On February 5 2021, Andrew Neil, once respected political interviewer, pundit and chair of the Spectator Magazine Group, posted this tweet:
The Spectator’s remarkable subscriptions growth over the last 5 years is bucking the trend in a declining industry. Try a month for free today and find out why. You might also be our 100,000th subscriber and win a prize worth £5,000. https://t.co/BtiecikZc1pic.twitter.com/ANQZDlHMRS
At a glance – which is all Neil is counting on you throwing at it – it really looks as though the Spectator is upping its game. Further examination, however, reveals that, as has become depressingly normal among those on the right, Neil is lying to you with statistics.
Check out the
y-axes on those images. (For those you’ve forgotten their year-five maths, the
x-axis is the horizontal line and the y-axis the vertical.) Notice anything odd?
For one thing, they start at different values. Second, they’re plotted on different
scales (the values for the Spectator are further apart). Why might that be?
Because if you plot them all on the same scale, the results paint a rather less flattering picture of the magazine’s fortunes:
At the end of the
day, though, this is hardly novichokking a kindergarten, is it? It’s just
rascally old Uncle Andy, cheekily tweaking the data to make his grubby little
publication look a bit more appealing to prospective readers and advertisers.
But if that was
all people were using these tricks for, I wouldn’t be writing this.
I started
this series of posts because while people aren’t too bad at working out when they’re
being lied to with words, our numbers game is a little less surefooted. And
that seems to go double (= two times as much) for data presented in visual form:
graphs, charts and tables, collectively known as graphics, or data vis.
Pictures
and graphs lend an authority to data that words cannot. Our
internal logic goes something like this: “Surely, if someone’s taken the
trouble of researching, compiling and publishing a graph or a chart, they must know
their stuff – and they must be telling the truth!”
Here’s the
rebuttal to the first part of your thesis, internal logic:
As for the second
part: truth doesn’t pay the bills (case in point: this blog). When people take
great pains over something, there’s a distinct possibility that murkier motives
are in play. Below are some examples to show you what I mean.
Quarter pounders
Until recently, you couldn’t move online for Tories
excitedly parroting the news that the UK was the “fastest-growing economy in
the G7”. (You’ll notice that not many of them are still flogging that
particular horse. We’re about to see why.) But few of them bothered to include
the data on which they were basing their claim.
The main problem with data visualisation is that it’s rarely possible to fit all the relevant data into your visualisation. Presenting numerical information inevitably involves making choices about what to include and what to leave out. If you want to illustrate the performance of the top 100 companies on the Financial Times Share Index in your newspaper, for example, you physically can’t represent every data point going back to its inception in 1984 without some sort of gatefold. So you go back as far as space will allow, and present what you hope is enough data to paint a meaningful picture. For share prices, such cherry-picking doesn’t matter so much. GDP figures are a different story.
Below is the data on which the Tories were basing
their uplifting, Brexit’s-so-brilliant claim. And sure, in itself, it’s quite
correct. A bigger gradient means a higher rate of growth, and on that metric,
the UK really was leading the world.
But there are two problems with extrapolating this conclusion
from this data. First, look at the actual values of those lines. The UK is
bottom of the heap, both at the beginning and the end of the period. What this means
is that the UK economy was faring worse, relative to its performance in 2017,
than all its rivals (the widely accepted explanation for this is that the UK
was hit the hardest economically by the pandemic, and was therefore recovering
from a lower base. It was bound to be “fastest growing” at some point).
The second issue is that this is the smallest
possiblerange of data. It shows us how the UK fared economically
against comparable countries over a single quarter. Zooming out a bit, the
picture looks rather different:
On the longer-term trend – which is the only trend
that matters here – the UK’s performance is woeful. And why wouldn’t it be,
with all those lovely trade barriers it’s thrown up with its nearest neighbours
and biggest trading partners?
To interpret this graph as “the UK is the
fastest-growing economy in the G7” is cherry-picking of the most outrageous order
– straight up lying with figures – and yet practically no one ever calls it
out.
Information dumped
In the next
example, which was also shared with great enthusiasm by Tories in March 2022, once
again, it’s not what the visual data is telling you, but what it isn’t,
that’s significant.
Some in the UK seem desperate to see the worst in the UK…frantically tweeting nonsense about UK ‘inaction’ on Russia. It is the opposite of the truth. Ukraine knows how solid our support has been & for how long. I’ve seen that for myself meeting Ukrainian reps at UNEP this week https://t.co/LyQlCxEdX1pic.twitter.com/FgjwUSofkL
Where’s that smell
of roses coming from? Oh! Quelle surprise, it’s the UK again! What a
world-beating nation it is!
The first thing that should set your Spidey sense tingling is the lack of any source on the graphic. (Turns out it was the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office, who posted this tweet, but when challenged, they declined to reveal their workings. The write-up of their exchange is worth a read.)
But once again, the most urgent problem is that we are missing crucial information. We have no idea what these figures represent as a percentage of the total Russian assets invested in those territories. If £1tn of Russian assets are invested in the UK economy, and only £40bn in the EU, then who is doing the better job on sanctions? (Definitive figures on the amount of Russian capital sloshing around the world are hard to come by, but the UK has long been oligarchs’ favourite spot to invest in property, and the bulk of Russian financial assets will inevitably have been parked in or near the City of London, the world’s leading financial centre.)
If you made a chart comparing how well-travelled Jason and Arthur are, showing that Jason has only been to France and Arthur has been to 50-plus countries, surely you’d think it apposite to mention that Jason is 14 and Arthur is 62?
Y, MIA
Once you’ve
checked the bottom of a graphic for a source, and ascertained whether the
x-axis is really as wide as it should be, the next place to look is at the
y-axis. Does it start at zero? Why not?
If you tinker with
the scale by selecting a narrow range of values, you can make differences
appear as big or as small as you like.
Rotten Apple
In 2013, Apple CEO
Tim Cook used the following graph as part of his presentation to mark the
launch of the latest iPhone:
Tim-Cooking the books?
We’ve already seen that the omission of any units on an y-axis is a cardinal statistical sin. But that’s not all that’s off kilter here. Usually, when illustrating a company’s sales, you show the units sold in each time period. But this is a depiction of cumulative sales. Short of a mass product recall, cumulative sales never go down! Anyone armed with a jot of mathematical nous should spot that that decrease in gradient at the top right of the graph means sales are falling.
Chartjunk
Be wary of tables tarted up with bright colours, flashy fonts and pictorial elements. Yes, it might look more arresting, but it can also be harder to make sense of. The statistician, designer and artist Edward Tufte, one of the fathers of modern data visualisation, coined the term “data-ink ratio” to describe the proportion of a graphic that is essential to the communication of data. In his view, this should always be as close as possible to 1. The more bells and whistles a graphic has, the more sceptical you should be.
A common form of “chartjunk” is the use of images to illustrate the quantities involved.
According to the data in this graph, the amount of stupidity in Britain has doubled since 2015. To reflect this, the graphic designer (me) has made Daniel Hannan’s stupid head twice as tall at 2022 as it is at 2015. However, because images are two-dimensional, the second Hannan is actually four times as large as the first. The use of images here has created a misleading impression.
Porky pies
Even the humble pie chart is routinely mishandled. Here’s Fox News up to its perennial tricks:
Presumably, even some MAGA types are aware that the segments of a pie chart should add up to 100%. What Fox have probably done is ask a question and permitted multiple answers. The results of such questions should never be represented in pie-chart form; a bar chart would be more appropriate.
Some of the more ostentatious data designers like to show off their Photoshop skills with 3D pie charts that seem to leap out of the page. But while they’re more visually arresting than their 2D counterparts, they’re less useful for displaying information, because the perspective distorts the respective quantities, making the slices at the “front” appear bigger than they in fact are, and the slices at the “back” smaller.
Pretty patterns
Finally, just because two things are sitting together on a graph or chart, it doesn’t mean there is any relationship between them. You can plot anything against anything. Here’s just one example of researchers finding a correlation between two completely independent phenomena.
Even when there is
a relationship, it doesn’t mean one thing is directly causing the other. Sometimes,
a third, unmentioned force – known as a “confounding variable” – is at work.
It’s hard to see
what role ice-cream consumption could play in the rate at which people drown,
or vice versa. The true explanation for the relationship, of course, is the
confounding variable of temperature. When it’s hot, people eat more ice-cream,
and go swimming more often.
Similarly, a US
study in the 1950s revealed that far more people were killed on the roads at
7pm than at 7am. “Goodness,” some wondered. “Why are there so many more bad
drivers around in the evening than first thing in the morning?”
And the answer is:
there are more drivers around in the evening than in the morning. The
confounding variable here was simply the number of people on the road.
Apples and oranges
In the early 20th
century, the US Navy launched a recruitment campaign based on the premise that
serving in the navy was safer than being a civilian. And their statistics were
sound: the death rate among serving naval officers was indeed lower than in the
general populace.
The stumbling
block in this case was that they were not comparing like with like. Sailors,
almost without exception, are young and fit. The general populace, meanwhile,
includes infants, old people and long-term sick people, all of whom (at least
at that time) were far more likely to die than the average able seaman.
Graphic non-fiction v graphic novels
The watchwords for visual
data, then, are pretty much the same as for verbal information: transparency, clarity,
simplicity.
When deciding whether or not to trust visual data, your checklist should be as follows:
Source
Units
y-axis
Large range of values
Context: is there any other information, omitted from this visual element, that would be useful for a fuller understanding of the subject?
I’ll conclude this series
soon with a round-up of all the other potential abuses of stats.
Here’s a thought experiment. Picture a woman who’s two metres tall (about 6ft 6in). Easy, right? Now picture a second woman, standing next to the first, who is a millon times taller: 2 million metres, or 2,000km, tall. I guarantee you the giant you’re imagining is no more than 100 times the size of her neighbour.
Try approaching it
another way. Say the six-foot woman launches a rocket, which travels straight
upwards at 100mph (about the average speed of the space shuttle for the first
minute after take-off). How long do you think you will have to keep mentally
following that rocket before it draws level with the giant’s head? The answer
is 12 and a half hours.
All of which is a rather long-winded way of showing that human brains are rubbish at processing large quantities. If everyday numbers cause a mental power cut in most of us, big numbers trigger a full-on meltdown.
“The crooks already know these tricks. Honest men must learn them in self-defence”
Darrell Huff, How To Lie With Statistics (1954)
‘We send the EU £350m a week’
No examination of number
abuses would be complete without a look at the granddaddy of them all: the slogan
that, along with “Take back control”, arguably swung the EU referendum for
Leave.
On one level, of course, it was just another example of populists making shit up. The true EU membership fee, after the UK received its rebate, was probably at most half that sum (Vote Leave’s Skid Row Svengali Dominic Cummings admitted in a letter dated April 2016 to Sir Andrew Dilnot of the UK Statistics Authority that “£237m per week was the net level of resources being transferred from the UK as a whole to the EU”) (pdf).
But the arguably more
interesting point is why he chose this line of attack in the first place.
The following Twitter
exchange from a couple of months ago (I failed to screenshot before the
inevitable block came) is enlightening.
“We’ll save £350m a week by leaving the EU!” “No, we won’t. The figure on the bus was a lie. The true cost of membership is about half that.” “Well, £175m still
sounds like a lot of money!”
Wait. So £350m a week is too much … and a 50% discount on that is still too much? What’s a reasonable amount then?
This is
what Cummings and co were bargaining on. They knew the exact sums
involved were immaterial; all that mattered was the emotional impact of the
big number. “Eek,
seven zeroes!” Critical faculties switched off, job done.
(Meanwhile, the other prong of Cummings’ propaganda assault – Turkey – was designed with similar intent: “Eek, brown people!” Primal fear of The Other evoked, rational brain bypassed, job done.)
Some of us identified
the flaw fairly quickly. If I arrived in the pub and told you breathlessly that
I’d just spent one thousand pounds, you might raise an eyebrow, but you’d
probably reserve your final judgment pending further information. Namely, what
did I spend it on? A house, a car, a watch, a hat, or a packet
of crisps?
A moment’s reflection,
which is apparently more than 52% of the electorate could spare, would tell you
that the statement Quantity X costs a lot of money is meaningless in
isolation. Before you can judge whether that expenditure is a good idea, you
need answers to the following questions:
Can the buyer afford it? What is this sum as a proportion of their budget?
What do comparable items or services cost?
Is it a reasonable rate? Are others being charged a similar amount?
How much will it cost to get out of the contract?
What exactly is the buyer getting for their investment? Does it represents good value for money? Can the same or better goods and services be obtained elsewhere, for less outlay?
“They said how much money we would save [by leaving the EU], but they didn’t say how much we would lose”
1) The UK’s EU contributions
for the financial year to April 2020, minus rebate and EU funds received, came
to £7.7bn. Total government spending for the same period is predicted to turn
out a shade north of £900bn. So as a proportion of the UK’s overall spending,
EU membership cost less than 1%. If you’re a taxpayer earning £30,000 pa, that
means you’re paying about £43.53 a year towards the cost of EU membership, or just
over a quarter of the TV licence fee. Does £150m a week (£7.7bn/52) feel so
enormous now?
2) To put that £7.7bn
in perspective, the government spends around £190bn a year on pensions (“We
send economically unproductive old people £3.7bn a week. Let’s fund our NHS
instead”), £170bn on the NHS, £110bn on education, £43bn on defence, £15bn on
civil service pay, £600m on running the House of Commons and the Lords,
including £225m on MPs’ and Lords’ salaries and allowances, £67m on the royal
family, and £80m on the Department for Exiting the EU. (Specific, up-to-date
figures are not available for all these areas, particularly when it comes to
the murky warrens of government, so I’m doing some approximating here, but they’re
all in the right ballpark.)
To round off with a
couple of other large-scale operations, the international aid budget stood at around
£15bn a year (until the Tories slashed it), the BBC’s annual spend is around
£4bn year, and membership of the United Nations and the World Health
Organization sets the country back £100m and £10m a year respectively.
Does £150m a week feel so
enormous now?
