Why James O'Brien lost Remains chances of a Peoples vote
In 2016 the campaigns in the lead up to the UK's EU membership referendum were run much like a US election which takes place over a number of months rather than weeks. One campaign would run a positive but rushed campaign and win it, the losing campaign wasn't rushed but ran a negative uninspiring campaign that only sort to get brexiteers to fear the consequences of leaving the EU.
The reason the Leave campaign was a positive campaign is that they used language to inspire how good it would be without the EU. They were however rushed because they didn't ever expect to win as the establishment had all given their die-hard kiss of death to the Remain campaign.
Remains campaign wasn't rushed because they thought they would win it from the beginning and a negative one because the hubris was as blatant as their uninspiring messages of doom if they didn't do as they were told by the establishment media.
After the campaign ended by kicking off a near 3-year campaign by those that voted remain still trying to catch the winners to divert the chaos they had simulated in reality. The problem was over the course of those years, their platform to prevent their simulated chaos become a reality, their biggest platform would be on the most listened to radio slot in the UK which interacts live with the Twittersphere of the Brexit taglines.
That show began to become the home of the debate and a key influencer on the narrative back on old media such as TV and press. This meant the representation of the new Remain campaigners was almost exclusively done via the slots host Mr James O’Brien on LBC.
Much like the negative punch down campaign that had lost before the referendum, Remain was given a super ego-fuelled message of entitled liberal elite toxicity thanks to this self-confessed "champagne socialist".
The message was then given a boost on YouTube by super fan "I'm Incorrigible" who would title the recordings from the show "Moron's of the week". These videos became popular for the entertainment factor of James O’Brien running a poverty porn style hazing of the average working class leave voter unlucky enough to take his bait call in questions which might as well have been called "How moronic and racist to you feel for voting Leave?"
This obsession with the entertainment factor of a well off radio host mocking working class voters became the misguided path of the entire remain movement with this shows activity on Twitter where “Mr Incorrigible” was often egged on with live shout outs from James O’Brien.
Eventually, the “Moron’s of the week” videos became so popular in the Remain movement that you could literally see links to the videos being shared across all social media networks from The Labour Party Forum and back to twitter responses to key brexiteer twitter accounts as if they were more powerful than any meme.
Surely the lessons of 2016 would be that negative campaigns lose. One of the 2 that year was Hillary Clinton’s establishment corporate democrats who decided they didn’t need to campaign in what’s called “The Rust Belt” because they were considered a “basket of deplorable’s”. Both these campaigns lost because they both had a negative campaign strategy involving voter shaming and an entitled to win hubris about the actual result.
These are errors in strategy because they don’t inspire people to change their minds, in fact, they do the opposite and cause factions to band together and double down on their original decisions. In many ways what James O'Brien did was to radicalize working class leave voters to stick to their original advocacy for Brexit.
This was reflected consistently in the polling which during the years since the original referendum, never significantly budged from the original result. This locked the 2 main parties into Brexit because there was never any strong evidence that the result would be different if a peoples vote were to take place even on a final deal.
This stalemate in the polls resulted in only fringe parties from being bold enough to take an all-out opposing stance to Brexit because the split was not just in the polling but within party memberships too. In Labour this gave some interesting clarity on who is a true progressive and who is more a Blairite centrist hopelessly influenced by non–elected corporate lobbyists.
Labour was already in terrible shape in 2016 after this more corporate wing of the party had twice tried to sabotage their own success in two desperate attempts to remove a true progressive as party leader.
It’s the inverse of what has happened to the US Democratic Party where the corporatists have locked in control of their leadership ever since Bill Clinton’s time in the 90’s where voters were easier for them to manipulate with detailed TV media control which was incidentally the same tactic used when Tony Blair first came to power.
The more new media online took root with progressive networks like The Young Turks (one of the longest running internet shows), the harder it was for the corporate TV media to dominate the narrative. The beauty of this gradual change between 2016 and the 90’s is that it allowed alternative ideas to influence the already 24/hour news cycles around the world.
So by the time the US election of 2016 was in full swing, a lesser known democratic socialist called Bernie Sanders was able to do the impossible by closing a 60 point poll lead Hillary Clinton had over all other democratic candidates for the best part of 2015. This was almost done again in 2017 when Jeremy Corbyn demolished a 20 point lead the Tories had over Labour.
