, the alternative at the EU referendum was Jeremy Corbyn – a lifelong Eurosceptic virtually invisible during the campaign, lacking in credibility with the public and who singularly failed to emphasise the key economic messages about the costs of Brexit.

Had the referendum been conducted twenty years ago, with a wildly popular, articulate opposition leader – don’t forget, in 1996, Labour was registering poll leads over the Conservatives of 40 points – most prominent in the public debate, the result would very likely have been different.

These twin shortcomings of David Cameron and Jeremy Corbyn meant that the economy firewall was breached. During the campaign, immigration became increasingly relevant in swinging votes.

The final failure of the Remain campaign was just ignoring it.

In a situation where the economic threat was not resonating sufficiently, there needed to have been some effort to neutralise the negativity of immigration. To demonstrate that the country and voters benefitted from the efforts of EU migrants.

Decades of public antipathy to immigration could not have been turned around in a campaign lasting a few months, but at the margin, in an exceedingly close election, maybe a difference could have been made. Perhaps.

The implications of this analysis are twofold for the coming fight over Brexit.

First and foremost, it’s still the economy, stupid.

If the public had believed the economic dangers of Brexit, Britain would still be in the EU.

Yes, people are angry. Elites are mistrusted. Immigration is a real issue and cannot be ignored. But in terms of determining votes, immigration only became such a salient issue once the economic threat was discounted.

The primary task of pro-Europeans fighting hard Brexit is to make the economic threat real, understandable and palpable for the public.

Second, there needs to be consistency in the campaign.

This is a case that needs to be made over years not months by politicians who are capable of commanding column inches (yes, business leaders, union leaders and non-politicians will be important, but ultimately this is a political battle which will be led by politicians, that is after all the point of them.)

For the anti-EU brigade, stretching back to the Maastricht rebels of the 1990s and earlier, Europe was a prism through which the ills of the world were explained. For pro-Europeans, Brexit now needs to fulfil the same role, particularly given the imminent economic slow-down.

These are the key lessons from the EU referendum. If they are learnt and acted upon, all else will be political administration.

Atul Hatwal is editor of Uncut

Tags: Atul Hatwal, Brexit, economy, EU referendum, hard Brexit, immigration