What worries me about the referendum is the trust. Every poll I can think of shows people on the Leave side claiming they trust no-one.
At the same time, Nigel Farage says smoking is just the best for your health and the official Vote Leave campaign issues maps suggesting Iraq and Syria are candidates for accession to the European Union, talks about the finances of the EU without counting the rebate Margaret Thatcher secured, and suggests we all need to be more like Albania.
I can see it – drive my cigarette boat over the Adriatic in a 500 horsepower blitz of seawash, slash some clown who lacked respect and toss his carcass in the harbour, dance like a wild peasant youth with a dark beauty – but I’m not seeing Michael Gove and Iain Duncan Smith keeping up.
There’s a reason why they come out with so much bullshit. There’s also a reason why they come out with so many outright lies. A couple of years back, people at Microsoft’s research lab were trying to work out why spam is so obvious. We’ve all wondered how anyone believes the Nigerian prince and his money are on the other end of the wire, or why anyone bothers trying to sell us drugs that are free on the NHS. The Microsoft researchers realised something important.
Even a leopard needs to sleep. Predators only have so many hours in the day, so they have to pick the prey that gives them the best chance of a feed. Spammers are looking for suckers, but you can’t pick those by looking at their e-mail address. The more time you waste on someone who’ll get wise, the less money you’re making and the more likely you are to get shopped to the police.
What you can do, though, is scare off all the other people. If you make your scam so excessive, so shameless, an outrageous camp striptease of a scam…well, you don’t need to worry about picking your marks any more, because the only people you’re talking to are the ones who weren’t paying attention. All the others have gone. It’s a kind of negative marketing – the point isn’t to get people in, it’s to put them off.
That’s where all this bullshit is coming from. The Leave campaign is the most fully realised exercise in negative marketing yet. The whole point is to show that they’re going to lie flat out to your face. It has to be obvious. They think you’re an idiot, a sucker, a bag of money on legs. You should see it as an insult to your intelligence.
In case you’ve wondered, there’s a reason why every Remain campaign message seems to come from people who define themselves by something they do, from scientists and trade unionists to midwives and skateboarders. We want you to think about what you do best, and act with the generosity of confidence. They want you baffled and scared by what you believe is your own mediocrity. Nothing else could put such a bunch of dullards in charge.
Let’s not be the country where 50% plus 1 vote chooses the Angus Steakhouse option.
“The Leave campaign is the most fully realised exercise in negative marketing yet. The whole point is to show that they’re going to lie flat out to your face. It has to be obvious. They think you’re an idiot, a sucker, a bag of money on legs. You should see it as an insult to your intelligence.”
I thought, in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, that some of the assertions made were a deliberate insult to our intelligence. There were people saying “We can say things that are an insult to your intelligence and you cannot do anything about it”. And now it has happened again.