An information war in an information vacuum?
Faced with a barrage of reports, statistics, and (mis)information, Ben Crome wonders which voices are most worth listening to in the EU referendum debate.
As the crucial 23 June referendum approaches, it’s fair to say that the past few weeks have witnessed an intensification in the frequency and vociferousness of the ‘In’ and ‘Out’ camps’ assaults on one another. The latest wave of conflagrations began when David Cameron announced the government’s intention to distribute pamphlets outlining the case for Britain to remain in the EU to every household in the country. Cameron’s initiative prompted Conservative minister and Vote Leave co-leader Michael Gove to accuse the prime minister of infantilising the leaflets’ intended audience. Then, when the International Monetary Fund (IMF) published a preliminary report outlining the debilitating effect that leaving the EU would have on Britain’s economy, Vote Leave accused the IMF of distorting its figures to suit the vested interests of the financial elites served by the organisation. Barack Obama’s speech in London last Friday represented an extended exhortation to British voters that only by remaining in the EU can the UK retain its global standing and ensure the continued geopolitical relevance of the Anglo-American partnership. In response, London mayor and Gove’s partner in crime Boris Johnson told Obama to mind his own business.
The common thread linking the sagas over the pamphlets, the IMF report and Obama’s speech is that in each case the debate has centred on how, and from whom, members of the public receive information about the likely consequences of leaving the EU. While the Brexiters denounced the £9 million spent on producing the brochures as a waste of public money, their main concern was the ease with which Cameron and his colleagues thought that they could brainwash the public with pro-EU propaganda. The IMF and President Obama were dismissed as powerholders in a neoliberal world order which uses the EU as a vehicle for weakening Britain, and articulating that populist, anti-elitist line seems to render meaningful engagement with the arguments voiced irrelevant.
These episodes marked the beginning of a two-month information war. Facts and statistics will be selectively deployed by one side and then ‘debunked’ by the other. The pro-Brexit narrative on these few issues has been simple. The government? Wrong. Obama? Wrong. An organisation responsible for dispensing economic advice to every country in the world? Wrong. And if for every assertion there is a riposte and for every numerical balance-sheet a counter-argument, the fundamental question becomes: who exactly is worth listening to?
Nigel Farage has asserted: ‘The more politicians, the more international leaders that line up and try and bully us and tell us what to do, the more likely we are to go and tell them to sling their hook. We don’t need their advice. They’ve been wrong again and again and again’. Even if Farage’s confident tone sounds convincing, his strident rhetoric is not reflective of the reality that in spite of whatever bias the government, the IMF, or President Obama may have, their number-crunching is significantly more rigorous than that of the Leave campaign, as was memorably highlighted by Labour MP and Brexit advocate Kate Hoey’s inability to name a single independent study which demonstrated that Britain would be better off outside the EU.
'We don’t need their advice. They’ve been wrong again and again and again.'
With all these arguments and statistics flying around, it might be easy to think that the electorate is being bombarded with too much information. But, in reality, the pre-referendum debate is being conducted in an information vacuum. Unlike general elections, where previous outcomes can give some indication of voting behaviour – how many people will turn out to vote, which age groups are more likely to do so, which side people will vote for, etc. – there is no precedent for an EU member state to vote on leaving the Union, and thus no evidence, apart from opinion polls, on which to base any sort of electoral science.
And because there is no precedent for a country to leave the EU, the economic effects of doing so are ultimately unknown. The effects of staying are equally unknown: if a decisive vote to remain puts the issue of Britain’s membership to bed for a generation, there’s no way of predicting how the EU’s powers might deepen over the coming decades. A general election is a choice of one set of policies or another; this referendum is not about policies or opposing manifestos at all. The nature of the referendum is such that campaigning, especially although not exclusively on the Out side, is necessarily based on hypotheticals.
'The nature of the referendum is such that campaigning...is necessarily based on hypotheticals.'
With each proclamation that voting one way will have one risky side effect or another, and with each lengthy report that’s published on the harmful consequences of a Brexit, we’re faced with an information war which is being waged so ferociously that generals in both camps are either forgetting or choosing to avoid the reality of the information vacuum. Whichever side fills the vacuum will likely win the war. And the significant proportion of voters who haven’t yet decided which way they’ll cast their ballot – or even if they’ll turn up on polling day at all – and don’t spend their lives in Europhile or Eurosceptic echo chambers will need to decide which sources of information they can trust.
One escape route is to pretend that statistical information is irrelevant, as Kate Hoey did when she went on to claim that the absence of a study on the economic disadvantages of leaving the EU doesn’t matter because the primary positive outcome of Brexit would be the restoration of British sovereignty. Unfortunately for Hoey, emotional arguments don’t tend to influence elections in Britain. Ahead of the 2015 general election, voters ranked the economy as their most important issue, and they rewarded the Conservatives, who had a handsome lead over Labour in the public’s perception of the two parties’ ability to handle the economy, with a comfortable victory.
The In campaign has been derided as ‘Project Fear’ because of its emphasis on the negative consequences of a Brexit as opposed to identifying any positives inherent to the European project. But in opting for this focus – expect to hear the figure of £4,300, the amount of money each British household is projected to lose per year in the event of a Brexit, flaunted more and more over the coming weeks – Britain Stronger in Europe may well have demonstrated a more sophisticated understanding of Britain’s electoral psyche than its rivals. If Team Brexit is to manoeuvre into a clear lead in the polls, it will probably have to find a way to fill the information vacuum rather than seal it.
