How Vote Leave turned expertise into evidence of bias

Imagine a group of people, perhaps tending to belong to a particular profession, social stratum, or of a particular political persuasion,  holds a view on an essentially factual (i.e non normative) question you happen to disagree with. You might think one of two things: perhaps they have some privileged access to information you don't, or perhaps something about their situation produces some kind of partial bias. We shouldn't actually view these two things as necessarily mutually exclusive. People with particular political agendas are more likely to spend time uncovering flaws in their opponents, certain positions can generate both animosity and specific knowledge, and sometimes specific knowledge can inform a political outlook. But it does make some sense to look at the motives and biases of information sources, in absence of the time and means to evaluate everything we hear. And  for better or worse, bias and privileged access to information generally are taken as mutually exclusive, such that expertise must be presented as arising from an impartial source.

The problem is, purely in the abstract, uniformity of opinion arising from a political agenda and uniformity of opinion arising from specific information are indistinguishable. During the Brexit referendum, Vote Leave used this to devastating effect. Once it became clear just how overwhelming opposition to Brexit was from exporters, economists, those who work in science and diplomacy etc, the best method of neutralising these criticisms was to claim they were motivated by cognitive biases or special interests. Contrary to expectations this did not mean playing the criticisms down- it actually meant the opposite. Michael Gove's famous remark that people had 'had enough of experts' was about stating defiance, rather than challenging the idea that expert view came to conclusions other than his own. References to the 'apocalyptic' nature of economic forecasts meant (sometimes satirically) exaggerating expert opposition, rather than dismissing it. By stressing precisely the uniformity and scale of expert opinion against Brexit, particularly in economics, as evidence of bias, Vote Leave created a situation where any informed criticism of Brexit could immediately be dismissed. This strategy may well have been improvised and accidental, but it seems to have been quite effective. Indeed, they have continued it to this day. In 2018, when the Treasury released analysis of possible impacts of Brexit, Rees Mogg immediately claimed the figures were manipulated and used the scale of their negativity as evidence of this.  Daniel Hannan, perhaps the most articulate of the prominent Brexit supporters, argued that the very fact that the Treasury analysis continued to show a negative impact of all Brexit scenarios was proof of bias too.

This is not to claim that this strategy is entirely effective or unchallengeable. But the internal dynamics amongst supporters can be very dangerous indeed. It means those committed to Brexit are effectively hermetically sealed from unfavourable information. This goes some way to explaining the lunacy of the Conservative leadership content.