‘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.
As loyal reader (not a typo) will know, I’ve compiled a fair bit of material about Brexit and the rise of populism on this site. But there are of course plenty of others with more knowledge and a better work ethic than me, so there’s a veritable glut of information out there now. Only thing is, it’s all so … scattered. So this page will serve as a nexus for all the best articles, blog posts, tweets and other resources related to the ongoing clusterfuck.
It will of necessity be fairly skeletal to be begin with, as I wanted to get it up sooner rather than later, but I hope it will grow quickly – ideally with your help. Feel free to suggest any links you’ve found useful. (And don’t be upset if I don’t use them straight away. I don’t have as much time or energy to spend on this as I’d like.)
Brexit terminology explained: EEA/EFTA, non-tariff barriers, max fac, backstop, etc. Part of a huge reference resource
Full Fact: What proportion of UK laws are written by the EU (of which, just to remind you, the UK is a contributing member)? Answer: smaller than you think. There’s a ton more EU mythbusting on the same site.
European Law Monitor: did people really fall for Leave’s lies? All that matters is, enough of them did. (Leave campaign literature and post-ref polling information)
Fake thinktanks, data harvesting and targeted propaganda
Richard Corbett’s Long List of Leave Lies lists the fibs the Leave campaign told in order to cheat their way to victory, along with some impressive refutations
European Commission’s Euromyths: hundreds more examples of the above, generally peddled by the UK’s gutter press
The Bad Boys of Brexit: MEP Molly Scott Cato’s treasure trove of background info on the people who engineered the disaster: a cabal of chancers, shysters, hucksters and outright villains
We need to talk about Tufton Street: Details of the shadowy network of opaquely funded “thinkthanks” based at 55 Tufton Street – the Institute for Economic Affairs, Civitas, the Taxpayers’ Alliance et al – whose representatives, despite their complete lack of relevant qualifications and clear neoconservative agenda, are interviewed on political talkshows as “independent experts” on a daily basis
Why do American corporations want Brexit so badly? Read this 2014 essay on the Heritage Foundation website to find out. (Heritage is the US template upon which the UK “thinktanks” were built: climate change sceptics, anti-tax, anti-regulation, inexplicable charitable status, donors unknown – but agenda points squarely to big business)
Carole Cadwalladr’s Observer piece on the global data operation that drove Brexit, still one of the few efforts by mainstream media to get to grips with the problem
JJ Patrick’s Pfft-what-tinfoil-hat-bollocks-oh-no-it’s-suddenly-all-terrifyingly-true Alternative War, on the kleptocrat/populist disinformation masterplan. That’s a link to the Amazon page; there’s a good taster here
My bit on feeble populist arguments and how to rebut them. Basically, how to shoot down those dreary, witless souls who parrot slogans they’ve picked up from memes and the Daily Express – “They need us more than we need them”, “Millennium bug!” – but don’t really understand.
The Leave campaign won chiefly by lying and cheating – but also through the cunning manipulation of metaphors
“That’s the EU, that is.”
You may have heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the theory that language determines thought. Benjamin Whorf, building on the work of Edmund Sapir, suggested in his 1940 essay Science and Linguistics that what and how we think are at least partly shaped by the words and grammar that we use to conceive and express those thoughts. (Whorf’s preferred term for the theory was “Linguistic Relativity”.)
He reached his conclusion after noticing huge systemic differences between languages: how different peoples divided up the colour spectrum in different ways; how the Hopi language lacked a word for time, or any recognisable tenses; how Eskimo languages had multiple words for snow.
The idea was revolutionary, hugely popular, and ever so slightly racist. Could our perception – and therefore our behaviour – really be determined by the place we were born? By the 1960s, however, after a number of rebuttals, the hypothesis, in its strong form at least, had fallen out of favour. How could form really affect content? Surely, even if your language doesn’t have a word for a particular colour, you can still perceptually tell the difference?
***
All my life, I’ve loved language. Like Stephen Fry (but not as well as Stephen Fry), I’ve savoured it, sploshed in it, flossed with it and galoshed in it. I kept my first diary at seven. I was writing stories at 11, scripts at 13, and soon studying English, German, French and Spanish. At university, I dipped into Hopi, Swahili and Inuktitut (and Whorf). And as an adult, virtually every penny I’ve earned has come either from writing, or from editing other people’s writing.
And all this time, I never considered language to be that important. Ultimately, while it was a useful tool, a fascinating area of study, an enjoyable way to earn a crust and a handy icebreaker at parties, it didn’t butter many parsnips. It was a passion that paid the bills.
But the events of the last couple of years have prompted a rethink. Seismic changes in the political climate and public mood have been engineered in the blink of an eye – and language, particularly as used in mass media, seems to have been one of the main vectors of this change. Perhaps Mr Whorf wasn’t so far off the mark after all.
***
Whatever else you think about the people who are dragging the UK out of the European Union, some of their wordsmithery has been astute. While most have relied on untruths and logical fallacies, subtler tricks have also played a part.
The peerlessly sinister MP Steve Baker engineered the wording of the EU referendum, persuading David Cameron to change a YES/NO vote to LEAVE/REMAIN. (“Yes” tends to attract more votes from the undecided because of its positive overtones; meanwhile, “Leave” is muscular, active and Anglo-Saxon, while “remain” is languid, passive and Latinate.) And we know that it was charmless Jack Skellington clone Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, who came up with the viscerally appealing but meaningless slogan “Take back control”. And the use of terms like “swarms” and “cockroaches” by the likes of Katie Hopkins and the Daily Mail to describe refugees entering Europe is well documented.
The turns of phrase used by the Brexit mob are deliberately selected to provoke an emotional, rather than a rational response. “You’re being attacked!” they bellow, or “You’re being held prisoner!” This triggers the fear centres in the brain and bypasses the rational circuits. Because all rational circuits conclude that the better course of action is remain in the EU.
Here are a few instances of linguistic chicanery that have become far too deeply embedded in far too many consciousnesses.
Protectionist
One spurious argument you’ll hear quite often from Brexit diehards is that the EU is protectionist; that it discriminates against non-member nations by imposing tariffs on their goods but not on those of member states.
They have, of course, got things (deliberately?) arse about face. Before the EU, tariffs and non-tariff barriers applied to all trades between all nations. The EU was created precisely to abolish those barriers, but obviously only for those who signed up, paid their dues and contributed to the legwork. In any case, these benefits don’t just apply to EU members; the Union has agreements in place with 47 countries or trading blocs which drastically reduce the impediments to trade, with many more in the pipeline.
In leaving the EU and withdrawing from all these treaties, it is the UK that becomes the protectionist, isolationist party. A bold few are advocating that the UK should unilaterally drop all its tariffs, but there are no end of potential hazards to this, not least the fact that a) there is no guarantee that other countries will reciprocate, and b) such a move would flood the market with cheap foreign produce and inevitably destroy British manufacturing and agriculture.
Red tape
One of the earliest of the Brexit mob’s clarion calls. “We need to slash all this EU red tape!” they wailed. “It’s strangling British business!” Of course, what they mean by “red tape” more often than not is regulations that benefit consumers and workers: safety standards, consumer protections, workers’ rights and environmental safeguards. The only people this red tape is “strangling” – or, to put it more clearly, “denting the profits of” – are megarich CEOs and shareholders.
Dictatorship
As absurd as it may sound, this is probably the Brexit fanatics’ most popular way of describing the European Union. For their benefit, let’s compare concept and the metaphor and see how apt the comparison is.
A dictatorship is defined by most dictionaries as “a government by a ruler with absolute power, typically one who has taken power by force”. Britannica elaborates: “Dictators usually … maintain power through the use of intimidation, terror, and the suppression of basic civil liberties. They may also employ techniques of mass propaganda.”
The imagery falls down on every count. The EU does not have anything close to total power over its members; it is concerned largely with trade, agriculture and the environment. Defence, taxation, welfare, education and healthcare all fall within the purview of individual states. Moreover, member states have a say in those laws (and the UK has been disproportionately successful in this regard). The EU did not seize power in a coup, it does not intimidate or terrorise, and no one has had any rights removed. In fact, British people enjoy more rights and protections as a result of EU membership than they otherwise would.
Shackles
Of all the Brexiters’ misleading metaphors, “EU shackles” has undoubtedly gained the most traction. I see it dozens of times every day. But how exactly does EU membership resemble a pair of fetters connected by a chain used to bind prisoner’s legs together?
