Making sense of Brexit - a personal reflection

(Photo: ROB STOTHARD/AFP)

Now that the initial shock and disbelief has made way for a general low level feeling of sadness and futility, I want to find ways to make sense of what has happened over the last few days in the UK.  This writing is one of those ways – an attempt to order what feels almost like physical turmoil as I attempt to pull together all the threads of what I am thinking.

I did not expect the result that I saw unfolding in the early hours of Friday. Like David Cameron, most of the people I know (with the notable exception of my despondent husband) and the pollsters, I firmly believed that the people of the UK would actually declare themselves in favour of remaining in the EU.

While this will probably be seen as sour grapes on the part of someone finding themselves on the losing side, I believe two things:

1. That this is the wrong decision both for the UK and Europe as a whole
2. That the result does not actually represent the will of the people

I can attempt to justify the first as anyone who holds a particular opinion would do, by presenting my arguments for the positive effects of remaining, and the negative effects of leaving.  The second point, seems somewhat harder to justify.  After all, the hard numbers show the absolute will of the people, don’t they? What possible reason would someone have to vote in a way which didn’t reflect their true beliefs? 

Well – for a number of reasons, I think. They didn’t have access to the facts about what they were voting for /against, and more importantly, is it a very different matter voting for something which you believe will actually come to pass, than something which you do not believe will actually happen.

They didn’t think it would happen

The concept of the ‘protest vote’ is well established.  It is used and widely discussed mostly in the context of local government elections, where it is possible to give the politicians of a political party a ‘bloody nose’ without worrying about the implications of electing to parliament someone you don’t want in power.

The potential for ‘protest’ during the referendum was high.   We have been a period of austerity for a long time.  The perception of a government which favours the interests of those like themselves (bailing out the bankers, but not the steel workers) has gone a long way to disillusion the low-paid worker.

When a desire to let the incumbent Government know about your bad feeling towards them is paired with a belief that you can make that protest ‘safely’, the conditions are right for people to vote for things they don’t actually believe in.  The pollsters told us that ‘Remain’ was a shoe in.  Cameron seemed confident too, and I am sure that the majority of the electorate felt the same.

The amusing (at the time; it seems less funny now) Twitter hastag #CatsAgainstBREXIT gave us some nice pictures, and one tweet in particular, which made my smile wryly then, and feels somewhat prescient now.

“Honestly I think cats would vote out, and then immediately miaow loudly to be let back in again”

An interesting exercise now would be to see how quickly Brexiteer MPs distance themselves from the unworkable claims they made during the campaign on issues such as immigration and funding of the NHS.  I think that will be an indicator of how unprepared they actually are for this result to have happened.

We’re kept in the dark and fed a load of s*#!

I think most people, whatever their view on the outcome, would agree that the way the campaigning was conducted did not exactly cover either side with glory.  The first casualties of the campaign were truth and critical thinking.  This issue runs through many of the other points I will raise later.  There were several well-publicised departures from the truth.  We heard much disagreement about the precise sums of money moving to and from the UK from the EU, for example. 

Both sides seemed to adopt the attitude that it was better to make unsubstantiated claims and assertions and rely on the press and populace to believe and spread ‘facts’ that later proved to be fiction, than to rely on telling the truth and trusting us to be able to use it to make up our own minds.

Unfortunately, this process is self-perpetuating in the way that, say, nuclear proliferation, is.  The truth is a poor weapon against lies, when those you are communicating with do not have the tools to evaluate the arguments and evidence that are being presented to them.  This is where the lack of critical thinking skills acts in the favour of the unscrupulous.

A lie does not have to operate within the same constraints as the truth does.  If one side wants to make a (true) point about the financial benefit or cost of immigration, for example, they can do so by citing figures from reputable sources.  If the other side finds this factual information to be inconvenient in that it does not lend support to their view, they have a choice.  They can either find other (true) contradictory evidence, or they can lie.  In the case that there is no contradictory evidence to be had, lying is the only option, or, lies may be used because it just easier. 

Once the lies are out there, any side who insists on continuing to use the truth is at a disadvantage.  While they have to rely on what actually is, the lying side can escalate ad absurdum.  The ‘untermensch’ argument of the Third Reich is an example of where this kind of ‘arms race’ can lead.

