Reading the ruins: lessons learned from the aftermath of a political Earthquake Brexit - a case of long-term political realignment or simply a bloody nose for the political establishment
1 Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland By Ed Williams Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland
1 Ours to Lose Every so often, the world seems to turn upside down. Or at least on its side. Sometimes it happens just through a millimeter movement in the political tectonic plates, creating enormous forces without apparent explanation. Other times, those forces are magnified by human intervention. Brexit is, in my view, an example of the latter. First let me make a confession. I am one of the 48% who voted to remain in the EU (big surprise, right!). I felt the economic, security and social case were stronger than the arguments mounted by those who wanted us to leave. But today’s case study isn’t about re-running the referendum. We must accept that the Leave camp won. So, please put aside what you personally feel about the result. Instead, let’s focus on how the campaign was won. How Brexiteers defied the pollsters; political commentators; and the “experts”, to win a majority. Let’s go back to February 2016. This felt like a vote that was Remain’s to lose. All roads pointed to victory, even if in the darkest hours of the night, there was still a sense that this was a reckless spin of the roulette wheel. Polling data was positive. Expert opinion sat mostly in one camp. The agitators looked like fringe head-bangers.
But, most importantly, we sought comfort in the long-standing norms of political science, which meant victory (while not a shoo-in), was in all probability, likely. Let’s first look at those accepted wisdoms of political science that offered what turned out to be false reassurances in the months before the vote. Number One. “The economy, stupid”. The phrase coined by James Carville during Bill Clinton’s 1992 Presidential race. This phrase underlined a truism of political behaviour – the power of the pocket book in the polling booth. The theory goes that we will cast a vote based on the outcome that will benefit us most financially. Even in the most emotionally driven campaign, out of the fog comes people’s finances, which they consistently put first. The problem with this theory - it completely ignores behavioural economics and replaces it with classical economics - and ‘rational man’ logic. But nevertheless, the pocketbook argument for remaining in Europe looked like a slam-dunk. The experts backed this up: • • • •
OECD figures echoed by the Treasury said GDP would be 3 per cent lower within four years of leaving the EU By 2020, UK households would be worse off by an average of £2,200 a year Government deficit would balloon by an extra £17bn a year The IMF said leaving would result in a “negative and substantial” hit to the economy, “permanently lower incomes”
None of this sounded great... 2
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
And so, these ‘expert’ opinions led the Remain camp to conclude that the economic case was won hands down, and therefore the economic case would deliver the votes. And that would’ve been the case, if another tenet of political behaviour also held true – that experts are trusted. The accepted wisdom was that the hierarchy of influence is like a pyramid. At the bottom, the masses. At the top, experts who inform and shape mass opinion. But we were seeing a desert mirage if we thought this pyramid was stable. ‘Remainers’ were also convinced that the tabloids, which in the past had arguably played a decisive role in swaying elections, had lost their potency. There are acres of political science papers exploring the correlation (or lack of) between newspapers and election results. But in recent years, the consensus has become that newspapers no longer have clout when it comes to driving political behaviour. The world had changed since Rupert Murdoch’s brash red-top claimed, ‘it’s the Sun wot won it’, in ‘92. Back then, the paper felt it had tipped the balance in favour of John Major. But that was then, this is now, and the Remainers felt however harsh the headlines, or however spun the story, facts would ultimately triumph. They believe that liars lose and that those sprouting falsehoods are penalised. Confidence also came from the outcomes of two recent referendums: the Scottish independence vote and the Irish referendum on same-sex marriages. Scotland had shown the political establishment that another assumption of behavioural science