The UK’s relationship with the EU is a bond, but it is one that was entered into voluntarily.
It is a bond of friendship and cooperation, not one of indenture or servitude.
It is also one that the UK can leave of its own accord. Sure, leaving is a complex matter, because we’ve spent 45 years integrating our economy with 27 other countries’, but no great feat of escapology is required.
It is a mutually advantageous agreement, not one designed to restrain or oppress one party.
It grants both parties more freedom (of movement, of trade, lower prices, simpler travel, worker protections), not less. It doesn’t prevent us from doing anything that we wouldn’t otherwise have to do ourselves. 55% of the UK’s trade is already with the rest of the world, and Germany, for example, does plenty of importing from and exporting to other countries.
Alas, this tiresome pairing is now imprinted on millions of impressionable minds, and undoing it will require the work of generations, or at least several years of penury and global humiliation.
Other commonly used terms that feed into this fraudulent narrative of subjugation and freedom include colony, vassal state, yoke, escape the clutches, independence and, of course, betrayal.
Freedom of movement
There was one big obstacle to the Brexiters’ messaging plans. They had banged the immigration drum so loudly during the campaign that when they won, they had no choice but to deliver on it – by ending freedom of movement. But when you’re running on a platform of “emancipation from oppression”, how on earth do you sell the removal of people’s freedom to travel, study, work and retire across 31 countries?
Their solution, as ever, was to turn things on their head. So you’ll rarely hear Brexit supporters talking sheepishly about taking away your freedom of movement (except the staggeringly inept, like Jeremy Corbyn). Instead, they will rhapsodise about how we are gaining control of our borders. Never mind that the UK already has control of its borders – it’s going to gain even more luvverly control over them!
When they are not twisting words and metaphors for their own nefarious purposes, of course, the Brexit wrecking crew are twisting the words of Remain campaigners in an attempt to undermine their validity. The outstanding instance of this was Boris Johnson’s shameless reductio ad absurdum of David Cameron’s point about 70 years of peace in Europe, but it happens on a daily basis. Any attempt to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, for example, is met with a murderous “You defend terrorists! You love paedophiles!”
I don’t have the space here to begin on Donald Trump’s linguistic abuses, except to note that while his misrepresentations are considerably less sophisticated, they appear to have been no less successful. Might may not make right, but shite certainly seems to.
People armed with enough time and enough critical thinking skills can generally see through these cheap conjuring tricks. The trouble is, in this era of instant gratification and limitless diversion, that’s a rapidly dwindling band. Meanwhile, a growing number of people who cannot (or will not, because the message resonates with their animal fears) question the platitudes that feed their lizard-brain’s fears are fortified, emboldened by them, and ever more convinced of their righteousness.
***
How do you fight back against this? I welcome all suggestions, because the only plan I have right now sounds far too much like hard work. Call this language out wherever you see it. Challenge people to justify their metaphors. Exactly how the UK’s relationship with the European Union like a shackle? “Protectionist”? You mean, abolished all barriers to trade with its partners? Copy and paste in the dictionary definition of the chosen metaphor, to highlight the absurdity of their point.
And let’s hope that we get through to enough people to prove Benjamin Whorf wrong, and reverse the catastrophe of Brexit before it’s too late.
For more examples of semantic skulduggery, check out the Dictionary of Brexitese – the bespoke dialect of English developed by the far right to mislead the easily misled.
A Clumsy Parable about Immigration and Freedom of Movement
Once upon a time, there were two towns called Catford and Dogcaster that were constantly at war.
No one knows why the first war started. But because the citizens of the two towns did not know each other, they did not understand each other. Both found the ways of the animals of the other town strange and improper. “It’s disgusting, the way those stuck-up Catfordians strut around in their ridiculous clothes!” the Dogcastrians would say. “And how lazy they are, not going for walks, and sleeping for half the day!” Meanwhile, the Catfordians complained: “What savages those Dogcastrians are, chasing their tails! And they don’t even cover up their poo!”
And so, at the slightest provocation, the towns fought each other. They fought over the hunting grounds to the east; they fought over the lake to the west – “It is ours to fish in!” cried the Catfordians. “It is ours to swim in!” insisted the Dogcastrians – and they fought over mountains hundreds of miles away that no Dog or Cat had ever visited.
Sometimes the Dogs would win; sometimes the Cats. But no victory was ever sweet. For generation after generation, the townsfolk on both sides lost homes, livelihoods, loved ones. Life brought them nothing but poverty, disease and misery.
To make matters worse, in the dark, dense forest between the two towns, there lived a huge, vicious bear. The bear liked to eat Dogs and Cats, and because the towns were always so weakened by the wars and the disease and the poverty, they could not fight back. So the bear wandered in and out of both towns freely, and gobbled up whichever Dog or Cat it fancied.
After one particularly bloody war, the towns’ leaders met in secret. “We cannot go on like this,” said President Garfield. “Something has to change,” agreed Prince Prince. And they struck upon an idea. The two towns would begin to trade.
Dogcastrians were excellent cooks, while Catfordian food was plain. The Cats were highly skilled at dressmaking, while Dog clothes were dowdy and grey. So President Garfield and Prince Prince ordered their finest merchants to begin selling their wares to the other town.
The Cats and Dogs were wary of each other at first, but after a few weeks of meeting, and bartering, and buying, each side discovered that the other was not so bad after all. Before long, stalls selling delicious Dogcastrian food sprang up in the streets of Catford, and elegant Catfordian fashions became all the rage in Dogcaster.
Slowly, they grew accustomed to each others’ differences. Some Cats noticed that Dogs, who slept far less, were happier and more productive, and they made an effort to stay awake a little longer each day. Meanwhile, some Dogs began, rather sheepishly, covering up their poo.
Soon the inhabitants were cooperating on projects that benefited both towns. They drew up a plan to share the lake and the hunting grounds fairly, and began working together on improvements: a park, a bridge, a dam, and eventually, something no Cat or Dog had ever thought they would see: a beautiful, straight road, linking the towns together.
With travel between the two towns so easy, more and more Dogs and Cats began to make the journey. Some of the merchants even moved in to the other town to save time travelling. And sometimes, their families and friends followed them.
And after a short time, Dogs began to fall in love with Cats, and Cats with Dogs. Some of the ordinary townsfolk were horrified at first, but soon grew to accept it, and little Dogcats were born.
So began an era of peace and prosperity. The citizens of both towns had twice as many jobs to choose from, and the businesses twice as many employees. They had twice as much space to play in, twice a many schools to learn in, and twice as many shops to shop in. Citizens who were unhappy or persecuted in one town now had somewhere safe to go.
One day, the vicious old bear wandered into Catford, expecting another easy meal. But the Catfordians called their Dogcastrian friends, and together, the townsfolk fought bravely, and gave the old bear a bloody nose, and it shambled back into the forest.
But there were some Dogs who did not like this new world. They had grown up hating the Cats, and still did not trust them. They had not personally benefited from the prosperity that others had. These bitter, usually old, uneducated Dogs, whom the other Dogcastrians nicknamed “Whiners”, wanted things to return to the way they used to be – even if that meant poverty, disease and war. They liked leaving their poo out in the street for all to see. They spoke rudely to the few Catfordians they met, refused point blank ever to travel to Catford, and frankly, didn’t see why anyone else should, either.
And the Whiners grumbled, and they plotted, and they whispered false rumours about the Cats, and they waited.
***
Then, one fateful night, in a Dogcastrian pub called the Manger, a loutish Cat called Stimpy got into a drunken fight with a Dog called Ren, and killed him. As soon as the news got out, the Whiners saw their chance. “We told you!” they screamed. “All Catfordians are killers!” And they began loudly sharing other stories, true and false, about Cats doing bad things.
The ordinary folk of both villages were appalled and called for calm, but many believed what the Whiners were saying. A Catfordian stall was vandalised and burned. Retaliatory attacks on Dogcastrian merchants followed.
Soon, trade between the two villages ceased.
And before long, Catford expelled all the Dogs, and Dogcaster cast out all the Cats. Mixed Cat/Dog families were cruelly separated. Finally, the furious citizens of Dogcaster, whipped into a frenzy by the Whiners, tore up the road between the two villages, and in its place built a wall. Once again, the two towns were in a state of war.
And from the forest above, the vicious old bear watched the Dogcastrian builders lay the final brick in the wall, and smiled.
