Project Fear: how Cameron plans to scare us into staying in the EU

It worked in Scotland, so ‘Project Fear’ will be deployed again to persuade Britain to stay in

The negotiations may be ongoing, but David Cameron has given up waiting for the outcome of his talks with the European Union. The Prime Minister has made up his mind: he wants Britain to vote to stay in the EU — and the campaigning has already begun. His closest allies have been assigned to the task; Downing Street is already in election mode and a strategy is being devised.
As with the Scottish referendum campaign, the In campaign will consist of vivid warnings about the dangers of voting to leave. In Scotland it was dubbed Project Fear, and that’s what Cameron is planning again. In theory, the Prime Minister has until the end of next year to call the referendum vote. In practice, he wants it over with. The polls suggest that it’s his to lose, the ‘In’ side is comfortably ahead at the moment — and the rule of thumb in referendums is that the change proposition, ‘Out’ in this case, needs to be ahead by double digits if the campaign is to win. But In’s advantage could evaporate with a new refugee crisis or a new eurozone crisis or both. Time, Cameron has decided, is now his enemy. He’d like to agree a deal, any deal, with the EU next month and hold the referendum in June — although this timetable may well slip, delaying the vote until September. The unofficial deadline has transformed government: the Prime Minister himself now never misses an opportunity to say that Britain should stay inside a reformed EU.
The campaign, though, is a little complicated for the PM. How can a self-described ‘Eurosceptic’ lead the effort to stay in the EU? How can the Prime Minister of a country whose recent success owes much to staying out of the single currency and the Schengen agreement argue that Britain must at all costs remain in the club that came up with these disastrous ideas? Many countries in Europe, whose leaders grew up in dictator-ship, cling to the EU project as the guarantor of their democracy. For most members, the European project has always been as much about geopolitics as economics. For the Poles, EU membership means a bulwark against the Russian menace; for the Greeks, it means no return to coups by colonels. But Britain has no dictatorial demons to hide from. If anything, Britain joined the then European Economic Community out of a fear of being left behind economically. When Cameron first declared his intention to hold an in-or-out referendum, he grasped this. EU membership was framed as an issue of prosperity. ‘Our participation in the single market, and our ability to help set its rules, is the principal reason for our membership,’ he said in his Bloomberg speech in 2013. But now even this argument looks shaky: given that Britain creates more jobs than the rest of the European Union put together, can he really argue that we need it for prosperity? Or that Britain, the world’s fifth — and soon to be fourth — largest economy, is somehow too small to go it alone?
This line was used in Scotland, and had some potency, given the amount of subsidy needed to balance its books, and the unanswered question about what an independent Scotland would have as its currency. But as one senior member of the government admitted in a more candid moment, the economic arguments for EU membership are now too finely balanced to be sure that they would deliver a referendum victory. So the Prime Minister has hit on one theme that does have force: whether Britain wants to go it alone in a dangerous and uncertain world. One senior No. 10 source says that this new emphasis reflects the times: ‘The rise of Isis changes arguments.’
This might sound a little incongruous. Traditionally, the British have regarded the EU as an economic arrangement, with security the preserve of the Nato alliance. When the EU was awarded the Nobel Peace prize in 2012, Cameron didn’t even bother turning up to the ceremony, sending Nick Clegg instead. Not content with that snub, the Prime Minister went out of his way to stress that Nato deserved the prize as much as the EU. But things have changed. One senior member of the government sums up the case for remaining like this: ‘Who’ll be happiest if we vote to leave? Vladimir Putin. Do we want that?’
But will we buy that? The Foreign Office thinks so. They were struck by the way support for EU membership went up after Putin’s annexation of Crimea. This (it is argued) shows that voters ‘get’ that Russian aggression in Eastern Europe means that the liberal, democratic nations of Europe need to gather together. But does one necessarily follow on from the other? Ultimately, Europe’s security is underpinned by a country that isn’t a member of the EU: the United States of America. When Poland’s Foreign Minister suggested that Warsaw could accept Cameron’s proposal for a four-year ban on in-work benefits for EU migrants in exchange for greater protection against the Russian threat, what he wanted was Nato bases — not the deployment of an EU Rapid Reaction Force. Yet this argument is more than just a campaign tactic. One government minister tells me: ‘Putin sees Brexit as weakening any effective system of European and transatlantic co-operation.’
This is a view shared by the US administration. Indeed, Barack Obama is expected to visit the UK this spring — his farewell tour — and the hope in government circles is that he will again make clear that he would like Britain to stay in the EU. While US presidents have always wanted this (mainly to improve the quality of the EU), Obama’s benediction would be used to make a separate point: that there is no conflict between the ‘special relationship’ and EU membership; that the leader of the free world wants Britain inside the EU for the sake of western security.

Europe