could be relied on – that the public ultimately favour the status quo, rather than the unknown. While the Scottish independence referendum occasionally looked tight in the polls, the outcome, 55 vs 45 to remain in the Union proved this point. The high turnout of 85%, underlined the belief that at critical moments like this, people turn out in large numbers to vote for stability. Rather than a leap in the dark. In Ireland, a movement to bring young voters out to support the legalisation of gay marriage succeeded spectacularly and overthrew centuries of social conservatism and defeated the iron strength of the Catholic Church. The Irish result was of course the exact opposite of the Scottish result. One was voting for status quo, the other social change. But it wasn’t seen that way. Instead, the Irish outcome was cited as an example of where young people can be activated to off-set older more traditionally minded baby-boomers. Though it’s worth noting that in Italy it was young voters who just booted out the young reformer Matteo Renzi, so the rule doesn’t always hold true. But it was the Brexit polls, more than anything, that showed confirmation bias in action. The confidence in polling, was even more astonishing, given just a year earlier a Tory majority in the general election had confounded the pollsters. The polls went up. The polls went down. But broadly Remain stayed ahead. Until June 14 when a poll showed leave making a break for it. The instant reaction: it’s a rogue poll! Remainers said nervously: ‘People can’t have listened to all this disinformation about £350m – they can’t have, everyone knows it’s a lie?’ 3
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
‘The experts have opined how could you ignore them?’ ‘Barack Obama said we’d be at the end of the queue when it comes to negotiating a trade deal.’ June 23rd dawned. We all know what happened next. The fact is that those of us wanting to remain in Europe had been consistently finding information that confirmed our worldview and downplaying anything that threatened it. We were shocked. Though to be fair not as shocked as Boris Johnson looked that morning! It defied logic for many Remainers. After all, the areas with the biggest Brexit majorities turned out to be the poorest in the country: places like Dagenham, Sunderland, South Wales, Cornwall. But how could this be, after all these were areas that benefited directly from the EU? The Nissan workers of Sunderland had been warned by their bosses that Brexit would threaten their jobs. But they still voted for Brexit. So why? What did they know that we didn’t? They’d had the same information as everyone else. They weren’t working off an entirely different economic playbook. This goes to the heart of the complexity of Brexit and understanding the ‘why’. Why people voted in the way they voted. Simply put, people voted for completely different reasons, and for different issues. David Cameron thought he had called a plebiscite on the EU.
In fact, this wasn’t a referendum on the EU. For some, it was a referendum on politics and politicians. For others, this was a referendum on the economy and on opportunity, or lack of. There were more individualistic reasons, too. Like the father who voted leave because his daughter was a GP and was unhappy with NHS reforms and the health secretary was a ‘Remainer’. They are dangerous things - referendums. Politicians call them at their peril. They’ve claimed two Prime Ministers in Europe in less than six months.
2 Hiding in plain sight The world reacted on June 24th as though this result was a bolt from the blue. But the warning signs were of course there. The nervous conversations of Remainers before the vote betrayed this fact. The so-called political elites knew they were ignoring dangerous cracks in the ceiling of our national home. Were those cracks just signs of what estate agents would breezily call “normal movement”, or were they the symptoms of subsidence that made the whole building unstable? The truth is that the signs of a Fractured Britain were there for everyone to see, if you wanted to see them. I would argue that there were four big fissures in British society, all visible and mostly ignored. The first was financial. 4
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
Sure, employment was at high levels, but what kind of employment? The British working classes have always been held up as a sturdy folk on whose shoulders an Empire was carried. Wars were won. Mighty feats of manufacture and engineering were achieved.
austerity, ordinary people, but by a superclass of financiers who got away scot-free.
But today… Zero hours contracts might keep you on a so-called “living wage”, but where was the pride in precarious work? Where is the dignity of labour in a service-based society?
Automation was also starting to cut a swathe through traditional industries. Slowly, imperceptibly, eating away at jobs in transportation, in manufacturing, in lowerincome activities in the service industry. It was machines, not Poles, which were depressing salaries, and it is only going to get worse. By 2025, estimates suggest 45% of all jobs will have been automated.
