A leading pro-Brexit campaigner has praised the “very clever” propaganda techniques of the Nazis, a tape recording of private comments has revealed.
“The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance – you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did”
Andy Wigmore
Andy Wigmore also acknowledged that the Leave.EU group deliberately deployed “outrageous” and “provocative” tactics borrowed from Donald Trump to keep immigration at the heart of the 2016 referendum campaign.
Mr Wigmore was the communications director for Leave.EU campaign, which was endorsed by former Ukip leader Nigel Farage and funded by the millionaire businessman Arron Banks.
Damian Collins, chairman of the Commons Digital, Culture, Media and Sport Committee, which is conducting an inquiry into “fake news”, said people would be “very frightened” by the remarks.
Cambridge Analytica links
In interview recordings released by the committee, Mr Wigmore can be heard discussing Leave.EU’s contacts with the controversial company Cambridge Analytica.
He was among several figures from the Leave campaign and companies linked to Cambridge Analytica who spoke to Essex University researcher Emma Briant for a book on the Trump campaign.
Mr Wigmore told her: “The propaganda machine of the Nazis, for instance – you take away all the hideous horror and that kind of stuff, it was very clever, the way they managed to do what they did.
“In its pure marketing sense, you can see the logic of what they were saying, why they were saying it, and how they presented things, and the imagery.
“And looking at that now, in hindsight, having been on the sharp end of this campaign, you think: crikey, this is not new, and it’s just … using the tools that you have at the time.”
Trump’s techniques ‘copied’
He added that Leave.EU “completely, completely, completely” copied Mr Trump’s technique of making attention-grabbing and controversial comments.
“The only way we were going to make a noise was to follow the Trump doctrine, which was, the more outrageous we are, the more attention we’ll get, and the more attention we get, the more outrageous we’ll be. And that’s exactly what we did.”
But Mr Wigmore said that the release of the tape “sounds like another attempt to try and justify a committee that is desperate to try and find any excuse to undermine the referendum”.
He said his conversations with Dr Briant were not for publication and described their release as “willful deception and trickery”.
The Nazis came up for discussion “in a historical context” in reference to the scare tactics being used by the Remain campaign, said Mr Wigmore.
He repeated Leave.EU’s denial that it used Cambridge Analytica’s services.
‘Bogeymen’
The chief executive of Cambridge Analytica, Nigel Oakes, was also recorded saying Mr Trump “leveraged an artificial enemy” in the shape of the Muslims in the same way that Adolf Hitler played on pre-war German hatred for Jews.
Mr Collins said the Nazis’ tactic was “to create bogeymen for people to be frightened of” and that its inquiry wanted to determine “were these tactics being used in the referendum campaign”.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “I think people listening to this programme will be very frightened to think that people like Nigel Oakes and Andy Wigmore would have access to their data and could therefore target them in this way.”
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I voted Leave, but Brexit doesn’t mean we have to lose our European identity
