Leave shouldn’t have won the UK’s referendum on the
European Union. They were a very uneasy coalition. There were huge ructions at
the top of their campaign. With just weeks to go before the vote, their whole
effort basically amounted to Boris Johnson bussing around the country shouting about bananas. Almost every single expert in the world thought that their
claims were nonsense. The official UK Statistics Authority trashed their main
slogan and pledge – to spend more of ‘Britain’s money’ on the NHS. Solid,
trusted, dignified figures such as the Governor of the Bank of England himself
came out to say that they were charlatans. And yet – here we are. They won. If
you’ll forgive us a detour into geekery, a load of Ewoks with sticks just
derailed the Galactic Empire. Their tactics shouldn’t have even functioned, let
alone delivered victory. Um. They have just unseated a Prime Minister,
unscrambled an admittedly-fragile Labour Party, thrown the European Union’s
institutions into chaos, and reshaped British politics for decades to come. How
did they do it? Here’s five quick answers.
Immigration. There’s
no other issue on many doorsteps. Everyone knows it. Everyone’s heard it. If
you asked us three main issues that face us now, they would be immigration,
immigration and immigration. It tops polling lists of voters’ concerns. It
comes up everywhere. It’s poisoning the well of British politics, leading to a
rise in hate crime, turning up the dials on the pressure cooker of some Britons’
sense of who they are, and what their country should be like. It’s an easy peg
to hang tough times and tough lives on. It’s a good shorthand for
globalisation’s damage and discontents in many of our most deprived
communities. And it stands in for older Britons’ worries about a
rapidly-changing, multi-layered and almost inexplicable world that they often
don’t recognise and don’t like. But let’s be frank about it: immigration is
high. It can lead to difficult hotspots of demand for housing and school places,
brilliantly (if darkly) played upon by the Leave campaign. There’s bound to be
tension. Overt racism is relatively rare in British life these days, though
it’s there, it’s nasty, and it’s growing. So an influx of newcomers became both
a lightning rod for other worries, about our rapidly accelerating sense of
vertiginous economic insecurity, and a really viscerally-felt set of concerns
about economic pressures that can be seen and easily conceptualised. No-one
urging a Remain vote could say, in truth, that much could be done about the level of European migration if we stayed in the
EU (though that's less than half the total). So we left.
Latent
Euroscepticism – or the lack of it. It’d be easy to say that the British
hate Europe. You could replay some footage of football fans chanting that they
wanted Out; or put up some tabloid front pages about immigration and ‘Europe’.
But actually, it isn’t quite like that. Most British people are quite open to, and admire, 'Europe' (opens as PDF). They like the food. The wine. They like free movement. They like the
ability to live in Spain. They quite like our neighbours. They’d rather prefer
to be part of the Single Market. It’s not anti-European feeling that’s
important here. It’s the utter, utter lack of knowledge about the European
Union and its institutions. Few Britons know anything about the Commission, the Council and the Parliament – and now it’s all too late. Apart from a few rather
pathetic feints at instilling ‘Europeanism’ among the British at the start of
our membership, successive governments have preferred to ignore or to fight about
European governance. That’s left a complete blank space where knowledge of the
EU might and should have been. That was easily filled by a load of Boris' stories about straight bananas and tabloid scare stories about toasters and
kettles. None of it was true. But the lack of attachment to ‘Europe’ –
something that’s perhaps rather more central to other Europeans’ identity –
allowed a load of nonsense to flood in where true engagement and real debate
might have been. By the time our now soon-to-be ex-Prime Minister David Cameron
launched his bid to keep us in, it was all far too late to rectify any of this.
Anti-intellectualism. This was a Leave vote from those who enjoyed fewer years of education than the Remainers. The moment that leading Brexiteer Michael Gove said that ‘people have had enough of experts’, you knew he was on to something. Not just because this
tapped effectively into long traditions of anti-scholarly and anti-intellectual
British thought – that’s evident across the developed world, and perhaps a bit
less in Britain than elsewhere – but because it took advantage of a whole slew
of resentments. Yes, those experts who didn’t see the banking crisis coming?
