People's Vote - well that died quickly.

The People's Vote thing was always likely to be a flash in the plan, given the awful strategy decisions made about setting it up in the first place. A pure piece of astroturfing (i.e. it is 100% the remain campaign in terms of people, sponsorship and objectives), which unsuccessfully tried to con the media into thinking there was some demand for a second referendum.


3 key mistakes were made:


1 - They never even tried to agree on the new question to put to the public, thus the core of their message was donut shaped - how can you campaign for a referendum but not know what that will even be. This was very stupid and they had 2 years to think of something plausible.


2 - It was always about remaining, it was not about anything else, so as astoturfing goes, it was not very subliminal - not even as good as McDonald's sponsoring the Olympics, at least that has an ironic undertone to amuse us all.


3 - The main game of Leavers has been that the original vote was about striking against the elite. Nigel Farage's People's Army etc etc of 2016/16. The People's Vote campaign jumped the shark the minute it was seen to be (which it was) the vehicle for Tony Blair to espouse his view from the slopes of Davos. Really, from there on it is just more money down the drain.


So now the last of the donations are being spent on a very elitist twitter campaign to try and extend article 50 - with some tacked-on idea of a vote afterwards.


All I can say is I hope none of those involved wanted future careers in public relations or marketing.

REMAIN, YOU RACIST!

All week on my way to work there have been people from the People's Vote on the bridges into London handing out their leaflets. In the main, they are not too bad. Some dreadful T-Shirts and the same earnest faces of the deluded Corbynistas, Happily, 99.9% of people walk straight past hoping they will go away.


However, today I noticed a change, clearly some of them are getting angry at lack of engagement they are receiving from the passing public - all of whom of course to them must be passionate remainers. It is not enough to hand out leaflets, they need some affirmation. So today up goes the volume, they are stopping people more aggressively and becoming more shouty.


Of course, with people on their way to work and busy with their real lives, this has zero effect apart from to make the odd leaver get shoulder-shruggy at the intrusion.


On reflection is demonstrates many of the difficulties with modern politics which are evident:


1) there is money to be thrown at causes, like People's Vote, without any real scrutiny of who they are or where it comes from. This would apply equally to the referendum in the first place - political campaigning regulation is yet to catch up with the single issue , identity politics of our age.


2) So many activists live in a bubble away from reality - 99% of people don't really care about Brexit and rightly so, it wont make any real difference to their day to day drudgery.


3) The bubble the activists live in is entirely filled with people of their own views, confronted with reality they can become angry and hostile, as I saw today.


4) Politics in the UK (and across  Europe is badly serving the people). In this country there are 2 main views through which prism people view politics currently -  Leave or Remain. Neither of the main parties can decide what side they are on or what it would mean - so they fudge, fudge and fudge some more. There is no outlet of expression for the main political decision of the day and so everyone feels unrepresented by their politics, Leavers and Remainers. That is a very poor state of affairs for civil society.