The referendum result drove me to go back and examine why Remain lost. In the process, I became a more committed Europhile than ever
The EU parliament shop. Yes, I did buy something. See if you can guess what.
To add to their grubby little crib sheet of mindless, soulless slogans – “You lost, get over it,” “They need us more than we need them,” “You hate democracy”, “Stop talking our country down”, “Triggered!” – the Brexiters have a new refrain: “You love the EU.” Common variants include “EU-loving leftard”, “EU stooge”, “Why don’t you fuck off to Europe if you love it so much?” and “How much is Soros paying you?” (Answer: not enough to make up for the rise in the price of my weekly shop because of Brexit.)
This is clearly intended to be an insult, disturbingly close in spirit to the “n****r-lover” of old, insofar as it implies that any fondness for the target is self-evidently evil or stupid.
The grand irony here is that before the referendum, I didn’t have any special affection for the EU (just as, four years earlier, animosity towards it was vanishingly rare – pdf). I was aware of its existence, of course: I’d heard about all the red tape and a few allegations of corruption (mostly from Ukip MEPs), and about how the accounts were never signed off, but I also knew that a lot of people had benefited from freedom of movement and research collaboration and was dimly aware that free trade generally creates jobs and keeps prices low.
I did a bit more research in the weeks before the vote, enough to satisfy myself that my instincts were broadly correct, and noted that while some proponents of Remain (Cameron, May, Osborne) were hardly the most trustworthy individuals, the Leave campaigners were, to a man (and Kate Hoey), corrupt, self-serving slimeballs churning out nothing but fearmongering tripe. As a result, when June 23rd 2016 rolled around, I voted Remain.
Then Leave won, and it was only then that I, and millions of others, began to realise exactly how much we had lost.
The EU Parliament building. You really should visit some time.
For the last two years, I’ve done little but debate with Leave voters online and devour articles and books on EU law and European history (I can particularly recommend Guilty Men: Brexit Edition by Cato the Younger). I interviewed EU citizens who were leaving the UK because of Brexit. I’ve now written 30 blog posts on the subject (one of which has racked up more than 600,000 hits and another of which was published in the New European, yay). I joined Best for Britain and began donating to all manner of Remain-related causes. I travelled to Brussels and visited the Parliamentarium and the Museum of European History.
And the more I found out, the deeper my attachment to the European project became. The Parliamentarium’s unpretentious explanation of the origins of the EU, as well as being fascinating, offered a sobering reminder of the dire circumstances that were the impetus for its foundation. The Museum of European History, with its tableaux representing decades of everyday life across 28 countries, lifted the soul.
I discovered that all those stories of red tape, corruption and unvetted accounts were a bunch of horseshit. At the same time, I found out that EU membership conferred vastly more benefits than I had imagined: consumer protections, basic labour rights, Horizon 2020, Erasmus, Erasmus +, free mobile roaming, Euratom, EMA, Galileo. And I watched with horror as the vote to leave not only unleashed a sickening wave of xenophobia in my once tolerant country, but led some of the vilest scumbags in existence to believe that they could get away with lies, abuse and psychological manipulation on an industrial scale.
So now I can say, proudly and with my hand on my heart: yes, I do love the European Union. And each one of your jibes and boasts and threats, Brexit fantasists, will redouble my determination to fight for the UK’s continued membership – or failing that, to retain the closest relationship possible.
No, the two things are not the same. And it’s a failure to appreciate this that has driven a wedge into the western world
You can fuck off as well.
Why are the UK and US suddenly so divided, so angry, so broken, when a mere matter of months ago, civility and relative prosperity reigned? Could the explanation be as trivial as a difference in interpretation of a nuance of meaning? Probably not, but let’s run with it anyway.
On Wednesday 16 May 2018, former stand-up comedian Lee Hurst posted this tweet:
That’s correct. In response to an article about a serious skills shortage caused by the overzealous application of immigration targets, Hurst, failed mayoral candidate, former warm-up man on Have I Got News For You? and veteran of literally several appearances on BBC1’s gammon-pleasing panel show They Think It’s All Over, piped up with the suggestion that the UK simply source the necessary workers from among its own citizens.
Why, you demand breathlessly, is Mr Hurst languishing in obscurity ranting to 46,000 racists on Twitter, when he should clearly be in City Hall – or even Downing Street? Well, I have one potential objection.
Labour shortages have been around for as long as civilisation. Did this 10th-dan dipshit, this walking cerebral vacuum, this hasbeen-who-never-quite-was who is now routinely blanked by all who once called him friend and whose greatest hope of glory these days is a retweet from Julia Hartley-Brewer, seriously imagine for a moment that his “idea” had never occurred to any of the 100 billion or so people who had preceded him on this earth? That he, Lee Hurst, with all the wisdom conferred by three months’ work as a telephone engineer, a few years being heckled on the east London standup circuit and a short spell presenting Shark Tank, had somehow produced the flash of genius that would rescue not just a nation, but a civilisation, from certain doom?
Here are seven (I’m sure there are more) glaringly obvious reasons why Hurst’s plan is the most moronic plan since Baldrick had a brain embolism while trying to translate his stupider cousin’s plan from Mandarin:
1) Unemployed British people might not want to do that particular job.
2) Unemployed British people might not have the aptitude for that job. You can’t just turn anyone into an IT genius with a wave of a magic wand, or even several years of training.
3) Unemployed British people might not want to, or be able to, move to the area where that job is based.
4) Training people takes time, and those jobs need to be filled now. This rebuttal goes double for all those Brexit twats insisting that we can simply replace all the departing EU doctors and nurses with British equivalents. TRAINING MEDICAL STAFF PROPERLY TAKES UP TO EIGHT YEARS. WE HAVE LESS THAN ONE. I DO NOT WANT DAZ FROM BASILDON PERFORMING MY CORONARY BYPASS AFTER A COUPLE OF AFTERNOONS WATCHING YOUTUBE VIDEOS.
5) There are undoubtedly people far better qualified for the job located elsewhere in the world who would enjoy the role more and be more effective in it.
6) What level of enthusiasm, commitment or productivity would you expect from a British person who didn’t want to take the job or move to the area in the first place?
7) What criteria will you use to select these people? A pin in the phone book? You know that in a free society, people choose jobs and not vice versa, right? That a society where citizens are told what work to do is … communist?
This sort of top-of-the-head chaff has been reeled off by belching illiterates in pubs up and down the land for centuries. But suddenly, thanks to social media, it is undeservingly reaching a wider audience. Now that the campaign to discredit intellectuals and experts has been running for several years, every jackass with a finger and an internet connection feels the need to make their voice heard on everything, regardless of their mastery of the subject-matter. Most of the time, these (largely far right, but there are plenty of culprits on the left) self-appointed arbiters offer nothing constructive to address the problems at hand, content merely to sneer at and abuse those who are giving it their best shot.
When they do make a suggestion, you can guarantee it’ll be entirely lacking in any of the substance or detail required to put it into practice. Donald Trump’s so-called policies; Rodrigo Duterte’s campaign to kill all drug dealers; Leave.UK screaming “Just leave”.
This, my populist friends, is the end result of the process I’ve been banging tiresomely on about. This is common sense, unconstrained by reason, in action; the system 1 brain, impatient at the slowness of system 2’s results, elbowing it out of the way and … fucking everything up even more. So it’s way past time, I think, to revisit a basic, but often overlooked, distinction in the English language.
The words “simple” and “easy” are often used interchangeably, but the difference is crucial. When something is simple, it requires little intelligence or effort to conceptualise or to articulate. Something that is easy, meanwhile, describes an action that requires little skill or effort to actually do.
Some examples to illustrate.
“Lose a stone!”
“Run a marathon!”
“Build a house!”
“Eat my shorts!”
“End world hunger!”
“Travel back in time!”
“Make Lee Hurst funny!”
These instructions are all eminently comprehensible – even John Redwood could understand them – but when it comes to actually implementing them, they range from difficult to downright impossible.
Simple cares only about the end result (usually some deliberately vaguely defined “better” state). Easy cares about how you get there.
Any idiot can shout slogans – indeed, that’s all most of them do – but it takes nous to apply them successfully, as Trump, and the Conservative government that the UK electorate has baldly ordered to “leave the EU”, are discovering. Moreover, there is no guarantee that, even if they do manage to realise these plans, they will be remotely effective.