And despite technology offering so much, things were getting worse not better. Liberal economists in the first years of this century glorified globalisation as a general good creating wealth not just in India, China and other emerging nations, but across the world. But for the British working man and woman, globalisation brought wage stagnation as they faced increasing competition from the billions of workers who have entered the global economy following the fall of the Berlin Wall (including the many tens of thousands arriving from Eastern Europe). As Mark Carney said: “…Globalisation is associated with low wages, insecure employment, stateless corporations and striking inequalities.” Economist, Branko Milanovic, calculated global incomes between 1988 and 2008 and found that trade boosted incomes for the poorest and very richest workers in the world everyone, really, except for the working and (crucially) lower middle classes in the West. And after 2008, the financial crisis brought a message from the political elite that there would be prolonged, profound austerity to pay for a mess caused not by those who would suffer that
That offended the innate British sense of fair play, a factor which should not be underestimated. But it was.
The next factor was social: austerity put yet another strain on the funding of schools, welfare for the vulnerable and, most symbolically, the NHS. The people who actually use those services were the same ones who voted to leave, particularly in the case of older voters. The vulnerable felt their vulnerability much more keenly than the comfortable felt their comfort. The longer you had been around, the more you felt that society had changed and not for the better. The gap in geography was also a fracture in Britain that was hidden from those who should have seen this coming – the economists, the columnists, the political leaders – because most of them spend most of their time in one place. And that place, London, had done better than the rest of Britain. London and to a lesser extent other British cities, had been protected from austerity by a faster growth rate. But whether you lived in the Cotswolds and wanted your Olde England back, or in Bolton and felt your way of life threatened in some 5
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
ineffable way, you knew the London filter bubble didn’t care one way or another. London looked out to the world. The rest of Britain looked towards itself, and a time when things were different, and fairer. And then there was that ineffable change. Call it the cultural change. A sense of identity which British people felt was being eroded. Unlike the Scots, who had decided in their own referendum that they preferred the economic security of the Union over the identity that came with independence - to the English, identity was a major factor in Brexit. The new kind of work, the housing crisis affecting their children and grandchildren, waiting times to see the GP, school waiting lists. All of these things threatened an identity that the English in particular had come to rely on. Brexit was a dog whistle to them - somebody out there cares for us, and is listening. At the centre of all these concerns, an issue that dare not say its name. An issue so tricky for politicians to discuss that they left it alone, hoping it would go away. It’s hard to blame an individual or a political party for the changes I have outlined, but it is easy to blame an idea. In this case, it was the idea (although not the reality) of immigration. This was the one big “crack” that united all the other little cracks. Without a shred of evidence, immigration could be blamed for problems with employment, the NHS, schools, falling living standards. Most of all it could be blamed for that perception of losing your country’s identity. And it’s actually hard to blame “immigration”, because you can’t vote against it. But on June 23rd, along came something that you could blame for it, and it was called the EU.
In January 2016, the Edelman Trust Barometer identified this trend and the need for business in particular to speak out on Europe to prevent a leave vote. Edelman surveyed the top 1% of earners and the bottom 20% and found that only 10% of low income households believe their standard of living will get better in the next five years – while just 10% of the high-net worths think they will be worse off. When asked about the question of Europe (in our survey held in autumn 2015) 61% of the high-income group said they wanted in; compared to just 34% of low income. We saw then, back in January, what we saw in June – a strong correlation between income, education and attitude to Europe. If you think about all of this through the prism of Maslow’s hierarchy of need you start to see that the result was only going to go one way. Deficiency needs like esteem, prestige and feelings of accomplishment for many people were out of reach. These needs motivate people to act if they aren’t met. The feeling to do something only becomes stronger the longer these needs are denied. And if you can’t satisfy yourself at this level, you have no chance of getting to the top of the hierarchy – the growth need, which is all about realising your own personal potential, selffulfillment, personal growth. How do you achieve peak experiences if jobs are changing, wages stagnating and the culture you grew up in is unrecognisable?
