Hedge funds shorting the referendum? The thing it's short on is fact

On the face of it, the Bloomberg article is a bombshell. It's not so much that it names Nigel Farage but more that it points the finger at the market research industry:

Hedge funds aiming to win big from trades that day had hired YouGov and at least five other polling companies, including Farage's favorite pollster. Their services, on the day and in the days leading up to the vote, varied, but pollsters sold hedge funds critical, advance information, including data that would have been illegal for them to give the public. Some hedge funds gained confidence, through private exit polls, that most Britons had voted to leave the EU, or that the vote was far closer than the public believed—knowledge pollsters provided while voting was still underway and hours ahead of official tallies. These hedge funds were in the perfect position to earn fortunes by short selling the British pound. Others learned the likely outcome of public, potentially market-moving polls before they were published, offering surefire trades.

The article mentions two polling companies by name - YouGov and Survation - and suggests that they conducted "private exit polls" that were shared with hedge fund businesses as a means of 'shorting' the Pound during the evening. The article also hints that the polls running up to the referendum were foxed in some manner. First let's get the exit poll thing cleared up:

An election exit poll is a poll of voters taken immediately after they have exited the polling stations. Unlike an opinion poll, which asks for whom the voter plans to vote, or some similar formulation, an exit poll asks for whom the voter actually voted.

It was widely reported in the run up to the referendum that there wouldn't be any exit polling (although there were suggestions that private polls were being commissioned) because of the methodological difficulties - with no past voting behaviour getting a balanced sample would be very difficult:

The problem they face is the same as that faced by the broadcasters: without a baseline it is hard – and expensive – to construct a sample of polling stations that is representative of the country as a whole. And they won’t know if they are right until the actual results start to flow in from about 12.30am on Friday.

The YouGov poll reported by Sky News at 10.02pm wasn't an exit poll but, as the Bloomberg article makes clear, an opinion poll conducted on the same basis and with the same sampling as similar polls in the run up to the referendum (a YouGov poll reported 51/49 Remain/Leave on 22 June and Survation reported Remain leads in two slightly earlier polls). The poll result announced (I think mistakenly as if it were an exit poll) by Sky News was pretty much in line with overall polling over the previous week. It is worth noting that eight of the ten polls prior to the murder of Jo Cox MP showed a Leave majority whereas only two of the ten polls after her death did so. If the money men commissioned any polling it probably won't have been exit polls because of the sampling problem - it will have been phone or online (most likely online).

There had been a slight improvement in exchange rates in the days prior to the referendum, something that was entirely in line with the increased expectation that Remain would win the referendum - speaking personally, I switched the TV on that evening expecting to see a reasonably comfortable win for the pro-EU campaign. There's a legitimate question as to why the polls were so wrong (although pollsters will point out that the difference between 52/48 and 48/52 really isn't large in statistical terms) but the Bloomberg allegation (and the hint at the end of the article) is very serious as it suggests polling companies are colluding with investors to game election results.

For all the shock horror nature of the report, I'm inclined to the view that nobody has fixed anything - some private polling will have given different answers (perhaps more in line with earlier polling) but that's all. The hedge fund folk no more knew the result than did any of the rest of us, including the people at Sky TV and Leave.EU.

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People who think Twitter - with or without Russians - decided the referendum need to get out more

There is an almighty panic afoot. It seems that a vast army of trolls in fur hats with snow on their boots are ruining our democracy by doing stuff on Twitter. Yes folks, it's the Russians - even the Prime Minister was moved to say how naughty they are albeit in a wonderfully sinister way ("we know what you're doing").

Some perspective is needed here because, while it may well be the case that Russian spies sat at computers in St Petersburg are bombarding Twitter with stuff, the impact on elections ranges from pretty much zero to really not very much at all.

According to Oleksandr Talavera at Swansea University there are 150,000 accounts with "links to Russia" that Tweeted about Brexit during the campaign. Talavera is at the upper end of the spectrum of guesses about these Russian bots most other researchers give much lower figures for accounts that can be clearly linked to the folk in St Petersburg - 419 from researchers in Edinburgh, 13,493 from London University and just 54 from Oxford University.

Taking the 419, this is what they were doing:

Professor Laura Cram, director of neuropolitics research at the University of Edinburgh, told the newspaper that at least 419 of those accounts tweeted about Brexit a total of 3,468 times – mostly after the referendum had taken place.

Commenting on the Brexit tweets, she told The Guardian the content overall was “quite chaotic and it seems to be aimed at wider disruption. There’s not an absolutely clear thrust. We pick up a lot on refugees and immigration”.

I'm pretty sure that the same will go for the bigger numbers. For a little context, however, we should note that there were literally millions of Tweets about the referendum - the LSE, for example, looked at 7.5 million in their analysis. Those Russian tweeters represent a drop in this ocean of Tweets. Let's remember also that there are about 10 million UK Twitter accounts (this matters because they're the ones with a vote) and let's also note that 17.4 million people voted to leave - rather more than have those Twitter accounts.

Even accepting that Russia did try to interfere in - disrupt, influence - the referendum (something that probably shouldn't surprise us), the evidence presented by researchers tells us that it really didn't make much difference at all, indeed it was swamped by a vast tide of Tweets from real people about Brexit. Indeed that LSE study showed just how Brexiteers were much more engaged and active:

There is clearly a pattern in the way the referendum campaign unfolded on Twitter, with those wanting to leave communicating in greater numbers and with greater intensity. Districts with a greater share of Twitter users supporting Leave also tended to vote for leaving the EU, so that Twitter activity correlates with voting in the referendum.

We also know from that LSE blog that the same goes for Facebook, Instagram and Google search - as a senior politician (and remain voter) said to me: "Brexit voters were going to crawl over broken glass so they could vote to leave". I've been involved in politics for 40 years and have never seen ordinary voters - the sort who often don't bother - so motivated to turn up and vote. Public meetings were a thing of history in British elections, yet we held a debate in Cullingworth and filled the hall with over 250 people, most of them planning to vote leave.

This latest conspiracy theory - hot on the heels of the "it was big data" nonsense - reminds us that many of those who voted to remain are still in denial as to what the campaign outcome was down to. These inconsolable remain voters simply can't countenance that their 'business as usual' message got both barrels from an electorate that frankly didn't think that 'business as usual' was doing them any good. The result has been firstly to shout about how it was all the stupid people who did it and it's not fair, then to blame the Daily Mail followed by lots of overhyped scare stories about 'hate crime'. We then got the conspiracies - it was shadowy American billionaires, it was manipulating 'big data' and now it's the Russians.

The truth is that two-and-a-half million mostly older and working class voters who don't usually vote or vote infrequently decided on this occasion to go down to the church hall or school and stick a big firm X in the box marked "Leave the European Union". There were a pile of reasons why they did this but the main one was that the EU is a distant, unaccountable, corrupt and undemocratic institution a very long way away filled with people who have absolutely no connection with or idea about what matters in Denholme or Wyke or Scarborough. It really had absolutely nothing at all to do with Twitter, the Russians, Cambridge Analytica or whatever stupid conspiracy sobbing remainers dream up and if you think otherwise you really should get out more.