When simple people propose simple solutions, they tend to omit two salient factors from their plans. 1) How exactly would you go about this? Implementation requires details. 2) Actions often have consequences beyond those intended. How do you know that you will a) achieve your stated goal and b) do so without causing even worse problems? George W Bush’s instinctive, system-1 reaction to 9/11 – the simple solution that the majority of people were demanding – was to bomb the crap out of the Middle East. Did that solve anything? No, it made things worse, killing millions, radicalising millions more, and causing further terror attacks, civil wars and regional instability.
Society’s unresolved problems are unresolved for a reason. The simple solutions have been suggested, and tried, time and time and time again and guess what, Lee Hurst? They haven’t fucking worked once.
Let’s look at some of the major problems still facing humanity, and at some of the fixes that the far right (and left) are proposing, and examine some of the possible hurdles to implementation. Into small, digestible chunks. You know. Keeping it simple.
Terrorism
Solution: End freedom of movementin the EU
Why the solution sucks: In terms of implementation, ending freedom of movement is perfectly feasible – it’s just doubtful whether or not it would be remotely effective. Hardly any of the people who have committed terrorist acts on British soil were immigrants. Some were Muslims, but all were born here – and in any case, the migration of people from Muslim-majority countries has sod all to do with EU membership. What’s more, the UK already has more control over its borders than any other country in the EEA, having secured an opt-out from the Schengen agreement. People will still travel to the UK from Muslim-majority countries, and since few terrorists accumulate long criminal records before they blow themselves up, there will be no way to tell the good from the bad. It’s very hard to see how adding a few customs checkpoints and lorry parks is going to change that.
The real flaw here, though, lies in the repercussions.
Knock-on consequences: Less money for everything else. Reduced trade. Reduced opportunities in travel, education and employment, especially for younger people. Reduced tourism, both ways. Fewer “desirable” migrants (99.99% of them) filling skills shortages. More hostile environment for immigrants. Requires abandoning the EU’s single market and customs union, as well as putting at risk countless lucrative collaborations and agreements including Erasmus, Euratom, Horizon 2020, European Atomic Energy Community, European Medicines Agency, etc etc ad infinitum.
There are a thousand more effective ways of combating terrorism than slamming the doors shut: education, attacking their funding, tackling social isolation and online radicalisation, improving links with minority communities, the Prevent programme, taking out the ringleaders. That’s where we should be focusing our energies.
Low wages
Solution: Stop immigration
Why the solution sucks: Common sense suggests that expanding the workforce, and thus creating more competition for jobs, will drive wages down. Alas, as we have established, when it comes to complex issues like this, common sense is as useful as an umbrella in a tsunami.
The true figures show that immigration has minimal negative effect on both pay and employment. In fact, in the longer term, it increases the average standard of living, because those immigrants pay taxes and spend money in their host country, stimulating the economy and creating yet more jobs.
Knock-on consequences: Less money for everything else. More hostile environment for immigrants. Less mixing of cultures, leading to greater distrust between nations, and an increased likelihood of war.
Services under strain
Solution: Stop immigration
Why the solution sucks: If too many new people move into an area in too short a time, local services can indeed feel the pinch. However, in the UK’s particular case, immigrants tend to be younger and fitter and require little care or support, and work disproportionately in exactly those areas. Losing immigrants would do more harm than good to healthcare and social care.
Knock-on consequences: As above.
Lots of people are dying in mass shootings in America
Solution: Ban guns
Why the solution sucks: In the interests of fairness, I’ll debunk a cause more often championed by the left. (The right don’t tend to bother offering any ideas at all for this one, apparently considering thousands of innocent children’s lives an acceptable price to pay for the protection of the second amendment.)
Yes, gun control advocates, history is on your side, insofar as both the UK and Australia have seen a big drop-off in mass shootings since tightening their gun laws. However, America’s situation is unique. A blanket ban on guns would be incredibly hard to enforce and probably would result, in the short term, in more civilians being unable to protect themselves from the criminals who had failed to turn in their weapons.
Knock-on consequences: Sizeable hit to the gun economy.
America is insufficiently great
Solution: a) Drain the swamp, b) lock her up, c) build the wall
Why these solutions suck: a) There are no doubt plenty of corrupt people on Capitol Hill. There always are near corridors of power. However, in the grand scheme of things, America was cleaner than most countries. The system was, if not perfect, then at least functioning.
b) Locking up Hillary Clinton would entail finding real evidence of a crime she had committed, which is impossible, because the charges were made up by Nazi conspiracy theorists.
c) Building a wall all the way along the US-Mexican border is cripplingly expensive, both to build and maintain, and will not in any case prevent much illegal immigration.
Knock-on consequences: a) The drained swampwater needs to be replaced with cleaner “water”. So far, the substitute looks like concentrated raw sewage.
b) Everyone thinks you are a bunch of gullible twats.
c) Less money for everything else, etc, etc.
There are too many brown people on my street
Solution: Stop immigration
Why the solution sucks: I hate to be the bearer of bad news, racist, but most people don’t consider any solution necessary here. Most of us believe that immigrants enrich our lives.
This is your problem, not the problem of the government, or of non-racists, or of immigrants. I suggest you deal with it by learning a foreign language, by making an effort to get to know someone from another country, or failing that, by topping yourself.
The last bit
People have complaints. We get that. Everyone (well, everyone normal), left and right and centre, wants life to be better, for there to be less disease and poverty and suffering and murder. We’ve just taken very different approaches.
As 10,000 years of slavery and sexism and famine and war should have hinted by now, there are no easy solutions to any of the above. But the fact that we have reduced all those things from everyday occurrences to vanishingly rare ones should be a huge encouragement.
How have we achieved this astonishing reduction in violence and increase in quality of life? By dismissing simple solutions and digging deeper, for complex ones. Solutions that involve detail, flexibility, compromise, sacrifice. And forgiveness. The pattern of history is unarguable.
And if we are to continue this trend, we need to acknowledge the difference between simplicity and ease. We need to recognise, while pledging eternal gratitude for its value in keeping us alive in trickier times, that instinct, the system 1 brain, is no longer in the driving seat of human destiny. Like cockfighting, trepanning, leeching and human sacrifice, common sense must now be consigned to history, and people with two functioning halves of a brain be allowed to take the wheel again.
Instinct and popular wisdom might butter parsnips, but they don’t design jet engines or cure smallpox
“Some folks set a powerful store by this here eddication, but I tell y’all right here and now that readin’ an’ writin’ an’ cipherin’ ain’t never got no sinners into Heaven yet!” – Evangelical Missouri preacher quoted in Ozark Folk Songs vol IV, ed. Vance Randolph (1949)
We’ve established, over the last few posts, why quite a few folk have “had enough of experts”, and some of the mechanisms by which rationalism is being undermined. One question we haven’t considered is this: who do they want running the show instead? Fine, so you’re anti-intellectual; but what are you pro?
Many don’t seem to have thought that far ahead. All they know is, the technocratic status quo isn’t quite to their liking, and they want it gone pronto, consequences be damned. Leave the EU with no deal! Lock her up!
But abandoning ship in the absence of even a makeshift lifeboat is criminally reckless. That’s why so many Britons are still so passionately opposed to leaving the EU; we haven’t heard any better ideas yet. Wishy-washy promises of a socialist utopia, or a “global-facing Britain”, both entirely dependent on variables over which we have little control, will not do. We want a detailed bloody plan.
Some give off the impression that they just want things to be like they were; before the EU, before all those horrid forriners moved in. But they’re overlooking three things. First, the hardships of life before 1973: lower living standards, labour disputes, moribund industries, high inflation, dwindling resources, diminishing world influence. Second, the rest of the world has moved on; the UK no longer enjoys the democratic, technological or military superiority it once did, and in this dynamic, hyperconnected world, the best way to survive is to maximise your international ties, not sever them.
Third, you can’t just wave a magic wand and undo 46 years of structural change. The UK’s economy is now intricately woven into the EU and the wider world, and if you just rip it out lickety-split, it will, quite simply, stop working.
Only one realistic alternative to technocracy has been proposed, but you won’t find any manifesto spelling out its methods or aims. It exists only in half-lit corners, in fragments of tweets, at the tail end of flip insults.
Kirk versus Spock
And, uh, what will you be basing those on then, Mark?
To explain, I’m going to bring in another book (sorry, Brexiters). Thinking Fast and Slow, published in 2011, is a tour-de-force roundup of the work of psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. At the risk of doing Kahneman a disservice, his thesis is essentially that humans have two primary modes of thought: he calls them system 1 and system 2.