6 Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
3 Take back control! Despite ample evidence that Britain would remain part of the EU, the truth of the result was hiding in plain sight. Beyond London and other major towns and cities, the public thought differently from the liberal elites. So how did it all come to pass? The first point I would make is that to understand Brexit you have to understand the history of the European debate in this country. The Brexit result has many similarities to the Trump victory in America. One of the biggest similarities is, like Donald Trump’s victory, that Brexit wasn’t won or lost on the basis of one short campaign. No, for almost two decades the anti-Europe weevils had been burrowing into the public consciousness to the point that the pillars of Britain’s relationship with the EU were ready to collapse. It’s just some of us didn’t know it. This is not to say the official referendum campaign didn’t matter: it did – for several reasons I will come on to. The intense campaigning delivered some important moments. But I’d argue it should be seen more through the prism of the phenomenon of biased assimilation than anything. The dust on the issues had settled some time before. One of the most memorable quotes from the EU referendum campaign came from Daniel Hannan, a Conservative MEP who pleaded to the public, “Please sack me”. But Hannan’s
campaigning to leave dates much further back in time. Having represented Britain in Brussels for 17 years, he promoted an anti-EU position in his writing, his work as a Conservative MEP and his campaigning. In the late 90s he helped set up a largely forgotten but very influential pressure group, Business for Sterling, to stop Britain joining the Euro. That campaign worked by finding the right language and symbols of Britishness to strike a chord with the public. And Daniel Hannan, along with his friend Dominic Cummings, did so rather brilliantly. In many ways the group paved the way for the 2016 Leavers – including bringing what were then fringe issues into the mainstream. So as you can see, the writing was on the wall for Europe. Let’s look at the campaign itself. First, I wrote that I thought it was a case of biased assimilation: which is the tendency to interpret new information in a way that makes it consistent with our own pre-existing views. It accentuates information that supports your case, and diminishes information that doesn’t. And let’s be clear, we all do it! The theory stems from Stanford psychologists Lee Ross and Mark Lepper who conducted an experiment in 1979 to help decipher how people deal with objective information. They took a group of participants; half of them for and half of them against the death penalty. They were given conflicting information about the effectiveness of the death penalty in preventing crimes. 7
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
The logical outcome after looking at the results would have been a moderation in their extreme position. Turns out that they accepted at face value the evidence that conformed to their belief about the death penalty but they picked apart the evidence that conflicted with their conclusion. So the bizarre result of showing people in this study conflicting information is that it actually reinforces their view and increased the polarisation of the group. This, as you can see is subtly different from confirmation bias. What this tells us is that people set higher standards of evidence for hypotheses that go against their current expectations; and more information actually pushes us deeper into our own convictions. In Brexit assimilation bias played a major role. Those presented with arguments for and against, picked up on the information that supported their position, which attenuated their viewpoint. They dismissed evidence that had the opposite effect. Not great right if you are the BBC and you are deliberately trying to present the case for and against! Assimilation bias was most profoundly put to work on two issues during the campaign. The mythical £350m and immigration. Here’s how it works in practice…
save the NHS, you’ve got a rich stew of assimilation bias. An entire construct grew up around the idea that leaving the EU would be a benefit – more money for services, the regaining of some nebulous form of “control” that was never quite specified, a return to a Britain that was going to be indefinably better because there would be fewer foreigners and more power over our own destiny. Yet there was never a simple and memorable counterargument by Remain that staying in the EU could be a benefit, too. With two major party leaders who both seemed lukewarm about their own cause, the best that ever seemed to be said for the status quo was that it was better than the uncertain alternative. The lesser of two evils, perhaps. So let’s get to the brass tacks, and the official referendum campaign itself. Why did it go wrong for Remain and so well for Vote Leave? What happened and with whom? In my mind, it boils down to three factors: 1. The metropolitan mirror 2. The heart beating the head 3. Welsh football versus English football… I’ll explain, don’t worry.
