Have you considered getting some horns? They rather become you.
Dear Dominic Cummings,
I know. It’s not fair to label all Brexit voters and campaigners as racists. For one thing, you bamboozled thousands of curry house owners into backing leave by (very quietly) promising them relaxed immigration rules for workers from Asia. On the other hand, you’d be hard pushed to find a white supremacist who didn’t swing behind it. The question here is whether it was hatred of foreigners that was driving you.
Shame, cos I was quite proud of this one.
If I’d needed any
convincing, by the by, that Brexit was beloved of the far right, the last nine
years would have set me straight. I’ve been doxxed, received death threats, and
had someone send me a picture of the pub at the end of my street, merely for expressing
the view online that the UK might have been better off staying in the European
Union. And last time I went on a pro-EU march, a band of Brexit thugs outside
Westminster tube station physically attacked me and snapped my placard in two.
I’ll save us time and take it as read that you condemn such behaviour in the strongest possible terms, while taking care to note that those individuals are a tiny minority and not representative of the leave movement as a whole, yada yada.
In our university days, I never got any overtly Ku Klux Klan vibes from you, although Oxford at the time was whiter than a No 10 staffer’s septum and since you never left your room, I never saw you interact with anyone but me.
The Leave
campaign was a many-headed beast, but by far the two biggest heads were your
bunch, Vote Leave, and Banks and Farage’s Leave.EU. While you were at pains to
point out that there was no cooperation between your groups, somehow, your attack
lines somehow dovetailed beautifully.
Leave.EU took the low road, spreading egregious falsehoods and obsessively shrieking “immigration”, appealing to people’s lizard brains, their base emotions. Your Vote Leave, meanwhile, took a semi-respectable, pseudo-intellectual approach, avoiding outright deception in favour of half-truths, exaggerations and cherry-picked data.
Ah. Two classic pieces by the Bruegel of Bullshit, Darren Grimes of BeLeave.
Leave.EU’s manure fuelled the motivation – racism – but it was your seemingly rational arguments that gave the shit a patina of legitimacy. So millions of people were free to vote with their gut safe in the knowledge that they could justify it to themselves and others with impressive-sounding but meaningless stats and equally meaningless abstract concepts like “sovereignty”. The bald fact is, you’d never have got over the line without them, nor they without you.
“The EU … [has ] got this combination of free movement, can’t cope with Islamic nutjobs and growing political extremist parties” – Dominic Cummings, 2017
For all that, I’m
fairly sure that you, as an educated man, don’t subscribe to the belief that
white people are genetically superior to black or brown ones. I’m also sure that
you, as a devotee of data, know very well that immigrants are net contributors
to the economy; that they are twice as likely as native Britons to set up their
own business; that only a small minority of immigrants are terrorists or
rapists or scroungers and the crime rate among immigrants is no worse than
among the native-born; that the great majority of asylum claims are found to be
valid; that the only reason some are a temporary drain on state coffers is
because successive UK governments pandering to their perceived xenophobic base
have deliberately created an abstruse and arduous asylum process and that the
state forbids them from working for a year (compared with six months, for
example, in Germany); that much of Britain’s historic wealth and influence was
built on immigrant labour and technical skill (as well as on slavery, which is
just immigration minus the letting-them-in part); and that in future, without
significant levels of inflow, the UK’s population, and therefore growth, will collapse.
I’m sure you also figured out at some point that you can’t just click your fingers and get all of Britain’s young, sick, or recently retired people to fill in for the jobs that immigrants currently do.
You might even admit under light torture that the “problem” with immigration is not the reality of the thing – most people who’ve met immigrants hold no fear of them – but its perception, which has been shaped for years by the Daily Mail, the Spectator, Tommy Robinson, Farage, and, well, you.
You have been
vocal in recent years about the EU’s inability to reduce immigrant numbers. (Though
if this were a genuine worry of yours, one would think you’d prefer the UK to
be on the inside, since even though we take in fewer souls than almost any
other country, it’s just as much our concern as the other 27 states’, and it
might be useful to have access to Europol, Frontex, the Schengen Information
System and the European Arrest Warrant.)
Perhaps, though, you’re not a full-blooded racist, but merely a patriot: a believer in sovereignty and self-determination.
But here again, I can’t imagine that you, a self-professed philosopher king, haven’t twigged that membership of an economic bloc – impossible without some shared standards and values – involves surrendering a barely measurable fraction of national sovereignty in return for enormous benefits to commerce and culture and opportunities for its citizens. It’s a trade-off that 27 other advanced, wealthy countries have been more than happy to make.
I’m sure you’re also aware that Brussels never really dictated anything to the UK, because the UK was a full and equal partner in all decisions (some would say, thanks to the concessions won by Margaret Thatcher’s bullying, a more than equal partner). Indeed, many of the most unpopular laws “inflicted on” Britain, such as the measures to promote energy-efficient lightbulbs, were British proposals.
And if, as I will discuss in a future post, you hoped one of the bonuses of Brexit would be closer alignment with (ie subservience to) the US, can the notion of sovereignty really be so precious to you?
