Learning from referendum failure is key to success, says leading Remain figure

A future campaign to keep Britain in the European Union will face defeat unless it learns the lessons of the first failed Remain campaign, one of its leading figures has warned. Andrew Cooper, a Tory peer and David Cameron’s former pollster, said that the “dry economic projections” of the Remain campaign had been easily dismissed as “project fear”, while advocates of EU membership failed to make “an emotionally resonant or positive case” for staying in. Cooper makes the plea for a different strategy in the event of a second referendum in a new report by the People’s Vote campaign, as it attempts to find a way of convincing voters that staying in the EU would actually help deal with some of the underlying reasons for the original vote to leave.