As we move into the last weeks of the European referendum campaign, there is a growing clamour of voices denouncing the terms in which the debate has been conducted. The chair of the UK Statistics Authority and the Treasury select committee added their criticism last week, as the economic debate about the implications of a potential Brexit reached new levels of hyperbole.
Perhaps most extraordinary was Vote Leave’s dismissal of the highly respected Institute for Fiscal Studies as a “paid-up propaganda arm” of the European Union as it joined bodies such as the Bank of England, the IMF and the OECD in warning of the economic risks of Brexit. Even the chair of Economists for Brexit distanced himself from this claim.
The UK Statistics Authority has criticised Vote Leave for continuing to use the misleading statistic that EU membership costs Britain £350m a week. The other side also stands accused of mis-deploying statistics, albeit in a less serious way.
Opposing sides flinging statistics and counter-statistics at each other is not particularly useful in helping undecided members of the public make up their minds. Economics is, of course, an inexact science based on assessing risk, and on any economic question there will usually be significant divergence of opinion within the profession. But a new Observer survey of 600 economists reveals an unusually resounding level of consensus that Brexit would be bad for growth.
The debate about the impacts of Brexit on immigration, security and the NHS have become similarly caricatured. Perhaps the yah-boo nature of the debate was to some extent inevitable. Both sides have clearly made a calculation that engaging in these terms is most likely to deliver success.
But it raises the question of what will this referendum have achieved? It has neither answered the bigger existential questions: about Britain’s relationship to the rest of the world; the best way to cooperate internationally when the challenges we face are increasingly borderless; or the purpose of the modern European Union. Nor has the Remain campaign spoken to voters who feel left behind by globalisation; who are concerned about the impacts of immigration on their own jobs and communities; and who feel there is a Westminster elite out of touch with people’s lives. And given the weight of economic opinion about the serious risks of Britain exiting the EU, not to mention the government’s own position on this, voters might well be justified in questioning why we are even having this debate in the first place.
For those in favour of leaving, this referendum was their opportunity to develop and set out a convincing alternative to Britain’s membership of the European Union. But no alternative has emerged, and they have resorted to a toxic campaign to paper over the deep divisions about what a post-Brexit future might look like.
And at what cost does this referendum campaign come to our politics? The debate has not only been off-puttingly hyperbolic but – as pointed out by Harriet Harman last week – male-dominated. Many voters are already cynical about the capacity of politics to make a difference to their lives, and trust in politicians is low. Those in favour of Britain staying in the EU have taken the biggest hit to trust: fewer than one in five voters now say they trust Cameron on the EU, half as many as six months ago. But the other side is not immune: while more people trust Boris Johnson to tell the truth on the EU than the prime minister, his trust levels have also fallen.
Conservative party moderates might once have hoped this referendum would act as a salve: a campaign that could put to bed the questions over Britain’s membership of the EU, not to mention Tory divisions over Europe, for at least a couple of decades.
But whichever way the vote goes, it brings risks for both parties: for Labour because the campaign has only served to highlight its failure to address the concerns of its working-class, socially conservative core voters; for the Conservatives because of the danger of the fallout and splits over Europe continuing to dominate their next leadership election.
Referendums are the ultimate form of direct democracy. But regardless of the result, perhaps one lesson from this campaign is that, for better or for worse, referendums rarely provide neat resolution of the big political questions of the day without generating long-term, and sometimes unintended, consequences for our politics.