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Big Data didn't win it (my opening remarks from Battle of Ideas debate)

I guess I represent all the axes of evil on this subject – I’m a qualified Conservative Party Agent, a professional marketer specialising in direct marketing and a politician.

I’m going to tell you that big data didn’t win it. That Cambridge Analytica is selling a bog-standard set of analysis tools rebadged as ‘political’.

Database marketing is brilliant. We can analyse large data sets and apply them to useable population geography – in the UK postcode sectors contain about 2,500 to 3,000 people.

When Cambridge Analytica tells you they have a profile for every community in the USA, they are simply describing the use of these well-established and widely used geodemographics.

It’s what they sell – it’s what we were selling to UK financial services companies, mail order business and retailers back in 1990.

Better still, we can then match this profiling information to our own data – in the case of a political campaign this is likely to be voting intention information: VI Data.

What this match will tell us is where our voters live and, more importantly, where voters with similar characteristics to our voters live. We might have lots of VI Data for Tory voters across the country but none in Walsall – what the profile does is tell us, at a very localised geography, where we’re most likely to find those voters in Walsall.

This is pretty much all that Cambridge Analytica do.

The big change Cambridge Analytica offer from base geodemographics is the use of social media information.

Overlaying this data onto that geodemographics perhaps (I’m not convinced) makes that granular geographical targeting more effective.

The bit of software Cambridge Analytica uses claims to be able to draw a phychographic profile from facebook likes and text – I’m not convinced (especially since most folks activity on face book involves saying LOL a lot, going aww at cat pictures and liking your friends baby photos).

Here’s an example of the problem from a review in technology blog, The Register:

A version of this test is online here, with another that analyses language. The first 1,000 words of Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May's Brexit speech from January generates a 67 per cent openness rating, making her "liberal and artistic" rather than "conservative and traditional", and a 99 per cent score for her being a man.

The truth is that the data from social media is very dirty – what these clever techie folk claim is a long way from the reality. And, regardless of quantity, having rubbish data will always give you rubbish outcomes.

What Facebook does, however, is allow us to target advertising at that same granular level – I only need to buy advertising within a few miles of high profile score communities in target areas making the advertising more efficient and perhaps more effective. It also means that if you are outside my profile you won’t see much of my advertising.

What we have here isn’t a sinister conspiracy but just a set of marketing tools applied to politics. Does it work? Yes – but it’s not a silver bullet. We’d reckon on uplift in response of around 2X or maybe 3X compared to a random selection. Great until you realise that the response to random was around 0.2% - all that clever technology means that, instead of getting ignored by 998 out of 1000 people, you only get ignored by 994.

In every other respect this is little different from what we were doing nearly thirty years ago – digging into data to make our marketing better.

And it was not the main reason that Vote Leave and Donald Trump won. I see five things as mattering in effective political campaigns, only one of which is targeting.

1. Brand. Vote Leave got lucky because some journalist coined the term ‘Brexit’ giving a simple and memorable brand for the campaign. One that opponents of leaving repeated again and again. The same goes for Hillary Clinton – almost all Democrat campaign material talked about Trump – and Theresa May where the Conservatives pumped out millions of messages saying ‘May or Corbyn’

2. Call to Action. Again Vote Leave got lucky – “take back control” they said, giving people a simple action, voting to leave, that would make that possible. “Drain the swamp” said Trump. And the same goes for Corbyn (find quote)

3. Enhanced Word-of-Mouth – or ‘going viral’. Thousands of little green frogs – with all the memes and comments that went with those frogs - were probably more important to Trump’s campaign than the money he spent with Cambridge Analytica. And the same was true of Vote Leave and Corbyn – thousands of people creating and sharing memes, doing things unasked and without the campaign’s say so

4. Good targeting – yes it matters and using geography is a great way to do it in a system based on people voting locally. But, as Corbyn showed, targeting a demographic – young people – can also be pretty effective.

5. Finally Brexit and Trump won because their opponents ran dreadful campaigns. Theresa May did too but started too far ahead for Corbyn to catch her.

Yes targeting matters. Absolutely the generation of ‘fake news’ matters. But no, ‘Big Data’ didn’t win these elections. There is no sinister conspiracy, just a set of circumstances – good branding, viral social media, strong calls to action and awful opposing campaigns – that allowed the results we got. Targeting helps but, if we’d not seen the brand, message and memes – and the useless campaigns from Stronger In and Hillary Clinton, the results would have been different.

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On those referendum Twitter bots...

It was, of course, the Russians:

The researchers also analysed the type of content the suspected bots were producing, finding this pool of accounts were eight times more likely to tweet slogans associated with Vote Leave, and tweeted more than average accounts in the run-up to the referendum – then less afterwards, before their removal from the network entirely.

There were, these researchers tell us, 13,000 of this sinister bots burst onto the social media platform spraying relentless pro-leave sentiments. And these bots - or so the MP who chairs the Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee thinks - have snow on their boots.

In other news, we're told that the reason for choosing to leave was because about 2.5m mostly older, primarily working class and regional people - many of who seldom vote - toddled down to their local primary school, church hall or library to put a cross in the leave box. Just the sort of voters who use Twitter a lot!

At some point the rump of disappointed remain voters will stop trying to find some sinister external force - Russians, American data companies, Facebook - that explains why we voted to leave and recognise that, in truth, we voted to leave because the EU is a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic institution. That's it - all of it. And if you ask people a slightly different question, they'll tell you that London is also a distant, anonymous, unapproachable, corrupt and interfering undemocratic place too. One run by and for people with more connection to New York or Paris than Barnsley or Stoke. Perhaps those still angst-ridden by us leaving can begin to learn this?

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A note on Conservative euroscepticism

There's a fairly common retort from those who still wish to remain in the EU when it's pointed out that we've had a referendum that voted to leave and parliament started that processs of leaving. It goes something like "Brexiteers had forty years of moaning about EU membership so they've no room to talk".

Now I'm sure we can probably find some few folk who, having opposed continued membership in 1976, continued to bang on about it from then onwards. Where you won't find them is in the Conservative Party. Aside from Teddy Taylor and a few unreconstructed Powellites, the Conservative Party was completely united in its support for our membership of what was then the European Economic Community (EEC). What opposition there was to membership came from the left - indeed Neil Kinnock, Tony Blair, John Prescott and other enthusists for EU membership fought and lost the 1983 General Election on a platform of leaving the EEC.

In that election I was agent for John Carlisle, MP for North Luton. I think it fair to say that John was as far to the right in the party as you could get but we still included support for EEC membership in the election address. Our membership simply wasn't an issue for Conservatives.

Between this time and the 2001 general election something happened. During the selection meeting for the parliamentary candidate in Keighley, I was asked a question about the Euro. My response was that membership of the Euro should only come following a referendum but that I didn't think we'd have one. I suggested that the next referendum would be about our membership of the EU not the Euro, and that I didn't know how I would vote come that day.