Unfortunately, in this circumstance, the logical outcome is that both sides will choose to manipulate the truth, because the alternative it to concede the advantage to those who are prepared to be unscrupulous

Ultimately, if you are dealing with an audience that cannot effectively discern the truth from falsehood, then even lies which have been debunked will make their way into the collective consciousness.  Once it’s ‘out there’ the damage is done.

38 degrees and the BBC, among other organisations, did make attempts to present us with facts, and to provide a channel to spread them.  Unfortunately, in the UK, we have a very partisan media infrastructure, the perfect petri-dish to grow the culture of fiction based decision making, so this probably did not have had much of an impact.

Referendums are wrong in principle

This referendum should never have happened, and it would not have done had Cameron actually believed there would have been a Leave result.  The lack of leadership shown by all party leaders (with the exception of Nicola Sturgeon) will be discussed later, but this is a point that referendums are fundamentally undemocratic and have other negative effects too.

The way we implement democracy in the UK is by holding elections every five years, not by asking everyone to have their say on each issue.  While no electoral system is perfect, this is generally workable.  If our politicians make decisions we think are wrong or damaging to the country we can dispose of them at the next election.  We pass decision making power to our politicians via our vote, and generally speaking we should be happy with that.  They should have better expertise (or at least access to expertise) than the average citizen, in the decisions they are being asked to take.  They should have better access to information to help them make those decisions.

I believe, and I realise this isn’t going to go down well with a lot of people,  being fairly uncomfortable with it myself, that most people in this country are not fit to be involved in a decision of this magnitude.  They are not sufficiently educated, and do not have sufficient critical thinking skills.  They only have access to partisan opinions and ‘facts’ and they hold entrenched views (for example, xenophobia, racism, misogyny and homophobia), which are not responsive to reasoned argument even when that is presented to them.

Many of the same things could be true of politicians of course.  They are just people.  The difference is, that when these things are discovered about politicians, they can be made accountable, by losing the popular vote, or by losing the party whip.  There is no way that all those who voted in a referendum can be made accountable for their decisions or the (potentially unacceptable) rationale behind those decisions.

Referendums are a way of politicians abdicating their responsibilities, and we should be wary of them doing this.  Watch out for politicians including (and probably especially) David Cameron, indicating that this is our own fault if (by which I mean, when) this all goes horribly wrong.

Parliament is sovereign, and could refuse to accept ‘the will of the people’. Personally, I believe they should do this, but they won’t, due to Tory fear of losing the next election.  It is ironic that in an instance when it didn’t really matter (the Boaty McBoatface debacle) this action was taken, but when we are faced with a popular decision with such potentially damaging consequences that the vote will be allowed to stand.  There are precedents which do not involve boats.  In 1955, the Swedish government decided to overrule a referendum on which side of the road that Swedes drove on.  They decided to say ‘You’ve had your say, and we are going to take the opposite decision, on your behalf, because it is the right one.’

In a parliamentary democracy this is completely valid.

Referendums are also damaging in other ways.  They have the power to divide both families and the country as a whole.  Especially in a situation where the split was so even, this damage can be keenly felt.  My husband put it very succinctly, this morning,  “I can’t look people in the eye.”  He articulated what I was feeling.  I feel mistrust of my neighbours; a nagging feeling that I may be talking to someone who hold repugnant views, and values those views more than the welfare of the nation, or that I am talking to someone who is just incapable of comprehending the complexity of the issue, and that there is therefore little point in discussing it with them.

The very fact that this referendum has occurred makes this country feel like a more divided and unpleasant place to be.

Cameron’s (and Corbyn’s) poor leadership

If Cameron had had the cojones to stand up to his backbenchers, we would never have been in this position now.  Because he never believed this result would occur, he decided to pacify back bench rumblings and ‘defuse’ the UKIP threat to Tory votes by promising a referendum.  This was a gamble, rooted in party politics, rather than the interests of the country.  This vested interest continued throughout the debate, when he refused to tackle Boris head on, in order to preserve ‘party unity’.  There are also rumours that he refused to encourage the participation of the Labour party to the Remain campaign, seeing it as a party political opportunity rather than a fight for the future of the country.

Much as I despise everything she stood for (and what she did) during her time in power, you cannot imagine Margaret Thatcher allowing anyone, much less a collection of whinging back benchers, to dictate her position or actions.  Leadership has been markedly lacking in both the Tory and Labour camps.  Nicola Sturgeon, on the other hand has been forthright and decisive.

