The campaign over the UK’s referendum on our continued membership of the European Union is entering its final stretch, with numerous facts, figures, and assertions being thrown around with wilful abandon. Here, Alan Finlayson argues that both campaigns in are build on thin theories which utterly fail to understand each other

Finlayson, Alan

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By Democratic Audit UK 2016-6-11Too many facts and not enough theories: the rhetoric of thereferendum campaigndemocraticaudit.com /2016/06/11/too-many-facts-and-not-enough-theories-the-rhetoric-of-the-referendum-campaign/The campaign over the UK’s referendum on our continued membership of the European Union is entering its finalstretch, with numerous facts, figures, and assertions being thrown around with wilful abandon. Here, AlanFinlayson argues that both campaigns in are build on thin theories which utterly fail to understand each other.Credit: Gage Skidmore, CC BY SA 2.0A common complaint about the referendum has been that there is a lack of reliable facts. It seems like a reasonablecomplaint. But it isn’t true. There are too many facts. The problem is that there aren’t enough interpretations.Here, for example, are some facts: Tony Blair wears size nine shoes; Jean Monnet once sold Cognac for a living;Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson MP suffered sleepless nights over his failure to attain a first-class degree; theRomanian branch of the Leicester City fan club has 64 likes on Facebook; Foreign Direct Investment into Albaniacurrently makes up 50% of GDP; the average temperature in Strasbourg in July is twenty degrees Celsius.These are all facts. Do they help? Are they interesting? Are they useful?An old philosophical saying, sometimes misattributed to Kant, states that ‘facts without theory are blind’. The point isthat for facts to be of use we need a conceptual framework to give them some order, to filter out the important fromthe merely interesting and to help us fit facts together with each other and with moral as well as political values.Without such a theory facts are just countless pieces from innumerable jigsaw puzzles with no image on a box tohelp us work out what goes where.One of the things politics does is offer such frameworks (sometimes called ideologies). This is not necessarily a bad1/4thing. It is just one of the things that politics is for. But such frameworks can be more or less helpful. They can helppeople see things more clearly and so act well within the world. They can put people on narrow trains of thoughtwhich carry them away from reality. And the fact is that the mainstream of the referendum campaign has provided uswith two such theories, neither of which is any good.The Brexiteers (of both left and right) think with a form of conspiracy theory. I don’t use that term just because it isrude. I don’t think that Brexit campaigners believe the world is secretly run by lizards or the illuminati. But theirrhetoric (the way they argue, the proofs they present, the thinking which guides their selection and interpretation offacts) has the unmistakable shape of conspiracy theory.For example, for the Brexiteers no point made against them can be sincere or in anyway motivated by reason. Itmust be motivated by some hidden force or interest. When President Obama says Britain should Remain, BorisJohnson says it is because he can’t suppress his innate Kenyan racial prejudice against the British. TheInternational Monetary Fund, Bank of England and Institute of Fiscal Studies produce data indicating the higheconomic risks of Brexit and former cabinet ministers say this must be because they have been leant-on or paid tosay it.The idea that nothing is what it appears to be – because of hidden influences – is a hallmark of conspiracy theory. Itis why Brexit campaigners see certain kinds of fact as highly significant: that somebody met with somebody shortlybefore a statement was made; that an institution received some funding from something to do with the EU; that atsome point in the past a person said something different (as if their change of heart must be mysterious). Behind allthis is a ‘them’ which is given various names according to taste: the ‘establishment’, ‘faceless bureaucrats’, the‘liberal intelligentsia’, ‘neoliberals’, ‘the Germans’, ‘capitalists’, ‘cultural Marxists’.One of the fascinating things about conspiracy theories is that what they are most opposed to isn’t whatever thealleged conspirators are trying to achieve; it is the conspiracy itself which appalls them. The conspiracy is a threat(to the people, to sovereignty, to freedom) just because it is a conspiracy. For this reason the weight of the theorist’sargument doesn’t fall on showing that any particular policy is ill-conceived but on showing that it is a product of theconspiring parties. This is why, for Brexit campaigners, any organized body expressing support for Remain is bydefinition illegitimate. An association of Economists, The University of Edinburgh, church leaders are all denouncedfor trying to exercise influence which is unjust because it’s part of the conspiracy. Ultimately conspiracy theorists seeall and any argument made against them as facts which prove their case. Each is an example of how wide theconspiracy goes, how deep are its roots and how anyone in its thrall will say anything. It is likely that some of youare thinking that about me right now (and about to Google to see who has paid me to say all this).Because it is the conspiracy which is the