3) You’ll often hear
Brexiters complaining that “the UK is the biggest contributor to the EU”. Again,
that’s not true; Germany, France and Italy all pay more. Moreover, there’s a
good reason why Britain chips in more than most, which is that Britain is one
of the most populous and richest countries in the EU. If you work out the
contribution per head, ie, divide the fee between us, the UK is bang in
the middle of the field. Norway, which isn’t even a full member of the EU and
has no say in passing its laws, pays in more per person than the UK does.
Besides, in most
societies, taxation is organised such that richer people pay more than poorer
people. It’s hardly crazy to suggest that the same logic should apply to
economic blocs.
Does £150m a week feel
so enormous now?
4) Calculating the economic cost of extricating Britain from the EU is fiendishly complex, because it touches on so many areas of government, business and personal life, so many of the costs are yet to be borne, and we can’t know for sure how things would have panned out if we’d stayed. But if we’re lacking all the pieces of the jigsaw, we have enough side and corner segments to give us an approximate idea of its size.
(There’s
bound to be a bit of double-counting going on here, but I strongly doubt
whether that will amount to more than the stuff I’ve missed. Speaking of which,
if
you’re knowledgeable in this field and you find anything missing or startlingly
amiss, please point it out – politely – in the comments, and I will amend ASAP.)
Paying 27,500 extra civil servants to plan and execute Brexit-related changes: £825m a year (conservatively assuming a salary of £30,000 per civil servant) (plus recruitment costs, benefits, pensions)
By the end of 2021, the government estimates that it will have spent £8.1bn just on making Brexit happen. And the haemorrhaging of cash isn’t magically going to stop then; businesses will still need support, negotiations for a new trading relationship with the EU will need to continue, and the government will likely have a lot of expensive court cases to fight.
Plus, of course, the loss
of our freedom to live,
study, work and retire in 31 countries, which to my mind is incalculable.
Finally, falling upon the
nation as a whole is a hotchpotch of unknown and unquantifiable losses,
which while impossible to nail down exactly, will without doubt all be sizeable
negatives: the talented immigrants put off from coming to the UK; shortages of
labour, skilled and unskilled; the brain drain of EU citizens and disillusioned
Remainers leaving because of Brexit; the effect on the mental health of
millions; the dire consequences for the economy of having a fanatical,
incompetent, mendacious, anti-intellectual far-right government in charge; the
social costs of a divided and disinformed citizenry; all the governmental,
parliamentary and civil service time wasted on Brexit; the value of EU laws on
workers’ rights, the environment, and health and safety; the huge blow to
Britain’s global reputation and soft power.
All these factors feed into probably the best indicator of a country’s material wealth: its gross domestic product (GDP). When a country is spending so much time and energy on negotiations, and unnecessary infrastructure, and form-filling, and stuck in queues of lorries, it has less time and energy to make things. Meanwhile, tariffs and non-tariff barriers never fail to reduce the volume of trade.
Estimates of the long-term hit to the UK’s GDP vary from 2% to 9%, with only Patrick Minford’s discredited Economists for Europe group predicting any improvement, and that at the cost of the UK’s manufacturing industries. Two per cent of GDP is £42bn per year. Nine per cent is £189bn.
Does £150m a week, or
£8bn a year, feel so enormous now?
5) Now to the crunch question.
What did the UK get for its money? Even if not everything about the EU
was desirable, some of it was clearly worth having, or the UK and every other
member state would have quit long ago. Can all these bounties be sourced elsewhere?
If so, at what price?
Here’s a list (far from
exhaustive – again, please pipe up with any glaring omissions) of some of the basic,
and not so basic, functions and programmes provided by the EU.
Frictionless trade, frictionless travel, trade negotiations, Horizon 2020, Natura 2000, Marie Curie programme, EHIC, Erasmus education programme, Erasmus+ sports programme, Galileo, Euratom, European Arrest Warrant, European Medicines Agency, European Banking Agency, European Youth Orchestra, regional development funds, research grants, pet passports …
Some of this is plain irreplaceable. The UK has already given up on developing its own alternative to Galileo, because it has neither the money nor the expertise. Erasmus and Erasmus+ are dead and gone, with only the spectre of a promise of a … UK-only version to succeed it. And if we want to be part of Euratom and the European Arrest Warrant again, we’ll just have to swallow our pride, beg for acceptance, and pay, doubtless over the odds, for the privilege.
Instead of a plaintive whine of “Lies!”, the Remain campaign’s response to the Bus of Bollocks should have been a bigger bus (Megabus? MAGAbus?) emblazoned with the slogan “£150m a week? Less than 1% of GDP? For all this? Bargain!”, and a word cloud listing all the positives of membership listed above.
Not as catchy, of
course, but unfortunately for the good guys, the truth rarely is.
Next time: I dunno, probably something about surveys and comparing apples and oranges.
There are plenty of maths wizzes out there, of course, and most of us, when the necessity arises, can perform basic calculations. It’s just that these operations don’t come naturally to human beings. For most of our species’ history, there was little need for any more mental arithmetic than “one/two/many” and “our tribe small, their tribe big”.
If your brain isn’t adequately trained, maths requires serious mental effort, which most of us will go to any lengths to avoid. As a result, when confronted with a differential equation or trigonometry problem, we curl into a ball and whimper, “Oh, I’m rubbish with numbers!”
So when it comes to statistics, just as with molecular biology and nuclear physics and translating ancient Phoenician, we tend to leave things to the experts. The catch is, the main conduits of this knowledge from professors to public – the media – are as clueless about maths as we are.
As a veteran of journalism of 25 years, I can let you in on a scary secret: reporters – even reporterswho are specifically charged with writing about business and science and trade – rarely have any sort of background in maths or economics. Most of those who aren’t media studies or journalism graduates studied humanities (English, modern languages, history, politics, law), and the same goes for the subeditors and desk editors whose job it is to check their work. In the average newspaper office, you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who tell an x-axis from a y-axis, a percentage point from a percentage or a median from a mean. And TV interviewers, judging by their performance before and since Brexit, are no better.
Most of us aren’t too bad at figuring out when people are trying to mislead us with words or facts or pictures. But because we’re useless with numbers – and the gatekeepers are too – we’re much more susceptible to numerical shenanigans. Statistics can be massaged, manipulated, misrepresented and murdered as easily as words can. And it is this human weakness that the populists are counting on.
What I want to try to do in the next few posts is look at some of the more common examples of statistical chicanery that you will come across, in the hope that at least a few more people can start calling out the bastards who are trying to rip our society apart. (If I miss any obvious ones, please add your suggestions in the comments.)
(If you have no time to read on, I beg you to consider buying or borrowing a copy of Anthony Reuben’s Statistical: Ten Easy Ways To Avoid Being Misled By Numbers (Constable, 2019). It’s clear and concise and bang up to date, covering Brexit and Trump (but not coronavirus), and an easy read even for the fraidiest maths-phobe.)
The truth, the half-truth, and nothing like the truth
Sometimes, of course, as our present government demonstrates on a daily basis, populists are perfectly happy to forsake real numbers for entirely imaginary ones.
The chief drawback of straight-up untruths, of course, is that they’re easy to check and challenge. Most of the fictions above were exposed as such fairly quickly (though not before they’d burrowed their way into a few million poorly guarded minds). A far more effective way of misleading people is to present numerical information that is not incorrect, per se, but which tells only part of the story. To offer up, if you like, a fractional truth.
11/10 for presentation
If you’ve ever used a dating app, chances are you didn’t upload as your profile picture that zitty red-eye selfie you took in the Primark fitting room. You hunted through old snaps, maybe asked a camera-handy friend over for a mini-shoot, possibly even added a flattering filter, did a bit of Photoshopping, and judiciously cropped out the boyfriend. In short, you went to reasonable (or extreme) lengths to paint yourself in the best possible light.
This process – statisticians call it “cherry-picking”, but I prefer “Instagramming” – is the populists’ most common way of abusing numbers (it can also be applied in reverse, to show something in its worst possible light). If the absolute figure (say, 17.4 million) is the most impressive, use that. If the percentage best advances your case, use that (but if it’s, say, only 51.9%, poof! It’s gone). If neither of those works to your advantage, what about the trend?
Which brings us to our
first example.
‘Trade with the EU is declining’
OMG! Trade with the EU is declining?! Tomorrow, our trade with them will be nothing! We must end all commerce with them now!
That’s clearly the reaction this claim was designed to elicit, and there were enough people lacking either the ability or the inclination to check it that it succeeded in its goal.
While it wasn’t one of the primary arguments advanced by the Leave campaign, it’s a drum that rightwing politicians, commentators and newspapers have been beating since day one. It was also one of the central planks of the “failing EU” narrative, which you still hear to this day.
Still, if the UK’s
trade with the EU is shrinking, surely it’s a point worth making?
The first problem here is that the statement is not true. UK trade with the EU has grown steadily since we joined, as even House of Commons figures show:
(I couldn’t find an HoC graph covering the whole period, but the figures are all out there.)
Which shouldn’t come as
a colossal surprise, as these are our closest neighbours, with whom we have enjoyed
ever closer ties for almost 50 years. Of course trade with them is always
going to grow.
So what is Thickinson wittering on about? It turns out what she meant is that the UK’s trade with the EU as a proportion of its overall trade has been decreasing (slowly) since 2000. Trade with the EU is still growing, but trade with other countries is growing faster.
(The trend was bucked
in 2019, when the share rose to 46%, which is why they bit their tongues on
this one for a while.)
So, not exactly a precipitous decline, but if trade with the EU as a proportion of overall trade is shrinking, shouldn’t we be a little worried?
Well, no, for two
reasons.
First, trade outside the EU has increased precisely because of EU trade agreements with other countries and blocs, such as Israel, Egypt, South Africa, Canada, Mercosur and South Korea. In other words, trade with the EU has (proportionally) fallen because of trade through the EU. (For the benefit of those who have been living under a rock for five years, the UK will cease to be a signatory to all those deals as well as its EU agreements from January 1 2021. Sure, we might renegotiate some after exit, but there’s no guarantee of that, and even if we succeed, they’ll almost certainly be on less favourable terms, as the UK now has a lot less negotiating clout than it did as part of a bloc of 510 million people.)
Second, the countries with which the UK’s trade is growing more quickly are on the whole much smaller; they are developing countries. Trade with developed nations, and with nations with which trade relations are already well established – such as those in the EU – is never going to grow particularly fast, because it’s all grown up already.
Let’s take, as a hypothetical example, the nation of Arsendia. If you were to tell me that trade with Arsendia had increased by 1,000% over the past year, while trade with the EU 27 had grown by only 0.2%, I’d think, “Whoa! Maybe Arsendia is the future!” But if I then discovered the somewhat relevant supplementary information that trade with Arsendia this year was worth £110, compared with £10 in 2018-19, while the value of trade with the EU stood at £668bn, I might come to a slightly different conclusion.
To take a real-world example often cited by Brexiters, over the last 20 years, trade with Commonwealth nations has increased by a factor of more than three.
Meanwhile, over the same period, the value of UK trade with EU countries has merely doubled.
Again, pretty much what
you’d expect when countries tend to do most of their trade with their
neighbours, and most Commonwealth countries are half the fucking world away.
Adversely comparing the
rate of growth of trade with established trade partners with the rate of growth
of trade with tiny, brand-new buddies is the equivalent of a father taking a
tape measure to his 18-year-old son and 14-year-old daughter, then saying,
“Sorry, Kev, but Lisa’s grown three inches this year and you’ve barely sprouted
at all, so I’m afraid she gets all the attention now.”
This is a common statistical misapprehension called the base rate fallacy, or ignoring the baseline. Expect it to make a reappearance, as it is one of the populists’ favourite subterfuges.
(The United States’
share of global GDP is declining for the exact same reason – less developed
nations are eating up the pie because they have more scope to expand quickly –
but you won’t find any of the Brexit zealots shouting about that.)
Let’s try to boil this down into something so simple that even the average Tory MP can understand it. Trade with the EU is growing. Trade with some other, much smaller countries is growing a little faster, because they have more capacity for growth, but that’s unlikely to continue for long. The EU, the UK’s closest neighbour, is, and will always remain, the UK’s most important trading partner.
A recurring theme of these posts is going to be: whenever you see pat statistical statements like Dickinson’s, by politician or commentator or journalist, they are not giving you the full picture. It’s not necessarily their fault – there isn’t enough space. But the space shortage gives them an excuse to Instagram the data; to present only the facets of the information that best supports their agenda.
For a full understanding of the situation, you need to a) read beyond the headline or tweet, and ideally trace the source of the data; b) do further research, or at least read some rebuttals; and if neither of those is possible, c) ask questions. In the particular case of “Trade with the EU is declining’”, the relevant questions would be: “What level is it declining from?”, “How fast?”, and “Is this trend likely to continue?”
As we’ll see time and again in the coming posts, without the proper context, numerical information is useless. However great the emotional impact on you, you must not draw any conclusions until you see the wider picture. If you can’t overcome your fear of numbers, you must at least stop meekly accepting them.
The far right’s awful analogies helped swing Brexit – and now they may threaten your life
“Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician” – Winston Churchill
For too long, too many people have been listening to populists: know-nothing blatherskites offering simple solutions to complex problems. As a result, the UK has left the EU, nutsacking the economy and the opportunities of the young and triggering a massive rise in racial and class hatred; Jair Bolsonaro has laid waste to the Amazon rainforest; and Americans have elected an incompetent, incontinent, incoherent pussy-grabbing golf cheat as president.
How did the far right achieve this coup? With lies, mostly; but blatant lies most people can see through. Subtler tinkerings with the truth are far more effective.
In 1987, the French scholar Françoise Thom wrote an essay describing the Newspeak-style “wooden language” that the totalitarian regime of Soviet Russia used to fob off, confuse and pacify its citizens. (Orwell’s Newspeak was based on a similar idea of language as an instrument of control.) She identified four main characteristics:
use of abstract terms over concrete – attractive-sounding but empty slogans (think “Brexit means Brexit”, “Global Britain”, “Take back control”, “Get Brexit done”, “levelling up”), and vague terms like “sovereignty” and “democracy” and “freedom” that sound great but signifiy nothing;
Manichaeism – nuance-free, black and white thinking that paints everything as a battle between right and wrong, good and evil: “You’re either with us or against us”, “Enemies of the people”, “You lost, get over it”, “Get behind Brexit”;
tautology – repetition of the same idea: “20,000 police officers”, “40 hospitals”, most of the above catchphrases;
bad metaphors.