The something - well somethings really - that happened between 1983 and 2001 was all about money and the approach of government. Firstly we had the debacle of the UK joining and then leaving the Exchange Rate Mechanism, then the long drawn out Maastricht Treaty ratification process, and finally we had the creation of the Euro. Tory euroscpeticism was born. But even then it wasn't about leaving but rather that Britain should be less supine in its dealings with the EU and more assertive in opposing moves leading to federalism.

It wasn't until the mid-2000s when the Better Off Out campaign was launched with support from a few Conservative MPs like Philip Davies and Douglas Carswell that we saw a group within the Conservative Party committed to leaving the EU. The long war over ERM, Maastricht and the Euro had scarred the Party and the membership placed the blame squarely on the pro-EU leadership - men such as John Major, Michael Heseltine and Ken Clarke.

It is important, therefore, not to rewrite history as some sort of rationalisation for seeking to overturn the decision to leave the EU. There has not been a 40 year campaign to leave - UKIP wasn't formed until 1993 and James Goldsmith's Referendum Party campaigned for a referendum on further federalism (and did very badly) in 1997. Even then the media position on membership was overwhelmingly supportive and the Conservative Party remained committed to membership albeit with a somewhat grumpy attitude to the EU.

None of this is to suggest that Remainers should shut up but rather to observe that their claim of a long media campaign supported by the right of the Conservative Party is largely untrue. The important question to ask is how the Conservative Party transformed from an enthusiast for European economic cooperation firstly into a scpetical and questioning party and then, in large part, to an advocate of leaving. If we're looking for the reason we left, it happened on 7 February 1992 when the EEC stopped being a free trade alliance and became a nascent 'superstate', the EU.

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Brexit, fussbucketry and being a Tory - top posts of 2016

In a fit of indulgence I thought I'd revisit my most popular postings of 2016. You never know with this sort of review, something might pop up, some sort of revelation. Probably not.

The top two posts, unsurprisingly, are about the EU referendum - firstly back in February when I invoked Don Quixote and talked of my scepticism:

I am a genuine sceptic in all this. I don't really believe in ever more draconian immigration controls, I don't want a sort of pseudo-fascist isolationist approach to the economy for that is lunacy. And I absolutely believe that the EU has played a role (albeit a smaller one than its vanity permits) in securing peace and harmony on what was a divided continent. So I ought to be a supporter of the EU except for a couple of real problems.

As the actual referendum campaign hotted up, I returned again to the problems as I saw them (referencing Jonathan Swift's flying island of Laputa this time):

In one respect it is quite sweet that so many very clever people cluster around the EU's court. Like every other bunch of courtiers throughout history, these people mostly believe (when they've finished chasing consultancy contracts, speaking engagements, advisor positions and policy jobs) that there really is no alternative to the world in which they live, they develop a sort of strabimus with one eye gazing into their narrow little world while the other swivels frantically searching for ever grander ideas of union, collaboration and co-operation. We're told these people are the bright ones, the 'experts', yet they are - quite literally - ignorant of the lives, loves, aspirations and hopes of the people who are supposed to be their bosses.

For me these statements are at the heart of why Remain lost. In the first, I was there to gained as a supporter - all they had to do was explain how the EU could reform in the direction of openness and freedom. The second explains why: the advocates of the EU were too wrapped up in now, in their schemes and plots, to engage with a million plus sceptics who were there to be persuaded. In the end I voted to leave and, given what's been revealed since, I think I made the right choice:

It is rather about whether or not you and I can, if we're angry enough, get up from our armchairs, turn the telly off, go down to the village hall, and vote the bastards out. It's not our country we want back, it's our rights. Or rather the most important right of all - the right to overthrow the government and stick in a new one.

You're welcome to disagree with me even to the extent of shouting abuse but if you try to use bureaucracy and legalistic legerdemain to thwart the decision of 23 June then you are no different or better than those alt-right authoritarians you despise so much:

Although with their talk of populism and nativism these Remainers want to portray the leave voter as the nascent authoritarian, the truth is quite the opposite. Remainers now consider that the ordinary voter cannot be entrusted with the future of the nation, this future should be in the hands of people who know, the experts. The idea of representative democracy is acceptable but only if it produces a result that allows the Remainer great and good to continue dictating the direction of policy.

Which brings us to the direction of policy where it's no surprise that most of those irritated - even angered - by the fussbucketry of public health were leave voters.

Public health is an ideology of control not a healthcare programme. It dulls the senses of health management by suggesting their inevitable cost pressures will be relieved by patients embracing an approved lifestyle that eliminates the risks contributing to the growing number of people living with chronic conditions like type-2 diabetes. Above all public health represents a crusade to promote a moral and righteous life to the populace - don't smoke, don't drink, don't stay up late, do the right amount of exercise, eat the right diet, avoid salt and sugar. This lifestyle is promoted through the use of public funds to appeal, on one hand, to our fear of mortality through talk of cancer, heart attacks and dementia, while simultaneously suggesting that beautiful, successful people adhere to this stultifying, dull set of consumption behaviours. Across all this runs the argument that, if we want our children to be one or those beautiful, successful people - or even to live - then they mustn't be exposed to these sins of diet or pleasure.

It's not just this nannying of grown-ups of course but an attitude to childhood that leads of seemingly every possible risk being banned or hidden from children:

Instead we see people who behave like the Childcatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang - corralling children into a dull, purposeful programme of approved activities monitored by the agents of those authorities. Much of the effort here is dedicated to creating obedient little unchallenging conformists. And what we create are a bunch of snowflakes who demand safe spaces, who cry at criticism and who would rather ban free speech than accept that some people are unpleasant or rude. Disagreement is dealt with not through a handshake and "we'll talk about this again" but by one or other party running off to cuddle a teddy bear while listening to calming whale sounds.

I discovered the origins of the word snob the other day - interesting how it shifted from the subject of disdain to the person doing the disdaining. And public health folk have snobbery in spades - the plebs aren't able to decide for themselves:

If public health campaigners really cared about people's wellbeing they'd ask why it is that poor people die younger. They'd wonder why the single mum overeats, the unemployed twenty-something smokes and the old soldier drinks rather than simply trying to nudge them out of these habits with the policy equivalent of a baseball bat. But these public health fanatics don't ask these questions, they just ban stuff, control stuff, lecture, nanny and fuss. Public health campaigning isn't about health, it's about the snobbish promotion of a lifestyle set by passionless middle-class puritans.

Thanks for reading - especially the dedicated few who keep posting comments even though I'm crap at responding - and remember that, for the Kippers and libertarians trying to claim me as one of theirs, I'm just a regular sort of Tory.

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Article 50 Case: Incompetence, lies and the importance of free speech

I may have been misunderstood. Not because of anything I said but because of how some people decided they knew what I'd said or because they knew what I really meant. The starting point was that, following the High Court decision about invoking Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty, I was angry. Indeed, I was as angry as I had ever been about something political.

Now if people had noted what I said, they'd have spotted how my anger wasn't directed at those three judges (however much I might think their decision egregious) but rather at the Government. After all they'd proposed and got support for (overwhelming support as it happens) a proposal to have a referendum on our membership of the European Union - something that had been in the manifesto that government stood on in May 2015:

That’s why, after the election, we will negotiate a new settlement for Britain in Europe, and then ask the British people whether they want to stay in the EU on this reformed basis or leave. David Cameron has committed that he will only lead a government that offers an in-out referendum. We will hold that in-out referendum before the end of 2017 and respect the outcome.

