Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
the aftermath of the June vote there was much dark talk about the need for the enlightened to tackle ‘post-truth’ politics. The UK Electoral Reform Society produced a damning report on the referendum campaign, claiming that there had been ‘glaring deficiencies’ in the facts offered by both sides which had left voters ‘feeling totally ill-informed’. The ERS report concluded with the Orwellian-sounding proposal for an ‘official body … empowered to intervene when overtly misleading information is disseminated’ in future political campaigns, presumably to protect gullible voters from their own ignorance by force-feeding them official facts. Perhaps it should be called the Ministry of Truth?37
What’s the truth about those ‘Brexit lies’? There were of course exaggerated claims and flights of fancy on both sides of the EU referendum: from the official Leave campaign’s fantasy of a quick extra £350 million a week for the NHS, to the Remain campaign’s horror stories of imminent economic depression; from Boris Johnson’s comparison of the EU with Hitler, to David Cameron’s warning that a vote for Brexit would delight ISIS and could start the Third World War.
Much of this is the overblown-but-normal cut-and-thrust of heated political debate in an electoral firefight. Voters do not need to be protected from such stuff by the wise men and women of the European Commission, the ERS or any other fact-checkers or ‘official body’ set up to decide The Truth on our behalf. What voters need is to be left alone to listen to all the arguments, join in the debate as they see fit, and ultimately decide for themselves what they consider to be truly in their own, and their society’s, best interests. In this sense, the EU referendum looks like an advert for the virtues of popular democracy.
Indeed, far from being duped by Brexit lies, the Electoral Reform Society report on the campaign revealed that most voters they spoke to had a ‘highly negative’ view of the official campaigns, and said the top politicians’ appeals had made ‘no difference’ to how they voted in the end. Where there had been any effect, it was most often the opposite of what the politicians intended; the interventions by top Remain-backing figures, from Cameron and Corbyn to Nicola Sturgeon and Barack Obama, had all made people marginally more likely to vote Leave.
They should have known. A pre-referendum poll conducted by Ipsos MORI was already revealing about the likely impact of experts and political elites. In May 2016 they asked respondents to answer the question: ‘Who do you trust on issues related to the referendum on EU membership?’. The winner with 73 per cent approval was ‘Friends and immediate family’. Other strong runners included ‘Work colleagues’ and notably ‘The ordinary man/woman in the street’, both with 46 per cent approval ratings. Lower down came ‘Leaders of large business’ (36 per cent) and ‘Civil servants’ (29 per cent). Rooted in the relegation zone of this public trust table were ‘Journalists’ on just 16 per cent and lastly ‘Politicians generally’ with a miserable 12 per cent – in a much lower league than those ‘ordinary’ men and women in the street.38
(The one odd note in this expert-bashing survey of public trust was that ‘Academics’ came second behind ‘Friends and immediate family’, with 66 per cent, showing that these experts are still held in relatively high regard. Not high enough, mind you, for the UK’s overwhelmingly pro-Remain academic community to make a difference to the ultimate referendum result.)
What, then, was ‘the truth’ that the Remain campaign had tried and failed to sell to voters? Essentially they sought to displace any discussion of the wider political issues of democracy and sovereignty, and focus the debate on their dire predictions of economic doom if the UK voted to leave the EU, in a bid to bully supposedly simple-minded voters into obedience. The message echoed the fatalistic view that was captured by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s and has effectively been repeated by every UK prime minister since; that ‘There Is No Alternative’ to the economic status quo, so forget about choice, lie back and think of the European Single Market.
The possible economic consequences of Brexit remain unclear, and were certainly uncertain in advance of the referendum. So what were the fear-mongers’ warnings of economic catastrophe really saying to UK voters? That it does not matter what you think or want, the global financial markets must decide. Share prices and the exchange rate of the pound are the determining factors of history. Your vote is worthless by comparison; swallow your medicine and watch the markets.
Yet for all this, what was remarkable was that the majority of the 72.2 per cent who voted declined to be swayed or bullied into submission. They kept their eyes on the bigger issues of sovereignty and democracy and voted Leave because they wanted more control over their own lives, UK politics and the country’s borders. It was not about the electorate’s ignorance or economic illiteracy. Millions made the entirely rational calculation that these reasons were important enough to support Leave, even if the immediate economic impact was uncertain and might prove adverse. Contrary to what the doom-mongers claim about ‘post-truth’ politics, it is perfectly reasonable to decide that the possibility of a fall in the value of the pound could be a price worth paying for an increase in democracy and sovereignty. Just as it was perfectly rational for others to vote Remain because they judged it to be in their best material interests.
Even before the US presidential election, many American critics were already following the lead of the Remain campaign and complaining about the influence of ‘low-information’ (code for low-intelligence) voters and the emotive ‘post-truth politics’ allegedly being practised by the Trump campaign. A week before polling day, academic Marci A. Hamilton caught the mood of exasperation when she asked in Newsweek, ‘Why are white, uneducated voters willing to vote for Trump?’ Answering her own question, as most academics like to do, she concluded, ‘I would posit that it is also because they have not been adequately educated to understand just how dangerous a President Trump would be to the Constitution.’ In other words, they had not been ‘adequately educated’ by the likes of Hamilton to swallow whatever they were now being told by the same people.39
In the shocked reaction to Trump’s election, these latent prejudices about the influence of ‘low-information’ American voters came pouring forth. Author and radio personality Garrison Keillor snorted that ‘Trump has won. Let the uneducated have their day’.40 For Georgetown professor Jason Brennan, who bluntly blamed Trump’s victory on ‘low-information white people’, the election placed a big question over democracy itself: ‘Democracy is supposed to enact the will of the people. But what if the people have no clue what they’re doing?’41
The arguments about ‘low-information voters’ and ‘post-truth politics’ provided a convenient excuse for the elites’ failure to get enough voters to do their bidding. After all, what hope have you got of convincing people if they are just too stupid and uneducated to recognise what is both true and truly in their interests?
Unfortunately, observed Republican commentator Rob Schwarzwalder, even in its own terms the argument that Trump won because of uneducated voters ‘has the disadvantage of being untrue’. In the 2016 election, the Pew Research Center’s exit polls found, college graduates did favour Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump by 52 to 43 per cent (though white graduates were for Trump by 49 to 45 per cent), while 52 per cent of voters without a degree voted for Trump with 44 per cent for Clinton. Yet in the previous presidential election in 2012, graduates voted for Democratic president Barack Obama over Republican challenger Mitt Romney by 50 to 48 per cent, while those without a college degree favoured Obama by a wider margin, 51 to 47 per cent. It is hard to recall many experts denouncing Obama’s win and blaming it on these ‘uneducated’ voters.
But then this discussion is not really about the statistics of college degrees and votes. It is about the elites recycling age-old prejudices about the dangers of allowing the ignorant, emotional masses to exercise control, in order to excuse their own failings as somehow being a serious flaw in democracy.
This condescending attitude towards the mass of people goes some way to explaining why those voters – who are quite