Since the first three are all pretty self-explanatory, it’s
the last one I want to look at.
You may recall learning about similes and metaphors in
English lessons. Quick refresher: a simile is a figure of speech that compares
one object to another using the words “like” or “as”; a metaphor does the same
thing, but by saying the two things are one and the same. So “My love is
like a red, red rose” is a simile, while “Love is a battlefield” is a metaphor.
(While, strictly
speaking, similes, metaphors and analogies are different things, their
difference is largely in form, not function, so I’ll be using the terms more or
less interchangeably.)
But it turns out metaphors aren’t just for Robert Burns and Pat Benatar. They underpin the very way we think, and if misused, can actually change what we think. A bold claim, I know. Bear with me.
Why do we use metaphors? In 99.9% of cases, they’re an explanatory tool. Metaphors tend to describe something that is less familiar to the listener in terms of something that is more familiar. The unfamiliar quantity – what psychologist Julian Jaynes (pdf) called a metaphrand, but which is now usually referred to as the target – might be an abstract concept (say, love), a complicated or disputed thing (the EU), or a brand-new thing (like coronavirus). The familiar quantity – the metaphier, or source – will generally be something concrete, which we regularly encounter in everyday life: a rose, a football match, influenza. So in “Love is a battlefield”, “love” is the target, the unfamiliar thing, and “battlefield” is the source.
The point is, we can easily summon a mental picture of battlefields
and roses and football matches, and most people have some experience of the
flu. We have much more trouble visualising abstract, complex and new things,
like love, the EU and coronavirus, so people naturally turn to analogies to demystify
them. The catch is that some metaphors do not work as advertised.
Two things determine the quality of a metaphor: the accuracy of the comparison, and its richness – the number of ways in which the things resemble each other. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” is a good metaphor because there are parallels galore between the stage and everyday life (not that surprising when you consider the stage was created as a representation of the world). Bill explores some of them himself: men and women are like actors, playing roles rather than living out their desires; they enter life, and they leave it, just as actors enter and exit the stage; the various phases of life are a bit like the acts of a play.
If, on the other hand, you’d never heard of sulphuric acid, and I explain it to you by telling you it’s a bit like water, you’ll be justifiably mad at me after you drink it (and survive). Ditto if you encounter your first snake, and I say, “Don’t worry, it’s just a big worm.” Bad metaphors can bite.
If anything ever called for a judicious analogy, it was
Brexit. Few people – myself included – understood the full detail of how the EU
worked, what the benefits of membership were, what the trade-offs were between
sovereignty and trade and geopolitical harmony, and how integrated the UK was
in EU supply chains. The far right was quick to fill this gap; two of their metaphors
have framed much of the Brexit debate.
1. Oppression/confinement/freedom
“EU dictatorship.” “EU shackles.” “Take back control!”
2. Sport/war
“You lost, get over it.” “You just want a replay until you
get the result you want.”
These are superficially powerful lines, which conjure vivid
images and cut straight to our sense of self. But as soon as you interrogate
them in any detail, they fall apart.
In what respects does the EU resemble a dictatorship? Well …
it does take some decisions on its members’ behalf; but it consults its members
on those decisions. Members vote on all laws and can veto them. And oftentimes,
those members ignore the decisions without sanction.
There are no votes in a dictatorship. They’re run by
self-appointed tyrants who tend to reign for life, and they’re characterised by
the use of force, propaganda, and an intolerance of opposition and independent
media. Dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. And crucially, no one is free to leave
a dictatorship.
None of these things apply to the EU, and yet the Brexit gibberlings would have you believe that Guy Verhofstadt is Hitler reincarnated. The propagandists tried to persuade us that the worm was a snake, and a lot of us swallowed it.
Now, in what respects did the EU referendum resemble a football match? A few simple follow-up questions – “What have you won? What have I lost that you haven’t lost too?” “What role did you play in this glorious victory?” “Where do the people who voted leave but have since change their minds fit in, and the handful of remainers who have swung the other way? Are they winners, or losers?” “If your team gets beaten by another one, do you suddenly give up on your team and start supporting the other side?” – expose this comparison as equally flimsy.
When remainers pointed out the possible pitfalls of Brexit, the populists pooped out yet another crap analogy. “Millennium bug!” they chirped. “People issued dire warnings about that, and nothing happened!” Yes, it’s true that then, as now, some people prophesied doom. But that’s literally the only parallel between the two situations. The actors were different, the conditions were different, the entire realm of knowledge was different, the problem was different, and the solutions were different. And crucially, in the case of Y2K, steps were taken to mitigate its effects, without which catastrophe might well have struck.
(It’s not just the far right that is guilty of this; the populist, pro-Brexit far left also seems to have a predilection for teeth-grindingly terrible comparisons.)
Remainers did hit back with some counter-metaphors – membership
of the EU is more like belonging to a golf club, they said: if you stop paying
your dues, you no longer get to play on the course or drink in the bar. But it
was all too feeble, too late. The right’s shit metaphors had forced their way
into enough people’s heads, put down roots, and become unassailable truths.
And as if that wasn’t enough for them, the populist demagogues
and disinformants, emboldened by their Brexit “success”, continued to wheel out
their cack-handed comparisons in response to the coronavirus.
Mail on Sunday dross geyser Dan Hodges can’t help himself; he
genuinely seems to consider himself a maven of metaphor, the Svengali of simile.
Football comes up a lot, doesn’t it. Wonder why?
But in their perpetual, desperate quests for attention and
relevance, Trump and Brexit party banshee Ann Widdecombe had to go one further.
Covid-19 and influenza are both contagious respiratory
illnesses caused by a virus, but that’s as far as the similarities go. The
symptoms are different, the infection rates are different, the morbidity rates
are different, and the treatments are different. The viruses aren’t even part
of the same family.
As for the Aids comparison, where to begin? Aids isn’t even a
goddamn virus (it’s the final, often fatal stage of the illness caused by HIV).
Trump and Widdecombe’s offhand disinformation goes beyond
simple irresponsibility and borders on criminal negligence. Hard though it is
to credit, there are people out there who have faith in their wisdom, and they’re
repaying their fans by putting their lives in grave danger. (The Express
presumably figured this out eventually, or caved in after massive outcry, as it
took the Widdecombe column down, which is why I could only screenshot the New
European’s response.)
They’ve been at it in America for a while, of course. Anyone
who has politely suggested to a gun nut that US gun laws might be a tad on the
lax side will be familiar with this retort: “Well, cars kill people too, and no
one talks about banning them!”
The problem with this analogy, once again, is that it is
fucking shit. Cars are not expressly designed to kill people. Their primary
purpose – conveying people and goods from place to place quickly and
efficiently – is so damned useful that society has reluctantly decided tolerate
the occasional accidental death. Besides, driving is subject to all sorts of
rules and regulations. You can’t drive under a certain age, you can’t drive
drunk, and you have to obey speed limits and the rules of the road.
“Hold your horses, Bodle – aren’t you getting your panties in
a bunch over what are, at the end of the day, just words?” you cry, mixing
three metaphors.
But as Hitler and Goebbels knew, as Orwell knew, as the Russian security services and Cambridge Analytica have long known and as others are finally slowly realising, words matter. In an ever more compartmentalised and specialised world, we’ve become unprecedentedly reliant on others for information. On matters we haven’t personally mastered, we have to trust someone. And terrifyingly, a large swath of the population has stopped trusting experts and instead turned to populists and their sloppy, misleading, and often downright dangerous metaphors.
Why
am I so concerned about metaphors in particular? Because they’re sneaky. When you
encounter a fresh metaphor, it brings you up short. “That’s odd,” thinks your
brain. “Not seen that before,” and you take a closer look. If I say, “British
shoppers in 2020 are locusts,” you’ll probably spend a couple of seconds
weighing it up before deciding whether or not you agree.
If enough people agree with a metaphor, it might catch on, and pass into wider use. So when you read “The elephant in the room” (a metaphorical phrase that dates to the 1950s) or “Take a chill pill” (early 1980s), it’s familiar enough that it no longer has the same jarring effect – you don’t for a second imagine that anyone’s talking about a real pachyderm squatting in your lounge – but still novel enough that you are aware of its metaphorical origin. Now it has become a cliche; if it’s lucky, it might even get promoted to idiom. And
when idioms stick around for long enough, a further stage of evolution occurs,
and they become part of everyday speech.
The language of abstract
relationships – marriages, friendships, etc – almost exclusively borrows the
vocabulary of physical relationships. So we talk about the ties between
people, breaking up with someone, being close to someone and growing
apart. We talk about grasping an idea and beating an opponent
and closing a deal. You’ve probably rarely, if ever, reflected on the
metaphorical origins of these phrases when using them.
And if you talk about time in any meaningful sense, you will find yourself drawing on the lexicon of space. You simply can’t conceptualise it any other way. You go on a long trip. You were born in the 20th century. You look back on your youth. Time passes by.
Julian Jaynes’s theory – and I’ve never seen a better one – is that humans have a “mental space” (not a literal one, obviously), a sort of internal theatre, where we visualise things in order to make sense of them, and that without this spatialisation, we can’t properly think about things at all.
Metaphors
are not just for bards and bellettrists – they’re part of everyday speech and
thought. A huge number of words we use, especially those for abstract concepts,
started life as metaphors, but have become so widely used that they have developed
meanings of their own. Our
dictionaries now contain hundreds of thousands of definitions that have
separate entries for the literal and figurative meanings of words.
In fact, if you look up the etymology of any abstract concept you can think of, the chances are, it originated from a word or words for tangible things or everyday actions. The word “understand”, for example, derives from under- (Old English “among”, “close to”) and standan (stand). “Comprehend”, meanwhile, comes from con- (with) and prehendere, to gain hold of: to take within. “Money” can trace its family tree to Latin moneta (“a place where coins are made; a mint”), while the verb “to be” ultimately comes from the Sanskrit bhu, meaning “grow”, while the parts “am” and “is” come from a separate verb meaning “breathe”.
Metaphors, it turns out, are fundamental to our conception of the world. They play a massive role in shaping the way we think.
Suddenly, the populist far right’s strategy comes into focus. By putting out misleading metaphors like “EU dictatorship” and repeating them until blue in the face, they’re trying to normalise them. To make people forget that they are in fact just opinions, and mould them into self-evident truths.
(It
turns out that there is a crucial difference between metaphors on the one hand
and similes and analogies on the other. Similes and analogies are upfront about
their intentions – they explicitly admit that they are comparisons, subjective
judgements, up for dispute. Metaphors, meanwhile, brook no dissent.)
Never trust an analogy from a populist. How can they
explain things to you when they’re totally unversed in the subject-matter? How
can Ann Widdecombe possibly know how similar coronavirus is to Aids when even
she would admit she knows nothing about either? Only recognised experts know
the target domain (in this case, epidemiology) well enough to judge what source
makes a good or bad metaphor. Populists just pull things out of thin air that feel
right, regardless of their accuracy or utility. This is why popular science
books are written by scientists, not populists, why popular economics books are
written by economists, not populists, and so on.
“Understanding a thing,” according to Jaynes, “is
arriving at a familiarising metaphor for it.” So if people are pushing duff
metaphors on us, we’re going to misunderstand things – and as we’re seeing with
Brexit, Trump, and especially coronavirus, the consequences of that can be
grave.
What
can you do about it? Well, the next time someone wheels one of these similes or
metaphors or analogies, don’t let it pass. Ask them directly: in what respects
is the EU like a dictatorship? When they inevitably fail to answer, point out
the differences. Extend the analogy until it collapses under the weight of its
own absurdity. Even if you can’t get through to them, you might just help
prevent someone else who happens to be following the exchange from falling into
the same deadly trap.
To finish on a more positive note, here’s how
metaphors should be done. Kudos to @ptp335:
Rorke’s Drift and Culloden, and Waterloo:
WILL ALL BE RESTORED WHEN WE LEAVE THE EU!
A paean to Brexit
Furlongs and fathoms and gallons and perches, Schools re-equipped (with canes, slippers and birches), Time at the bar at 11pm, Ladylike skirts with an ankle-high hem.
Antimacassars and old music boxes, Legal permission to maim and kill foxes. Coal mines and coal fires and smog and black lung, Horses and coaches
and streets full of dung!
Rattles on match day, not them vulvazelas, Sensuous foot rubs at camp from Akela, Skipping and hopscotch and conkers and jacks, Pubs that are free of dogs, Irish and blacks!
Washing the dishes by hand, not machine, Pogroms and blackshirts and Combat 18! Checkout staff who call me “Sir” and not “Bruv”, Films without swearing and homes without love!
Typewriters, pencils – or better, a quill! Thirty per cent chance of death when you’re ill! Andersen shelters and Spitfires and Spam! Frankly, dear Scarlett, I don’t give a damn!
Bring British justice back home from the Hague! Bring back red squirrels! Bring back the plague! Rorke’s Drift and Culloden, and Waterloo: WILL ALL BE RESTORED WHEN WE LEAVE THE EU!
You may not want this, but I won the vote; And democracy says that we’re in the same boat. As I depart through the heavenly doors, That past I
requested, my son – now it’s yours.
CBAs may be a flawed and oversimplified way of looking at Brexit, but they’re still more than most Leave voters have bothered to do
You’re a business owner. An opportunity arises for expansion. The risks are daunting – but the potential boost to income is huge. How do you decide whether to proceed? The first thing any halfway competent company director will do in this situation is undertake a cost-benefit analysis.
Essentially, you note down all the anticipated dividends of the project, alongside all the costs, risks and drawbacks. Assign values to each dividend and cost, then add up both totals. If the figure in the first column is greater than the figure in the second, expansion is officially a Good Idea, and you should crack on. If the opposite is true, you can the plan.
The technique has two main weaknesses. First, benefits and costs can be hard to evaluate. How much is an hour of your time worth? What about stress? Environmental impact? Reputational damage to the company? Can you put any meaningful value on things like job satisfaction, or the feeling that you’ve made a positive difference to the world?