So my expectation was that the result of the referendum (and whether you like it or not, we voted to leave) would be implemented. The Government even wrote to us all telling us just that:



All pretty unequivocal. It seems, however, that this isn't really the case, at least as far as those three judges are concerned. Not only was the Government incompetent in proposing a referendum bill that didn't do what it said in the manifesto, they then compounded this by issuing a false statement that this was so. Put simply the Government led by David Cameron was either incompetent or it lied (maybe even both). I feel entirely justified in being as angry with this as I was with Tony Blair's government when it sent young men to die in Iraq on the basis of what turns out to have been a lie. Just as subsequent enquiry revealed Blair's duplicity, the three judges last week revealed the incompetence (or lies or both) of David Cameron's government.

Although I may not be angry with the judges, I do have a great deal of sympathy for the many people - including those writing the front page headlines in some newspapers - who were explosively cross with the decision and those who made it. And I find the reaction of too many, especially lawyers clucking round their superiors, to these headlines deeply concerning. All this stuff about the headlines "intimidating" the judges (by writing in a newspaper - how spineless are they?) and wanting some sort of unspecified action from the Government to deal with the offending editors simply represents an attack on press freedom and free speech. Do we really think a headline in the Daily Mail is going to destroy the independence of the judiciary, however unpleasant and intemperate that headline might be?

The thing with free speech is that it's loud, messy and often pretty unpleasant (trust me on this - I get that same bile directed at me as those judges got). But no part of our state's institutions should be immune from robust criticism - even when that criticism is ill-informed or ignorant. It is disturbing that the Bar Council and a parade of "Important Legal People" think judges should be privileged by newspapers being punished in some way if they dare to criticise. The law - just like other institutions - needs broad public support. If the law's leadership is too thin skinned to make good decisions because a newspaper might have a go at those decision, then perhaps we need to get better leaders?

If the law is excluded from exposure to free speech because of 'judicial independence' then we have a problem. Law in all its forms - and the decisions lawyers and judges make - is central to our lives. If we're not permitted to challenge those laws, those lawyers and those judges then our liberty is compromised. The law becomes vainglorious, privileged and its practitioners untouchable. In a nation that values freedom and the idea of democracy, this cannot be so.

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Quote of the day: On hate crime

This is about the sum of it:

The true story here is not that Britain became more hateful post-referendum, but that officialdom, aided by spectacularly uncritical commentators, has developed new ways of cynically constructing crime epidemics. And to what end? To the explicitly political end of demonising the choice made by voters in the referendum and depicting Britain outside of the EU as a dangerous place in which old and ugly views have been emboldened. Rarely has the political motivation behind spreading a crime panic been so obvious, so shrill, as this.

And it continues with ever more spaces and places to report such crimes. Most of which is purely and simply an attack on free speech.

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So long as we're not free, we need democracy

Thurber's Very Proper Gander in full flow

I like and respect many Leavers, but I’ve never shared their enthusiasm for democracy – I want liberty and prosperity, and I don’t want to trade that in just to give my stupid next-door neighbours more power over my life.

What follows isn't about the recent EU referendum although, like much discussion and debate right now, it is inevitably framed by the issues surrounding our vote to leave the EU. The quotation above is from Sam Bowman, the Executive Director of the Adam Smith Institute and it cuts to the heart of what I think will prove the dominant division in politics for the coming generations - the debate about democracy and its purposes. We will have a bickering coalition of collectivists and populists arguing that democracy is pretty much everything opposed by an equally troubled combination of technocrats and libertarians to tell us democracy is an anachronism.

In some respects, the argument for more democracy is akin to the argument for more railways - a nineteenth century solution to twenty-first century problems. yet, at the same time, we are vocal in our support for "having a say", "being consulted" - for votes, elections and polling. Public opinion, far more than evidence, ideology or reason is the driver of political decision-making - Sam Bowman's "stupid next-door neighbours" really are as important to what government's do as are the wise minds in Sam's think tank.

The advocate of democracy pipes up here - we're all equal in the eyes of the law and we all should have an equal say. This is the 'end of politics' envisioned by UKIP's Douglas Carswell:

Douglas Carswell, a British member of parliament, likens traditional politics to HMV, a chain of British record shops that went bust, in a world where people are used to calling up whatever music they want whenever they want via Spotify, a popular digital music-streaming service.

For Carswell, political systems of representative democracy are legacy systems, clunky, unresponsive, corrupt and not well-liked. We need, Carswell would argue, to embrace technology to create an iDemocracy filled with referendums, instant consultations and dispersed decision-making. It isn't democracy that is failing and out-of-date but the institutions of representative democracy - parliaments, parties, election days and preening politicians. Release democracy from these constraints and it will flourish, will once again capture Rousseau's 'general will' as the flow of information from and between people allows a fluid, data-driven iGovernment.

But is it so simple? Here's John Naughton reviewing historian Yuval Noah Harari’s new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow:

...modern society is organised round a combination of individualism, human rights, democracy and the free market. And each of these foundations is being eaten away by 21st-century science and technology. The life sciences are undermining the individualism so celebrated by the humanist tradition with research suggesting that “the free individual is just a fictional tale concocted by an assembly of biochemical algorithms”.

We don't have to accept Harari's argument to recognise that, as every science fiction reader will tell you, for every optimistic technological future there's a frightening dystopia. Carswell's web-enabled democracy sits at odds to Harari's world - one more like H G Wells 'Time Machine' than a happy world of progress. Using that metaphor of nineteenth century technology beloved of so many tech writers, Harari depresses us with:

“the train of progress is again pulling out of the station – and this will probably be the last train ever to leave the station called Homo sapiens. Those who miss this train will never get a second chance. In order to get a seat on it, you need to understand 21st century technology, and in particular the powers of biotechnology and computer algorithms.”

So which is it to be, Harari's world of Morlocks and Eloi or Carswell's liberated world filled with empowered citizens actively engaged in the new democracy through a new politics? Cynics, the wise ones at least, will recognise in Harari's world the realisation of that part of post-democracy we'd call technocracy. This is government by experts informed by ever more sophisticated 'Big Data' analyses. A world where there is no ideology merely data-driven answers to questions posed by the experts. A world where, if Harari and many others are right, the expert won't even be human. Public opinion plays no role in this decision-making other than as one imput to the expert system.

What we have is Hari Seldon's psychohistory, the idea that everything can be boiled down to a set of equations - algorhithms as we'd call them today:

“It is the first lesson you must unlearn. The Seldon Plan is neither complete nor correct. Instead, it is merely the best that could be done at the time. Over a dozen generations of men have pored over these equations, worked at them, taken them apart to the last decimal place, and put them together again. They’ve done more than that. They’ve watched nearly four hundred years pass and against the predictions and equations, they’ve checked reality, and they have learned.”

