A reflection on the EU referendum campaign.

A monumental, historic event occurred yesterday; I feel I cannot let it pass without commenting. On June 23rd the people of the United Kingdom voted in a referendum deciding whether or not they wanted to remain a member of the European Union. A 52% majority voted to leave, 48% desired to stay.

 

The people have spoken; this is democracy in action. It was fantastic to see so many people exercising their right to vote (72.2% turnout). Democracy, however, is a strange thing; it is essential to modern civilisation, wars have been fought (and are still being fought) solely to to defend the right of the people to choose who governs them, but it isn't perfect. Democracy doesn't rely on a populace being able to make an informed choice. Many voters, whether wilfully or not, are often ignorant of the consequences of the choice they are making.

Politicians will often cultivate ignorance, it is in their best interests; pre-election promises that go unfulfilled lead to disillusionment (just look at the student fees debacle in 2010). The campaign leading up to the referendum was rife with this practise on both sides. Whilst I am disappointed with the overall result (and to an extent, genuinely worried about it), it is the campaign process that has concerned me more.

Both sides' campaigns resorted to appeals to emotions, appeals to fear, appeals to consequences. ad hominem attacks, straw men, exaggeration, cherry picking,  flag waving patriotism, oversimplification, assumptions, non sequiter reasoning and seemingly intentional vagueness. In essence, propaganda at it's finest. Many leaflets I received in the post had glaring inconsistencies and illogical lines of argument. Having studied critical thinking I was able to spot these fallacies; some even made me genuinely angry - do people really believe what they are reading at face value?

  
The whole campaigning process was an absolute shambles. What this resulted in was people having to vote based on either scattered contradictory information, gut feeling, patriotism, nationalism or worst of all, prejudice. The information presented by both sides was so contradictory it was impossible to make a genuinely informed choice. It was truly disheartening. I'm not sure which is worse; voting based on poor information or not voting at all.

 

My ballot paper should have had a third option:

'I cannot make an informed decision and wish to abstain'. 

I wonder how many people would have put a cross in that box?