Second, the universe loves delivering nasty surprises. It’s impossible to factor in every eventuality, and even the best-informed predictions can be undone by twists of fate. What if demand for your product suddenly fizzles? What if interest rates shoot up immediately after you take out that huge loan? What if your product is implicated, however unfairly, in a national scandal?
But
while it might be an inexact science, taking any decision that may have
far-ranging consequences without some sort of attempt to estimate its chances
of success is downright irresponsible.
Hang on, you interject. Isn’t “cost-benefit analysis” just a fancy economese way of saying “making a list of pros and cons”? Superb observational skills, I reply. While the term comes from economics (coined by the French engineer Jules Dupuit in the 1840s, it didn’t catch on until the 1950s), it does bear some similarities to an operation that humans have been carrying out for millennia.
In fact, your brain is conducting CBAs all the time; it just does most of them – ones involving familiar situations – at a subconscious level. “Shall we go to work today?” your automatic, system 1 brain asks itself. “Uh, yeah, if we want to carry on putting food on the table.” “Shall I dodge this falling rock?” “Duh!”
Sometimes, though, when we find ourselves in novel situations, or ones where the arithmetic is not laughably simple, the reflective system 2 brain steps in.
Say you’re in a relationship, but things are getting a bit stale, so you’re umming and ahhing about ditching the boyf. Some in this predicament will go with their gut; others might talk to a friend or family member; still others will actually hunt down a pen and paper and tot up the pluses and minuses of giving poor Baz the heave-ho. The finished report might look something like this:
Like the business owner’s, Sammie’s calculations are bedevilled by uncertainty – what if it turns out she misses the action movies and tongue-clicking? What if Liam doesn’t fancy her after all? – but now there’s an extra complication. Whereas a businessperson can at least attempt to assign a monetary value to each cost and benefit in order to make them easier to compare, Sammie has no such option.
While the business assessment would read something like “New office = £100,000 per year, extra staff = £80,000 per year …”, Sammie’s is a mess of question marks. “No more Saturday nights of the lads just popping round for one beer” = ??, no more stupid fucking action movies = ?? …”
Since there are no objectively established units for “value”, all Sammie can do is compare the two lists and try to get a feel for which wins out.
The same problems beset CBAs in the public arena. And as the decisions of local councils, military commanders and national governments can affect millions, the need to properly evaluate the ramifications of any new operations or policies is all the greater. Let’s take two examples.
If
there were some way to “score” these quantities objectively, there would never
be any dispute over whether a particular policy was right or wrong. But the
awkward truth is, if you asked 100 people to rank the costs and benefits listed
above, you’d get 100 widely varying results. While some people attach great
importance to the environment, others are more concerned with personal liberty,
the economy, and their personal comfort and convenience.
It so happens that in the case of cars – powerful environmental movements notwithstanding – most countries have come to broadly similar conclusions. While mass motorised transport has many sizeable drawbacks, one of its benefits is considered so great that it outweighs all the negative considerations (although more and more countries are taking steps to minimise the downsides by encouraging the design of safer, more environmentally friendly vehicles, imposing speed limits, criminalising drink driving and using phones while driving, and so on).
Now for a more contentious and tragically topical issue.
Cost-benefit
analyses should not be one-shot deals. If the circumstances or risk factors
change, you need to run the scenario again. And this is one reason why policies
on gun controls across the modern world are so polarised.
What’s interesting about this case is that technological and social change have altered the calculus. When guns were first invented, they were inefficient and limited in their capacity for damage, capable of firing only single bullets. Today, of course, they are far more sophisticated, with some models able to fire 100 rounds a second. Even an amateur gunman can kill 10 people and injure 26 more in under 30 seconds.
Perhaps just as importantly, times have changed. When America first adopted its lax stance on gun laws, people lived in much smaller concentrations. The world was more lawless – state security was patchy, scrappy and corrupt – so it was more important for citizens to be able to defend themselves; and there were fewer people (in absolute terms, if nothing else) with serious mental illness or bitterness born of social isolation. Run the cost-benefit analysis in the southern states of the US in 1776, and you might well conclude that giving everyone the right to bear firearms was a reasonable proposition. Run it again today, and most people come to a very different conclusion.
The majority of civilised nations have decided, in light of these developments above, that the balance has shifted decisively. The benefits of arming the populace have dwindled and the risks have increased a thousandfold. Mass shootings in the UK and Australia, for example, prompted draconian clampdowns on gun ownership (and as a consequence, no mass shootings have happened there since). It’s only a hardcore of psychopaths in America who refuse point blank to rerun the cost-benefit analysis in 2019.
What about another highly controversial topic, immigration? Well, this post from last November was essentially one big cost-benefit analysis of freedom of movement, so I won’t repeat the arguments here. To summarise: minimal costs, lots of benefits.
(This
is to say nothing of the various laws beneficial to safety standards, workers’
rights and the environment that have been passed by the EU, which we cannot strictly
count as costs since they may theoretically survive Brexit. However, if
the party leading the UK out is the Conservatives, whose chief motivation for delivering
Brexit was precisely the removal of such “Brussels red tape”, you can kiss
those goodbye too.)
I’ve done my level best here to make an honest assessment. Despite asking Leavers for tangible upsides of Brexit well over a thousand times, I’ve rarely had any (rational) answers that aren’t covered in the seven points listed. I listed some of the looniest ones here. As for the cons, the evidence for all of them is only a Google search away. But for the exceptionally lazy, many are covered here and here.
There are very few ways you can conclude that column A outweighs column B. But first, let’s be honest: most people, when they voted on 23/6/16, were not aware of the sheer number of items in column B (not even most remainers). For this, much blame must be laid at the feet of the half-hearted and disjointed Remain campaign.
But
even now, 38 months later, there is still a sizeable rump of individuals who insist,
while generating biologically unfeasible amounts of spittle, that the rewards
of Brexit outweigh the costs. How is this possible?
One form
of mental gymnastics I regularly encounter is the wholesale dismissal of column
B as “Project Fear”. “Of course the European Medicines Agency won’t relocate,”
they babble, weeks after it has gone. “Of course there won’t be a hard border
in Ireland,” they froth, despite being unable to offer an alternative solution.
Another
is to attempt feebly to recast the costs as benefits in disguise: “We can just
train our own doctors … The bankers deserved punishment anyway … I preferred
it when you could only get raspberries in October.”
But probably the most common attempt at an argument is that you can’t put a price on sovereignty. No matter how numerous or how valuable the entries in column B, sovereignty trumps all. Half of leave voters over 65 said as much in a YouGov survey published in August 2017.
They might have had a point if Britain were actually shackled to a dictatorship and enjoyed no independence at all. But the fact is, the UK only ever pooled a small amount of its competences, in minor areas of law. And it’s not as if it even surrendered those completely; it still had a say – many would say a disproportionately large say – in the drawing up of that legislation, and a powerful veto.
The
UK government certainly didn’t think the country had forfeited much sovereignty
when it published its Brexit white paper in February 2017: “Whilst Parliament
has remained sovereign throughout our membership to the EU,” it said, “it
hasn’t always felt like that.”
And
judging by the polling carried out by Ipsos MORI every year, neither did you,
until 2016. If you did, it clearly wasn’t very high on your list of priorities.
No
Brexiter has yet been able to put their finger on any specific negative
outcomes of this partial sacrifice of sovereignty; few can name a single law passed
by the EU that even mildly inconveniences them. If you’re lucky, they might mumble
something about fishing (0.12% of the economy); but they don’t seem to
understand that the UK will still have neighbours. If we stop Europeans fishing
in “our” waters, they’ll retaliate – and most of the fish that Britons like to
eat swim far from British shores. Exporting fish (most of our native species
are more popular in other EU countries than they are here) will be harder. And
quotas will still need to be observed in order to prevent overfishing.
If sovereignty is really so important to people, why did we hear practically nothing about it before the referendum? Why were they not marching in the streets? The simple answer is, it wasn’t an issue. It’s a buzzword, a revisionist escape clause, a superficially respectable fig leaf for the true underlying drivers of Brexit: unfounded British exceptionalism and full-fat racism.
To anyone whose perception is unclouded by hatred and nostalgia, there’s only one way to interpret this cost-benefit analysis. Half the country made the correct call in 2016. Let’s hope we can persuade enough of the rest to stop chanting “Project Fear” before it becomes clear just how terrifyingly right we were.
A letter to the man who has devoted his life to taking Britain out of the EU – regardless of the cost to his fellow man
“No one, but no one, is talking about leaving the single market”
If you had told people that you wanted them to vote for Brexit because you wished to pursue unconstrained neoliberalism; because you wanted to sell off all of Britain’s public services to the highest bidder –
If you had told them that the only sovereignty you were interested in was that of the Conservative party, which would then be able to railroad through its anti-human rights agenda without fear of oversight by supranational courts –
If you had told them that the only freedom you were interested in was that of big business, which could similarly turn a blind eye to worker protections, like maternity pay, a minimum wage, and the right to sue for wrongful dismissal –
If you had told people that you wanted them to vote for Brexit because you wished that large British companies could operate outside EU laws designed to protect the environment and address the climate crisis –
If you had told people the truth, that the EU is not holding them back, but that it is holding you, and the climate crisis-denying industrial lobbyists who pay you, back –
(You did not, of course, tell people any of this, because not one of them, in their right mind, would have voted for it)
If you had told people all these things before the referendum – and, ideally, if you had not resorted to gerrymandering the vote, illegal campaign collaboration, illegal overspending, illegal data harvesting, and disinformation on an industrial scale –
And the country had somehow, in flagrant violation of its own self-interest, subsequently voted for what you proposed … then even those who voted against you would, somewhat incredulously, have got behind Brexit.
Because that is the essence of democracy: promises are made. Choices are made on the basis of those promises. The people who made those promises then do their level best to deliver them.
But to your everlasting shame, you said none of those things. Therefore, those who voted against you will, as long as they draw breath, resist you, and all who support you, and all that you stand for.
A collection of the various contradictory, hypocritical and downright absurd positions held by Brexiters
1. “Love Europe, hate the EU. Know nothing about either.”
2. “Proven grifting, self-serving liars [Farage, Watson, Robinson] are far more trustworthy than people who occasionally make mistakes [MSM, experts].”
3. “A bunch of billionaire capitalists and toffs who have never before lifted a finger to help the working class are the champions of the working class.”
4. “People who passionately believe that they are doing the best for their country are traitors to their country.”
5. “Wanting the status quo to continue, and believing in sensible, incremental reform, is extremism.”
6. “You metropolitan elites are so condescending. You are also stupid and wrong.”
7. “The UK is shackled to the EU that we just democratically voted to leave!”
8. “Once we leave the EU, we will be free! To do what, that we can’t do already, I , er … what about that commie Corbyn, eh?”
9. “Once we leave the EU, we will be free to trade with the rest of the world that currently makes up 55% of our trade!”
10. “We must vote to leave the EU, where we have enormous influence, in order to join the WTO, where we have next to none.”
11. “Every single Remain warning is Project Fear. Even the ones that have come true. Those were just coincidences. But the predictions about Turkey joining, the EU collapsing, the EU army, are all bang on.”
12. “Do you have some sort of crystal ball? No one can predict what will happen after Brexit! However, I happen to know that Britain will thrive!”
13. “It is vitally important that we leave the EU IMMEDIATELY. Even though 97% of the country didn’t give a crap either way until four years ago.”
14. “Leaving will have zero negative consequences for Britain. Also, sovereignty is worth making sacrifices for.”
15. “Things were so much better before we joined the EU. Which is why we begged to join it and overwhelmingly approved the move in a referendum in 1975.”
16. “EU membership has been terrible for Britain! It has only increased its GDP by a factor of 12 during that time, a better performance than any other major power except China.”
18. “The UK gets outvoted at the EU all the time! Yes, 2% of the time! Like I said, all the time! Never mind that this is entirely on laws that benefit ordinary people and protect the environment, which Conservative and UKIP MEPs inexplicably voted against.”
19. “We must get rid of this stifling EU red tape! Even though 75% of all businesses clearly have no problem with it, as they are desperate to remain in the EU, I can’t name a single example of it, and most of it is rules that directly benefit workers, consumers and the environment.”
20. “The EU inflicts so many nasty laws on the UK! Yes, of course I can name one, but sorry – doorbell.”
21. “The EU is weak, corrupt, bloated and on the verge of collapse. It is also a nasty bully that has not given an inch and treated the UK atrociously.”
22. “Other countries are growing much faster than the stagnant EU! Yes, I know my baby son is growing much faster than me. What of it?”
23. “The EU is failing! Look at the poor, suffering unemployed youth of Greece! Should we help with bailing them out? No, fuck those lazy goatbangers.”
24. “Foreigners are taking all our jobs. Which is why employment is currently at its highest levels ever.”
25. “We need to look after our own first. And everyone on benefits is a scrounger, and no, I can’t spare the price of a cup of tea, you stinking bum, you brought this on yourself.”
26. “Getting a good deal will be the easiest thing in history! But at the first sign of difficulty, we must flounce out and embrace no deal.”
27. “No deal* is better than a bad deal**, and a bad deal is better than a good deal***.”
*WTO (hopefully)
**WAB
***EU membership
28. “I voted for no deal, even though no one mentioned it as a viable option at the time, and most Leave campaigners dismissed even the possibility as Project Fear.”
29. “If we leave without a deal, we’ll have an extra £39bn! Which will go some way to offsetting the £90bn that Brexit has cost so far.”
30. “If we leave without a deal, we’ll have an extra £39bn to spend! On paying off our £39bn debt, which the EU will oblige us to do before it negotiates the deal we will be begging them for.”
31. “We don’t like the EU telling us what to do. However, that time Britain told a quarter of the world what to do, while asset-stripping its lands and subjugating its peoples, without allowing them any voice at all – that was fantastic.”
32. “German car manufacturers will come to Britain’s rescue and get us a good deal! Also, Germany is trying to conquer the world by stealth through the EU.”
33. “It’s not all about the economy, you know! But as it happens, the economy will boom.”