System 2 is deliberate, reflective, analytical; it involves focus and application. It’s what we mean when we say we’re “putting our thinking caps on”. We use it to tackle novel or complex problems, to carry out complex calculations, to make long-term plans, and learn skills. Most of its operations take place in the prefrontal cortex, the newest, most uniquely human part of the brain.
System 2 is also creative, original, often brilliant. The catch is, it’s slow – and takes a lot of effort. It monopolises valuable resources (because when you’re focused on one task, you can’t undertake any others). Improvising a speech, writing a play, attacking a mathematical problem: few can sustain these activities for long without a break. As a result, we do all we can to avoid engaging system 2 thought, particularly as we get older.
The good news is, we don’t have to – because we have a spare brain.
System 1 has none of system 2’s hangups. It is quick, bold, almost effortless. It’s what we’re using when we talk about doing something automatically, or “without thinking” (we are thinking, of course – we’re just not conscious of it). What’s more, it’s remarkably good at a vast range of tasks. Estimating distances, locating sources of sounds, pattern recognition, basic arithmetic, completing common phrases. System 1 can even – after lots of practice, for which it is admittedly indebted to system 2 – manage complex functions like playing the piano and flying a plane.
But speed comes at a price. The reason system 1 is so snappy is that it uses a lot of short cuts. Because its functions are centred on the amygdala – one of the oldest parts of the brain, the part we share with lizards – its deductions and decisions are rooted in instinct and emotion rather than reason, and thus can be wildly off the mark.
(If I have one bone to pick with Kahneman’s book, it’s that “system 1 versus system 2” isn’t a terribly memorable opposition. So henceforth, I shall refer to system 1 – the the old-fashioned, impulsive, combative brain – as Kirk, and system 2, the more modern, analytical brain, as Spock.)
Kahneman spends much of his book detailing Kirk’s commonest cockups – the cognitive biases. I’ve covered these in a previous post, but those that crop up most in online discussions are the third-person effect (“My opponent has fallen for lies but I haven’t”), the projection illusion (“Most people act like me, for the same reasons as me”), the slippery slope fallacy (“Soon we’ll all be under sharia law!”), the sunk cost fallacy (“We’ve come this far – we can’t turn back now”) and the availability heuristic (“I’ve seen or read about this behaviour, so it must be everywhere”).
Essentially, humans have two different operating systems, with complementary strengths, suitable for different situations. One is great for getting you through everyday tasks and dire emergencies; the other is better for novel quandaries and counterintuitive problems.
As fascinating and rigorous as Kahneman’s book is, it is, in a way, just a restatement of an age-old theory. Ideas about the duality of mind date back at least to the concepts of chokhmah and binah in the 13th century and run on through instinct and reason, conscious and subconscious, to id and superego.
So what’s all this psychobabble got to do with the common fisheries policy? Look back at the description of Spock thinking. Reading, problem-solving, creative solutions, learning: it’s basically the operating manual for an intellectual.
Academics, experts and their ilk don’t only use this mode of thought. We all have access to both Kirk and Spock; they are what makes us human. What differentiates one person from another is not their access to these systems, but the frequency and efficiency with which they use them. Genetics may play a part, but there’s little doubt that education is a decisive factor.
People who have read more widely, who have studied to a higher level, travelled more widely, mastered a skill like a language or a musical instrument, or spent more time solving problems or creating things, are more likely to have a well-developed Spock brain, and to use it in a wider range of circumstances.
Meanwhile, those who aren’t so in touch with their Spock side – because they didn’t go to university, or learn a language – prefer, wherever possible, to stick to Kirk.
“As popular democracy gained strength and confidence, it reinforced the widespread belief in the superiority of inborn, intuitive, folkish wisdom over the cultivated, oversophisticated, and self-interested knowledge of the literati and the well-to-do” – Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life
Just plain folks
Trump. Genius. Let’s see if that makes his Britannica entry.
One of the crucial factors in Donald Trump’s appeal seems to be his gift – in the eyes of just enough American voters – for “telling it like it is”. An exit poll taken during the South Carolina Republican primary, for example, reported that 78% of those who rated “tells it like it is” as the top quality in a candidate planned to vote for Trump.
For non-Trump supporters, this is flabbergasting. Few of us could name anyone who tells it less like it is. It’s a documented fact that Trump has told an average of six lies for each day of his presidency. So what do they mean by this?
I think what they love about Trump is not his laser accuracy or his staggering genius, but his simplicity. He tells it not like it is, but like they wish it was, breaking every problem down into a formula so basic that they can absorb it without breaking sweat.
Kahneman might translate thus: “Donald Trump speaks to me in my language. He offers solutions simple enough for me to understand without effort, in words simple enough for me to understand without effort.” In other words, this is a Kirk-dominant brain communicating in a way that is perfectly clear to other Kirk-dominant brains. And the language it is using is common sense.
Common sense. The rallying cry rings out again and again and again across tabloid editorials and the social media battlefield.
Their passion is not wholly misplaced. As we’ve seen, the system 1 brain, honed over millennia, is a perfectly good remedy to many problems. You sure as hell don’t want to be hanging around engaging your Spock when there’s a rock hurtling straight at your head.
But in the wrong situations, common sense is poison. Its ingrained cognitive biases make nuance and compromise impossible. Kirk is abysmal at performing cost-benefit analyses and hopeless at planning for the long term. While going with your gut might serve you well in a live combat situation or on a frenetic trading floor, it’s a downright liability when it comes to negotiating intricate trade deals, eliminating terrorism, or persuading a rogue state to abandon its nuclear research programme.
When confronted with unfamiliar problems, ones that Kirk is not best equipped to deal with, lizard-brains react in one of three ways: fight, flight, or give up.
The first two are apparent in just about every one of Donald Trump’s policy decisions. Drain the swamp (fight). Build the wall (flight). Lock her up (bit of both). And 99% of his Twitter diplomacy consists of hamfisted playground insults and threats. The man is literally incapable of a measured response.
The third reaction is interesting.
Armchair critics
One of the things that has struck me most during my online interactions with Brexiters is how little work they are prepared to put in. Few lifted a finger or eyelid to inform themselves about the pros and cons of EU membership before the referendum, and the number has scarcely been augmented since. When responding to statements they disagree with, they seldom elaborate beyond “You’re wrong”, “Bollocks”, “Nonsense” or “Yawn”. If you send them a link to an article to back up your point, they rarely click on it, and when they do, they don’t read past the headline.
As for creative phraseology, forget it. They talk almost exclusively in clichés and slogans, and their “arguments” are all ripped verbatim from Farage or the Express. This is why it’s sometimes so hard to distinguish Brexiters from bots.
Tempting as it is to write off all diehard Brexit and Trump voters as stupid, that might be an oversimplification. My theory is that because their Spock brains are less developed, analytical thinking is even harder for them than it is for the rest of us, and so they’re even more likely to avoid it. They just prefer to use their Kirk, even when it’s clearly not the right equipment for the job. They’re not dumb, necessarily; just intellectually lazy.
Revenge of the pointyheads
Many people still seem to revere common sense as an unalloyed good, a panacea. It is not. Different operations call for different tools, and Kirk is painfully limited in scope. (For a good summary, read this.)
(*Telling little phrase, that. Reason doesn’t dictate anything; it simply states.)
Common sense was all very well when humans scavenged on the savannah, and it served most of us adequately until quite recently. But it has always been our ability to reason that separated us from the animals, allowing us to create, to hypothesise, to codify, to pass on knowledge and, crucially, to specialise.
Common sense has had millions of years to eliminate war, terrorism, poverty, disease and famine, and it has failed miserably. It’s only since the Enlightenment broke its chokehold that humanity has begun to address those issues. And in this insanely complex modern age, when the amount of knowledge required for society to function is a thousandfold greater than any one person could hope to take in, the need for uncommon sense – ie, experts – is greater than ever.
The historical trend is undeniable: slowly but surely, Spock thinking is displacing Kirk, correcting its cognitive biases and giving us more effective solutions to our problems. Advances in medical science, the steady increase in the standard of living, the lengthening human lifespan and the gradual decrease in the rate of violent crime are all testament to this.
Now, perhaps resentful of this encroachment on their territory, the lazy lizard-brains have reared up. In a campaign unlikely to be of their own devising – I’ll save the speculation as to who might be responsible for my next post – they are sidelining, shouting down and smearing voices of reason at every turn.