All of which leads me to near certainty that you, as a literate and numerate man, will have known full well that leaving the EU would do nothing to alleviate the immigrant crisis, so there’s no way you’d have inflicted such deep and lasting damage on Britain’s economy, its relations with its allies, and its global soft power, for that reason.
On balance, then, I’ll grant you the benefit of the doubt and conclude that racism was not your chief motivation for Brexit. While taking care to note that you collaborated with racists, used methods favoured by racists to win the hearts of racists, caused a massive rise in racially motivated attacks, and handed more political power to racists than they could have dreamed of 20 years ago.
Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a communist?
‘Humanity has produced few true visionaries. But it’s produced plenty of arseholes who thought they were visionaries.’ Photograph: Hannah McKay/Reuters
Andy Bodle here. Remember me?
It would be wrong to say we were close at university,
except in the strictly geometric sense. You were my neighbour on Staircase 9 in
Exeter College in 1991/2 – my fourth year, your first. We didn’t hang out much,
because you didn’t really hang out with anyone, but on the occasional Sundays you
would invite me into your room for a glass of port and a game of chess. I think
I managed a draw with you once.
But as this was the extent of our social
interaction, we didn’t exchange details when I graduated, and we lost touch.
So it came as quite a pleasant surprise when,
about 14 years ago, you turned up in my office as the guest speaker at our
morning meeting (I believe you were an adviser to Michael Gove as education
secretary at the time). We exchanged brief pleasantries and I think we might
even have mooted meeting for a drink one day. We didn’t.
It was a rather less pleasant surprise when, four
years after that, you appeared again, at the forefront of the insane clown
posse that was Vote Leave, the official campaign group advocating the UK’s exit
from the European Union. And to widespread surprise, you won.
In case you hadn’t guessed, that’s why I’m
reaching out after all this time.
Initially, I was angry – very, very angry, to the point that I found
out where you lived with the firm intention of knocking on your door and punching
you in the face. Nine years on, I’m still extremely angry – because my life is no less
ruined by Brexit, and the nation no less fucked – but since it’s neither healthy nor physiologically possible to sustain
that level of hatred for more than a few years, I’ve now calmed down enough to address you with
what I hope is some measure of restraint.
So here’s my question. Why? Why were you so
determined to drag the UK out of the EU?
Millions of businesses, millions of livelihoods, hundreds
of thousands of relationships, 4% of GDP, the fishing industry, the NHS, social
care, UK farming, household budgets, Jo Cox, Makram Ali, Duncan Keating, Arek
Jozwik, the freedom of movement of 68 million people across 30 countries, were
all acceptable casualties in the pursuit of what, exactly?
For most of the Brexit cabal, the answer
is not hard to fathom. They’re racists, they’re nostalgia-driven Thatcher loyalists,
they’re business leaders looking to slash costs by slashing workers’ rights, they’re
grifters, they’re short sellers, they’re Hayek/Friedman free-market loons,
they’re idiots.
You, though, as far as I’ve been able to
ascertain, are none of the above. You have no employees to strip rights from, no
CEO bonus to swell, no colossal hedge fund likely to be further inflated by
relaxed regulations, no willingness to spout populist bollocks born of a burning
desire to be in the public eye, and your college room was relatively light on
Nazi memorabilia.
You have offered us a few nuggets over the years,
most notably the arguments you put on buses and full-page newspaper adverts – £350m
a week for the NHS, Turkey joining, etc – but as half of us knew then and most
of us know now, they were bullshit.
There have also been some possible pointers in your
public statements, usually in evidence to various parliamentary committees, and
I’ll touch on those as they come up, but none of them really stand up to any
sort of scrutiny either.
There’s probably something buried in one of your interminable
screeds on Substack, but first, I don’t have enough time left on this earth to be
trawling through a quintillion words of vicious, poorly structured, self-aggrandizing
jabber, and second, I don’t see why I or anyone else should have to find out
why you made us poorer by parting with yet more cash.
So I wondered if, as a courtesy to an old
acquaintance, whether you might for once in your life, with minimal evasion,
divagation and tu quoque, provide a succinct and direct answer to my question?
I realise that a life spent on the extreme fringe
of rightwing politics, in the company of (by your own admission) charlatans,
fools and professional propagandists, will have caused irreparable damage to
your relationship with the truth. But for once in your life, Dom, please try to
include at least a smattering of it in your reply. Because I really, really
want to know why you did this.
One of your guiding principles seems to
be that the end justifies the means; that any amount of collateral damage is
acceptable in pursuit of your goals; that you can’t make an omelette without
breaking eggs. Which raises the question: how fucking big and delicious is this
omelette to merit the violent destruction of so many millions of eggs? And
where the fuck is it?*
This was originally intended to be a single
blogpost, but I don’t believe modern attention spans will relish everything I
have to say at once.
So over the coming weeks, I’ll list, in more or less reverse order, all the explanations I’ve been able to conceive of: the ideological, the cultural, the economic, the personal. Some are more plausible than others, but literally none of them, as far as I can tell, seems valid enough to justify the massive historic damage you’ve inflicted on your country.
*Sorry. I did warn you there was still some residual anger. But courtesy and diplomacy have never really been your thing anyway, have they?
Next time: did you back Brexit because you’re a Nazi?
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!”
1. “Love Europe, hate the EU. Know nothing about either.”