Corbyn likewise has been lacklustre and, frankly, practically invisible during the debate.  This disappoints me, as I was gratified to see, finally, after the disillusionment of the Blair years, a Socialist at the head of the Labour Party.  Sadly, I find I am now having to agree, that despite his principles, Corbyn is unelectable.

Old people shouldn’t have been allowed to vote

According to data from YouGov, 75% of 18 -24 year olds voted to remain.  The implications of this plebiscite are inevitably much more long-lived than the results of a General Election.  A mistake in electing a government can be rectified, at worst, in five years.  These young people will have to live with a decision they did not want for decades to come.

Brexit has been characterised, with justification, in my opinion, as the last ‘F*&# You’ from the baby boomers to their pro-Europe children and grandchildren.  The protections and advances they benefitted from, many as a result of European legislation, will not be enjoyed by the younger generation.  Put simply, ‘I enjoyed my well-financed retirement in Spain, but you can forget it’.

While it could be characterised as ‘undemocratic’ to disenfranchise older voters, or ‘unworkable’ to weight the votes of younger people over older voters, it is, I think the complete opposite of democracy to expect the young to live with the decision made by those who will not have to live with the consequences.

Individual political ambition

We have all been used as patsies in a game of individual political ambition.  Boris saw his opportunity to present himself as a future leader, and to raise his profile with column inches (feet, yards).  He, like the rest, never thought the status quo was threatened, so he had a safe arena in which to flex his leadership muscles and test the feeling of the voters towards his ambitions.

I don’t believe he actually wanted to Brexit.  His turnaround from his previously strongly stated views does not seem plausible.  This means that there is now a strong possibility that the next leader of the Conservative Party (and thus Prime Minister) will be a man who is so unprincipled that he would toy with the future welfare of the nation just to further his own career.

Members of the Conservative Party must be aware of this, and yet they will elect him as their leader, because the Leave vote has told them what they need to know, that Boris is going to be a popular leader and will give them a better chance to be elected next time we go to the polls.

It is little wonder that we are disillusioned with politicians, when the evidence of personal ambition over public service is evident in so many of them.

Whoever follows Cameron, Farage is the real winner

The rise of Nigel Farage and UKIP from crackpot sideliner to genuine contender beggars belief.  Like everyone else, I think the result caught him by surprise.  The evening editions of many newspapers on Thursday saw him conceding a narrow victory to Remain, arguably the best he could have reasonably expected.

But now he has everything he has worked for.  We will be out of Europe, but perhaps more importantly for someone of Farage’s political beliefs, the whole political landscape has shifted considerably to the right.  The fact that the referendum was called because the Tories felt they needed to compete with UKIP for votes meant that UKIP was calling the shots from the start.  They decided the issues upon which the campaign would be fought.

Given that, it was inevitable that the overriding issue of the whole campaign would be immigration.  Despite the (admittedly somewhat lacklustre) efforts of others to introduce more complexity (the economy, business etc.), the arguments always returned to UKIP’s favoured territory.

This is the new battleground.  The genie is out of the bottle.  Farage now has enough credibility and coverage to make even more of a noise, which means that increasingly, mainstream politicians will have to address the concerns of far right politicians like Farage, and adjust their own thinking in line with a perceived threat of leaking votes to the right.

I think it is sobering for us as a country to look at who our bedfellows now are.  The Brexit vote has encouraged the far-right across Europe.  Marine Le Pen and Geert Wilders are not individuals in whose company any mainstream politician in this country should feel comfotable.  And yet we now have to realise that these are the very people who would be happy if their countries took the same action we have.

The very fact that Brexit was fought via a referendum also favours the simplistic politics of individuals like Farage.  Referendums have to be couched in simple terms, in this case distilling a very complex issue into two boxes ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ which actually enabled the vote to occur.

This favours those who argue on single, easily articulated issues, rather than those who are willing to embrace actual real world complexity.  Arguing on immigration and appealing to the worst instincts of those suffering from the effects of austerity made Farage appear to be a champion of the oppressed, enhanced the perception of his charisma and gave the masses something easy to articulate.