It’s time to return fire. But I’m not suggesting that we try to eradicate common sense. We can’t – it’s an inalienable part of our makeup. But we do need to dispel this pernicious notion that gut feeling is the answer to everything; to escort Kirk out of the delicate galactic peace negotiations, pack him off to some distant planet with lots of slimy aliens to punch and green-skinned women to boink, and let Spock handle the tricky stuff.
Fearful people want swift, simple solutions – and woe betide any pointy-headed intellectual who gets in the way with pleas for calm or evidence
Over the last two years, there have been more attempted explanations of Brexit and Trump than there have been leaders of Ukip. It was racism; it was the Russians; it was a longing for simpler times; the dumbing-down of culture; the echo chambers of social media; a collective brain fart. And all those things doubtless played a part.
But since it’s the alarming new wave of anti-intellectualism – the collapse of faith in expertise – that has enabled both these developments, it might be productive to consider how we’ve suddenly arrived in a world where knowledge is seen as a shortcoming and “I’m no expert” is practically a boast.
History tells us that surges in populism like the one we’re experiencing generally follow periods of economic strife. But while times may be tough by modern standards, our privations are nothing next to the hardship of the 1930s, 50s, or even the 70s (yet). Cashflow can’t be the sole cause.
Why, at an individual level, did people vote for Brexit and Trump? What have intellectuals and liberals done to deserve the sudden scorn of the masses? To my mind, there are three main factors.
Envy
It’s hard to escape the feeling that some of the people who voted for Brexit and Trump did so out of sheer spite. Having not, perhaps, achieved the station in life they feel they deserve, they are beside themselves at the notion that others might have found relative happiness. Their pain is all the more acute for being at least partly self-inflicted. They’re haunted by the suspicion that if, at school, instead of flicking bogies at the ginger kid who finished top in the spelling test, they had applied themselves, or if, in their first grown-up job, they’d thrown sickies less than once a fortnight, they too might have finished a little higher up the field.
How to persuade Remainers to get behind Brexit.
Others’ grievances have a little more substance. After all, the world is plainly full of high-flyers who haven’t earned their wings. Too many people have got where they are by cheating, or through nepotism, the old boys’ network, or dumb luck. And those who have put in the graft are often rewarded out of all proportion with their efforts. I’m sure running Lloyds Bank is no cakewalk, but is António Horta Osório’s contribution really worth £8m a year? Mark Zuckerberg may have sweated blood building Facebook, and his social network brings pleasure to millions (when not furiously fucking them in the arse), but is $65bn really a commensurate prize when talented, dedicated nurses and firefighters are topping up their weekly shop at the food bank?
We’ve reached a point where the top dogs have a bigger share of the Winalot than ever before. What’s more, the inequality has never been more glaring: it’s rubbed in our faces daily on reality TV shows, newspaper and magazine front pages, advertising billboards and Instagram.
But the perception that all people keeping their heads above water are similarly undeserving is grossly unfair to those who started without any advantage – and particularly so to intellectuals, such as writers and academics, who on the whole have it a lot less cushy than is widely believed.
Laziness
“Nothing has more retarded the advancement of learning than the disposition of vulgar minds to ridicule and vilify what they cannot comprehend” – Samuel Johnson
Far too many Britons – and I include Remain voters here – voted in the EU referendum in ignorance. I’m constantly astonished at the number of people with a tenuous grasp of the issues involved, even almost two years after the decision. The majority seem to have voted with heart rather than head, without taking the time to find out if there was any truth to the tabloid stories about Brussels bureaucracy, or how deeply integrated the UK’s economy is with the EU. I don’t think some of them even read the fucking bus.
There are a couple of reasons for this. First, I don’t think many people really believed their vote would count. Both sides were expecting a walkover for Remain (so much so that many plumped for the “Give Cameron a bloody nose” option, believing that it wouldn’t tip the balance). Why bother doing your homework when your vote won’t matter anyway?
Second, many people are not accustomed – or can’t be bothered – to take in complex information. They’ve got more important, or more interesting things to think about than what James Thurber called the “clanguorous, complicated fact”. Going through the minutiae is someone else’s job.
Indeed, that’s exactly how things work in a representative democracy, our usual system of government. Since we don’t have the time to do all the research required, we elect councillors and mayors and MPs, who then, with the help of expert advisors (we hope), make decisions on our behalf. But when it comes to referendums – the purest, most direct form of democracy – those crutches fall away. You’re the expert now. At least, you should be.
What’s more worrying is that some of the representatives we elect to make decisions for us think exactly the same way.
Nadine Dorries (MP!) came in for a lot of stick for her assertion that the vote to leave the EU was correct because international trade was too complex for her to understand, but she deserved it all and more. This is one of our supposed leaders, giving up on a matter of paramount importance just because it made her head hurt. If we all followed Dorries’ logic, humankind would have given up long ago on space flight, curing polio, powering our homes, building viaducts, developing antibiotics, compiling the English dictionary and mapping the globe.
A few months later, another Tory MP made a similarly unedifying contribution to the public debate.
To label this behaviour “stupidity” is to give Dorries and Fysh too much credit. What they are guilty of here is intellectual laziness; they’re not too dumb to understand international trade. They just can’t be arsed.
This pattern is repeated thousands of times a day, in pubs, in the comments under online news articles, and on social media. Attempt to explain a point in any detail at all and you’re greeted with a “Yawn”. Boring. Tell me something simple that makes my tummy feel fuzzy instead, like how all Muslims are paedophiles.
It’s hard to pin down what’s turning us all into Homer Simpson, but there’s little doubt that in this era of tweets and vines and all-round instant gratification, attention spans and patience are declining. In 1982, 57% of US citizens had read at least one novel, play or poem in the previous year. By 2015, that had fallen to 43%. In the UK, only 40% of children now read beyond what they are obliged to at school.
Probably the scariest study in this area was carried out by Kiku Adatto of Harvard University. She found that in 1968, the average quotation from a presidential candidate used in TV news lasted 42.3 seconds; by 1988, the duration had fallen to 9.8 seconds. In 2000, according to a later paper, it stood at 7.8 seconds. Donald Trump’s rousing battle cries – “Make America great again”, “Build the wall”, “Lock her up”, “Drain the swamp” – come in at an average of 1.3. You can’t solve complex problems like crime and unemployment and terrorism with 1.3-second soundbites. But people, it seems, aren’t willing to listen for any longer.
(I’ll go into this in more detail in my next post. If you want to do some prep in advance, I recommend that you go out and buy Daniel Kahneman’s Thinking Fast And Slow. Even if you don’t intend to read the next post, you won’t regret it.)
Fear
Four years before the referendum, no one, beyond a handful of cryogenically frozen Tories and fanatical racists, cared much either way about the UK’s membership of the EU, probably because it had no readily measurable effect on their everyday lives. In a survey carried out at the end of 2012, just 2% of respondents said the EU and Europe were the most important issues facing Britain. But by June 2016, millions of people had suddenly become raving Europhobes. What happened?
The last great wave of populism in the 1950s occurred at a time of unprecedented flux. Millions had lost loved ones in the second world war, food and money were scarce, and the world was cowering under the threat of nuclear armageddon. Technology was advancing at a dizzying pace: newfangled gadgets from TVs to phones, from freezers to food mixers, transformed homes beyond recognition in a matter of years. Cultural change was not lagging far behind, thanks to contraception, vaccination, postwar immigration, and the more prominent role in public life played by women.
For many people, change engenders fear. We prefer to stick to familiar things and routines because they don’t require mental effort and we know from experience that they won’t kill us. Too much innovation too fast sends their primal instincts into overdrive. The calmer, more rational part of the brain is cut off. They want swift and simple solutions to their problems, and woe betide any “pointy-headed professors” who get in their way with pleas for calm or evidence.
Change-induced fear, I believe, was also a decisive factor in 2016. Immigration, sexual liberation, WhatsApp, gay marriage, wind farms, Amazon, contactless payments, self-driving cars: the scale and pace of innovation can be bewildering even to young, plastic minds.
Few of these things, however, are threatening in and of themselves. On a day-to-day basis, most of them can be mastered, or avoided, easily enough. But the crucial point here is not the change itself; it’s the perception of change.
Each and every one of the Remain camp’s warnings about the likely dangers of leaving the EU was airily dismissed with a cry of “Project Fear!”. But the other side was even more adept at peddling dread. “Turkey is joining the EU!”; “The EU is becoming a superstate!”; “The EU wants to form an army!”; “The EU’s share of world trade is shrinking”.