34. “Of course Britain can survive outside the EU! It’s the fifth largest economy in the world! Never mind that it was sixth and floundering when we joined.”
35. “Of course I’m not racist! I discriminate against people on the basis of their religion, not their colour. But only if most of its followers are brown.”
36. “You hate democracy! I love it so much that I want to deprive you of your right to peaceful protest and insist that we vote on this issue only once.”
37. “How dare you attack my freedom of speech!” … *Blocks/reports in bid to provoke Twitter ban/triggers pile-on*
38. “Ugh, Remoaners, they have no arguments. Always so aggressive and nasty! All I did was lazily copy and paste a deliberately provocative and insulting tweet, like ‘Why don’t you fuck off to the EU if you love it so much?’, with a cry emoji.”
39. “Ha, you believe ridiculous conspiracy theories about the Russians and American billionaires funding Brexit! I, meanwhile, believe there is a worldwide plot by the elites, funded by George Soros or some other Jew, to destroy white culture and inflict multiculturalism on the world.”
40. “So, how many refugees have you taken in? What do you mean, the same number as Islamist terrorists that I have killed?”
41. “My opinion is just as valid as yours – more so, in fact – even though you can support yours with evidence and logic and I’ve only got a Daily Express headline and a feeling in my tummy.”
42. “I demand to see evidence for each of your assertions, and refuse to provide any for mine.”
43. “I demand that you provide evidence for your assertion, so that I can dismiss it as fake news from an obviously biased source. Like the GUARDIAN. Which as we all know is funded by … oh. An independent trust.”
44. “Of course my vote wasn’t swayed by dark Facebook adverts!” … *Backs up argument with meme originally posted on Facebook*
45. “When you’re in England, you should speak English. And when we are in Spain, you should speak English.”
46. “Jean-Claude Juncker is a drunk! Meanwhile, Nigel Farage is just a bloke’s bloke who enjoys a pint, David Davis is a very laid-back person, and Tommy Robinson is naturally hyper.”
48. “We’ll just train our own doctors and nurses. Regardless of their aptitude for the job or whether they want to do it. In a year.”
49. “Eighty per cent of people voted for pro-Brexit parties in the 2016 general election, which was about a range of issues. But no, you absolutely cannot add together the figures for Remain-supporting parties in the 2019 European elections, which were plainly just about one.”
50. “Once all those Muslim ‘refugees’ have crossed into southern Europe, they can just saunter freely into the UK! Crammed into the backs of lorries and via hugely dangerous dinghy crossings of the Channel!”
‘We’ is a slippery little pronoun that can have any number of meanings – a fact that populist demagogues are gleefully exploiting
A world without pronouns would be a tedious one. “Bryan Fielding was an ordinary man. Bryan Fielding did not think of Bryan Fielding as an ordinary man, but Bryan Fielding most certainly was.” Pronouns save us time by avoiding the need to spell out the objects of our utterances in full at every mention.
But they can be slippery blighters.
When I use the word “I”, you have a pretty good idea of who I’m talking about. With a bit more context (where you are, who you’ve been talking about), the same goes for “he”, “she” and “they”. Minor confusions can arise in sentences like “When Sara kissed Barbara, she felt amazing”, but things are usually clear enough.
“You” is a trickier proposition. If I address a statement to “you”, I might be talking to you and you only, to you and others present, or to you and others of a group of which I consider you a member who are not present. Those who have studied foreign languages will know that while English lumps all these possibilities together, other tongues admit more distinctions: the French tu and vous, the German du and Sie.
But of all of personal pronouns, by far the biggest potential troublemaker is “we”.
Without any context, all you can be sure of when someone says “we” is that they mean “me, plus at least one other individual” (and even then you’ll still be wrong some of the time). This may or may not include any or all present; it may include only one other person, or it may stretch to every other human being who is living, has lived, or is yet to be born.
But the crucial ambiguity – and one that populist demagogues have gleefully exploited – is this: “we” may include or exclude the person being addressed.
Some examples to show you what I mean.
1. “We are not amused”
I’ll get two special cases out of the way first, as although they’re not especially relevant to my argument, they’re fascinating.
The “royal” we, meaning “I”, while associated most closely with Queen Victoria, has actually been with us for almost a millennium. Depending on who you believe, the first to use the word this way was either Henry II or Richard I, and its intended signification, apparently, was “God and I” – ie it was an attempt by the monarch to shore up his authority by claiming a “special relationship” with Him Upstairs.
It soon spread by contagion to anyone who overrated themselves – Margaret Thatcher was widely lambasted for her comment, “We have become a grandmother.”
2. “How are we feeling today?”
This “doctoral” we, also sometimes heard from carers of small children, actually means “you”. It’s a trick GPs, specialists and other “responsible adults” use to put the patient or child at ease from the off by creating a sense of affinity.
3. “What shall we do tonight?”
The most basic meaning of “we” is “the person speaking plus the person they are speaking to”, namely “me” and “you”.
4. “We are gathered here today …”
Ever since the first human ancestor ululated from a treetop, it’s been possible to address more than one individual at a time. Now, in the era of mass communication, you can talk to millions.
5. “Sorry we’re late”
The second simple meaning of “we”, again mostly restricted to real-life applications, has a radically different meaning from no 3: it’s “me, plus another person or persons, and explicitly not you”.
6. “We know from Godel’s second incompleteness theorem…”
The academic we, used in dissertations and other research literature, is frowned upon by most pointy-heads these days, precisely because it presupposes the reader’s agreement. “We” should strictly refer only to the authors of the study, not to “the scientific community” or “people in general”.
7. “We are destroying the planet”
What you might call the “Attenborough we”: generally taken to mean everyone; humanity as one monolithic mass. Can be extended to denote all humans past, present and future: “As a species, we do not know what our legacy to the universe will be.”
8. “We’re gonna win the league”
In the above cases, the referents of “we” are generally very clear (while the first two cases are a little odd, they are agreed by longstanding convention). There’s no potential disparity between who they actually mean when they say “we” and who you understand them to mean.
But now we’re entering murky territory. How can this 20-stone football fan, who hasn’t kicked a ball in anger since 1987 and whose sole contribution to match strategy has been to bellow “Useless wanker” at the team’s left-back, possibly claim any ownership of the on-field players’ success?
What he is signifying by “we” here is the team, or the club, that he supports, rather than himself and his Stella-swigging friends in the Fyffes End. He feels a connection to the club, even though his contribution is limited to a few hundred quid a year in season tickets and foul-mouthed support from the sidelines.
The club itself, assuming he hasn’t disgraced himself by throwing coins at the opposition goalkeeper, barely knows that he exists. But when that trophy comes home, he celebrates just as wildly as if he were the team’s veteran captain.
This is the chief appeal of tribalism: the ability to opt into and out of whatever aspects of membership you see fit. Your responsibilities within the tribe are minimal, and yet you feel able to take your share of the credit in the event of a victory.
9. “We won the war”
If you were a 95-year-old who served in the North African campaign, you might be justified in claiming a small part of the acclaim for Britain’s victory in the second world war (along with millions of Russians, Americans, Chinese, Indians, Poles, Aussies, Kiwis, French, etc). But as a fat middle-aged loser from Coventry who was born in 1963, you absolutely cannot.
What this old bigot means to be understood by “we”, of course, is all British people who have ever lived and will ever live. There is no such thing as an “innate British character” that you simply pick up by virtue of being born in these isles.
It also raises the question, how far back does Britishness go? To the Empire? To the Norman kings? To King Alfred? To Boudicca? And where do conscientious objectors, traitors, naturalised immigrants, and anti-Brexit liberals fit into your “we”?
Wars these days are fought on values, not nationalities. It’s difficult not to conclude that, were the same conditions of 1945 to emerge today, this old bigot would pick the other side.
10. “We don’t like strangers round here”
The speaker presumes to speak on behalf of all members of a group, when in fact their view may not be universal or even widespread.
There is undoubtedly a malicious element to this “confrontational we” – it is after all an attempt to intimidate by suggesting that the speaker has extensive support. But there may not necessarily be any deception involved; the speaker may well believe, correctly or not, that everyone else thinks the same way he does.
11. “We have a remain parliament”
Permavictim rentagob Chloe Westley of the TaxPayers’ Alliance has no such defence. When she says “we” here, she wants Brexit voters to believe that she is on their side. For one thing, she’s Australian, so not even part of the group she claims membership of. For another, she’s paid by US corporations to spread falsehoods in order to secure a damaging no-deal Brexit that will actively harm British citizens and facilitate the sell-off of public services and the quashing of workers’ rights and environmental protections, all to swell the coffers of the Koch brothers.
12. “We voted out”
An intimidatory “we” similar to No 10, and a favoured tool of the Brexit voter. There’s a huge and important disjunction here between who the speaker intends us to picture, and who they actually mean. In this case, the intent is to give the impression that the United Kingdom voted as one unit to leave the European Union, when in reality, only 17.4 million people, or 26% of the population, did.
Just under a quarter of the population voted for the exact opposite outcome, and the remaining half voted for nothing at all (which you could legitimately interpret as a passive vote for the status quo). Furthermore, 3 million EU citizens and a sizeable number of the 1.5 million British migrants to the EU were denied a voice.
(The phrase “the people” is often used in the same misleading fashion: “the will of the people”, “the people have spoken”, “enemies of the people”.)
But this “we” falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. As long as your collective aims are nice and broad and vague, you can muster quite a lot of “us” in support of them. But as soon as you try to narrow down those aims to specific course of action, the illusion of unity vanishes and your following splinters – as we are now seeing with the various warring Brexit factions.
“What do we want?”
“Change!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
“What specific changes do we want to make?”
“Well, Parvinder favours option A. Sally prefers option B, which is completely incompatible with option A, and Keith doesn’t really have any ideas. He’s just cranky.”
13. “Let’s take back control”
The “we” is rather buried, in the form of that apostrophe+s, in Vote Leave’s ingenious and probably decisive slogan for the 2016 referendum campaign, but it’s crucial.
Almost three years after the vote, no Brexit campaigner has yet been able to explain how leaving the EU will restore any control to the average person in the street. The truth is, the only beneficiaries of the change will be whoever is in power at Westminster and, some way down the line, the big businesses that lobby them.
And they will benefit precisely at the expense of the average person in the street, whose rights and protections they will be free to curtail once the UK leaves the European Union. The slogan is a ruthlessly cynical exploitation of the ambiguity of the word “we”. It implies everyone in the UK; in fact it means only a very small subset of that group.
Dominic Cummings and his fellow cacodemons were essentially trying to pull the same trick as your GP – but with far less benevolent intent. In return for nothing more than putting a cross in a box, they seemed to promise, you could become part of a project, a team, a family. You’ll feel valued again! And that family will go on to achieve untold glories, that you can share in!
Alas, the bitter truth for Brexiters is the same as for the football fan: while you may experience the elation of vicarious victory, it’ll cost you a small fortune, and you won’t so much as lay a finger on that trophy.
Cummings, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Westley et al can say “we” till they’re blue in the face – but know this: you, the common person, are not and never will be part of their club.
The Bad Boys Of Brexit is an all-warts study of an irredeemable crook massively overstating his role in a fraudulently procured disaster
Going down?
I’m guessing not all Remainers and opponents of racism will be falling over themselves to wade through The Bad Boys Of Brexit, Arron Banks’s account of his part in the EU referendum campaign, so in a fit of masochism, I’ve done it for you.
While no one would be fool enough to pick this up expecting a literary tour de force, it’s not as unreadable as you might think. It was not, after all, written by Banks himself, but by the journalist Isabel Oakeshott, who, soulless monster though she be, knows how to string a sentence together. And the first-edition text at least, prior to the two hurriedly bolted-on updates, clearly passed under the eye of a halfway competent editorial team. (It would have been nice if they’d decided on a tense and stuck with it, mind.)
Tonewise, it’s a different story. It’s repetitious, riotously unfunny, and unremittingly smug. If a normally proportioned man waved his wang this hard, he’d take off. It’s also pretty dull, unless your idea of a rollicking yarn is a bunch of fat middle-aged men slapping each other on the back or, more usually, stabbing them there. If you’ve ever wondered what Hannah Arendt meant by the phrase “the banality of evil”, look no further than this book.
Banks’s boundless arrogance does, however, lead him to say quite a lot more than he probably should, which, especially now that we know so much more about the people, places and programs involved in the runup to the referendum, means there are some isolated pockets of interest.
Dishonour among thieves
One of the mildly surprising things about the book is the sheer malice that many of the anti-EU crowd bear towards each other. They block each other on Facebook, snipe at each other in the press, hire private detectives to spy on each other, and serve each other writs. It’s like a boring, R-rated version of the Borgias.
And even by his own account, the pettiest, most paranoid culprit of all is Banks. For someone so purportedly keen on “playing the ball, not the man” (p 212), he spends a stupendous percentage of the book insulting, mocking and otherwise belittling every other player on the field.
The principal targets of his ire are the rival Vote Leave campaign (notably Matthew Elliott and Dominic Cummings), but there are harsh words aplenty also for Nigel Lawson, the Conservatives, most of Ukip (special rancour is reserved for “slanty-jawed, boggle-eyed bellend” Douglas Carswell), the directors of Grassroots Out (“second-rate nonentities”), the director of Get Britain Out, George Galloway (“irritatingly sanctimonious leftwing political hasbeen”, “bellend”), and “Flexciters” Richard and Pete North.
Remember, these are almost exclusively his allies he’s talking about. What’s more, these are his edited, sanitised, fit-for-public-consumption recollections. Imagine what he says and thinks about these people in private. Now imagine what he says and thinks about people who aren’t on his side in private.
The only people Banks shows a modicum of respect or affection for are Kate Hoey (!) and his main muckers, Wigmore, Farage and Tice – and even then he takes every opportunity to scoff at them and minimise their role. It’s a wonder the man has any friends at all.
Socking it to the (common) man
Perhaps the book’s most miserable failure is its attempt to portray a battle between valiant underdogs and the Establishment. You know, the “ordinary people versus the elites” shtick that the likes of Darren Grimes are still breathlessly spurting in a bid to whip working-class white men into a murderous frenzy. Right now, it’s worrying. Here, in its infancy, it’s risible.