The complexities which could have been addressed in parliamentary debate would not engage the majority, and were therefore beyond the scope of popular discussion on the debate.  

Legitimisation of racist xenophobia

This movement to the right will inevitably have the effect of legitimising (in the eyes of many people) the holding and articulation of many views which would previously have been seen as unacceptable.

Despite all his protestations to the contrary, I firmly believe that Farage is a racist xenophobe, and that is the basis of his desire to leave Europe.  His poster showing a procession of brown immigrants, launched on the day of Jo Cox’s murder, reveals his true colours, and horrified many.  But sadly, it probably also had the effect of making many others feel that their views on foreigners had a legitimate outlet at last.

There is a kind of Doublethink at work in the minds of some.  From the novel  ‘1984’ Doublethink is the act of simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs as correct, often in distinct social contexts.  I saw this when discussing Brexit with those who had made the decision to Leave.  When asked to articulate their reasons for wanting to leave, they were unable to do so, instead resorting to bluster, and attacks on my perceived reasons for remaining.

I believe that many of these people had based their decision to leave on a xenophobic germ, planted on their minds by Farage and the divisive debate, but, when challenged felt socially unable to articulate that because, deep down, they know it is wrong, not to mention socially unacceptable, to hold those views.

I am aware that people, myself included, have a tendency to attribute both stupidity and bad motives to those who disagree with them, and it is perfectly possible that I am doing this by attributing racist views to those who disagreed with me.

However, I think it is quite plausible that this was the basis of their decision given that so much of the debate focussed on immigration, and also given their own reluctance to state clearly their arguments for leaving.

Reaping the whirlwind of interference in education

Finally, I want to tie all of above together, by offering my opinion on why the electorate are so unfit to take a decision on a question as complex and with such far reaching consequences as remaining in or leaving the EU.

Successive governments of all political persuasions have sowed the wind of ministerial interference in education and we are now reaping the whirlwind.  Since the introduction of the National Curriculum and through the ministerial interference in the exams system via the elevation of league tables and testing at the expense of learning, those in power have systematically reduced the capacity for critical thinking, creativity and practical application of knowledge in those that pass through our education system.

Everybody seems to feel that they are an expert on education, possibly on the grounds that they have been through the system as pupils.  Michael Gove certainly took this approach, when deciding that schools and exams should be modelled on his own youthful experience.  Ironically, according to the actions of many ministers, the only group of people who aren’t experts on education and cannot therefore be trusted with its future, are teachers.

An emphasis on rote learning, facts over application and the devaluing of the higher order thinking from ‘soft’ humanities subjects will result in a future workforce which is equipped for ‘task’ oriented roles, but less well prepared for innovation, independent thought and creativity.

This obviously has implications for our future competiveness in business, but my main concern here is with the referendum.

There are numerous examples from history of totalitarian regimes repressing independent thought in their people to make them easier to govern.  Extreme examples from literature like Farenheit 451 and 1984 paint pictures of dystopian world where the people are at the mercy of manipulative rulers who restrict access to knowledge in order to maintain their power.

It could be seen as being in the interest of any incumbent government to reduce the critical thinking capabilities of the people.  It makes it easier to bend them to your will if they cannot recognise truth from lie, cannot detect the fallacies and flaws in your arguments.

However, the last thing you should do in that case is to give those same people the chance to make a decision on anything important unless you are absolutely sure they will do what you want.  Clearly that wasn’t case for David Cameron this week, because it turns out that Farage and Boris are better than he is at finding ideologies to fill the empty gap where reasoning should be.

So, I’m afraid I can’t even attribute a sinister plan to the way that government is failing us in education.  No it is far worse than that.  There is no plan, just incompetence, driven by the desire of each new Education Minister, to be seen to be doing ‘something’ (anything) that is different from what went before.

The Brexit McBrexface moment should be a massive wake up call.  The next Education Minister should indeed do something different, if they have the courage to do so.  They should declare that enough is enough and that Education needs to be entrusted to those who actually understand it, and are prepared to leave things be for more than the life of a single parliament.

I am hoping (not vainly, I hope) that some of those pre-referendum promises made by those who will now lead us out Europe, will be honoured.  I am hoping that the money that will no longer be going to Europe will indeed be spent on the things that this country needs to survive and thrive outside of the EU, because it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

I am hoping Education will be one of those things.