Leave’s Turn: British Justice Secretary Makes His Case

This is the third installment of my continuing yet irregular series on the British referendum to Leave or Remain in the European Union. Here are the first two. The referendum will be held on 23 June.

Sky News presenter Faisal Islam took a chunk out of David Cameron (British PM and leader of the Remain side) last night. Today, he took at at Justice Secretary Michael Gove (yes, you read that right, the British Cabinet is divided on this subject). The Telegraph had running analysis of it.

Islam annoyed Cameron enough to have the PM accuse him of sounding like a Leave supporter. Gove was equally upset by Islam’s questioning, but was more personal, calling the newsman “on the side of the elites.” Gove was more personal in general, revealing how his adoptive father’s fish merchant business was effectively shut down by Brussels-led regulations: “Don’t belittle the pain caused by the job destroying machine of the European Union.” Meanwhile, Islam himself pushed Gove on claims and counterclaims of just how much the UK paid into the EU budget. Islam focused on the gross-payment claim, which doesn’t take into account a partial rebate the UK has received since the 1980s. Then again, Islam treated the gross-payment number as an inaccurate claim, which it wasn’t.

Indeed, Islam himself stumbled into an error on non-EU trade zones, as Tim Stanley note (same link):

At one point Faisal Islam seemed to suggest that there were no European free trade arrangements outside the EU. There are two: the EEA and EFTA. Becuase the EEA has no website, Islam said, it probably doesn’t exist. Well it does – and I can prove it with a link to the UK government’s website.

However, if the Justice Secretary was more angered by Islam than his fellow Tory, he also had a better time with the audience. He adroitly played off the Remain’s “Project Fear” campaign (the label for Remain’s warning about the economic damage they claim would result from leaving the EU) by calling the Leave crew “Project Hope.” He was also more personable, telling them he’d rather not be the “poster boy” for Leave: “I am not the sort of person that you want to have on your bedroom wall when you wake up.”

As expected, he also talked immigration, but not in the expected way. He called the UK’s current EU-friendly (and EU-mandated) system “racist” in that it discriminates against non-EU immigrants, such as in Commonwealth nations in South Asia and Africa (he cited India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh).

In the end, however, the reaction was as expected: the Remain folks thought he did badly and the Leave crew thought he did well. One audience member summed up the effect on the debate, I think: “It’s a bit confusing.”

So, for both sides, it’s back to their corners for the next round. If either side moved the needle over the last 48 hours, I’ll be surprised.