Imagine you are a person who believes in leaving the EU. To the bog-standard election rhetoric about squeezed public services is added a pinch of official figures on net migration, published during the campaign. Once you add this to your normal diet of misleading stories in the media about hospitals and schools struggling to cope because of vast numbers of migrants, garnished with a fictitious £350m that would 8 Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
The Metropolitan Mirror When you examine the Brexit result, two Britains emerge. One Britain is outwardlooking, open and welcoming. A Britain that understands the Ricardian world view that a rising tide raises all boats. This Britain embraced multiculturalism and felt more intellectually and economically prosperous than the past. They lived mainly in big urban centres, or in University towns, like Bristol, Oxford, Exeter. But it’s not as simple to say this is a case of the educated versus the uneducated. It would be wrong to conclude that the 17 million were less educated, older, white people (though they were mainly whites). They came from a variety of backgrounds and included the 2.8m who didn’t vote in the General Election last year. Many of these voters reflected a more closed, more inward-looking, Britain. A Britain that was concerned with three things, and we’ve met them all in the last section: • • •
One, the pace of life, and a nostalgic view of the past when things were slower and simpler; Two, the fact that people feel like they are working harder, but earning less (and as you saw, they are); and Three, the impact of immigration on their standards of living had not been addressed by politicians.
They were mainly people of the country – but were as diverse as wealthy individuals in the Cotswolds and lower income voters in the North East. Look at a map of the result and you see this point starkly.
The Remain camp believed that their case hung on an economic argument and in the end, as Tony Blair argued that Britain would do the sensible thing and stay in the EU. But by the time the starting gun was fired, the Vote Leave team had been on the running track for many months – and they were employing US style grassroots tactics. And these grassroots tactics were being targeted outside of London and other big metropolitan areas. The reflection in the metropolitan mirror was a distorted view of Britain. But for those looking at other mirrors, they were seeing a completely different image. Gerry Gunster, a well-known, US political strategist with a 90% success rate at home, was in the thick of it. His last big campaign victory - defeating Mayor Bloomberg in New York’s efforts to limit the size of soda cups to tackle the obesity crisis. Why shouldn’t New Yorkers be able to drink as much Pepsi as they like? What’s it got to do with government? he successfully argued. Here’s how he described his role in Brexit: “The effort was waged on a truly grassroots level: through word of mouth at pubs, at rallies and through door to door canvasing”. Gunster’s view was that grassroots campaigners understand better than anyone a) the need to get out of the bubble (in this case London) and b) to switch into listening mode. Armed with research (both qualitative and quantitative) his team were deployed to Manchester, Bristol, the Midlands and everywhere in between on a listening tour. What’s powerful about this kind of campaigning isn’t so much the ability to spread the word online as well as off, as its ability to capture testimonials from these messengers; and not 9
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
only that, but ones that resonate with the public in terms they can understand. And, perhaps most importantly, do so with a ruthless focus on hammering home one message. Gunster was one cog in a machine that knew what people outside London felt. He understood their fears, he knew that 55% of Britons felt that the country was on the wrong track, that politicians were unaccountable and that Brussels was distant, unelected (for the most part) and irrelevant (at best). Vote Leave understood this. It’s not entirely fair to say that Remain weren’t aware either. It’s just they hoped that the public would put aside “feelings” in favour of a rational cost/benefit analysis…
The Heart Beating The Head But they didn’t and nostalgia was conjured up by Vote Leave. At the centre of this image – a galvanising issue that transcended class, income and geography – British sovereignty. Here was an issue - like a deep-sea fishing net – that captured votes across the ideological divide. The trick was clever. The Vote Leave camp recognised that traditional left-right politics was being replaced by a different divide. A horizontal dividing line below which sat people who felt the country hadn’t delivered for them; above it, the so-called elites. But it wasn’t enough simply to pander to the anti-government, anti-elite zeitgeist. Vote Leave needed to reach above the line too – and sovereignty was the issue to do that. Sovereignty united the council estate and the country estate.