After 30 years of relentless Brussels-bashing by the tabloids, the Vote Leave campaign, with the forensic assistance of psyops firm Cambridge Analytica, weighed in with a bumper anthology of horror stories. Online, an army of trolls sputtered out every tale they could find, true or false, about terrorists and feminists and Muslim rape gangs and fucking Easter eggs. While the streets were notable for the absence of upheaval, the gutter press and gutter politicians successfully forged the narrative that the British and American ways of life – and particularly the white male way of life – were under immediate threat. To deliver their message more effectively, they used deliberately emotive language: when the likes of Katie Hopkins deploys the words “swamped”, “infestation” and “cockroaches”, she does so knowing full well which part of the brain she is poking at.
Those who did not take the time, or did not possess the critical faculties, to question what they read went into fight-or-flight mode. Few could point to any direct personal experience of the danger posed by immigrants or the European Union or Barack Obama, but they had been told that they were a threat. The papers said so. My friend on Facebook shared a meme saying so. Simple, swift solutions.
And so they gobbled up the vacuous, undeliverable slogans. And they voted for Brexit and Trump.
I have a couple more things to say about this, and then I’m going to take a bit of a break and write a hit romcom and retire to fucking Lanzarote. Brexit permitting.
The demagogues can’t win the debate with intellectuals, so instead, they’re trying every trick in the book to shut it down
Socrates, forced to drink a fatal cup of hemlock for the sin of … asking his students philosophical questions.
The western world is some way from being a technocracy. But there is no doubt in my mind that those sectors that are run on the basis of expertise – the judiciary, the civil service, academia, the creative sector – are under ferocious attack.
Intellectuals, however, are no pushovers, because – well, they’re bright, and they usually hold influence and power. When ideologues face experts on a level playing field, they tend to have their arses handed to them – see the epic owning of alt-right bilemonger Paul Joseph Watson by teacher Mike Stuchbery over the question of racial diversity in Roman Britain. So if a fair fight is out, how is this war being prosecuted?
Wherever possible, extreme rightwingers steer clear of direct confrontations. Jeremy Hunt declines Ralf Little’s offer of a live debate about mental health provision; Chris Grayling refuses to appear on a radio chat show with Andrew Adonis.
They’re assisted in this by the dumbed-down clickbait culture that’s consuming our media. The coverage of science in most newspapers these days is woeful: research findings are published without caveat, rebuttals added too late, if at all. And on news programmes, it’s increasingly rare to see a genuine expert consulted on any issue of note. You can understand why: academics can be a little dry and stuffy, their arguments detailed, nuanced, full of ifs and buts.
Watch the BBC or Sky next time there’s a debate about gun control: guaranteed, there’ll be someone from the NRA, spouting the usual inflammatory bilge, and as a counterpoint, if you’re lucky, you might get the relative of a shooting victim. They don’t want people who know about guns; they want people who care about guns (and who generally add little of substance to the debate). Similarly, in any discussion about the EU, do the producers summon a professor of European history or an economics journalist? Good God no, haul in a rabid Remainer and a batshit Brexiter and watch the sparks fly!
This sidelining of rational voices is even easier on Twitter, where Brexiters can obliterate all those who post inconvenient truths with a tap of the block button.
Another part of their arsenal is the logical fallacy. I don’t want to regurgitate my entire post on the subject here, but to recap, they’re non-arguments masquerading as arguments – underhanded attempts to deflect or reframe the debate, or throw the opponent off balance, rather than address the topic at hand. The ones you’ll come across the most are the argumentum ad populum (“17.4 million people can’t be wrong”), the false dichotomy (“You’re either for freedom of speech or against it”), the appeal to emotion (any tweet by Daniel Hannan), tu quoque or whataboutery (“But Hillary’s emails”), tone policing (“Typical condescending Remoaner”), and Boris Johnson’s favourite toy, the straw man (“So what you’re saying is …”).
But the populist’s standard-issue weapon is the ad hominem: the personal attack. Play the man and not the ball, and hopefully you can forget about the ball.
I’ve written before, too, about the revival of the art of the smear. Essentially, Leave and Trump advocates, like fascists throughout history, love to sling mud. In logic speak, this is known as poisoning the well: an attempt to discredit the target such that people will no longer believe or trust them. Thus, no matter how wise their words today, Tony Blair (Iraq), Nick Clegg (tuition fees), Tim Farron (homophobia), Hillary Clinton (crooked, although no one has yet produced any evidence to support this assertion) and Jeremy Corbyn (IRA, Palestine) can, in some eyes, never be taken seriously again.
(The reason ad hominem works, of course, is that it is not entirely without foundation. Some people or publications are habitual liars or fools and, if shown to have been so often enough, probably should be ignored. Into this category fall most of the UK tabloids, Fox News, Hannan and many of his Brexit conspirators, and most of the alt-right – but also plenty on the far left. Generally speaking, however, people should not be permanently written off on the basis of one or two lapses of judgment.)
Intellectuals – and for the purposes of this section we can scale right down to passably intelligent liberals debating on Twitter – represent a particular challenge for the ad hominist. They don’t tend to be well-known, so their every past mistake and foible is not in the public domain. Populists will still take every opportunity to play the man rather than his argument, but where that’s made difficult (eg by the anonymity conferred by the internet), they’ll go after his sources, or his motives, instead. And in my experience, they tend to do so in one of six ways.
1) Fallible
You may have more information than me, but you were wrong once before, so you may be wrong now.
The argument that someone’s opinion shouldn’t be trusted because she doesn’t have a 100% record in her field is idiotic, but it’s one that’s trotted out with tiresome regularity, most often, in the context of Brexit, in respect of economists.
Yes, they goofed up once. (Or rather, a different group of economists did; that was 10 years ago.) But those economists were appointed to their jobs over thousands of hugely qualified rivals. If they weren’t generally good at their jobs, they’d have lost them long ago. They’re still far more likely to make accurate forecasts about the UK’s future outside the EU than Kev from Castle Point.
Say you find out the cardiac surgeon who’s going to perform open-heart surgery on you lost his last patient. Would you rather he operated on you, or a bricklayer? Someone’s past failings have no bearing on the credibility of their statement today.
2) Biased!
You may have information, but that information comes from a compromised source.
The word “biased” is tossed around by arch-Brexiters almost as freely as “democracy” and “Get over it”, and yet it’s far from clear whether they know what it means.
Bias is not a synonym for preference. You can prefer something to something else instinctively, or having considered both options carefully. “Bias” specifically means a predisposition to like or dislike something because you have a stake in the matter. I’m not biased against wasps; I’ve just weighed up the pros and cons of wasps and concluded, as I imagine most have, that they are a bad thing. If I argue that 1 + 1 = 2 and you argue that 1 + 1 = 3, I’m not biased towards the result 2. I’m just right.
Similarly, I don’t have a holiday home in Florence and I don’t have a crush on my Latvian barista. I have no vested interest in the future of the EU. I’ve just researched the issue, calculated the likely fortunes of my country within and without it, and decided, overwhelmingly, that within is better.
More commonly, this accusation is levelled at any source you use to back up your claims. There’s more justification for this – after all, the Mail, Express, the Canary, and fake news sites like Westmonster, Breitbart and Infowars are notorious for their partisan views and casual relationship with the truth. But a number of other news providers – the “mainstream media” – are also regularly rubbished.
There’s a lot of contempt for the Guardian, for example (mostly from people who haven’t opened it since 1981). Sure, it probably has more commentators from the left of the political landscape than the right, although most are tepidly centrist these days. But it provides a forum for voices from across the spectrum. It follows due journalistic process: it names its sources where possible, and allows those mentioned in its stories a right of reply. It has subeditors and lawyers and its staff routinely discuss the most balanced way to word headlines. On the whole, it uses neutral language in its news pieces, with minimal value judgments. It keeps its news reports separate from its opinion pieces. And above all, it is accountable to its readership, to its own ombudsman, and to the wider public. It responds to all complaints, and when it is incorrect, it publishes retractions and apologies.
The likes of Infowars, Fox News and the Express, meanwhile, are bound by no such constraints. They publish only stories that promote their narrow, ultra-right conservative agenda. News and opinion are an inseparable morass: their stories tell you not just what happened, but exactly what you should think about it.
