Referendum analysis: divisive campaign of lies and lethargy

It may be that the Remain campaign’s Project Fear, along with a succession of missteps by the Leave campaign, will be enough to pull Britain back from the brink of leaving the EU.

But if that happens, it will be, as the Duke of Wellington said of Waterloo, “the nearest run thing you ever saw in your life”.

It has been a dispiriting campaign, which has divided and embittered rather than enlightened, and both sides share responsibility for that. The shallowness of the Leave campaign is beyond dispute but, despite what London mayor Sadiq Khan claimed during Tuesday's Wembley debate, it has not been "Project Hate" so much as "Project Ignorance".

Most of those I met at Leave events over the past couple of months were polite and temperate in tone, even about immigration. What was striking and disquieting, however, was their indifference, even hostility, to evidence and their contempt for expert opinion.

Vote Leave chairman Michael Gove yesterday apologised for comparing the economic experts who have warned about the consequences of Brexit to scientists paid by the Nazis to tell lies.

But this most cerebral and courteous of politicians had already climbed aloft the know-nothing tiger, declaring earlier this month that “people in this country have had enough of experts”.

The cynicism of Gove and Boris Johnson, who is a brilliant classicist and a cultivated cosmopolitan, has been almost as unattractive as the saloon bar swagger of Nigel Farage, whose barely concealed pandering to racism slipped into the open with his notorious Breaking Point poster.

But the dismal quality of the debate owes as much to the emptiness of a Remain campaign which failed to make the positive case for its own proposition.

David Cameron and George Osborne bet everything on frightening voters about the economic consequences of Brexit, hurling one horror scenario after another at an increasingly numb public.

The other side of the Remain campaign was a Labour Party so estranged from parts of its traditional working class base that it found no plausible response to those within it who blamed immigration for the impact of austerity.

Some of those around the London-based leadership simply shrugged off these concerns, while Jeremy Corbyn’s right-wing enemies in the party came close to endorsing the demonisation of immigrants.

One of the most eloquent moments of the Wembley debate came when Khan was met by loud and sustained jeers when he said that the euro zone economy was growing faster than those of the UK and the US.

He was telling the truth, but after years of continental Europe being characterised in the British public discourse as an economic basket case, nobody believed him.

Even if he wanted to, Cameron could not plausibly have made a positive case for the European Union after an entire political career spent demonising it. Even Gordon Brown, who sought to cloak himself in the blue and gold of the European dream during the campaign, lacked credibility when he sang its praises.

This, after all, was the man who blocked Britain’s membership of the euro, the central political project of the Union in recent years, with his five phoney economic tests.

A vote for Brexit will usher in years of uncertainty and political instability but, whatever the result, this campaign will leave behind it a legacy of a society divided, a governing party torn apart and a political class discredited and vulnerable to challenge from new, untamed forces.