Outcome of the European Union Referendum

Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve Excerpts

Tuesday 5th July 2016 Lords Chamber

[Baroness O'Neill of Bengarve (CB)]

My Lords, were the referendum campaigns a great exercise in democracy, or were they a great exercise in talking past one another? I fear that the disarray which we now witness and the retractions, revelations and recriminations that spill out every day suggest that large parts of these campaigns were not even an exercise in communication, and that the public were not offered adequately described alternatives or the means to judge the real options, opportunities or risks.

This sorry situation is the fault not of the electorate but of the political class and the media. The options were not set out adequately or responsibly by those advocating them. The public did not believe the Government’s economic forecasts, which is not surprising since such forecasts are a specialised art form based on complex assumptions and quite unsuitable for mass communication. One has to say that even those who voted for leave may not have been convinced by many of the claims made by the Brexiteers, some of them since simply retracted. What opponents dubbed respectively Project Fear and Project Fantasy failed to explain either accurately or simply what was at stake or what would happen in the event of each outcome. Neither the process of invoking Article 50, and the role of Parliament in that process, nor the constitutional risks for the future of Northern Ireland and Scotland, and thereby to the integrity of the UK, were adequately communicated to voters.

Independent information was impeded rather than provided. Institutions charged with presenting expert and independent evidence—the Bank of England and the Institute for Fiscal Studies—were accused of being partisan when they did so. Publicly funded institutions such as the Office for National Statistics, the research councils and others whose task is to present evidence-based views were placed in purdah. The BBC often gave equal time to differing opinions but seemingly could not provide sober and informative challenges to the claims that were bandied around, so the elementary conditions for checking and challenging claims and arguments that democracy requires were simply ignored. Nor, it appears, did the Government make preparations for the contingency of a majority for Brexit. A civil service unit for negotiating was not established until after the referendum. Expertise in trade negotiations had been run down and was not being repaired. There was no explanation about the process for invoking Article 50, and the findings of the admirable report of your Lordships’ European Union Committee on the process were very little known.

How did this damaging decline in democratic standards come about? The causes are quite complex and I shall mention only two. One is an everyday matter but the other is fundamental. The everyday matter is that social media make it possible for people to think that they are in touch with a wide range of views and information, even when they are not. Unless the media ensure that the range of views, evidence and arguments is available and taken seriously, public engagement cannot flourish. If the media ignore, caricature or rubbish some positions, democratic decision-making is hardly likely to work well.

Last year at a meeting of an all-party group on hate speech, I realised how insidious this can be. Facebook gave evidence to the group that it removes postings that incite hatred after a certain number of complaints—the informants thought it was about 20—but it also reported that these postings are promptly reposted and recirculated, creating a continuous torrent of abuse and incitement. We are all aware that social media create echo chambers that contribute to the radicalisation of extremists, but perhaps we are not sufficiently aware of how they can undermine democratic debate. Crowdsourcing is, no doubt, a fine way to find out about consumer products because each contribution is independent and the results are cumulative, but it is a rotten way to source judgments when inputs are repetitive and the opinions that surface and prevail are echoes.

Additionally, there seems to be widespread confusion between rights of self-expression and press freedom. Both are covered by the term “freedom of expression”, but they differ. Rights to self-expression are for individuals. We often follow John Stuart Mill in thinking that rights to self-expression protect individuals and should be restricted only when their self-expression is likely to harm others. His classic example was shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theatre where there is no fire. However, Mill did not think that institutions or the powerful, including the press, have rights to self-expression. After all, they have no selves to express. He supported a free press for different reasons: because it can support freedom of discussion and debate, and enable citizens to encounter a wide range of relevant views and opinions—and to check and challenge what they read and hear.

What is past is past. Looking ahead, I have two questions for the Minister. First, will the Government make it a red line not to agree to any settlement with the European Union that damages the very people who were led to believe—or misled to believe—that Brexit would address their concerns, their interests and what they felt to be their exclusion? Secondly, will the Minister consider whether to make it a red line not to agree to any settlement with the European Union that abandons the common travel area we have with the Republic of Ireland, and have maintained since the 1920s, and that risks destroying the peace process in Northern Ireland and the UK?