In my March 2015 prediction of the tenor and conduct of the EU Referendum, if anything, I underestimated just how dirty it would be.

Back in March 2015, I wrote an article for fellow-Brexiteer Ben Kelly over at The Sceptic Isle, on how the EU Referendum, whenever it came, would play out. (Ben has archived it, so I can’t link to it, but fortunately I kept a Word copy of it).

The first part of the piece was a prediction of how the referendum would be conducted. Here it is:

“Whenever it comes, the EU Referendum campaign will undoubtedly be the dirtiest and most deceitful plebiscite ever seen in Britain. For the EU-enthusiasts disproportionately represented in opinion-influencing circles, there is simply too much at stake for it not to be.

For them, an OUT vote means a popular re-affirmation of the democratic, sovereign nation-statehood they have spent almost their entire adult lives repudiating. It means a national rejection of the centre-leftish, universalist, democracy-bypassing supranationalism of unelected elites, which they believe is the necessary civilising antidote to the unpredictable caprices of robust, accountable one-country pluralism.

The overwhelmingly EU-phile politico-media establishment, including the three main legacy parties, will exaggerate the supposed benefits and advantages of EU membership, and simultaneously downplay or suppress its drawbacks. There will be massive scaremongering to overstate, in wildly dramatic fashion, the alleged risks of exit, whether to UK jobs, economic growth, ease of travel, or even our much-vaunted but much less evident “influence”.

Even in the 2014 EU Parliament elections, we saw the readiness of the EU-phile movement to retail the risible “3m jobs at risk” meme, and the media’s willingness to boost it, despite its evident falsehood. The personal smearing of advocates for withdrawal will be constant, and vicious. It will be a media negative-propaganda campaign such as we have never before seen.

Hand-in-glove with the media will be what will be trailed as “the voice of business” – more accurately, the voice of big business and its representative organisations like the CBI, which benefits most from the crony-corporatism that the EU exemplifies. Big business values the EU for the competitive advantage it brings: large firms have sufficient size and economies of scale to absorb the mountains of EU regulation and attendant compliance costs that both deter new entrants and cripple their smaller, nimbler competitors. They will do everything to maintain that advantage.

Meanwhile, pro-EU campaign groups and third-sector “charities” and quangos will be vocal in support of EU membership and its alleged benefits as never before. Our emotions will be assaulted by heart-rending warnings of hardship and unfairness to recipients of charity if EU regulations cease to apply on exit.

The anti-exit movement will be backed by massive financial support, not least from the EU itself. For the EU, the stakes in a UK exit referendum being held at all are huge – remember, the entire European super-state project is predicated philosophically on the historical inevitability of ever-closer union – but the risks to the EU from that referendum delivering a UK exit are incalculable.

Britain would be the first major country, and economy, to resile from the project. Not only would it take its contributions with it, but it would almost certainly tempt others to follow. The possibility of it being the thin edge of the wedge, and the first step in the breakup of the entire edifice, could not be discounted.

The extent of EU funding which has been funnelled to the BBC and the CBI is well-known.

But the EU has also been quietly suborning civic society, and even local government, with EU funding, for many years. The recipients cannot be expected to do other than campaign vociferously for its continuation. The EU will pour money into the pro-EU, anti-exit campaign – because its own very survival could be at stake.

History shows, too, that the status quo exerts a strong voter pull in referenda, and that voting intention in favour of the status quo actually hardens as polling date approaches. Dangling before the electorate the idea that the intended change represents a risky leap into the unknown unfortunately works.”

The purpose behind this quick post isn’t to gloat, or to say “See, I told you so!” I’d much rather I’d been completely wrong, and that after a robust but more-or-less civilised campaign on the substantive issues, Britain was now irreversibly on course for a Brexit vote.

It’s just to record ruefully, not that I was right, but that I underestimated the depths to which the Government, the mainstream political parties (albeit with some honourable exceptions within them) and the Remain Campaign would sink – or perhaps that should be dive.

But the cynical, shameless exploitation, by all, of the MP Jo Cox’s murder, culminating in what Conservative Woman‘s Laura Perrins rightly calls something that should go down in the political handbook of infamy, plumbs depths of ethical depravity and turpitude even I could not have imagined.

That Britain now seems about to commit what will arguably the greatest act of national self-destruction of the Modern Era is bad enough. That it should do so as a result of being susceptible to baseness of this magnitude is profoundly depressing.

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