Britain’s sovereignty is in its DNA. It’s one of those keystone issues that brings right and left together. The story of our island is built on defending and projecting sovereignty – and for Vote Leave being part of a European bloc was anti-sovereignty. Sovereignty isn’t an entirely rational concept; after all, to trade with the rest of the world, you have to comply with a set of rules laid down, not by parliament but by supranational organisations like the WTO or the EU. But that was mere detail. The future of the nation was at stake, and an opportunity was in front of us to ‘Take Back Control’. And now we come to the genius of the campaign, the language. I couldn’t do justice to the Brexit messaging in here – there is a discussion, in its own right, that examines the shift from professional, rational, political messaging, to campaign messaging that masquerades as authenticism. Authenticism is the style of rhetoric that seeks to present itself as unvarnished, absent of guile or focus-group marketing. It is short and straightforward in tone. It doesn’t obfuscate, or seek to confuse. It tells it how it is, it tells it straight…or seemingly straight. This is a type of rhetoric we saw both in the US Election, as well as Brexit. The language is simple, staccato and concise. It taps into underlying concerns, some of which have been publicly difficult to air, immigration being the prime example. It speaks to a wistful nostalgia; directed at the heart, not the head. Nigel Farage is a chief proponent of authenticism. Sarah Palin in America. Plain speakers, “truth tellers”…
10 Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
Comments by Michael Gove appealing to the public to not listen to “us” the politicians, but to listen to themselves “the people”; and Beppe Grillo in Italy over the weekend when he said the public should listen to their “gut not their head”, are examples of politicians deploying authenticism. Let’s briefly compare and contrast the two campaign themes: • •
Stronger, Safer and Better Off; and Take Back Control
First, Stronger, Safer and Better Off. You see a clear attempt to activate the self-interested voter – here’s rational man. Classical concepts like economic strength, national security and personal benefit sit squarely in the statement. You could parachute this sentence into any US election campaign right up to Obama in 2008. It’s a classic piece of rhetoric; it assumes voters are rational, able (or indeed want) to balance an argument and deploys hard issues to convert them. It’s the economy… stupid. The language itself is robust. Strong. Safe. Better Off. Turn now to Take Back Control. On the face of it, not so different, right? But there are two big differences. First, it’s an active declamation. Something has been lost, and it needs to be recovered. You need to find the courage in yourself to take it back, to seize it. It’s calling on the voter to take action and do something. The word ‘control’ is crucial. Who doesn’t want to take back control? Who wants to cede control to others?
harder than ever before, we are always on, yet we’re no better off. This is all subtext in ‘Take back control’. Second, it is nostalgic. It speaks to the heart, to another time when we had control. Whether this ever existed is irrelevant. And rather brilliantly it activated older voters who turned out in great numbers, in arithmetically more numbers in fact, than young people who wanted to stay. Take Back Control was a clarion cry to the 17 million in Britain who felt they no longer had control and wanted to do something about it. Take back control from British politicians. Take back control of your job and your future. Take back control of our NHS, our schools. Take back our culture and identity. It was…genius.
Welsh Football Vs. English Football Vote Leave had another great advantage. They were a unified team. Think about it in footballing terms – it’s the difference between Welsh football and English football at this year’s Euro championships. England fielded a team of stars, expected to win every game in their group. The badge weighed heavy. Formations kept changing. Key players were played out of position. And no-one knew quite what to do with Rooney. They were less than the sum of their parts and complacency was always a risk: England defender Gary Cahill predicted their next opponents were due “a real beating”. They were knocked out by Iceland.
The Welsh were a team of unfancied journeymen, with two star players. Gareth Bale Not only that, it taps into another concern – and Aaron Ramsey (think of them as Boris modernity. Underscoring much of what we are Johnson and Nigel Farage). But they played as a seeing in politics is a rejection of modern life. well-drilled unit, with a clear game plan. They Life has become too busy, we are working were motivated by the prospect of beating the 11 Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
odds, which meant that they were disciplined throughout.
would never vote Tory that the Remain camp needed to engage with.
When you translate that to the campaign the differences were obvious and deadly for Remain. They had great individual players: the Prime Minister was no slouch, after all he’d just won the first Tory majority in 23 years; political strategist Jim Messina; the man who was instrumental in the election of President Obama; Craig Oliver, my former colleague at the BBC, a man who understands the power of television; and respected pollster Andrew Cooper.