To the democratic establishment, this was seen as a genuine threat to their control over the party and its corporate agenda. They decided to actually cheat Bernie Sanders out of the primaries which in the process defrauded a vast number of their voter base who were switching to support Bernie and had donated to the party with the intention of those funds being used to help Bernie win the general election not Hillary who already took a large amount of corporate donor money.
The difference here between the campaigns was incredibly clear when comparing TV news media to online Independent media. The TV media had almost no coverage of Bernie Sanders and in some cases where news anchors would cover one of his huge rallies live, that anchor would be fired by the network.
Online however it shows exactly why Hillary Clinton was never going to beat Donald trump in the General Election. So the Washington establishment blinded themselves with an echo chamber of TV media giving the impression that Hillary Clinton would win by a land slide.
When it was clearly too late, many of the Independent news networks went into a panic over the idea of the Democrats allowing Trump to win, so this kicked of a short period of independent news voices switching to endorsing Clinton as a kind of better the devil you know scenario.
Popular night club comedian turned online news journalist Jimmy Dore was one of the few not to fall for this futile change of message and decided to endorse the US Green party candidate Jill Stein instead.
Of course we all know it was a futile phase at TYT because Trump had already campaigned where Hillary took for granted and he had stolen Bernie’s populist message of “cleaning the swap”, of course for trump it was a throw away pledge to get elected but compared to Hillary who was showing weaknesses in debates against Trump and no desire to take on board Bernie Sanders popular policies.
So this meant that a lot of people who originally supported and donated towards the Sanders campaign would either not vote, or vote for Trump in protest of the DNC’s bias towards an inferior candidate.
Back in the UK it seemed clear the hubris of the US democrats were coming to give the kiss of death to the Remain campaign by fielding President Barack Obama to help PM David Cameron to persuade voters to not vote for Brexit or face “being at the back of the cue” for a US trade deal.
This was one of many kisses of death for the remain campaign because it wasn’t the least bit persuasive to the average voter that doesn’t have much control over trade as it is and simply angered the leave campaigners who jumped on the opportunity to expose how entitled the remain campaign was.
Things had not been helped by the Greed of David Cameron to use taxpayers money to canvas the entire UK with pro-EU remain campaign leaflets. This was a catastrophic strategic error just like the Obama threats came across as entitled and talking down to the voters.
So we have Trump and Brexit because those that opposed these 2 things are more interested in running negative campaigns that either neglect vast geographic areas, patronise them, mock their intelligence and parade them as “morons” to get clicks and listening figures up.
By 2019 it now looks as though a no deal Brexit is more likely than ever after a weak government through away their majority even though they had a 20 point lead in early 2017. But at least James O’Brian’s listening figures are still high enough to promote those “moron’s of the week” youtube hits and to sell you his book titled just as arrogantly as his campaigning strategies.
Of course, this analysis will be totally rejected by both the UK and US establishment because if they are wrong about this it means there hasn’t really been any opposition to Trump or Brexit ever since both had won. It’s also shameful that these bad strategies were pointless in the first place.
Not all that campaigned for Remain over the past 3 years have been running negative, some formats were much more positive and less insulting to brexiteers, for example, Mike Galsworthy who did his best to keep in the spotlight, the scientific advantages of EU membership or Owen Jones who instead tried to listen to those working-class communities rather than just mock and talk down to them.
The Remain campaign could have instead just focused on how the EU could be reformed or how it could mean better times for the UK, the “sunny uplands” but from an EU perspective. The fact is, James O'Brien spent too much time trying to red scare about Jeremy Corbyn because like the right of the Labour party, they would rather lose to a full on right wing government than win with a hopeful progressive message.
In all honesty, I wouldn't have been able to identify these problems myself before 2015 because I was much more like these "Centrist Dads" defending capitalism from critIque as project Cameron came to hug the Huskies. This is why I know how these neoliberals think and why they are so cocksure that they are always right because neoliberalism relies on a class system where those at the bottom deserve no respect but socialism for the super-rich is fine, (remember it was Obama, Brown and Cameron who ensured they were bailed out and looked after).
So as a Millennial who only has been disadvantaged by neoliberalism but still voted remain for science, supported Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn, I think I will skip his book and wait for Fully Automated Luxury Communism by Aaron Bastani of Novara Media to be released instead.