The private prosecution brought against
Boris Johnson has got me thinking again about the 350 million figure used by Vote
Leave. As Jonathan Portes points out here, it represented an unusual moment in
politics. Politicians may often engage in spin, and this is surely a normal, or
at least unavoidable part of politics. They may even try and
promote false beliefs. But they usually do so whilst avoiding obvious, outright
lies. Take Iain Duncan Smith’s claim in 2012, for example, that there were ‘more people in work than ever before’. The message, that unemployment was historically low was false, but the statement itself was strictly true. This example illustrates how a politician
can promote a false belief without making a literally false statement. But it
also illustrates something else: it is not clear that the distinction between a
literal lie and an intentionally misleading statement is particularly useful.
And with regard to the 350 million figure used by vote leave, the literal sense
in which it was a lie may have not been the most significant way in which it
was misleading.
Why is this? As we all know, the literal
sense in which Vote Leave’s claim was a lie was that it took a gross contribution
figure and claimed it could be reallocated and spent as if it were a net
contribution figure, even though it they explicitly promised to match almost all EU spending in the UK to reassure direct beneficiaries. If we wanted to analyse this further, we might say that it was actually even worse than this. The 350 million was not even in a
gross figure in the particularly useful sense, as it included a cash rebate, deducted
before payment. But the surface level claim of a specific figure was not all that relevant anyway. Most people don’t have much of a sense of what these kind of numbers
mean in the context of overall government spending. The significance of the number was that it sounded large, and could be reallocated*. But for a decision of
the magnitude of Brexit, even the false figure is not actually that big. What’s more, because of
almost certain declines in government revenue following Brexit, and
additional spending commitments coming from replicating existing regulatory
structures, any ‘savings’ from net contributions would be dwarfed by losses
elsewhere.
Indeed, the substantial sense in which Vote Leave lied might very well have been achievable without resorting to strictly untrue
statements. This is as the actual net contrition figure might well also have
sounded arbitrarily large to many people too. The spirit of the lie, that there is a
substantial cash dividend to Brexit, could have been preserved without making a
strictly false statement.What, then, was the significance of the
literal mistruth? As Dominic Cummings himself boasts, it may well have been a
major strategic innovation. By goading remainers into disputing the 350 million
figure, the discussion became about precisely what the net contribution figure
was. But all of the numbers mentioned sounded large to a general audience.
The spirit of the lie was therefore reinforced by the literal lie being challenged.
But I think it is significant that this
strategy worked. When I first heard that Vote Leave had decided to go with this
figure, I thought it would backfire. It was, as mentioned, an unusually crude
and brazen lie, and what’s more, it was very easy to falsify. Indeed anybody
could do so with a single google search.
In a different world the very straightforwardness of the lie would have
been its undoing. The story that dominated the campaign could have been Vote Leave lying, critically undermining their credibility. The fact that it did not
certainly paints a depressing picture of the state of the British press and
media. It is one where even the most obvious and uncontroversial falsehoods can
go unchecked if they are politically favourable to the right people. And the success of Vote Leave
was certainly instructive to other unscrupulous politicians. While it may be
true that more subtle means of deception may have similar effects, these are at
least more difficult to achieve and more situationally constrained. The success of this strategy is surely an unwelcome development.
* It is also possible that the mere fact of
a large figure being ‘taken’ was a source of anger, separate from any sense
that it could be better used. Given the low level of trust in politicians to
actually deliver improvements, it would not surprise me if anger that money was
‘sent’ to the EU was as important as the idea that something constructive could
be done if this weren’t the case.
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