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A Brexit post-mortem: 17 takeaways for a fallen David Cameron
This is a brilliant article. It's a bit outdated (4 July; mentions Liam Fox in the leadership race, for context) but really worth reading. An excerpt:
1. Referenda are the nuclear weapons of democracy. In parliamentary systems they are redundant. Seeking a simplistic binary yes/no answer to complex questions, they succumb to emotion and run amok. Their destructive aftermath lasts for generations.
2. Never call a referendum without being sure of the outcome. You called this one primarily for reasons of tactical political positioning, mainly to appease anxiety in the English Conservative Party (and I mean “English”) that the United Kingdom Independence Party was gaining strength with your party’s voters. The pledge to hold a referendum helped win you an unexpected majority. It also ended your career and seriously compromised your country’s interests.
5. Your appeals to the nation’s head didn’t get through. In a post-factual political age, reasoning doesn’t reach the heart. To win, you needed to mobilize convincing passion behind the case that the status quo is both preferable and improvable. You could have said that despite its struggles and seeming faults, the European Union aims to be a force for good; that it has brought, and will bring, decisive benefits to Britain, and to all European peoples. Implying only that the EU is a mess but that leaving would be worse was bound to lose the campaign. Raining fears about the material costs of leaving, supported by experts and authorities, had no impact on the growing cult of “ordinary people” who took cues only from each other, animated by their populist rain men.
9. Why didn’t the Remain campaign say more about non-industrial benefits from the EU? Is it because of a visceral inability to praise its merit after years of denouncing it? The contribution to the EU budget by the UK has been exaggerated beyond belief. It only accounts for 1.3 percent of the UK’s budget. On the other hand, British farmers love the 55 percent of their income coming from the Common Agricultural Policy. The cultural and arts community needed its 230 EU grants. The one third of university students hoping for Erasmus support for study in Europe will be stuck at home. Britain’s rank as fifth in the world in scientific papers despite being only twentieth in science spending owes a lot to the additional US $11.6 billion in EU competitive research grants (2006-15). All of these sectors have constituencies. Leave courted the wistful retirees in the shires and marginalized “victims of globalization” in the once-industrial North – did Remain sufficiently target the younger generations whose futures were being bound by a senile chase after a receding past?
2. Never call a referendum without being sure of the outcome. You called this one primarily for reasons of tactical political positioning, mainly to appease anxiety in the English Conservative Party (and I mean “English”) that the United Kingdom Independence Party was gaining strength with your party’s voters. The pledge to hold a referendum helped win you an unexpected majority. It also ended your career and seriously compromised your country’s interests.
5. Your appeals to the nation’s head didn’t get through. In a post-factual political age, reasoning doesn’t reach the heart. To win, you needed to mobilize convincing passion behind the case that the status quo is both preferable and improvable. You could have said that despite its struggles and seeming faults, the European Union aims to be a force for good; that it has brought, and will bring, decisive benefits to Britain, and to all European peoples. Implying only that the EU is a mess but that leaving would be worse was bound to lose the campaign. Raining fears about the material costs of leaving, supported by experts and authorities, had no impact on the growing cult of “ordinary people” who took cues only from each other, animated by their populist rain men.
9. Why didn’t the Remain campaign say more about non-industrial benefits from the EU? Is it because of a visceral inability to praise its merit after years of denouncing it? The contribution to the EU budget by the UK has been exaggerated beyond belief. It only accounts for 1.3 percent of the UK’s budget. On the other hand, British farmers love the 55 percent of their income coming from the Common Agricultural Policy. The cultural and arts community needed its 230 EU grants. The one third of university students hoping for Erasmus support for study in Europe will be stuck at home. Britain’s rank as fifth in the world in scientific papers despite being only twentieth in science spending owes a lot to the additional US $11.6 billion in EU competitive research grants (2006-15). All of these sectors have constituencies. Leave courted the wistful retirees in the shires and marginalized “victims of globalization” in the once-industrial North – did Remain sufficiently target the younger generations whose futures were being bound by a senile chase after a receding past?
https://www.opencanada.org/features/brexit-post-mortem-17-takeaways-fallen-david-cameron/
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