So next time someone plays the “MSM” card, stand your ground. Ask them: “What’s that got to do with anything? The BBC/Guardian is the fourth/seventh most trusted news source in America. (Fox News is 29th.) Which specific details of the report I linked to are wrong?”
3) Brainwashed!
Yes, you have more information than me, but it is false information imparted to you by another. You are a dupe; a stooge.
I love it when Brexiters pull the pin on this one. “You’ve been brainwashed into loving the EU.” As if, through some preposterous sequence of accidents, I had only ever been exposed to pro-EU messages. And it really would have to be preposterous: most of the tabloids (and the Telegraph) have printed nothing but negative stories about Brussels for decades; the quality papers, meanwhile, never said much positive about it because – well, come on, European politics. (If the EU really is a dictatorship, it must surely go down as the dullest in history.)
The circulations of the Guardian and Independent, the only unabashedly pro-EU papers left, are, as the right never tires of pointing out, dwindling rapidly. Personally, I can barely recall coming across any positive messages about the EU, even from the Remain campaign during the referendum. Am I missing something? Euro-conversion booths on our high streets, perhaps? The only real advertisement I ever saw for the EU (before I went looking for information) were EU citizens themselves – valued contributors to our economy and our culture, to whom I cannot apologise enough for the shitstorm Brexit has visited upon them – and the general impression that the country was more prosperous and culturally rich than when I was a boy.
Perhaps sensing the absurdity of that argument, some Brexiters shift the blame to an institution that, to them, is shrouded in mystery: university. Our places of higher learning, some seem to believe, are hotbeds of communism, cranking out rows of malodorous, long-haired men and short-haired women who love immigrants and homosexuals and quinoa and hate white people and Britain and America.
If any of these deluded souls had ever been within a country mile of a campus, they’d know the truth was more mundane. With the exception of the politics faculty and the student union offices, universities are not especially political places. Some right-on loon might make the news every few weeks with a call to ban music from campus because it’s discriminatory against deaf people, but most courses don’t even touch on politics (students of history and the social sciences make up 8% of the corpus) and membership of political groups is low. Most students aged 18-21, like most non-students aged 18-21, are more interested in beer, sport and sex than they are in social welfare budgets or the privatisation of the Land Registry.
Besides, how the hell is this monumental operation being conducted? Are there posters on every wall depicting a smiling Jean-Claude Juncker with the slogan, “Your country needs EU?” Is Ode To Joy piped into student halls of residence while they sleep? Are the student union canteen lunches laced with brie?
If there were some sort of conspiracy to indoctrinate western students in leftist ideas, you’d think someone would have produced some definitive proof. But 49% of Britain’s young people go into higher education. That’s half a million people a year. Surely one of them – or a rogue lecturer, or cleaner – would have recorded some footage on their mobile by now?
There’s a far simpler explanation for young people’s attachment to the EU: their minds are more idealistic, more plastic, more open to new ideas. In addition, university teaches them to think critically, and introduces them to people from a far more diverse range of backgrounds than they were exposed to at home. It’s not the current education system that makes people liberal; it is education itself.
And ask yourself this. Who is more susceptible to brainwashing: the person with at least three years’ extra education, who has been trained to question and critique everything she reads; or the person who never once raised his hand in 10 years of school?
4) Bribed!
You may have information, but it is information that you have been paid to disseminate.
We’re fully into wackjob territory now. I know George Soros is rich, but to fund every Remain vote and leaflet and march and pro-Remain MP and academic and research paper and CEO and judge and economist, and keep it all a secret … You know what? If that did turn out to be the case, I’d remain a Remainer, because I’d want to be on that man’s side.
5) Brideshead
You may have information, but it is esoteric information, irrelevant to everyday life.
Alongside the soap-dodging, sickle-wielding snowflake, another university stereotype stubbornly persists: of Rupert and Sebastian, foppish, entitled aristocrats lounging louchely in their double set while Mrs Miggins meekly serves them tiffin and opium. Entitled, effeminate, with alabaster hands that have never been in the same room as a screwdriver, they can solve complex equations or recite passages of poetry or critique Leibniz’s theory of monads, but when it comes to the business of getting by in life, they’re all at sea. And yet, on graduation, Daddy will fix them up with a cushy number in the civil service or on the board of a big bank.
This, I think, is the image the tabloids are trying to conjure up when they use phrases like “out of touch” and “elite” (the American equivalent seems to be “coastal elite”). They’re trying to foster this idea that students (and academics, judges, civil servants, and anyone else who may have touched a book by someone other than Danielle Steel or Andy McNab) are sheltered from hard reality and therefore unqualified to speak on real-world issues.
Loath as I am to break the devastating news to you, Brexit fans, things have moved on a lick since the 1930s. Ninety per cent of UK students are now from state schools. Daddy’s more likely to be a bookie than a landed gent. And contrary to your belief, the laws of the universe apply as much at university as they do in the “real world”. You still have to work hard, you still have to pay your way – most undergraduates now do regular temporary work on top of their full-time course – and the social competition from your peers is, if anything, more intense. All that, plus the crushing spectre of tens of thousands of pounds of debt hanging over you, and no guarantee of a job at the end of it. Small wonder that suicides among students have doubled in the last decade.
A greater number of students than ever are studying hard vocational subjects, in science, IT, agriculture and journalism, with clearly defined careers at the end of them. In any case, education isn’t about what you learn. It’s about how you learn, how to develop a curiosity about the world, how to question and understand and predict and follow chains of logic.
Besides, if people are so implacably opposed to a pampered, nepotistic elite, they’ve chosen a decidedly odd bunch of champions to rid themselves of the scourge. Jacob Rees-Mogg (Eton and Oxford), Daniel Hannan (Marlborough and Oxford) and Boris Johnson (Eton and Oxford); and in the US, Donald Trump (wealthy businessman), Steve Bannon (Goldman Sachs financier and media executive) and Reince Priebus (corporate lawyer).
6) Boring!/Bollocks!/Bullshit!
You may have information, but it is … bollocks. Because I say so.
Probably the most common responses from Brexit fanatics to any point I make, or any post I write, are one-word answers: “Rubbish”, “Nonsense”, “Bullshit”, “Bollocks”. They go silent when you ask them to elaborate. I can’t begin to imagine why.
So much, then, for the strategy behind the war on intellectuals. In my next post, I’ll look at the war aims.
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).
This, my populist friends, is the end result of the process I’ve been banging tiresomely on about. This is 
Their passion is not wholly misplaced. As we’ve seen, the system 1 brain, honed over millennia, is a perfectly good remedy to many problems. You sure as hell don’t want to be hanging around engaging your Spock when there’s a rock hurtling straight at your head.
Nadine Dorries (MP!) came in for a lot of stick for her assertion that the vote to leave the EU was correct 
They’re assisted in this by the dumbed-down clickbait culture that’s consuming our media. The coverage of science in most newspapers these days is woeful: research findings are published without caveat, rebuttals added too late, if at all. And on news programmes, it’s increasingly rare to see a genuine expert consulted on any issue of note. You can understand why: academics can be a little dry and stuffy, their arguments detailed, nuanced, full of ifs and buts.
If a showdown with someone who knows their stuff is unavoidable, far right-demagogues have several ploys. The crassest is simply to prevent their opponent from getting a word in edgeways, as 
Yes, they goofed up once. (Or rather, a different group of economists did; that was 10 years ago.) But those economists were appointed to their jobs over thousands of hugely qualified rivals. If they weren’t generally good at their jobs, they’d have lost them long ago. They’re still far more likely to make accurate forecasts about the UK’s future outside the EU than Kev from Castle Point.
If any of these deluded souls had ever been within a country mile of a campus, they’d know the truth was more mundane. With the exception of the politics faculty and the student union offices, universities are not especially political places. Some right-on loon might make the news every few weeks with a call to ban music from campus because it’s discriminatory against deaf people, but most courses don’t even touch on politics (students of history and the social sciences make up 8% of the corpus) and membership of political groups is low. Most students aged 18-21, like most non-students aged 18-21, are more interested in beer, sport and sex than they are in social welfare budgets or the privatisation of the Land Registry.
We’re fully into wackjob territory now. I know George Soros is rich, but to fund every Remain vote and leaflet and march and pro-Remain MP and academic and research paper and CEO and judge and economist, and keep it all a secret … You know what? If that did turn out to be the case, I’d remain a Remainer, because I’d want to be on that man’s side.