Protagonist Banks, the Banks in the book, shows an awareness of bad optics early on when he cancels a swanky donors’ dinner aboard HMS Victory and upbraids Andy Wigmore for moaning publicly about anti-offshoring legislation. But writer Banks, secure in the glow of his Brexit victory, clearly no longer gives a shit.
Virtually all the dramatis personae in this story are either billionaire investors, peers, politicians or wealthy businessmen. And most of the inaction takes place against a backdrop that would give Leave voters a myocardial infarction: Brown’s, Boodle’s, Claridge’s, private members’ clubs in Soho, Belizean beaches, Swiss ski chalets, the Hamptons, Cannes, Cunard’s Queen Elizabeth. Think Keeping Up With The Kardashians, minus the beauty. And the class.
This isn’t the Ordinary Man against the elite; this is one dodgy, illiberal, corporate elite, narked at having to pay taxes and give its staff paid maternity leave, trying to oust the liberal elite that champions those things. It’s the Meribel bubble versus the Westminster bubble.
While Banks might be a little more familiar with Joe Schmo than your average politico, he holds him at least as much contempt. You can count the “ordinary” people in the book on the fingers of one hand, and they’re mostly irrelevant flunkeys.
If Banks has any sort of grand vision for Britain’s post-EU future, he doesn’t share any details here. But you can bet your bottom diamond that there’s no place in it for Sid and Phyllis from Cromer.
For my money, there was never any vision. Putting hundreds of thousands of people out of a job, taking away citizens’ rights and opportunities, driving carers and nurses out of the country and wrecking the country’s global standing is all just a jolly Beano wheeze to Arron Banks. All that matters is winning and socking it to The Man, because The Man has a slightly bigger yacht than Arron does.
Banks is desperate to be seen as a sort of Robin Hood figure, a roguish champion of the people; but this is a Friar Tuck-shaped Robin Hood, who lives in a castle bigger than the Sheriff of Nottingham’s, and who instead of stealing from the rich to give to the poor, steals from everyone to give to himself and his Merry Fucking Crooks.
A head for sin and a body for business
While Banks doesn’t actually confess to any crimes – he’s not that stupid – the whole book drips with dodginess.
He starts off by boasting that both of the book’s two protagonists, himself and Andy Wigmore, were expelled from school for theft, and it goes downhill from there. Almost everyone he consorts with is arrested or under investigation at some point. George Cottrell. Lord Ashcroft. Richard Tice. Jim Mellon. Roger Stone. Jason Miller.
And there are 100pt comic sans question marks over practically every episode. The Love Saves The Day charity. The diamond mines. The GoSkippy data. Goddard Gunster. The Russian ambassador. Banks clearly has zero respect for the rule of law – every mention of the Electoral Commission, HMRC, or any other legal entity is accompanied by a snort – and one of the main threads of the book is his battle to circumnavigate spending limits. He practically admits that his modus operandi is to bend and break laws and worry about it afterwards.
I suspect the only reason he hasn’t yet been brought to book is that he has powerful friends and extremely expensive lawyers.
At one point in the book, he says he will “do anything” to win the referendum. It’s hard to imagine that rampant cheating would be excluded from that list.
There’s no smoking gun here. But there are five used rounds, a receipt from a gun shop, and a set of grubby fingerprints a few inches lower than you would expect on the wall.
Ming the Clueless
Sure, so Banks backed the winning horse in the EU referendum and the 2016 US elections. But those are the sole victories in a campaign otherwise characterised by laziness, incompetence and rank stupidity. First, he and Farage crash and burn in Thanet South. Then he backs Steven Woolfe as UKIP leader. Then the Leave.EU campaign loses the official designation to Vote Leave. Then there’s the Brexit song, the Brexit essay contest, the Brexit concert, the Brexit movie, coming out for Leadsom and Fox as Tory leader, backing Diane James for UKIP leader … Everything the man touches turns to shit.
For all his boasting that he single-handedly won it for Brexit and Trump (while Wigmore is a constant presence in the book, Banks is careful to ridicule him at every turn and deny him credit for anything, while Farage is portrayed as a snivelling wreck and Tice as a bimbo), it’s clear even to the casual reader that both campaigns succeeded in spite, rather than because of this malevolent gnome. Banks was just a chancer with a bucket of cash who happened to pick the right side – which he promptly did his level best to eliminate with friendly fire.
Sure, pushing the well-worn immigration buttons worked well enough; but any twat could have done that, as many have done for centuries. None of the good ideas were Banks’s, none of the technology was his, and he wasn’t exactly a convincing TV pundit. He’s no writer, as the ghosting by Oakeshott proves, and he’s not even very good at lying.
Banks will die before admitting it, but Leave won only because it possessed the twin nuclear weapons of Cambridge Analytica’s psychological profiling and real-time advertising technology, and lies about immigration and Muslims.
In a way, the book’s title is apt. Sure, being aged between 52 and 54, the protagonists certainly aren’t boys by the dictionary definition. Nor are they “bad boys” in the cuddly, idiomatic sense. There’s no Will Smith or Martin Lawrence in this line-up, and there’s certainly no George Michael (although Wigmore could serve as a passable cunt double for Andrew Ridgeley).
They are, however, truly execrable human beings.
In any other reality, Banks would by all rights have been a knock-off DVD salesman or a promoter of illegal bareknuckle fights. It’s only in our universe – curse our luck – that the stars aligned perfectly and elevated him to the level of dull James Bond villain.
Miscellaneous notes
It is depressingly predictable to note that at no point in the book is Banks ever found to be reading anything, or doing any research of any sort. He knows what he knows about the European Union – presumably based on a quick scan of the redtops over breakfast – and that is all he will ever know.
Jacob Rees-Mogg, the haunted pencil, features in the book just twice, and in minor roles, not particularly connected with the Leave campaign. Did he deliberately keep a low profile until he saw which way the wind was blowing?
It transpires that Farage is a bit of a self-doubting snowflake, who crumples at the slightest criticism. No great surprise there, but it’s good to get independent confirmation that prison will utterly annihilate the slimeball.
Banks has a wife and five children. He mentions them once, and in the course of a year, spends one solitary afternoon with one of his kids when he gets injured playing rugby. Lord only knows how those poor souls will turn out.
(Oh, and by the by, Arron, I’m afraid my acquisition of your book will not have swelled your bank balance by much. Sue Ryder, 50p.)
No, you felonious lardbucket, I didn’t enrich you by buying it full price.
Dem notes, innit
xxi. Both Banks and his literal partner in crime, Andy “Wiggy” Wigmore, were expelled from school for theft.
xiii. “Peter Hargreaves … thinks British finance industry will thrive free of the Brussels straitjacket.” Well, Pete is on his own here. Even the soberest assessments point to enormous risks, short-term chaos and long-term decline for the City.
xxvi. On Nigel Farage’s thwarted bid to win the seat of South Thanet in the 2015 general election: “Taken together, the excessive spending, the push polling, and the very murky ‘sharing’ of UKIP’s private data suggest an extraordinary stitch-up by the Tories.”
Might this stinging injustice explain why Banks and friends felt justified in deploying the exact same dirty tricks in order to win the referendum?
xxvi. “Our brief was to … keep immigration at the top of the agenda.”
xxvii. “Our strategy was to go direct to the people, using techniques that bypassed the mainstream media.” Why would you want to do that? Oh yes: so that you can tell them lies as big as you like, and no one can call you out on them.
xxvii. “We were … gloriously unaccountable.” You say that …
4. Wigmore “comes from a long line of fugitive pirates and buccaneers” and is “descended from Blackbeard himself”.
11. “We are going to be blunt, edgy and controversial, Donald Trump-style.” I present to you, ladies and gentlemen, the world’s first blunt, edgy weapon.
11. Of the nascent Leave.UK campaign: “We were calling ourselves The Know. Because the wording on the ballot paper was going to be ‘Do you want to remain in the European Union? Yes, or no?’” 1) Top-notch info you have there, Mr Banks. 2) Jesus Christ. How did these intellectual Lilliputians ever persuade anyone of anything?
12. “Today’s story was Osborne’s plan to abolish permanent non-dom status. I’m not offshore myself, but kept my head down. Doesn’t do to be [seen] sticking up for the super-rich.” But you would dearly have liked to – and Wigmore did.
15. “Cameron wasn’t wrong when he said UKIP has more than its fair share of fruitcakes and loonies.” This is the party Banks has given £1m to and chosen to back.
15. “[Cameron] should really be aiming for associate membership that leaves us with free trade but no political or economic integration with the eurozone – in other words, what people voted for back in 1975.” First up, if it is what they voted for, they weren’t paying a blind bit of attention.
Second up: why are you now banging on about no deal?
16. “Cameron will be calling in favours from the global elites, and we need sympathisers from abroad, too.” Narrator: apart from Donald Trump, they didn’t find any. And we all know what happened when Barack Obama had the temerity to express his opinion on the matter. Fucking hypocrite.
17. UKIP sends out an email to its members that signs off, “Remember the Battle of Britain, let’s get airborne.” Banks is furious because it makes the party of doddering xenophobes look like a bunch of doddering xenophobes.
17. Banks spends £1,800 a month on health insurance. The monthly premium for comprehensive cover for a 49-year-old smoker supporting a family of six is £330 tops. What the hell is wrong with you, man? Might impending mortality begin to explain his cavalier attitude to a) the future of his country and b) his own likely destiny within the UK justice system?
18. “A rightwing thinktank in the States called the Heritage Foundation has promised to find us a couple of red-hot interns”. First mention of one of the members of the shady network of corporate-backed climate-change-denying lobby groups attempting to influence politics and wider opinion in the UK. Start being scared here.
21. Banks wants to hire Dominic Cummings (who ended up heading Vote Leave) as a strategist. We know from the film Brexit: The Uncivil War exactly how far off Cummings will have told him to fuck.
22. Billionaire property tycoon Richard Tice: “I’m in. Whatever. Needs. To. Be. Done.” Why the disturbing zeal? It certainly doesn’t feel as if it comes from a passionate desire to defend the working classes.
22. “The Indy … tried to imply Jim Mellon is a bit dodgy.” What, suggest that your main sponsor, the co-owner of your mysterious Isle of Man-based bank and innumerable shell companies, who made “countless millions” in the carnage of 1990s Russia, is anything less than squeaky-clean? Moi?
24. “A few years ago, I bought several old De Beers mines: two in South Africa and two in Lesotho.” Why would De Beers, the second largest producer of diamonds in the world, offload viable mines? If they couldn’t efficiently extract any more precious stones, how could rank amateur Banks expect to?
25. “[Daily Mail wetwipe] Andrew Pierce has made a career out of telling people what they want to hear.” Indeed. What would be far more socially useful, of course, would be someone who told them what they need to know.
26. Banks admits he’s “worried” about the Electoral Commission, because “they will be overseeing the legalities of the referendum campaign”.
29. “[Donald Trump] represents a new kind of politics, and I think it’s coming here.” What makes you think that, Arron? Gut feeling?
31. Banks claims that a global economic crisis is imminent, “which is why I am stockpiling gold”. (Gold and other precious metals and minerals – like, er, diamonds – only increase in value when the usual investment favourites, like government bonds, shares and currencies, are a bad bet.) Banks is banking on a crash. Surely, though, he would never take active steps towards triggering one purely for his own gain?
31. Email from (eventual Vote Leave chief) Matthew Elliott to Banks: “When we win the referendum, we’ll both have invitations piling up, and people saying they were with us all along.” How’s that prediction working out, Matty?
36. “The big question Remainers will ask is what Britain will ‘look like’ outside the EU. We need an answer.” Banks goes on to give a brief summary of Richard North’s “Flexcit” idea – the one actual plan that any believer in Brexit bothered to concoct, involving a slow, managed departure from the EU – and seems broadly supportive. And now here we are, 31 months later, with all such “Brexit lite” options jettisoned, and no new suggestions beyond unilaterally dropping all our tariffs to zero and crossing our fingers.
38. Banks fervently hopes Corbyn is Labour leader by the time of the referendum: “Everyone knows Corbyn’s a Eurosceptic.”
40. Banks toys with hiring Goddard Gunster, a US firm with expertise in polling for referendums and social media. GG claims a success rate of 90% in its previous campaigns, which include: blocking taxes on sugary drinks and plastic bottle deposits in several US states, defeating Hillary Clinton’s healthcare programme, and thwarting Michael Bloomberg’s attempt to ban large sugary drinks in New York.
Banks later said in an interview: “What [Goddard Gunster] said early on was ‘Facts don’t work’, and that’s it. The Remain campaign featured fact, fact, fact, fact, fact. It just doesn’t work. You have got to connect with people emotionally. It’s the Trump success.”
NB: Leave.EU’s failure to declare its costs relating to the hiring of Goddard Gunster was one of the reasons the Electoral Commission found it in breach of electoral law and fined it £70,000.
Banks tried to convince the watchdog that Gunster’s advice had come before the official campaign period began or that the advice was given to him in a personal capacity, not to the campaign. But Goddard Gunster is mentioned umpteen times in the book, throughout the campaign, and Gunster himself admitted that some of his staff were embedded in the Leave.EU offices.
40. Another wizard idea from PR geniuses Banks and Wigmore: a Brexit concert. Early suggestions for a name include BRock Around The Clock and BPops. Read the full, rather amusing story here.
41. Farage is pleased about the announcement that the wording on the referendum ballot paper will be leave versus remain instead of yes versus no or in versus out. “He thinks it’s the best question we can get.”
43. First mention of Jack Montgomery. Here, a “young PR guy”. Now, deputy editor of Breitbart and deputy head of communications for Leave.EU. One of the nastier pieces of work.
44. Banks believes someone has hired a private detective to spy on him, and thinks Elliott is the culprit. He writes to Elliot threatening to retaliate by deploy his own security firm: “It’s called PrecisionRiskIntelligence.com.” Catchy! Its staff, apparently, include ex-MI5 and SAS employees. Does this perhaps begin to explain the spectacular failure of Britain’s security services to properly investigate the Brexit swindle?
