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[...] From Johnson questioning President Obama’s “part-Kenyan ancestry” to EU migrants being blamed for the problems in everything from British schools to our health service to our prisons, every recent Vote Leave intervention has had immigration at its heart. [...]
Why the change in strategy then? Because what little economic credibility leave campaigners had was shredded by George Osborne and Obama in the space of a week. First the Treasury showed that quitting the EU’s single market would take 6% out of our GDP and leave a £36bn black hole in our public finances. Leave campaigners had no answer to the Treasury’s finding that Brexit would cost every household an average of £4,300 a year. Obama then stepped in to make it clear that, once out of the EU, the rest of the world did not offer salvation. Even America, he said, Britain’s special friend, would put us at the back of the queue in future trade priorities.
The leave campaigners knew they could not afford to cede the economy entirely and so rustled up a motley crew of economists to fly in the face of all credible international and domestic economic analysis and suggest we would actually be better off outside the EU. In doing so, they embraced the Treasury’s worst-case scenario of moving to trade based on simple World Trade Organisation rules, which would increase the per-household loss from Brexit to an eye-watering £5,200 a year.
Leave’s economic case is dissolving. It has forced Johnson, Stuart and Gove to pretend they were secret Kippers all along. By throwing in the towel on economics and putting the end of free movement before Britain’s future prosperity, they are endorsing Ukip’s sugar-daddy, Arron Banks, in accepting that the huge economic cost of doing so is “a price worth paying”. When tested with the public, almost no undecided or wavering voters agree.
Does this mean the remain campaign is home and dry? Absolutely not. It must not tire in spelling out Britain’s trade gains and job benefits from being in Europe’s single market. People in Britain – and elsewhere in Europe, for that matter – are rightly concerned about current levels of migration and the impact these have on our way of life and on public services. That’s why the arrangements negotiated by David Cameron to make welfare entitlements for EU nationals more conditional in Britain are being viewed enviously by other member state governments. But it is not the only thing the public worry about. [...]