BREXIT - FIGHTING ON ALL FRONTS

The battle for Brexit involves all terrains and the use of all means

One week to go before the final Parliamentary attack on the people’s decision

Today we thought we would give readers an insight into the work that is going into the fight to achieve Brexit.

The specialism of the Brexit Facts4EU.Org team has always been the bringing of well-summarised facts to people. Well-researched facts have power when they come from official sources such as the EU Commission, UK and other national governments, and international bodies.

This is original work. We do not simply publish other people’s.

It is this research which has enabled us to offer MPs and the public the largest repository of searchable Brexit facts in the World, in the form of our Brexit Index.

This isn’t the whole story, however.

Reaching out further

It is well-known that the official Leave campaign disbanded the day after the Referendum was won. Whilst we carried on researching and publishing on a daily basis, it was a lonely business back in the second half of 2016 and – frankly – for a great deal longer than that.

By mid-2018, immediately prior to the infamous Chequers meeting, we were organising a public campaign of letters to Cabinet Ministers, and we have since carried on with a public campaigning role. Not because we enjoy it, but because so few pro-Brexit groups have been doing it.

You, our readers, responded to our initiatives, and so we continued our efforts to lobby MPs using the power of the people. We wrote countless articles detailing the facts of the Remain-domination of the Government and of Parliament, and we provided sample letters for the public to send. It seemed to us that the well-funded Remain campaigns were being allowed to lobby MPs almost unhindered. We fought back, with your help.

The power of social media

Frankly, we believe that the power of social media in political campaigning has been vastly overstated. It’s important, but not to the exclusion of good old-fashioned campaigning.

Nevertheless it has an important role and so we got to work on social media, starting with Twitter and moving on to Facebook.

For readers who don’t use social media each day – and there are huge numbers of people who don’t – we thought you would like to see some examples of simple messages we have been pumping out.

We will be publishing some of these in an article tomorrow, because we thought that those of you who don't use social media might like to see this work.

Promoting the factual

In addition to examples of simple messages such as those above, we have also used social media to promote our factual articles, with great success.

After all, if Brexit Central won’t publish any of our highly-respected work, and if the BBC won’t use any of it, we had to use every means possible to get the information out there.

Fortunately we had some success with some mainstream news media, and there are some great pro-Brexit groups who promote what we do – and we reciprocate with their work.

Just some of the press coverage of our work

We don’t have massive funding from a foreign billionaire, but we do what we can.

Working with other pro-Brexit groups

This is something we get asked about all the time. We completely understand the frustration of the public, when they see so many groups and they can’t understand why we don’t combine, or at the very least support each other’s work more.

Since before the Referendum we offered to become the ‘facts arm’ of the large, well-funded groups. We continued to make these offers in the last two years, but were either rebuffed or (sadly) ignored.

The good news is that over the past nine months we have been at the centre of an initiative to get pro-Brexit groups communicating with each other and promoting each other’s work, and this has resulted in some success.

Pro-Brexit groups backing our #GoWTO campaign

Ordinary voters have a massive role to play

On behalf of our readership we have pushed for far more effort to be made in reaching out to the public. We continue to believe that if this had been done consistently since the Referendum, we would not now have as many Remainer MPs trying to thwart Brexit, because they would have felt the weight of public opinion against them.

Instead, we have seen a large volume of (albeit extremely good) Brexit articles buried behind the paywalls of London-based newspapers, online magazines, and journals. That’s fine for the Bubble, but it makes little impact across the country. When a big name pro-Brexit MP regularly sends us links to articles in the FT and asks us to promote them, we despair, frankly.

How many of you subscribe to the FT, to be able to read these?

Nevertheless, there are some pro-Brexit groups who are magnificent, and very hard-working. They understand that the EU Referendum was a democratic vote and that our first duty is to the people. When this is all over we would like to produce a roll of honour. These are people you can be proud of.

Political lobbying

Do we lobby MPs? Of course we do. Is it remotely on the scale of what the Remain groups do? No. We simply don’t have their funding or resources.

Sadly the nature of the lobbying work we do is mostly invisible to readers. We work with other like-minded groups behind the scenes. We try to ensure the feelings of our readership are communicated to pro-Brexit MPs to stiffen them, and to Remain MPs to remind them of their democratic duties.

Sometimes you will see an example of our efforts behind the scenes. A good example came on Sunday, when the marvellously-staunch Brexiteer MP Anne Marie Morris kindly took time out when she could have been relaxing with family, and wrote us the piece we published that day. Not only did she make the effort, members of our team then had to get this published fast, which takes more work than people think. This then had to be promoted.

We are very grateful to this hard-working MP and are delighted that her article was so well-received on this site and on social media. It is still being talked about.

Similarly another well-respected senior member of the ERG called our Editor on Saturday morning. He didn’t have to do this, but the conversation was very fruitful with just a week to go before the key votes start in the Commons next Tuesday.

The Brexit Facts4EU.Org team, Wed 06 Mar 2018

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