(“Precision Risk Intelligence was established in 2005 to provide our clients with innovative excellence in risk and crisis management, cybersecurity and investigation services with a global reach,” says its website, which doesn’t offer much beyond assurances of top-level, extremely vaguely defined services, but you can check it out here if you really must.)
48. The sole mention in the book of any of Banks’s five children: one paragraph about his son sustaining an injury in a rugby match, and Banks going home to look after him. What a salt-of-the-earth family guy.
51. Banks gets stuck in traffic and doesn’t like it. We suggest he steers clear of Kent for the foreseeable future.
57. “Farage let fly about the ‘toxic Tory toffs from Tufton Street’.” Another Leave faction Banks and co were apparently at war with. Are they still, I wonder?
79. “Andrew Neil’s asked me to speak at an event for the Addison Club, his very elite private dining society.” Neil has sworn oaths on sacred relics that he is neutral on Brexit.
84. “We’ve hired Cambridge Analytica, an American company that uses ‘big data and advanced psychographics’ to influence people … They devise psychological profiles of the electorate, using thousands of pieces of data to filter the population into 150 personality types. With this information, you can tailor campaign material to particular groups … It may sound a bit creepy, but these days it’s how most political parties work.”
85. “Cummings has been shooting his mouth off about having two referendums.”
88. “Immigration, immigration, immigration … Wiggy reckons [Theresa May would] be the best person to front the Leave campaign.”
92. “Liz [Bilney]’s ‘pop star’ Antonia Suñer launched the Brexit song.” Let the River Run currently has a shade over 5,000 views on YouTube, most of which resulted from a tweet mocking how few views it had on YouTube.
96. Banks and Wigmore meet the Russian ambassador. “We’d been invited by a shady character called Oleg who we’d met in Doncaster at the UKIP conference.” Banks tells us where they met, what they drank, and some of the banter; but other than a vague “Our host wanted the inside track on the Brexit campaign”, he’s shtum on what they actually talked about.
97. “We shook hands and promised to meet again.”
In November 2017, Banks responded to the Electoral Commission’s questions about his contact with Russians thus: “My sole involvement with ‘the Russians’ was a boozy 6 hour lunch with the Ambassador.”
It has since emerged that he met officials from the Russian embassy – also known as spies – as many as 11 times before and shortly after the referendum.
100. Strong insinuation that Tory MPs Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove are homosexual lovers.
102. “[Campaign strategist] Gerry [Gunster] thinks the final vote will be 55% Leave.”
103. Banks blames the EU’s open borders policy for the terror attacks in Paris on 13 November 2015. Rather than, say, the terrorists. Or hate preachers, or inequality, or mental health provision, or disaffected youth … If a man catches a bus on his way to commit a murder, do you ban buses? Twat.
106. Four months earlier, Banks was insistent that having separate campaigns would be to Leave’s advantage. Now he says: “Two rival campaigns is a waste of time, money and effort” and suggests to Vote Leave that the two groups merge.
106. Ah. Everyone pipe down. Banks doesn’t just give to charity – he runs one. Let’s take a look, shall we?
From the Charity Commission:
Love Saves The Day
Registered charity number 1161939
Registered 1/6/2015
Removed 31/5/2018
Charitable objects Such charitable purposes for the public benefit as are exclusively charitable according to the laws of England and Wales as the trustees may from time to time determine.
What the charity does General charitable purposes, education/training, prevention or relief of poverty, economic/community development/employment
Who the charity helps Children/young people, elderly/old people, people with disabilities, people of a particular ethnic or racial origin, the general public/mankind
How the charity works Makes grants to individuals, makes grants to organisations, provides services, provides advocacy/advice/information
Have you ever seen a charity with a wider remit? To help “the general public/mankind”? There are no records in existence of how much money Love Saves The Day raised, or where it went. It’s a colossal piss-take.
118. Lord Ashcroft conducts a poll. 75% of the UK thinks immigration is out of control. Thanks, Daily Express and Nigel Farage.
120. Banks asks economist Ruth Lea, of Economists for Brexit, for help with an economic question. She says it’s not her area of expertise. So what is economist Ruth Lea’s area of expertise?
121. Banks sends luxury hampers to all his staff for Christmas, and buys all his kids hoverboards. Who said there was no money in insurance?
My dad was director of an insurance broker and my mum was a senior executive with one of the very largest insurance firms. Between them, they cleared about £110,000 a year.
123. “Vote Out, and the repercussions will be as big as the fall of the Berlin wall.” Nah, mate. The fall of the Berlin wall led to forgiveness, strengthening, and unification.
132. “The Brussels-funded CBI”. Part of the CBI’s remit is to carry out economic surveys. The European Commission is naturally interested in some of these, so it pays for them. The work amounts to 0.6% of the CBI’s income.
132. “It’s a shame our competition for the best essay on what shape Brexit should take never really took off. We didn’t get the quality of entries we’d hoped for.”
136. The one thing you would expect Banks to know something about, given his insurance background, is the financial services industry. “Brexit will breathe new life into the UK’s financial services.” Hmm. The Economists for Brexit might agree with you on this … if it was their area of expertise.
137. Banks observes boldly that Toyota, Volkswagen, Nissan, Rolls-Royce, General Motors and Jaguar will never reduce investment in or leave Brexit Britain in a million years. He’s also quietly confident that Leave.EU are going to win the nomination for the official Leave campaign. Jonathan Cainer can rest easy.
138. Wigmore accuses Vote Leave of “astroturfing” – giving the impression of widespread grassroots support, when they do not have it. As far as we can determine, this is Wigmore’s sole accurate observation in the campaign.
141. “I reckon [BPop will be] the biggest political rally since the war.” If you’re after racing tips, Arron might not be your guy.
142. The mini-Michelin man disses the “meddling” Pope (for saying cooperation is better than competition, in a possible veiled dig at Brexit).
145. “We’ll keep the Airbus wings, which we make here.” Oh, Arron, you are truly spoiling us.
146. Banks has a meeting with Jim Pickard and Kiran Stacey, two journalists from the Financial Times. He gets them so drunk that they start oversharing. Neither has said a bad word about him since.
(@odysseanproject is Dominic Cummings, director of Vote Leave and my neighbour at Exeter College, who has since quit Twitter.)
155. Of entrepreneur John Mills’ involvement with Vote Leave: “Sometimes it’s best to cut your losses.” Sound advice, there, for once, Bankski. Perhaps Theresa May could do with taking a leaf out of your book. Perhaps you could do with taking a leaf out of your book.
156. Four months before the referendum, Banks spends nine days “checking on the mines in South Africa”. He fills up a few pages with what the rest of the gang are up to, but is oddly tight-lipped about his own activities.
158. “The sinking Vote Leave ship”. Shades of “the failing EU” and “the failing New York Times”. Starting to wonder if this man could correctly predict night following day.
158. Steve Baker, the ERG Tory MP, is “pompous … a little greaseball”. For once, we are more than happy to agree with Banks on something.
166. Security staff apprehend a man trying to enter one of Farage’s gigs “armed with a machete”, apparently. I can’t find any mention of this anywhere. Surely they’d have exploited the publicity – unless the grunts were overly heavy-handed with the guy and it wasn’t a machete at all?
189. Now he’s skiing in fucking Meribel. Anti-elitism can be such a drag.
190. Leave.EU spend £3.2m on targeted leaflets, positively brimming with half-truths and outright lies, which are delivered to 8.1 million homes. (The infamous Remain “propaganda” leaflet was sent to all 27 million UK households at a cost of £8m – but it’s restrained in tone and I for one can’t find a falsity in it).
190. “I don’t think we’ll need to print as many copies as we planned,” Banks admits. Why might that be? Not because you’ve obtained targeting data from your shady American friends, perchance?
191. Banks whines that the BBC, in selecting the lineup for a Brexit debate at Wembley, is “trying to make Brexiteers look like a bunch of grumpy old men”.
192. “Wiggy and I like winging it.” No plan? No shit.
195. “Negative campaigning is not engaging the public. We are going to be the keen, bright-eyed optimists.” A proper tea-spluttering moment.
197. The plot to weaponise Turkey. Depressing stuff.
198. “The Duke of Edinburgh, a man with a great sense of humour”. I bet this foreskin stretched over a balloon spends his evenings watching old VHSs of Jim Davidson gigs.
199. Banks whines about Barack Obama coming out for Remain. He’s clearly sore that Leave still haven’t managed to find a single person outside Britain who thinks Brexit is a good idea. (Trump didn’t give his blessing until after the vote.)
206. Matthew Elliott and Bernard Jenkin “were putting it about that I’m a racist homophobe and misuse personal data to boot”, so he serves Elliott with a writ. Rule of thumb: if Arron Banks serves you with a writ, you’re likely on to something.
212. “Let’s play the ball, not the man.” Banks’s entire modus operandi is to play the man. Dirt-digging, smear campaigns, playground insults … If he ever makes contact with the ball, it’s by accident.
216. Now he’s in Miami, clearly a crucial swing state in the Brexit vote.
217. All bar one of the acts booked to appear in Banks’s mega-BPop concert pull out, leaving them with a bill of Phats and Small.
218. Now he’s in the British Virgin Islands. Another must-win constituency for Leave.
219. “We have comprehensively overspent on the campaign anyway.” I repeat: “We have comprehensively overspent on the campaign anyway.”
224. “I’m sorry to report that our last stop was a sleazy gay bar in Soho, the only place still open.” Why is he sorry to report this? Might it be because … he’s a raging homophobe after all?
229. Banks wants to emulate Beppe Grillo’s populist Five Star Movement. Funny I should read that on the day the oinking little fascist and Wigmore are reported to have met not Italy’s far-left populist movement, but its increasingly frightening far-right equivalent, La Liga.
230. Describes Jeremy Corbyn’s campaigning efforts for Remain as “useless” and “half-hearted”. “Everyone knows he’s been a lifelong opponent of the undemocratic EU.”
232. Mocks George Osborne’s latest economic forecast (GDP 6% lower by 2030 in the event of Brexit). Leave.EU issues press releases labelling him “Mystic Gideon”. This also marks the point at which the Leave campaign started deriding any negative predictions with playground snarkery like “Scaremongering!”, “Prorect Fear!” and “Have you got some sort of crystal ball?”, all the while merrily scaremongering about Turkey joining the EU and predicting that the UK will be billions better off out of it.
233. More brickbats, this time for the “slightly loopy” director of Get Britain Out, Jayne Adye.
234. Negotiations with Martin Durkin, maker of Brexit: The Movie, which Banks is part-funding. The feculent toad is concerned that it will just be a puff piece for libertarianism, and wants more anti-immigration material, and clips of Farage.
The Wikipedia page for Brexit: The Movie claims its budget was £100,000 and that it was entirely crowdfunded, but when it was announced in January 2016, it already had £50,000 in “seed funding”, and here Banks tells us he’s forked out another £55,000 for the project.
Durkin is a climate change-denying free-market libertarian very much in the mould of, if not in the pay of, the network of fake rightwing thinktanks, the Institute of Economic Affairs, the TaxPayers’ Alliance, Civitas, et al.
His previous project, Britain’s Trillion-Pound Horror Story, put forward the case that public spending stunts the economy (and thus, indirectly, promoted austerity). The one before that, The Great Global Warming Swindle, was rebuked on multiple counts of imbalance and inaccuracy by the media regulator, Ofcom.
235. Peter Bone and Tom Pursglove are caught paying themselves out of Grassroots Out funds. Banks calls them “second-rate nonentities”.
238. Tice’s turn to get into hot water, as the Inland Revenue demand to see his records.
239. An openly scornful account of Tice and Banks’s interview with the Treasury Select Committee, in which Banks manages to slag off literally everyone on the committee, plus everyone else who has been summoned before it.
241. “London’s status as an English-speaking global hub with a legal system people can trust is what lies at the heart of our success.” True, but it stops being a hub the second you drag it out of a close-knit alliance with its neighbours, blatantly subvert its laws, dismiss its lawyers and judges as “out-of-touch elitists” and set out on the road to regulatory divergence.
243. It feels odd, from our 2019 vantage point, that this marks the first appearance of Jacob Rees-Mogg in the book – and even then, he only has a bit part, on the Treasury Select Committee, rather than any significant role in a referendum campaign.
246. Apparently, constantly being called a racist gets Farage down. In that case, we have some top-drawer advice for him.
246. “A Victoria’s Secret model … turned on her heel, leaving him staring forlornly at her perky derriere”. Fear not, Benny Hill fans! Your hero is alive and knocking back cocktails in Knightsbridge!
248. The Republicans are confident that Donald Trump will win the Republican nomination for the presidency, but privately, none thinks he has a chance of beating Clinton. Nor do they foresee any prospect of Brexit. This is early May 2016.
250. The BPop concert is back on the cards, with prospective acts including Alesha Dixon and Soul II Soul.
251. A discussion of possible hosts and acts for the event reveals who they regard as anti-EU: Jeremy Kyle, Michael Caine, Sol Campbell, Joey Essex, Roger Daltrey, Mick Jagger. Wigmore, ever the groundbreaking PR man, suggests hiring some Stringfellow’s table dancers.
251. More worries about breaking spending limits, and contortions to try to pacify the Electoral Commission.
253. More bellyaching about the Tories busting spending limits at the 2015 general election: “We’re supposed to be Great Britain, not a banana republic!” This, two pages after confessing to pulling every trick in the book to bypass those limits himself.
253. On seeing rushes from Brexit: The Movie, Banks bleats that it contains no reference to Isis terrorists infiltrating the migrant caravans into Europe. Hm. Maybe that’s because no one has the tiniest scrap of evidence of that happening.
255. Banks and Wigmore balk at a section of the film on “the joys of unregulated toys”, for once rightly divining that a reference to the EU’s efforts to prevent children’s deaths might not be the massive Brexit recruitment tool they were aiming for.
257. David Cameron’s “world war three” Mansion House speech. Nothing much of note, but I’ll never pass up an opportunity to link to this debunking of a Brexiter staple.
258. “The Electoral Commission should wind their necks in.” Gosh, all this checking-that-people-aren’t-breaking-the-law stuff is such a drag, isn’t it?