problem its theorists are not really concerned with what happens once it isdefeated. Some vague gestures aside, the Brexit campaign has little to say about how things will work post-EU.Their primary goal is simply to name the conspiracy: to point at and expose the ‘guilty men’. This gives the Brexitcampaign a certain strength. It can stitch together very different positions, across the left and the right, sincesupporters are free to imagine whatever future they like while pointing to whatever group they most dislike as at thehead of the enemy.Remain, in contrast, is dominated by a theory that is nowhere near as interesting and imaginative as a conspiracytheory. It is the thinnest of thin utilitarianism. For the Remain campaign everything must be judged against acalculation of advantage, a measure of what will increase our happiness or avoid the risk of pain. A problem for thistheory is that people aren’t made happy or upset by the same things. Consequently the Remain campaign isreduced to listing facts about specific things which are better with the EU in the hope that individuals will see at leastone they like. These are all real examples of things campaigners have said are at risk if we leave the EU: jobs,wages, the cost of shopping, research into malaria (or cancer or Alzheimers), animal rights, apprenticeships, theenvironment, workers’ rights, farm grants, the British landscape, scientific excellence, pig herd health, the UK watchindustry, curries, ice cream.2/4There may well be merit in some or even all of these claims. But the longer the list gets the less convincing it is. Itfeels like a random list of facts with no meaningful political or ethical theory behind it. The much mocked Remainadvert ‘Votin’, which tried to convince young people that being in the EU is literally more fun than leaving it, is a casein point. It seems like a narrow and cynical appeal to a narrow and cynical self-interest. It also exposes the narrowworld-view of the campaigners behind it: one in which young people are ravin’, chattin’ and travellin’ and neverworried about paying off their ever-increasing student loan, keeping up with the rent and remaining in precariousemployment.Because they think that sourced measurements of advantage and harm are the essence of reason Remaincampaigners find it hard to fathom their opponents. They cannot understand that people value things which are notmeasureable – a sense of identity, getting one over on smug politicians, feeling like you have some control overyour life. Because they can’t conceive of people so committed to a value or principle that they are willing to take a hitto GDP, Remainers can only think of Leavers as irrational dupes. And because they think themselves committed toreason they don’t really know how to deal with an opponent that will say whatever it needs to say to win.We are left with two sides equally convinced of their insight and perspicacity, unable to see any merit in the opinionsof their opponents or to formulate a strategy for speaking across the divide.There are better ways of thinking about all this. There are voices out there – on both sides – making cases that relyon theories about who we, the British, might become or on moral values such as solidarity. But these voices receivelittle coverage from British news media which are focused on the personalities and relationships that amusejournalists rather than on the ideas and values which matter to the rest of us. We ought to have more interpretationson offer – more ways of generating, organizing and understanding the facts which would also be more choices aboutthe kind of future we want to make together.But this is where our politics is now.On the one side are various fantasies of evil and of the heroism of those who claim they can vanquish it. On theother side are spiritless technocrats busy pulling the levers on the state machine but so far away from the front linethey cannot see how few of them work or hear how their language is not one the rest of us speak. Both are sowrapped up in their own theory of the world that they can’t hear let alone understand what anybody else has to sayand think that all contradictory evidence must be a fabrication or a delusion. But the truth is that each is nowdedicated primarily to maintaining and protecting their own delusion – far more so than they are dedicated tounderstanding the rest of us and working out how to persuade us of something. Whatever happens in our littlereferendum this will not change much. The ideological intensity may increase, the gulf between them widen and thepolitical culture fragment further.The collapse is yet to come.—Note: this piece originally appeared on the Open Democracy blog and the University of East Anglia blog and isreposted with the author’s permission. It represents the views of the author and not those of Democratic Audit or theLSE. Please read our comments policy before posting. —Alan Finlayson is Professor of Political and Social Theory at the University of East Anglia. His research isparticularly concerned with the theory and practice of democratic politics, the study of political ideologies and alsowith political rhetoric. As part of a project supported by The Leverhulme Trust he has developed thewebsite www.britishpoliticalspeech.org and is working to promote the theory, analysis and improved practice ofpolitical speech, oratory and argument in the UK.3/44/4

Too many facts and not enough theories: the rhetoric of the referendum campaign

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