Although part of me suspects Gordon Dickson's Final Encyclopaedia is a better analogy, the lesson here is that there's just too much to know, that every model is a simplification and every trawl through 'Big Data' only touches a tiny part of the potential evidence. For all its wonders, technocracy does not provide the answers - the more we know, the more we're aware of what we don't know (unless, of course, you're a macroeconomist). And technocracy without democracy gets uncomfortably close to fascism even though its advocates do not see this problem and persist with ideas like basic income, depoliticised public services, industrial strategies and the belief that the economy can be directed from a room in the central bank.

There are two distinct responses to the EU referendum result. One is to reject the idea of referendums - to put Carswell's iDemocracy firmly back in its tin and screw the lid down really tightly. The other is to observe that the experts - the technocracy - were out-of-touch, unable to express their understanding other than through a patronising appeal to authority: "I'm an expert and you should therefore agree with me". The experts were not 'of the people' and, if the direction of technogical advance Harari describes is rights, future experts may not be people at all.

All this takes us back to Sam Bowman's quote where he rejects democracy in favour of "liberty and prosperity" and expresses the liberal view that his next-door neighbour (stupid or otherwise) should not have any power over his life. In some ways this libertarian viewpoint isn't set out often enough. Anyone who took an introductory course in political science will have pondered the essential conflict between freedom and democracy. Most usually this is dealt with by adopting the constitionalist view that liberties enshrined in law act as a check on the essential tyranny of democracy - the 55-45 or 52-48 problem.

By accepting liberties, whether we call them constitutional or human rights, our liberal democracy qualifies democracy and, as S E Finer put it, recognises that government is limited, society is pluralistic and that there is no "objective science of society or of morals". I take this as meaning that, when the chips are down, liberty trumps democracy. Just because you've 50% plus one behind you doesn't mean you can run me out of town on a rail. Nor, as Bowman hints, can you take decisions that damage my interests especially if they cause me harm.

The problem is that, while we nod in the direction of liberty, when faced with its realities we favour democracy. We see this in the debate around what is called "hate speech", in the French government banning the burka, and in a host of interventions designed to promote order at the expense of pleasure (because the majority disapprove of that particular pleasure). Perhaps because of its essential nature, our politics shouts more loudly about democracy than about freedom meaning that, too often, we lose the core idea of a government limited by the exercise of that freedom.

This, in a roundabout way, gets us to the problem with Sam Bowman's decision to vote to stay in the EU. As I noted at the start, we're not really concerned with the rights and wrongs of that vote but the real issue is whether the EU is liberal or technocratic. Bowman suggests the former because the institution insists on free movement of people and prevents the use of tax receipts to subsidise private business (there may be other examples but these are the two Bowman cites).

The problem is that these examples may not be the consequence of a commitment to freedom but rather a happy correlation between technocracy and liberalism. Such correlations are - as this note from Noah Smith tells us - pretty rare. Smith sets out a series of things he calls "free-market ideology" that, on reading, are all central elements of the currently dominant technocratic view - the weight of regulation's touch, the faux-privatisation of public services, public-private health systems and controlling monopolies. What matters isn't whether Smith is right but rather that he identifies the flaw in the technocratic ideal that 'Big Data' and the prophets of evidence-based policy have promised.

Bowman proposes supporting an undemocratic technocracy because, currently, it protects some freedoms he values. In the context of the recent referendum this makes sense - UK government is not significantly less technocratic except that, unlike the EU, it is more susceptible to democracy. And right now that democratic pressure is populist, it is Bowman's 'stupid next-door neighbour' demanding that something is done about the demons (and their witches) that infect our society. The result being the moral of Thurber's ' Very Proper Gander':

Anybody who you or your wife thinks is going to overthrow the government by violence must be driven out of the country.

Right now the main reason for having democracy is the scale of government and that this government does not respond to free choices made in a free market. In the UK government spends about £4 in every £10, it is a behemoth that dominates our society and economy simply because of its size. In other liberal democracies the governmental whale is even larger. We can, and rightly do, celebrate Tax Freedom Day when we start earning for ourselves not the government but this doesn't change the fact that the only brake on the desire of government to grow larger is the existence of democracy.

Until we are able to realise that those things we assume can only be provided by government - schools, roads, hospitals, drains, welfare - don't have to be provided by government, we need to keep that democracy and accept that sometimes Sam Bowman's neighbours get too much say over Sam's life. This is probably wrong but, until the case for libertarianism and a voluntary society is accepted, we really have no other way of keeping the Mr Creosote that is government from overeating.

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Why Remain lost (more evidence of bad marketing)

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Politico has done a long interview - really a cobbling together of three interviews - with Craig Oliver who, we're told, ran the 'Stronger In' campaign having previously between the PM's communications guru. Oliver's background is as a TV producer - reports tell us a very good TV producer - which, unless my education is wrong, isn't a professional marketing role. And, it's true that while Oliver did some good (well sort of) stuff getting the then PM on the telly this is a long way removed from running a comprehensive marketing campaign - which is what Remain needed.

How completely separated Oliver is from any understanding of marketing is shown in this paragraph:

That week, one of Oliver’s trump cards had flopped. A senior MP, Sarah Wollaston, had defected from the Leave camp because of its dubious claim that leaving the EU would save £350 million a week that could be spent on the NHS. He had given the story to the Times, thinking it would lead their front page, but instead they buried it and splashed on a wealthy Tory donor endorsing Brexit (even though the Times ultimately endorsed Remain).

So someone who nobody outside Oliver's bubble knew existed 'defecting' was a 'trump card'? As if Mrs Smith on Branksholme estate in Hull knew or cared. If Oliver had been running a decent campaign, he'd have known what the problem was, known why Remain weren't getting traction with undecided voters (let alone shifting wobbly Leave voters). The Politico piece sets out how wrong:

Remainers came across as “too mean,” an adviser to the Leave campaign told me later. The clips just played to Leave’s argument that Remain was trying to keep voters scared.

The core of Oliver's campaign - a media war - wasn't working and all people like Oliver and Will Straw (another marketing know-nothing who ran Stronger In) could do was what they knew: more media, more attacks, more clips on the evening news.

It's clear from the interview that Oliver isn't about to admit to error and is writing a book - presumably 80,000 words of self-justification over the disaster of the campaign to remain in the EU.

When people look at the Leave campaign they focus on the divisions (Vote Leave, Leave.EU, Grassroots Out) and the clunky media campaign filled with faux pas and dominated by defensiveness over a factual error they'd committed to at the start of the campaign - the £350m claim. But Leave got something else right - it got its message through to two important targets: non- or occasional voters, and voters who hadn't decided.

What we see from Oliver is complacency and a failure to realise that referendum campaigns are not like general elections. The latter are driven as much by personality - could you see Ed Miliband waving in front of Downing Street - as by policy. Referendums aren't, they're driven by policy and what people see as policy - by trying to turn the campaign into an attack on Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage, Craig Oliver and his team completely misread how people respond when asked a policy question.

In the end there were lots of reasons for Remain throwing away its advantage but it seems to me that the biggest reason was that the campaign not only lacked a marketing strategy worth the name but was led by people who wouldn't recognise marketing if it danced before them in a tutu.

