Politics & Power Quote by William Hague

Hague’s line is a small masterclass in political repackaging: take a partisan project and sell it as a civic coalition. “Remember” is doing heavy lifting. It’s not a neutral prompt to recall facts; it’s a corrective, aimed at policing the audience’s perception. Someone, implied but unnamed, has tried to frame the No campaign as Tory-coded. Hague’s move is to pre-empt that frame and replace it with a more reassuring one: broad, ordinary, cross-cutting.

The list is deliberately blunt. “Conservative people, Labour people, people of no party” is a three-beat rhythm that borrows the cadence of national unity slogans, but keeps it colloquial with “people” instead of institutions. That choice is strategic. Parties are distrusted; “people” reads as authentic, even when it’s carefully curated. The inclusion of “people of no party” is especially shrewd: it flatters the politically unaffiliated as the reasonable middle, inviting them to see themselves as the campaign’s moral ballast rather than its swing demographic.

Context matters. Hague was a senior Conservative voice during referendum-era politics in the UK (and a veteran of the Eurosceptic battles that made “No” a brand). In that arena, legitimacy is everything. If No looks like a Conservative hobbyhorse, it risks becoming a proxy fight about government popularity. If No looks like a citizens’ alliance, it can claim the high ground: caution, stability, common sense. The subtext is less “we’re diverse” than “you can vote No without joining a tribe.” That’s persuasion by identity laundering, done with a tidy little roll call.