Many attempts were made to reach out to the Labour leadership, to reach across the aisle and campaign jointly. But they were rebuffed. Jeremy Corbyn’s appeal to remain was lacklustre, weak, arguably pathetic. It didn’t stand a chance against the ‘take back control’ rhetoric.
Also at the centre, another accomplished and clever political strategist George Osborne. A dream team, you could argue. A team in the English mould. Because when it came to acting like a team they had one critical problem… The Queen’s Opposition, the Labour Party. Still to this day it isn’t clear whether Jeremy Corbyn actually voted for Britain to remain in the EU. He has never emphatically said, whether he did or didn’t. And here was the problem, the total meltdown of the Labour Party and take over by the far left presented an insurmountable issue. Personal antipathy and ideology on the part of Labour got in the way of joint campaigning. A combination of a political tin-ear on the part of the leadership and deeply inexperienced advisers who couldn’t see the accident ahead, was one of the factors in Remain losing the referendum. It was critical for Remain to reach loyal Labour voters as much as Tory ones. Remain needed to convert voters in Labour strongholds like the North East or South Wales. We are talking about traditional working class voters who
If you look at the outcome and converted the traditional Labour areas to Remain the result would have been very different. And it was possible to do. The SNP pulled it off by working with, not against, Tory Scottish leader Ruth Davidson, and delivered a resounding vote to remain. So significantly handicapped – they also didn’t stand a chance against another zinger from Vote Leave, Project Fear; the catch-all rebuttal to fact-based analysis and expert forecasting. Whenever Remain raised legitimate concerns about security, cooperation, competitiveness, trade, economics, they were dismissed not by detailed rebuttal but by one phrase. Project Fear. Leave painted Remain into a corner. Anything vaguely negative with respect to the consequences of Brexit was characterised as scaremongering. Again, this was playing to irrational fears and the heart of the voter, but it was also Remain’s lack of cooperation and connectedness as a team that meant they could never convincingly respond to this. Even economic or scientific proofs became tainted as examples of the work of a belittled group on whom we had previously relied quite a lot: experts. Project Fear also brilliantly took advantage of the phenomenon of psychological reluctance. 12
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
This phenomenon says that people intensely dislike being told what to think. They evolve negative feelings towards a messenger trying to argue or advocate a particular behaviour, or viewpoint. This perhaps explains why President Obama’s intervention back-fired – and perhaps should never have been proposed. So to conclude one thing from this examination, maybe it should be this: if we are going to restore reputation of, and trust in, expertise, we are going to have to find a new language in which to express it.
There are two interconnected revolutions, and one big shift. First, traditional hierarchies are over. The pyramid might not have been inverted, but it’s certainly looking shaky. Second, the old left-right political model has been replaced by a horizontal dividing line, a DMZ with people feeling that they are either below or above it. Finally, the shift… to authenticism from rational market-tested politics.
So here we are almost six months after the referendum and the mist still hasn’t cleared.
For many years, the established pyramid of hierarchy has been eroded. It started in the 60s in this country in the professional classes when it became ok to ask your family doctor for a second opinion. It moved into the family in the 70s and the vogue for calling your parents by their first names. It entered politics in the era of New Labour and a Prime Minister who insisted that people “call me Tony”.
Referendums carry the promise of decisiveness, of a binary choice that delivers action. But even though “Brexit means Brexit”, we are still not quite sure what Brexit means.
Social media has over the past decade or so accelerated this phenomenon with peer-to-peer communication, grassroots coalition building and online activism.
And as the Supreme Court considers whether Parliament should be allowed to debate and be consulted on the triggering of Article 50, Italy has become the latest European nation to stub its toe on the great EU project.
Whether you are unhappy with Jeremy Clarkson being sacked by the BBC, or want to put pressure on Lego over a commercial deal with the Daily Mail, social media now provides a channel to mobilise support and exert influence, quickly and at scale.