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More on why Remain lost (clue - it wasn't the media)

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It had seemed that we were getting to grips with the reasons behind the Brexit vote. Once we'd got over the cries of pain and anguish from disappointed Remain supporters, a narrative began to emerge. This narrative took us beyond the simplistic line of 'it was immigration that won it for Leave' to some more sophisticated assessments of voting patterns and behaviours. Added to this were appraisals - from outside and inside the two campaigns - of the marketing strategies and tactics used to promote Leave or Remain.

Broadly the reasons underlying the Leave vote began to crystalise - a lack of trust in authority, a conviction that Leave offered control and using a referendum vote to kick out at a system that served too many people poorly. Plus, of course (and this is still the most significant factor in Brexit), people wanted the UK to leave the European Union.

Alongside these reasons sits the failures of the Remain campaign - from tactical incompetence through to a strategy founded on the assumption that voters would trust 'experts', from whatever field, who advised to vote Remain. All this plus a torrent of scare stories that didn't work because the target voters simply didn't trust the messengers.

It seems, however, that we're not quite out of the woods and the discredited narrative of dumb leave voters not listening to 'experts' remains. We need to stress again that this narrative - like the narrative of old vs young - doesn't fit the facts regardless of how much people want it to. All it does it fit perceptions of those leave voters and act as wish-fulfilment for some (fortunately a declining few) looking back at the referendum.

Here is a particularly bad example of this wish-fulfilment from economist, John Van Reenan:

There are many other notable features of the Brexit vote – including the fact that Remain had a voting majority for those under 50 years of age and also in London, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It is shocking that a constitutional rupture can be made based on 37 per cent of the eligible voters. We take decades debating and prevaricating on major infrastructure projects like Heathrow and Hinkley Point, yet are prepared to gamble with something even more important for our futures on a simple one-off in-out referendum.

The referendum was won on a drumbeat of anti-foreigner sentiment. It’s the same tune being played by demagogues in every corner of the globe. It’s the same tune that was played in the 1930s. It’s the same old beat that rises in volume when people are afraid. In the UK, it’s echoed by a rabidly right-wing press and unchallenged by a flaccid establishment media. Mixed by a band of unscrupulous liars and political zealots, it has become a tsunami of bile that has downed and drowned a once great nation. The only question is which other countries will now be swept along in this poisonous flood.

This screech of pain - rejecting democratic choice, conflating constitution with infrastructure investment and invoking Godwin's Law - builds on the only substantive point in Van Reenan's article, the role of the media. Like so many, Van Reenan falls for the simple belief that, in some way, it was the media that won it for Leave.

The problem is that there's little solid evidence to support the 'it was The Sun wot won it' line - that the media (keen to maintain perceptions of power) is central to the outcomes of political campaigning. Too few understand how the media influences our behaviour just as too few are able to appreciate how advertising doesn't increase aggregate demand. And we have seen a shift in media consumption with newspaper readership declining sharply and people relying on broadcast and online sources. Yet the sinister influence of newspapers is still stressed:

Most of the British press has been unrelentingly Eurosceptic and anti-immigrant for decades. This built to a crescendo during the Brexit campaign with the most popular dailies like the Sun, Mail and Express little more than the propaganda arm of the Leave campaign.

Now this is simply a statement - Van Reenan doesn't present any evidence to support his contention and I'm guessing wasn't a regular reader of the three publications he accuses of bias (worth noting here that the Mail on Sunday supported Remain which doesn't fit his narrative well). Instead, Van Reenan attacks the BBC for doing its job - set out very clearly in the law - of providing balanced reportage during election campaigns. Even worse, we're told that the BBC - and I guess other broadcasters governed by balance and impartiality regulations - should abandon this because of an opinion poll, not a very good one, of economists.

Amidst all this, we should recall that during the referendum campaign, Leave advocates criticised the BBC (and other broadcasters like Sky News) for favouring arguments to Remain. You really can't win this one and the broadcasters will be quite happy to get flak from both sides in the referendum.

This isn't to say that media is unimportant - the public consistently tell pollsters that they trust broadcast media so what they say (or don't say) matters. But structured communications are only a part of any political campaign, the other part of campaigns - sometimes called, with that love of military metaphor so common to politics, the ground war - is just as important to the outcome. And it works like this:

So it was that Bird and his colleagues drew up plans to ­expand the electorate into one that could reelect Obama. In Ohio, for example, a “barber shop and beauty salon” strategy was designed to get likely Obama supporters, particularly African-Americans, to register to vote when they went for a haircut. “Faith captains” were assigned to churches to encourage parishioners to turn out for Obama. “Condo captains” were told to know every potential Obama voter in their building. The goal was like nothing seen in presidential politics: Each Obama worker would be ­responsible for about 50 voters in key precincts over the course of the campaign. By Election Day, that worker would know much about the lives of those 50 voters, including whether they had made it to the polls. Romney’s team talked about a ratio of thousands of voters per worker. It would prove to be a crucial difference.

It was here that Remain performed badly. The reason why working-class voters tumbled out from council estates to vote Leave was more about word of mouth than mass media - conversations in hairdressers, in the pub, at work, at the garden gate, with family. Voting Leave was valorised - reinforced and confirmed by people's daily conversation. The failure of the Remain campaign was to rely on mainstream media to feed this conversation whereas Leave fed enough information to activists to provide a drip-drip of arguments, refutations, reinforcements and messages into those community conversations.

It is dispiriting that people in influential positions misunderstand communications so much - Remain felt position and authority were enough to get the campaign over the line and ignored the importance of trust and brand equity. And - if Van Reenan's article is anything to go by - some Remain supporters are still looking for others to blame rather than the abject failings of their own campaign. Saying it was the media simply doesn't wash.

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Why Remain lost (redux)

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Can I start firstly by saying this is a marketing view not a political one (although inevitably there'll be some politics). And secondly that Remain lost the referendum, Leave didn't win it. The campaign to stay in the European Union went from a secure opinion poll lead at the start of 2016 to losing the referendum six months later. At the outset of the campaign - which really started back in January not at the official campaign launch - Remain (or Stronger In) held all the cards. The campaign could count on the support of the three mainstream party leaders, most of the established names in politics, business, academia and science. Plus a reliable stream of celebrities happy to smile at the camera and proclaim "Stronger In".

The 'Stronger In' message - immigration aside - should also have been a winner. Thousands of foot soldiers to be recruited from the direct beneficiaries of EU members, from organisations receiving grants, from the ranks of universities. Big business, local government and the 'third sector' could be relied on to do the right thing in getting that message across.

So what went wrong? Well before some analysis from cleverer marketers than me, I'd like to share a couple of anecdotes (or qualitative analysis if you prefer).

Here in Cullingworth, the Village Hall decided to hold a referendum debate - they'd sounded out some folk in the village who all seemed keen and got a time and date (the venue, of course, would be the hall). A call to the local MP provided a Leave speaker pretty quickly and the Hall then contacted Stronger In - firing an email off to the address on that organisation's website. Nothing. No response at all. The good folk from the Hall chased - still nothing. I messaged the chief executive of the campaign, the Stronger In press office and another In twitter account. No response. Eventually, on the eve of the event, we got a limp phone message: "have you got a speaker?"

