My word, Michael Gove, you have some front.

First, he accuses the remain campaign of treating voters like children, waging a campaign of fear, seeking to leave the electorate “frightened into obedience by conjuring up new bogeymen every night”. Then he goes on national radio to warn Brexit must happen “before it’s too late”, that a vote for remain would mean “voting to be hostages, locked in the back of a car” before warning of the threat posed by foreigners and criminals.

Call it what you want. Chutzpah, shamelessness, brazen hypocrisy, an attempt to put satirists out of business because reality is too absurd to be mocked. Last month Gove’s Vote Leave campaign released a list of murders and rapes committed by EU nationals. Who, other than the terminally disingenuous and the chronically mischievous, can convincingly argue that the Vote Leave campaign is doing anything other than infantilising the electorate, of waging a quite frankly sinister campaign of fear?

Actually, I’ve overstepped the mark in appropriating Gove’s arguments. Children are often smart, inquisitive, critical, and certainly not gullible. Gove – a man who once argued that all schools should be better than average, which is statistically impossible – and his allies are not treating us as though we are children, but as though we are thick.

For those of us who want a Europe run in the interests of working people, we have no dog in this pathetic fight

Brexit will mean an end to austerity, they argue: the very austerity they have gleefully imposed as a means to an end, not to balance the books but rather to roll back the state. It will save the NHS, they say, as they castigate the policies of Jeremy Hunt that many of them have championed and indeed voted for. Boris Johnson is among leading Vote Leave figures who have advocated scrapping a NHS free at the point of use. Brexit will save the steel industry, they argue: the very same people who still swoon over Thatcher and her ideology that laid entire industries – and the communities they supported – to ruin. They have as much interest in industrial strategy as I do in dancing the fandango naked down Whitehall. Let’s just say I suspect their sudden conversion to the causes of anti-austerity, the NHS and industrial salvation will not outlive a referendum.

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Are the Cameron and Osborne remainers themselves waging a campaign based on fear? Yes, but a campaign of fear was waged to prevent Scotland from voting against independence. I didn’t support independence, but still objected to the fear campaign on a point of principle. Did they? No – they were waging it. Similarly, when an outlandish campaign of scaremongering was directed towards Labour in the run-up to the general election, did they object? No, again, they were waging it. And now, again, they are conducting another campaign of fear, including deploying the threat of raping and murdering foreigners. If only there were as many English words for hypocrisy as Eskimo words for snow, then I might be able to accurately sum up the brazen shamelessness of this bunch of shysters.

EU referendum: Remain camp treat public like 'children', says Gove Read more

In February, I wrote that the issue isn’t whether the Tories teeter on the brink of civil war, but how civil that war will be. I’m not sure I predicted the brutality that was to come. How the Tories are supposed to get back into bed with each other post-referendum remains to be seen.

But for those of us who want to change the European Union into a democratic Europe run in the interests of working people, we have no dog in this pathetic fight. Let them shred each other to pieces and trash each other’s reputations and throw around fear and hysteria. Let’s stick with those – like Britain’s Another Europe Is Possible and Yanis Varoufakis’s Democracy in Europe Movement – who have a positive, compelling vision. Let them have their race to the bottom in fearmongering, and opt for hope instead.