Nearly all the UK’s major anti-Brexit groups are coordinating in a fresh push to keep the country in the EU, launching a summer of campaigns, a music festival, a new app, and public adverts, starting in weeks.
“The new money that we’ve got in the last few days and the Soros match-funding is to deploy guerrilla marketing, also on social media,” a coordinator for Best for Britain told Politico.
The group, who were given hundreds of thousands of pounds by billionaire open borders activist George Soros, boasted how they would be investing in election-style billboards and a mobile phone app inspired by Labour’s Momentum movement.
They plan to hold “barnstormer” meetings in Leave-voting areas over the summer to antagonise Brexit supporters and spread their message, as well as attempt to influence Members of Parliament, the coordinator revealed.
The unnamed activist also said Best for Britain is working to launch an anti-Brexit music festival in London on the August bank holiday weekend, taking advantage of the fact the Glastonbury festival is not happening this year.
Best for Britain are allegedly coordinating with Tony Blair’s former spin-doctor Alastair Campbell, the New European newspaper, Conservative Lord Ros Altmann, Guyana-born investor Gina Miller, and Labour’s Lord Adonis, via an email list and a structure called Grassroots Coordinating Group (GCG), chaired by the Labour MP Chuka Umunna.
“There has been, for the first time probably, a great deal of coordination and coming together on email, through meetings and a determination I think to present a joined-up message against Brexit that’s been absent up until now,” explained Matt Kelly, editor of the New European.
The groups ultimately hope to subvert the referendum result by defeating the Government in Parliament, and then either forcing a general election or a second referendum on the terms of exit.
However, Gina Miller, one of the founders of Brest for Britain, attacked her former group as “undemocratic” last weekend, condemning their “guerrilla warfare” tactics, attempts to bring down the government, and lack of “transparency” after taking cash from Soros.
A new youth-focused anti-Brexit group, Our Future, Our Choice (OFOC), is also receiving Soros’s cash indirectly via Best for Britain, and is focusing on pushing Labour’s leader Jeremy Corbyn to call for a second referendum.
One of OFOC’s co-founders, Femi Oluwole, a 27-year-old law graduate, said: “I realized that if all the problems I know Brexit will produce happen, and I did nothing… I would hate myself… So I’m now coordinating a national campaign from my parents’ loft in Sheffield.”
Another of the group’s co-founders, Cambridge student Lara Spirit, claimed they had representatives in more than 40 universities willing to campaign on campus, with young apprentices, and unemployed young people.
“Young people should be at the centre of this debate,” she said. “They stand the most to lose, and yet they voted most decisively to stay.”