4 What Does It All Mean?
With rising populist dissent in France, Holland and Denmark, anti-establishment parties in Spain, Italy and Greece, the future of the EU is very much in play. But as we look back on the UK’s referendum what are the big takeaways from a political strategy and political behaviour point of view?
Influence is now being driven by peer-to-peer rather than top down. Politicians and those in positions of traditional authority cannot just assume influence based on title. You must engage in the debate, advocate and build coalitions of support to get stuff done. You must get out of the ivory tower and go to the street to win support. 13
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
And you must work hard at it. We have seen the decline in trust in the institutions that govern and shape society over the past decade. Leaders must win back trust, and if they don’t we are all vulnerable to populist causes that make promises that cannot be met. Just look at America and Donald Trump’s promise to repatriate manufacturing jobs, which in their absence abroad have in any case been outsourced to robots.
until 2020. Though in Italy over the weekend, arguably you saw the same effect again.
And this leads to the second revolution, that Trump so masterfully exploited. The old model of the left and the right was replaced in Brexit and Trump’s Presidential win by a horizontal dividing line.
Finally, then, the problems with language. This is one of the trickiest issue of all. There is no doubt that one of the great innovations we saw in Brexit was the strategy to successfully bulldoze through fact-based rebuttal and appeal to the electorate’s heart (or gut if you’re an Italian) through simple, plain English. Big claims using small words.
Above the line, the “haves”, below the line, “the have nots”. A line that wasn’t class based, but a line that both incorporated perceptions of relative income, and relative opportunity. Labour voters in the north and Tory voters in the shires came together to vote for Brexit. Just as voters in America who had voted for Barack Obama voted for Donald Trump. Traditionally labour unions delivered to the Democrats the white working class vote in Northern states like Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania, and areas like Detroit that had benefited from government programmes. But the horizontal line cleaved that support. Just like South Wales, the North East or Cornwall, these Northern American states had started to crawl out of the great recession of 2008, but it wasn’t happening fast enough. And they saw, the “haves”, like Hillary Clinton and her receipt of $18m for 80 speeches during this period, as symptomatic of a rigged system. So, traditional left allegiances were tossed out of the window. Whether this is a permanent paradigm shift we won’t know in this country
It is interesting to note the rhetoric from the May government, starting at the steps of No.10, to tackle this problem and be a leader for a disconnected and disenfranchised group of people. Though, how different May’s efforts are to David Cameron’s Big Society, is a moot point.
We need to accept that this is a response to the inadequacy of political language that has evolved over the past 40 years. The public smell message-testing a mile off and clearly yearn and demand what they see as more honesty. But in my mind, we must be careful not to confuse the symptom with the cause. Authenticism in political communications is the symptom of a system that is not trusted. The answer to authenticism isn’t a battle to be more “authentic”. The answer isn’t necessarily a new type of political language. No, the answer lies in our politics itself. We need to find ways of rebooting the political system and rebuilding trust. Qualification for political office shouldn’t be a PPE degree, but instead be something more lofty – a genuine desire to make the country better. We need to be more honest about trade-offs with the public – and we need to start with Brexit. It simply isn’t possible to have access to the single market and the customs union, not to 14
Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016
pay for that access, and not agree to freedom of movement. This doesn’t work and to say it does is dishonest. We are misleading the public to believe that this is possible. Brexit can be achieved, but it will require tradeoffs. It isn’t win-win. Just as infrastructure spending from the Trump administration won’t address structural labour issues. Brexit won’t in the short-term improve people’s lives in poorer parts of the UK. But these magic solutions continue to be marketed to the public. So, let’s get more grown up and more informed about what is possible. That is why we need more informed debate, and critically, a more balanced and impartial media. The growth of fake news imperils this. But that….is for another day!
15 Reading The Ruins: Lessons Learned From The Aftermath Of A Political Earthquake By Ed Williams, CEO, Edelman UK & Ireland Delivered at Goldsmith’s University, 6 December 2016