As it happened, other avenues had got us a speaker (thank you to Richard Corbett MEP for stepping up). But had we not used those avenues the event wouldn't have happened. The Stronger In campaign had failed at the very first hurdle of any campaign - not responding to enquiries. And, while Will Straw and the Stronger In press office were having a fun spat on Twitter with the much better organised (if smaller and poorer) Leave campaign, they also failed to respond to a request - from a non-partisan organisation - for campaign help.

The second anecdote is about public perception of what the vote was about. I'm sat in the sitting room of some local members - we were actually there to talk about the May local elections - and the referendum, perhaps inevitably, came up. Now these members are both elderly - 70s maybe even 80s - and they spoke about their doubts. Not selfishly but from the perspective of their children and grandchildren - "this is about twenty, thirty, forty years in the future - what sort of Britain we want for them" was the driver of their doubt. Now I don't know how this couple voted but I do know that the Stronger In campaign completely missed their perspective - the public campaign (where it was coherent) was entirely about the next few years.

I picked up this time perception time and time again but the Remain campaign stayed trapped in its short-termism - there was no message that answered my members' question: "what would a Stronger In Britain be like in twenty, thirty or forty years". Other than a sort of grandfatherly (at best) "it won't be good, you know - I wouldn't do it". And this short-termism continues after the Brexit vote - West Yorkshire Combined Authority in a report on 'Brexit implications' described 'long term' as 2017-2018.

I commented before on how the advertising folk - and Remain had access to all the top agencies, a deep well of marketing knowledge - saw the campaign as a shambles, without any positive message and focused more on personalities than on that message. Well here's another comment - focused more on tactical communications issues - from Mike Hind:

It was almost as if Remain actively wanted to exclude you if you read the Daily Express. Tepid offerings of business information and hesitant requests to support them if you’d “like to” hardly spoke of a passion to mobilise people who are generally more turned on by a direct call to arms. It didn’t work for me — and I was a financial contributor to the campaign. A despairing one.

Hind looks at web messaging, brand development and the lack of any apparent strategy. But this paragraph gets to the core of it - there was no message for the elderly couple sat in a Yorkshire sitting room worrying about their grandchildren. Instead Stronger In figures spent time painting these likely (but not certain) Leave voters as if they were pariahs - racist xenophobes, Little Englanders, selfish, ill-educated, lacking in understanding. A communications strategy designed to reassure the core thirty- and forty-something professional audience of Stronger In not a strategy to have a conversation with people in places like Cullingworth who hadn't made their minds up.

As I started out saying - Stronger In, or Remain, began the campaign with all the advantages, all the expertise and the basis of an effective organisation. And blew it. On the evening of polling day - a few minutes after the polls had shut, the BBC interviewed Ed Miliband. It doesn't matter what the MP for Doncaster North said in the interview, it matters where it was conducted - from London. Miliband wasn't where he would have been most effective - in his constituency where he's known, influential and probably liked.

The problem now is that those who campaigned to remain a member of the EU are compounding their error. They're still preferring to paint Leave voters as thick, ill-educated, oafish bigots rather than begin the job of listening to those people. Analyses of voting that confirm this view are shared. Bad news of any sort is leapt on and spread around - whether its reports of xenophobic attacks (do note that West Yorkshire police say there's no post-referendum increase in such attacks) or some snippet of economic news, mostly opinion or anecdote, that confirms the Remain campaign's predictions of short-term doom and gloom.

Right now there's a peace to win. And it won't be won by portraying half the nation as stupid, bigoted, ignorant and selfish. It will be won by presenting the case most of us support - Britain as an outward-looking, co-operative, creative nation that's up for trade, intellectual exchange and, yes, sensibly managed immigration.

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Brexit means we're leaving the EU - it really is that simple

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"But what does Brexit mean?"

In a multitude of comments, each coloured by the particular preference or prejudice of its author, this is the cry. It's not enough to say you want to Brexit, you have to set out all the precise constitutional, legal, economic, political, cultural and moral details of that Brexit. If you don't do so it isn't Brexit and we can carry on pretending that, on 23 June 2016, the British electorate didn't vote to leave the European Union.

Worse still you can get your lawyer friends to cobble together an argument that might - just might - mean that the referendum result can be ignored in favour of what you'd probably call 'wiser counsel'. And then get surprised when ordinary voters wonder what the hell you're on about and which bit of the word 'democracy' you fail to understand.

Some have a cannier approach - rather than trying to use legal legerdemain to try and get round the fact that people voted a way you didn't like, they set about a process of getting a second referendum so as to get the right result. That result being, of course, one they agree with - that overturns the mistaken decision of those 'excluded' and 'insular' voters last June. We're familiar with this disdain for European electorates - our lords and masters have rammed through second referendums in Ireland and Denmark and, in the case of France, simply ignored the referendum result completely.

In summary Brexit means we're leaving the European Union whether or not you are happy about that. As the Prime Minister said - "Brexit means Brexit".

What was this I heard you say? "What do you mean by 'Brexit means Brexit' then?"

Really? You've not worked this out then? It's simple - the people voted to leave the European Union and, therefore, the government is morally (if not strictly legally) bound to take us out of that Union. That's it - people didn't vote to do anything else and it's for the government to propose, parliament to debate and the application of politics to decide just what the details of leaving might be.

But that doesn't include an option where we ignore the wishes of the electorate and remain a member of the European Union.

In the future all things are possible but right now our government has to set out a timetable and process for leaving the EU. I'm pretty confident that is what it will do and I'm also pretty confident that the government will seek the support of parliament for that timetable and process. And that parliament - if it has any respect for the idea of democracy - will endorse a timetable and process for us to leave the European Union. Probably one pretty close to that set down by the Prime Minister and her government.

I appreciate that there remain a bunch of folk who hate the result of June's referendum. And they've every right to argue for us to stay in (or, in some future scenario, rejoin) the European Union. But right now the right - as in moral, ethical, democratic - thing to do is set about doing what the electorate asked for. That is to leave the European Union.

Now, as a consequence of this, the UK government might have less open borders - "an end to free movement" as its advocates put it. But that's not what we voted for - we voted to leave the EU. Other things may happen as a result of us leaving - we might see more state intervention in industry. We might see an upsurge in the sort of economic nationalism that people like Will Hutton have been advocating for years. And we might see some new regulations and the ending of some old regulations.

The point isn't that these changes are or aren't made but that they will be made by British governments through the UK parliament. And when it becomes clear that ending all but "high skilled" immigration is a bonkers idea, a future UK government can open the borders up again. And the same goes for trade deals, for tariffs, for regulations on the shape of bananas and for much else besides - the final decision, while moderated by treaty and international negotiation, will be made be people we can boot out if they get it wrong.

All Brexit means is that we're no longer a member of the European Union subject to the obligations in the various treaties that form that Union. That's it. Nothing else. Indeed all the other stuff people are talking about - the assorted bogeymen and doom-laden dystopia set out by disappointed Remain voters included - represent the consequence of choices that can, and will, be made by the UK government.

