As I earlier did two entries in a row, it’s Matts turn to blog again this week and bring you all up to date. But in the interim, I felt compelled to do an entry focusing on this very important issue. By Friday morning, the results will be known in the UK’s EU referendum. The next time I write a post on here, it will be either to describe the relief of unimaginable disaster averted, or the terror of disaster confirmed.
As you may have read in the press, a Labour politician from Yorkshire, Joanne Cox, was recently killed by a constituent. A far-right extremist, the killer’s motive was revenge for her positive views on the EU and immigration. This terrible tragedy was the referendum’s nadir, and indeed, a low-point for the country in general.
Both campaigns were suspended for a few days as a mark of respect, but have since resumed. Along with them resumed the ceaseless polling. While polling is imperfect, it’s the best gauge we have to measure attitudes, so I’ve been following them and the aggregated poll of polls avidly for weeks. In the weeks before Jo Cox’s death, the Leave campaign began to gain ground. This momentum hit a peak of 52% in favour of exit, by which point everyone began to panic and global markets tumbled. Now, with just days to go, the poll of polls is split at 50-50: it really is on a knife-edge. I don’t know if Jo Cox’s death was a factor in the late boost to the Remain camp, and if it was it was obviously too high a price to pay. But maybe it did us all good to take a moment to reflect and lick our wounds in what has been a bloody, divisive and vitriolic few months for the country.
Conventional wisdom says Remain will win, the status quo usually having the upper hand in referendums. I sincerely hope this is true, but I fear the worst. I’ve read every article I can on this topic – left wing, right wing, UK, international, on social media etc – and one fact has struck me every time. Regardless of the publication’s political bent, or the individual article’s stance, in every single instance, the pro-Brexit voices outway the Remainers by a factor of easily 4 to 1 in the below-the-line comments. This makes me afraid that the polls aren’t accurately reflecting the swell of support for Leave.
It’s felt like trying to explain to a believer of Intelligent Design that evolution is in fact a proven reality. You can say “well then, why does man have an appendix?” all you like, but you just cant use logic to change views that are based on faith or emotion instead of a dispassionate analysis of the facts. “Take our country back” is a far more compelling slogan than “Better off in”, even if it can quickly be exposed as a nonsense and a fallacy. The Remain campaign is supported by a majority of economists, historians and politicians across the globe. A few choice names include Barack Obama, Stephen Hawking, Richard Branson, Angela Merkel, François Hollande, and in fact every single head of an EU country. The other camp’s list of supporters reads like a who’s-who of the despised and the dangerous: Marine Le Pen, Vladimir Putin, Nick Griffen of the British Nationalist party, and, of course, Donald Trump.
Whichever way you look at it – economically, politically, socially, environmentally – the case for Remain is overflowing with factual evidence to back it up. The case for Leave has nothing to support it but a jingoistic small-mindedness. Their response to the arguments is to dismiss them all as merely the views of “experts”, as if that were a bad thing. Just when did expert become a pejorative word?
And yet, Leave could well win on Thursday. This says something about the state of Britain, and indeed the world, that is both depressing and disturbing.
The experience has left me with three thoughts. The first is that a referendum, while in theory an exercise in democracy at its purest, is actually a really stupid idea. We elect reprentatives to make political decisions for us because they’re (theoretically at least) in possession of the facts and so can act accordingly. The members of the British public are being asked to make the biggest decision of a lifetime, and the vast majority are woefully ill-informed. This is madness. A criterion for being able to vote on such a crucial issue should be an ability to demonstrate awareness of the facts. A questionnaire to fill in to see if you’ve read up on the topic, or are just planning on voting based on a feeling. Or worse, based on an outright lie peddled by the media. Which brings me to my second thought.
We need to deal with how the media get away with lying. We obviously need freedom of press, but I think we need to introduce a safety measure. Just as packs of cigarettes now have health warnings on them (an EU measure, incidentally), all newspaper articles should be obliged to print an adjacent article containing the unbiased truth. Thus all the stories claiming our EU membership costs £350m a week would be followed by a note stating that actually, that’s 150% higher than the true figure, and it ignores the massive return on our investment.
This way the Sun wouldn’t not have gotten away with a disgraceful whopper it told recently. It claimed that news of Leave taking the leads in the polls had led to a huge boost to share prices. In fact, the opposite was true: share prices had slumped. That’s a direct lie, told by the most popular paper in the UK. If the Sun wants to print lies, it needs to label them as such and follow them up with the truth. This would also put a stop to such monstrosities as the Leave campaign’s recent Nazi-propaganda-inspired poster.
A last thought. If Remain loses, it will be in no small part due to the fact that older people vote more and are far more anti-EU. This is hugely unfair on the younger generation whose futures will be permanently altered by the result. Why should an older generation have as much of a say in a decision that will barely affect them, when it will greatly affect the lives of generations to come? So, my solution is a weighting system, based on age. The older you are, the less your vote counts.
Right, that’s my Referendum rant over. I will leave you with possibly my favourite pro-remain article I’ve come across so far – a no-nonsense, factual piece from the Economist: Divided We Fall. But take my advice: dont read the comments.