Those elitists who think they know what’s best for you? Those technocrats who pull the levers of the arrogant, distant, demanding state? What do they know? Well,
they are pretty clear that growth will be slower, and that we will all be
poorer, now that we’ve voted for Brexit – but why should you listen to them?
They’re just as arrogant as those scientists who think that Genetically
Modified foods might feed the world, with their unpopular Frankenstein technologies;
and as high-falutin’ as all those politicians who think that everyone should
accept gay marriage and multiculturalism. Or so the hemmed-in, angry and
unhappy drumbeat of Leave resentments would have it – to great effect among the
general public.
A sharper
campaign. On one level, it’s all so simple. As soon as Leave pivoted
towards talking about immigration, they sliced through every conversation and
argument. They won. But there’s much more to this. Dominic Cummings and Matthew
Elliott, veterans of the ‘No to AV’ campaign in Britain’s last referendum
campaign, grabbed two or three issues like a rag doll and shook them until they
broke. Don’t keep sending our money out in EU membership fees, they said: spend
it on the National Health Service instead. That was a clever way of appealing
to older working-class voters who need the NHS, and worry about immigration’s
impact on the Service. Don’t let Turkey into ‘Europe’, they said – cynically
and opportunistically playing on voters’ fears of Muslim immigration given that Turks would be free to come to the UK if they did join the EU. And control our
laws, they shouted – even though the UK might well end up with less control over the legislation that
affects all our lives if we want to stay in the Single Market, perhaps via membership
of the European Economic Area. Firing back, Remain could only make very
complicated points, about the UK’s votes in the European Council and
Parliament, about nebulous and hard-to-account-for gains to the macroeconomy overall that many voters thought would only go to ‘big business’ and the like. ‘Look
after ourselves’: ‘pull up the drawbridge’. Powerful, simple words – from the better
campaign, well backed-up and targeted on social media. It worked. The lesson?
Bold, technicolour, almost outrageous claims – they’re great if you want to
win.
Lying big. Leave
didn’t play fair. There’s no reason why they should, of course, but they
smashed the ball out of the park with their blatant untruths. Turkey is about
to join the EU, they said. No, not true. We can take back £350m a week and
spend it on the NHS, they said. No, that wasn’t true either. If we had stayed, they
threatened that we might have to join an EU army. That was nonsense as well.
But they said it so loudly, so confidently, and with such conviction, that it
just seemed so straightforward and believable. And if you challenged these
falsehoods, you just publicised the Leave camp’s many misrepresentations rather
than calling them out. It was a lose-lose situation for Remain. Stay silent,
and the lies shot by them, slipping straight into voters’ minds all the while
Remain said nothing; or fight back, and risk voters just saying ‘well, if it’s
not £350m, it still seems quite a lot’. If you keep a straight face, and you
can make it to the short campaign governed by statute, you can take advantage
of broadcasting rules that force producers to give you equal time with the
reality-based community: the BBC, bending over backwards in the service of
supposed ‘balance’, was particularly easily manipulated in this respect. Basically,
Leave had clearer attack lines. They had to bodge them up from less than
nothing – to fabricate them from totally untrue factual remainders and nonsense
scraps – but whoever said life was fair? Not us.
So there you have it – a good guide of how to win power
and influence people in the late modern, and semi-decadent, West. Frighten people
about foreigners. Take advantage of gaps in people’s knowledge. Lay into
experts. Rage at people like a latter-day Foghorn Leghorn on a particularly
ultra-patriotic acid trip. Trample all over people who know what they are
actually talking about. Rely on television journalists’ impartiality to spray
lies all over the place. Then, dear reader, you can take Britain towards danger
and away from safety – if you want. It is a doleful prospect. But then again,
as Britain’s political ice age has tightened, what aspect of its collective life
does not present such an unappealing face to the world?