So instead of crying salty tears into your schooner of achingly trendy craft lager try accepting that Brexit means Brexit and moving on to argue for a post-EU Britain that follows the sorts of policy you think right. You might not get those policies - democracy is a pain - but if your policy is to plan to say "I told you so" on a loop tape then you will definitely be disappointed. We're leaving the EU - what matters is making that decision a great one not in either insulting those who made that choice or else sitting with your bottom lip out and arms crossed sulking because your side lost.

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Why 'Stronger In' lost - the ad man's tale

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In a close political contest and especially one conducted across the whole nation, campaign tactics and execution matter. Which makes this report on the 'Stronger In' advertising and messaging in Campaign very important:

But, without doubt, one of the key problems was that the Remain camp was determined to take a negative stance. MacLennan says his agency was clear on the need for a positive message. "We said don’t try to cower people into submission – encourage them to see the positives," he insists. "We came up with a strategy based around ‘Don’t leave it, lead it’ but they didn’t run with it."

James Murphy, chief executive of Adam & Eve/DDB, says his agency had also wanted to focus on positive messaging, presenting Remain as offering the best of both worlds (inside the EU but with special status): "But that didn’t fit with the prevailing feeling in the camp that the Scottish referendum and the general election had been won by emphasising risk."

So counter to the agencies’ recommendations, Project Fear became the linchpin of what was a confused and disparate strategy. While the Leave campaigners were able to talk up all the good things about quitting the EU, Stronger In’s agenda was almost unrelentingly negative and undynamic.

Now there's a disconnect here between our understanding of what works in political advertising and how we frame more regular brand communications. In simple terms we think negative political messaging - Project Fear - works whereas we believe negatively founded messaging causes long-term brand damage in regular consumer advertising. From an outsider's perspective the 'Stronger In' campaign had a simple (and fundamentally strong) strategy - secure endorsement for 'remain' from respected experts, commenters and celebrities and stress the value we get from EU membership. What seems to have happened is that this strategy was run from 10 Downing Street while the 'Stronger In' campaign team floundered about essentially directionless:

"We were simply called upon to provide creative window-dressing, not political strategy. And because Stronger In had no political strategy, we had nothing to say. Of course we struggled to get our message across, because the real art is working out the message in the first place and we weren’t allowed to help with that."

The Campaign report talks of divisions, suspicions and an inability to collaborate - coupled with the lack of focus that led to 24 people round the table deciding on the execution of strategy. 'Stronger In' had no message besides 'stronger in' itself - there was no effort to try and provide a context or rationale to that positioning, to explain in language people would understand just how we might be 'stronger in'. Instead 'stronger in' was defined in terms of us being 'weaker out' - in other words negatively. And people - or rather the people who mattered, the undecided voters - didn't believe that message or trust those proffering ever more shrill reasons why leaving the EU was bad.

In contrast (and for all its failings of strategy) Vote Leave - perhaps more by luck than judgement - hit upon a message that was both positive and also flexible enough to accommodate the range of views and expectations of people considering a leave vote. "Take Control" they said - positive, telling people they have power and agency, and hard for 'Stronger In' to refute or challenge. Alongside this, the media (and 'Stronger In' who should have known better) embraced the term 'Brexit' meaning that leaving became a thing, had a brand people could use.

There were other mistakes - once Vote Leave had adopted a red and white livery it was pretty dumb of Labour In to produce material in red and white. In the fleeting moment between picking the leaflet from the mat and putting it into the bin or the glimpse of a poster as we drive past, you need to capture attention - it seems that Labour couldn't bring themselves to use Stronger In's blue and white with the result that, at best, a confused message was presented to the voters it targeted.

As the disappointed 'remain' voters emerge blinking into England's watery sunshine, they're beginning - too late, way too late - to construct a positive message about the EU. One about personal links, shared history, economic co-operation and our voice in the world. It might have been a different result if that had been the message prior to 23 June. Instead we got a parade of the great and good spreading doom and gloom and a persistent sub-text that anyone voting leave - or thinking of voting leave - was a narrow-minded, xenophobic, racist bigot. It's really no surprise given this barrage that people took advantage of the polling booth's calm to stick two fingers up at those elites who painted such a negative picture of English voters.

I am, of course, pleased. But it could have been a very different result if 'Stronger In' had actually tried to explain why we would actually be 'stronger in'. And as a former Ad agency Account Planning Director and a pretty experienced political campaigner, it's clear to me that 'Stronger In' had every advantage in this campaign but failed entirely in using that advantage. Whatever the politics of this, 'Stronger In' - perhaps from complacency, maybe from lack of direction, or even arrogance - threw the referendum win away.

....

Understanding the Conservative dilemma...

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Here are two of the ward level voting breakdowns* for the Shipley constituency:

Wharfedale       Remain 4539 (60%)   Leave 3068

Bingley Rural     Remain 4190 (42%)   Leave 5776

Two wards both, broadly speaking, safe Conservative wards. About five or six miles apart yet showing almost perfectly opposite results. What we have to do now is ask how we bridge this gap - to over-simplify, deal with the very different outlook and expectations from AB voters in Wharfedale and C1C2 voters in Bingley Rural.

This isn't really about Brexit but rather it's about a stew of economic, cultural and social issues. For me (but representing Bingley Rural as I do, I'm biased) the priority should be reconnecting with the disgruntled C1C2 voters - what the Americans would call the 'middle class' - who live in places like Bingley Rural. A lot of the talk is about the 'traditional' working class but, for the Conservative Party, we need a leader who my neighbours, quite literally, believe has got their back.

So when we talk about security it shouldn't be only about the unlikely terrorist attack but rather about not being burgled, not mown down by idiot drivers and feeling it's safe to go for a drink in town. When we talk about the economy, it's not just about stock markets, banks and business leaders flitting across the globe but about opportunities for young people to get on in the world, about small business and the taxes we all pay too much of. And when we talk about services it's those boring old basics - good schools, access to the doctor, getting the bins emptied and the potholes fixed.

There's something else though. People want their culture to be respected. That what they enjoy is respected and appreciated. Hardly a day passes without some public school educated comedian taking the piss out of the dreary, dull and uninspiring lives of those middling sorts. We get sneery remarks about suburbia, selectively misleading guff about how 'millennials' are being robbed blind by old people, or yet another fact-free attack on drinking, vaping, smoking or fast food. Is it any surprise when these people turn round to media and political sorts and give them the finger. Is it any surprise that, if you spend months on end telling people they're racist xenophobic bigots, they don't exactly flock to buy your political message.

In the end this isn't about agreeing with racism, pandering to the worst sort of anti-immigrant nonsense or signing up to the sort of crypto-fascist autarky that now passes for UKIP's policy platform. Rather it's about respecting what people say, understanding the concerns that underlie those words and having a conversation with these people about what we can do to help them, about what they expect from government, and what realistically government can do to meet those expectations.

*The figures carry a caveat in that the postal votes were distributed evenly across the 30 Bradford wards - we suspect this slightly skews the leave votes.
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