Last year in Kent, after covering Nigel Farage’s seventh general election attempt, my final line was to send sincere good wishes to Britain for their referendum. With only two UK-wide referendums under their belts, they really had no idea what they were letting themselves in for.
We knew. That a referendum can feel a lot like civil war. That nice, smiling faces have a way of stating “facts” that are foul distortions or outright lies. That a few words on a poster can trigger a world of cruel, twisted inferences. And yet, we have never devised a means of sanctioning blatant lies in a timely fashion.
In Britain, referendum innocents aware that even crisp advertising campaigns are governed by a vigilant standards authority, assumed blatant lying about issues that would determine their country’s future would carry even harsher strictures. The awakening is painful to watch.
Take a look at the centrepiece of the Leave campaign: the £350 million figure it claimed Britain was sending the EU every week, a “fact” so earthshaking they plastered it on the red campaign bus from which Boris Johnson disgorged himself several times daily to a panting media. As such, it achieved saturation coverage, generating millions of pounds of free advertising, doing the job required of any advertising blitz: to embed its message in the voters’ psyche.
Blatant lie
The message was a blatant lie, of course. The £350 million figure was thrashed by every independent body from the Institute for Fiscal Studies to the UK Statistics Authority. To compound the cynicism, the £350 million claim on the bus carried the kicker: “Let’s fund our
NHS
instead.”
Since polling day, with nauseating inevitability, one Leave figure after another has denied they ever said such a thing. They include Iain Duncan Smith, a former leader of the Conservative Party. Yet awkwardly, there is that picture of him posing beside the big red bus emblazoned with the big, two-pronged lie.
Also awkwardly, on the Leave website – although they tried to junk it on Monday – a big banner survives: “Let’s give our NHS the £350 million the EU takes every week. Vote Leave, take control.” This was the Leave campaign’s position. And when their lies crisscrossed the country, they were presided over by the heir apparent to 10 Downing Street himself.
"I can't get over the fact that the winning side lied about a whole bunch of stuff and yet expect us to live cheerfully with the result," tweeted journalist Rupert Myers. To which one Stewart Jackson, the right honourable member for Peterborough, replied : "Suck it up, whiner. . ."
Jackson, a former banker and Tory frontbencher, was exposed in the Westminster expenses scandal as having claimed nearly £67,000 for his home, including £304 for his swimming pool.
So much for taking back control from the elites. Or as JK Rowling put it: “Welcome to our post-referendum, anti-elitist, in-touch-with-the-people politicians.”
But did the £350 million lie make a material difference? According to an Ipsos Mori poll a week before polling, nearly half the British public had swallowed it whole. Suppose a sanctioning regime had been in position to order say, instant, large, front-page corrections plus fines, might it have dented that four point lead?
Referendum virgins
But is the voter entirely relieved of responsibility? No campaign got more blanket coverage nor was more fact-checked than
Brexit
. The rebuttal to the £350 million claim was widely publicised. So here is the lesson for English referendum virgins: many, many voters and activists regard facts as disempowering and/or inconvenient. They confine their “research” to
and fear machines such as the
Sun
, whose summation on “How the Brex was won” went like this: “Streets full of Polish shops, kids not speaking English . . . but union jacks now flying high again.” Even on trusted news channels, reporting from towns with zero immigration and massive EU investment, racist or xenophobic views were rarely challenged. So of course, the slogans worked. Summarising Remain’s arguments as “Project Fear” was a brilliant strategy from the Leave campaign; it allowed the don’t knows to dismiss rational reservations without having to think them through, and even more incredibly, it enabled the Leavers to fight a lengthy campaign without being forced to set out a coherent plan.
A friend, living in England for 25 years, dismisses all this "handwringing" as "a bit naive". The end – "a deafening wake-up call for the EU's intransigent elite" – will justify the means, he says. As a father of four, he acknowledges the gamble but is confident it will pay off. But he also acknowledges the phrase "I didn't know this . . . we didn't get enough information" is resounding all around him from Leavers, as the wheels come off in Westminster.
The “we didn’t get enough information” line is a familiar one. Before our next referendum, more imaginative solutions must be found to enforce truthfulness among slippery politicians and activists. The stakes are too high to do nothing.