What we can learn from Vote Leave's Head of Ground Campaign
Nick Varley joins us this week. Ten years on, the lesson is less about the vote, and more about how we talk to people we've already decided are wrong
Craft Politics is a Canada-U.K. cross-border political podcast co-hosted by Joseph Lavoie and Andrew Percy. You can subscribe on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify.
Ten years ago last week, I stayed up to watch the Brexit results come in, mostly out of idle curiosity. I didn’t think it would go anywhere. And like most of the world, I quickly realized how wrong I had it. It turned out to be the night I got interested in British politics.
Here’s what I couldn’t understand at the time. From Canada, leaving the European Union looked like walking away from a strong economic bloc for no reason at all. Then, a few years later Nick Varley walked me through the sovereignty argument, and I suddenly better undersrtood what drove the Vote Leave campaign.
Nick ran the ground campaign for Vote Leave. He built a twelve-thousand-person volunteer army from a standing start in eight months — his own account of how is worth reading. He’s our guest on this week’s episode.
The version of Brexit I’d absorbed was that it was about immigration, or a lie on the side of a bus, or Cambridge Analytica. Nick’s account is different. For the twelve thousand volunteers he actually mobilized, it was mostly about one thing: who gets to decide. The argument, he says, went something like — I could live with X, if we the voters had the power to decide.
If some institution I didn’t elect could overrule my Parliament on the things I cared about most, that would piss me off too. I don’t have to share the conclusion to understand the feeling. And that was my mistake in 2016: I mistook a feeling I didn’t share for a feeling that wasn’t real.
Nick has a theory that isn’t really about Britain at all. He calls it “skint” — the British word for broke. His claim is that a lot of politics comes down to whether people feel skint. And if you feel skint, a campaign warning that you’ll be poorer if you vote the wrong way doesn’t frighten you. It insults you. You already feel poor. Telling you it’ll get worse mostly tells you the person talking has no idea what your life is actually like.
That’s what “Project Fear” did, again and again. As Andrew points out on the episode, the messengers were often the very people voters blamed for being skint in the first place. When President Obama flew in to warn that Britain would go to “the back of the queue,” it landed as a threat from a club that had already decided you were the problem.
There’s a rule in there, and it isn’t complicated: don’t campaign in contempt. It doesn’t work, and it deserves not to.
Which is why Alberta has been on my mind.
I keep hearing the same confident dismissal I made myself in 2016 — it’s fringe, it’s a tantrum, it’ll pass. Maybe. But two things from Nick and Andrew’s decade of scar tissue should give us federalists pause:
Referendums don’t release pressure. They harden it. Forcing people to pick a side makes them re-identify around the choice, and the losing thirty percent doesn’t evaporate — it organizes. Scotland lost its independence vote in 2014 and then handed the SNP nearly every seat it had.
Sure, Alberta’s first vote is a “just” a vote on whether to hold a binding referendum later. That feels low-risk — you’re not actually deciding anything yet. But that’s the trap. Once someone crosses an identity line, even a cautious one, they rarely cross back. The first yes is the hard one. The second gets easier.
Craft Politics is a cross-border, Canada-UK political podcast, hosted by former UK MP Andrew Percy, and former political staffer, Joseph Lavoie.