259. Some exquisite ball control from Banks in this section. The Guardian’s “synthetic rage”; “self-appointed spokesman for political correctness Chuka Umunna”; “Tommy Two Belts Soames”; “invisible Tim Farron”; “Eurosceptic corpse Bill Cash”.
261. Banks gets high and mighty (or as close as he is able) about the £350m “blatant lie” on the side of the Vote Leave bus. An only superficially different version of which he included in the Leave.EU leaflets that were printed and sent to 8.2 million households two months previously.
261. In a braggadocio email to Vote Leave and other Leave groups, Banks admits to having paid £5m into the campaign (sans mentioning its ultimate source, of course). FYI, the commission’s full breakdown of donations to both campaigns is here. Interesting reading.
Banks signs off thus: “We will set this campaign alight in the last four months!” There are six weeks of the campaign left. Probably just an oversight, but … an odd one.
262. Hatchet job on the IMF. “Dodgy single currency groupie” Lagarde, “in the pocket of Brussels”, “made incorrect predictions”, “Project Fear”. Sometimes you get the impression that this man believes his own bullshit.
263. Rees-Mogg reappears, but again, not specifically in connection with Banks or any Leave campaign, just on Robert Peston’s sofa.
264. Ryanair founder Michael O’Leary has changed his mind on the EU, and Banks is incensed. This must have happened, Banks assumes, because O’Leary has been bribed, not because, ooh, I dunno, he has acquired new information and rationally revised his opinion. This is how Banks’s mind works: the only thing people can possibly care about is money, because all he cares about is money.
265. Farage has begun his battlebus tour targeting the areas that Gerry Gunster’s polling technology has identified as being full of “persuadables”.
266. Banks jokes about killing Dominic Cummings. Ha ha, très drôle.
267. Another “humorous” reference to killing Dominic Cummings.
268. Believing himself the victim of an “establishment stitch-up” (Farage pulled from a pre-referendum debate at Wembley), Banks … doxxes everyone involved. Yup, he sends the personal details of five Vote Leave staff and the director of the BBC to tens of thousands of people on his databases. He doesn’t seem to get any blowback from anyone but Farage.
270. “The truth is that a post-Brexit economic boom will bring thousands more jobs.” Banks neglects to explain by what mechanism this will occur – and, indeed, why it is needed, when the employment rate is currently the highest it has been since records began.
271. A new tranche of acts pulls out of BPop Live after finding out that it is promoting Brexit. Meanwhile, Liz Bilney, Leave.EU’s chief exec, threatens to quit because funding the concert in breach of campaign spending limits “is a jail offence”. Banks still thinks he can land AC/DC and the Who.
279. Banks praises Michael Gove’s “People in this country have had enough of experts”. Of course he does. Of course he fucking does.
282. Ever had a rightwinger accuse you of “attempting to politicise” a tragedy in its immediate aftermath? A school shooting, a far-right terrorist attack? Because, basically, they want to silence you until the fuss has died down?
“We will do whatever we need to get people talking about it [immigration]. Today, that meant exploiting a dreadful incident in Orlando, Florida, in which 49 people were murdered in a gay nightclub by a Muslim with an assault rifle.”
Omar Mateen was an American citizen; EU membership has precisely nothing to do with levels of immigration to the UK from majority-Muslim countries; Britain already has strict controls at its borders; and leaving the EU will harm, rather than improve, UK security, because it will jeopardise the UK’s access to the EU security database and its participation in the European Arrest Warrant. These points were curiously omitted from the race-baiting, fearmongering advert that Leave.EU put out.
286. The Battle of the Thames: Bob Geldof’s cruiser goes bow to bow with a few fishing trawlers, Kate Hoey panics about being seen with Farage, and Farage shits his pants. Banks claims it as another win for Leave.EU (rather than for Leave more broadly).
(One question for the – mostly Scottish – fishermen: if the EU really has destroyed your livelihoods, then how come you’re all still fishing? Couldn’t you have switched to a more lucrative career? And how come you can afford to take a week off to sail down to the Thames for a cheap stunt?)
292. The murder of MP Jo Cox by white nationalist Thomas Mair. “Wiggy, Tice and I agreed we should suspend campaigning immediately.”
294. “Lagarde says jobs, growth, investment and financial markets will all suffer if we leave the EU. It’s just noise.” Arron knows best, because … hang on, why do you know best again, you jumped-up insurance salesman?
295. “Our contacts at Labour Leave think 43 Labour MPs would vote Out if they could.” Wonder what that figure is today.
295. “We’ve done some polling on Cox. The tragedy doesn’t seem to have made any difference to voting intentions on Thursday.”
298. Banks gets all jizzy over an anti-EU letter from an old war bigot who is still bitter about not being thanked by every single Frenchman and Belgian for his actions in the second world war. I thought the UK was leaving the EU, not Europe?
298. A Norwegian anti-EU campaigner is described as “a lovely Scandinavian blonde”.
300. “20 million leaflets, 10 million letters, 9 million views for our best video, 1 million social media followers, and reaching 15 million people every week.” Curiously, he doesn’t mention what their “best video” was. I’m guessing it wasn’t a bland paean to sovereignty. If anyone knows, do share.
302. Banks and co select Italian restaurant Zafferano as the venue for their celebratory Referendum Day lunch. Zafferano was opened by Claudio Pulze, who began his hugely successful career founding high-end eateries in 1975, having moved to the UK to exploit the opportunities afforded by its membership of the EEC.
302. Banks buys Farage a first edition of Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls as a gift for Referendum Day. “It seemed so appropriate, because the bell was very definitely tolling for Nigel.” Farage seems unappreciative; perhaps because he knows the phrase “the bell tolls for you” means “you are dead or about to die”.
303. Banks is excited about the discovery of a valuable blue diamond in one of his South African money-laundering holes. If you fancy delving further into this particular mineshaft, there’s more info here.
You never have to dig far before you get to Russia.
306. Banks takes out a full-page advert in Telegraph thanking Farage for his efforts. It features a quote from Teddy Roosevelt: “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly.”
The quote could not describe Farage more perfectly: a man who has devoted himself to attacking everyone else’s mistakes while failing to offer any constructive suggestions of his own. He is a shirker, a sniper, a backseat driver, a wrecker. He hasn’t achieved one positive thing in his life.
308. “This decision has started a potential domino effect across Europe, with other countries facing referendums.” Bang on, except for the small point that the UK’s Brexit convulsions have sent support for the EU rocketing to unprecedented levels across Europe.
308. In an email to Christopher Hope at the Telegraph, Banks sets out, with characteristic immodesty, how the “war” was won. It’s worth reading in its entirety, because I have a feeling much of this will ultimately be found unlawful – and if it isn’t, outrage will ensure that the law is changed. Highlights: “The use of big data for the first time in any election the UK left Leave.EU with a massive advantage over both official campaigns … Leave.EU had 100,000 followers on Twitter and 800,000 supporters on Facebook. Weekly posts often broke 20 million … a broad range of content [lies, to you and me] designed to appeal to different types of voter … We were able to update this material in real time to improve its appeal … Goddard Gunster were able to mine this database to conduct in-depth demographic polling and recommend precision target messaging.”
This is all remarkably reminiscent of what Cummings said about how AIQ/Cambridge Analytica helped Vote Leave. Even if you accept that the technology is morally and ethically acceptable, it looks very much as though Vote Leave and Leave.UK shared the same technology and, quite probably, the same illegally harvested data.
310. A rise in racist attacks follows the vote. Banks dismisses people’s concerns out of hand like the sociopathic little shitpiece he is.
312. “It’s unlikely that the Chinese or the Russians are hacking our website.” This is unintentionally revealing. How can he be so confident that the Chinese and the Russians have no interest in attacking his operation? The least sinister interpretation here is that he knows they share the same goals – ie, the undermining of democracy and security in Europe.
313. The phrase “biggest democratic decision in British history”, which the likes of No Facts Chloe and Darren Crimes still parrot on a daily basis, has entered circulation within a week of the vote. Yeah, kind of hard for it not to be the biggest democratic decision in history when it’s the most recent, and given that population increases over time.
314. What Arron Banks wants: “Immigration cap of 50,000, with a £5,000 deposit. The economy would explode. Singapore on steroids.”
Singapore’s spectacular economic growth is almost entirely attributable to the open migration policy it embraced until 2011 (its population almost doubled over that time, largely because of migrants). In 2014, non-resident workers made up 38% of the non-resident Singaporean workforce. In the face of populist unrest, it has recently introduced curbs on immigration – and seen its growth slow commensurately.
(Anyone objecting to the “floods” of migrants coming to the UK could do worse than read this analysis of the situation in Singapore. Yes, even the unskilled workers are valuable.)
315. Tory leadership contest: “The only two I trust with carrying out the people’s wishes are Andrea Leadsom and Liam Fox.” Backing some more nailed-on winners there, you walking rectal prolapse.
320. “We’re ready to put the Tory party to the sword so we can stop the establishment murdering Brexit.” That policy is beginning to bear fruit as we speak.
320. Banks is ecstatic that Corbyn looks likely to survive the Labour leadership challenge. “We [Ukip] stand to gobble up 40% of their supporters.”
321. “He’s our greatest ally. Long live Jezza!”
321. What to do next with the infrastructure and power base they have built? Banks fancies setting up “a rightwing Momentum”.
323. Health scare. Banks is told to rest and sort out his lifestyle, and thus misses the trip to the Republican National Convention in Cleveland.
325. The rest of the gang meet Roger Stone, who has since been indicted for witness tampering, obstructing an investigation, and lying to Congress about his communications with WikiLeaks and its founder, Julian Assange. The same Julian Assange that Nigel Farage slipped into the Ecuadorian embassy for a covert meeting with in March 2017.
325. The rest of the gang meet Donald Trump, who has since … sorry, jumping the gun.
326. Farage is mortally wounded, again, when a blogger approaches him in the street and asks, “How does it feel to be hated, Mr Farage?”
327. Farage’s aide, George Cottrell, is arrested for fraud at Chicago airport.
Cottrell’s CV reads as you would expect: expelled from Malvern College for illegal gambling; became an expert at shadow banking, offshore accounts, transmitting money across borders without detection, and money laundering. Cottrell was found guilty of wire fraud and released from prison in March 2017 after serving eight months. However, the price for this short sentence was “information”. Watch this space (and George, watch your back).
It’s worth noting that when “Posh George” is arrested, Farage and his so-called friends … just leave him there alone and fly home.
329. Another incoherent, hypocritical rant about the “Westminster bubble” and the “Remain-supporting establishment”.
329. “Voters … coalesced around Brexit not only because they believed in it, but also because they wanted to teach the cosy elites a lesson, that the status quo does not serve everyone well.” I’m not going to argue with him here; I’ll just note in passing that Banks and his nefarious ilk are definitely not the solution.
331. Epilogue: Farage has been invited to help Trump on the presidential campaign trail.
333. Republican delegates mob Farage. “They appeared to know more about Brexit than a good many British voters!” What’s this, Arron? You’re suggesting that a large number of British voters … didn’t know what they were voting for?
336. “Nigel got a call from Steve Bannon.”
340. “Nigel’s old friends Steve Bannon and Jason Miller …” You’ve no doubt heard about avowed white supremacist Bannon. Here’s the low-down on Miller.
341. Banks decides to back Diane James to succeed Farage as UKIP leader. Sorry, Diane.
349. Farage is suddenly “battle-hardened”, having been a portrayed as a thin-skinned, whingeing snowflake all the way through.
350. Banks’s response to Trump winning the presidential election: “We’ve won.” That’s right – fresh from his victory over the liberal Goliath in Britain, Arron, by spending no more than a few days across the Pond, has spurred the weak, struggling Donald Trump to the same feat in America.
351. Wigmore has crush on Kellyanne Conway.
352. “He [Trump] and Nigel had forged an unbreakable bond.” How many times has this unbreakable bond led them to meet again since?
358. Of Douglas Carswell: “the slanty-jawed, boggle-eyed bellend”.
358. “I am convinced that the Queen secretly loves him [Farage], and would welcome him as a knight of the realm.”
359. Meetings with Hollywood moguls about a Bad Boys of Brexit film. Let’s hope that goes as well as Brexit: The Movie, South Thanet, Let The River Run, BPop, and Leave.EU’s bid for designation as the official Leave campaign.
362. Banks dismisses a report on his and Wigmore’s involvement with the Russians as “absolutely mad”. Can’t wait to see how that defence holds up in court.
362. In a beautifully appropriate coda, Wigmore is stripped of his diplomatic status for breaching the Vienna convention. The person who made the complaint to the Foreign Office? One Dominic Grieve.
1. “Love Europe, hate the EU. Know nothing about either.”
A world without pronouns would be a tedious one. “Bryan Fielding was an ordinary man. Bryan Fielding did not think of Bryan Fielding as an ordinary man, but Bryan Fielding most certainly was.” Pronouns save us time by avoiding the need to spell out the objects of our utterances in full at every mention.
In the above cases, the referents of “we” are generally very clear (while the first two cases are a little odd, they are agreed by longstanding convention). There’s no potential disparity between who they actually mean when they say “we” and who you understand them to mean.
The speaker presumes to speak on behalf of all members of a group, when in fact their view may not be universal or even widespread.
An intimidatory “we” similar to No 10, and a favoured tool of the Brexit voter. There’s a huge and important disjunction here between who the speaker intends us to picture, and who they actually mean. In this case, the intent is to give the impression that the United Kingdom voted as one unit to leave the European Union, when in reality, only 17.4 million people, or 26% of the population, did.
(@odysseanproject is Dominic Cummings, director of Vote Leave and my neighbour at Exeter College, who has since quit Twitter.)
190. “I don’t think we’ll need to print as many copies as we planned,” Banks admits. Why might that be? Not because you’ve obtained targeting data from your shady American friends, perchance?
286. The Battle of the Thames: Bob Geldof’s cruiser goes bow to bow with a few fishing trawlers, Kate Hoey panics about being seen with Farage, and Farage shits his pants. Banks claims it as another win for Leave.EU (rather than for Leave more broadly).