Brexit: a glitch in the network of political incentives
Last week, Dominic Cummings, who ran the Vote Leave campaign, said that Brexit could be a mistake. His willingness to be candid about his views is an opportunity to explore a paradox: if Brexit is going to be bad for the country, why did so many smart people support it?
With Brexit, the mechanisms that try to line up the interests of politicians with the interests of the country went awry. Brexiters had only the vaguest idea of how Brexit could be beneficial in practical terms, no concern for the political fallout of campaign promises that were almost certainly going to be broken, and completely ignored (or didn’t know about) the crushing complexity of a negotiation which, as David Davies now admits, is going to be as difficult as landing on the moon.
Yet most of the key players are smart people seeking to achieve political success. This seems like a contradiction: how could so many sophisticated operators make such a terrible mistake, one that might easily take its toll on them at the ballot box? One possible answer is that most only supported Leave in the belief that it wouldn’t actually happen.
First up — how did the idea of Brexit manage to persist for so long? The heavy lifting of keeping the idea alive was down to Nigel Farage, a man who wanted to be a politician but couldn’t get elected as an MP. He is, however, very good at appearing on TV, and so he was able to achieve his ambitions outside of the (UK’s) normal democratic institutions. Charisma plus a plausible but controversial idea is catnip to political media, so leaving the EU assumed a constant background presence in national debate through Farage’s talents. Of course, for his political power to persist he needed Brexit to never quite actually happen. His assiduous cultivation of Brexit made perfect sense for him, and probably did not put him in a frame of mind for disinterested evaluation of the impacts of leaving the EU.
Within parliamentary politics, as Dominic Cummings points out, many MPs, even those involved in the Vote Leave campaign, didn’t deeply care about the issue, and probably didn’t understand the EU very well. If you are a backbench MP, life is about getting reelected — by currying favour with constituents on issues like keeping hospital wards open or where new houses get built. As a result, MPs are likely to have sophisticated strategies to get what they want on these issues. Their views on EU are more akin to dinner party posturing — back bench MPs are unlikely to subject their view on the issue to any detailed analysis, instead just going the way the wind is blowing amongst their core voters. Why do otherwise on a policy issue you probably can’t change?
Combined, these two forces kept Brexit on the menu. Plenty has been written about Cameron’s mistake in offering a referendum. But the referendum only opened the door. To win that referendum, those advocating leaving had to mount an effective argument, and some big political stars needed to throw their weight behind that argument. More smart people had to back a bad idea.
I’ve been particularly interested in how Dominic Cummings and Andrew Lilico (an economist who helped the leave campaign) have formulated their arguments. Both, I believe, have been very clear about their personal reasoning on the subject — and it might not be what you’d think. First of all, they’ve both pointed out that the EU would be better off without the UK constantly acting as a drag on further unification. If you believe this is true, and it does seem plausible, it’s a moral and indeed altruistic reason to back Brexit — not one you’d mention in a campaign though.
Secondly, both of them see Brexit not as an end, but as just part of a journey. Lilico wants a CANZUK alliance, a new amalgam of the UK, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. Cummings wants to see epochal administrative reform that leaves Britain hyper-efficiently managed. Both of these are what I would call ‘Boris Islands’. When Boris Johnson had to make a decision about how London’s airport capacity should be increased — a decision which was bound to piss a lot of people off no matter what — he had a (politically) brilliant idea. He proposed that a new airport be built on an artificial island in the Thames estuary. It was brilliant because it was never going to happen, but by pretending it would he neutralised his obligation to answer a otherwise intractable question. In the same way, by saying Brexit only works if it’s part of some larger program you ‘Boris Island’ away difficult questions about Brexit itself. You just say, ‘oh no, you needed Brexit + CANZUK, no wonder it all went wrong’. You’re on safe ground because it’s pretty certain that neither CANZUK or Cumming’s government reform will happen. This reasoning allows smart people to support a position that is not itself very credible.
But what did wonks and campaigners like Lilico and Cummings have to actually gain? Notoriety — both of them earn their income by proving their ability to have a political impact. If they lost, they could say the deck was hopelessly stacked against them, and that a narrow defeat in a campaign where every major party, the government and the media were against them was actually a sign of how brilliant they were. If they won, well, it might be brown trousers time, but you’ll be heroes for a year so maybe it’s worth it. Maybe you can cash out your chips before anyone realises, or may be something (like the EU collapsing) would turn up to save your reputation. This is political logic flipping: getting involved with a campaign for a bad idea can make sense, but only if you think you’re going to lose while remaining credible — and, perversely, heroically losing might boost your credibility within right wing politics. Remember, everyone though Leave would lose — betting markets, actual markets, Cameron, the media… .
So far we’ve got Tory backbenchers and Farage keeping Brexit bumping along in the background, gun-for-hire politicos opportunistically and possibly accidentally shaping a referendum winning campaign, but what about the star power?
Without Boris, Leave would probably of lost. So why did he, at the last minute, get behind a bad idea? Why did Gove do exactly the same? Because, many have suggested, they were both ruthlessly trying to be Prime Minster. Backing a failed Leave campaign could position them perfectly for a winning leadership campaign within the Tory party. Just like Lilico and Cummings, if they won, they’d just have to cross their fingers that something would turn up. If they lost, they’d have proved their credentials, and, even better, earned the right to tell eurosceptic Tory MPs it was time to shut up about the EU and talk about something else — a recipe for a successful premiership. Theresa May, I assume, adhered to some ‘stay neutral’ variant of this logic.
Counterfactuals are difficult — but could Leave have won a campaign if the expectation was that they would win? Would the extra scrutiny of the dawning reality of a Brexit deal have done them in? Did they need to be seen as underdogs? How many wonks, politicians or campaigners would have wanted to knowingly involve themselves in the horror show Theresa May is currently enduring? Who would stand in front of a 350-million-a-week pledge plastered up the side of a campaign bus if they expected to be telling everyone it wasn’t going to happen a month later?
This story, if it is true, shows how smart people, acting, if not exactly in good faith then well within the envelope of normal political tactics, can enact bad policy. It’s a cautionary tale about how incentives can line up, especially in the context of a referendum.
When people like Cummins and Lilico tell us what they really think, we should encourage it, not use it as an opportunity for a Twitter lynching- which is what actually happened. I thought it especially depressing that so many jumped on Cummin’s for admitting a degree of uncertainty. Only unreflective people have zero uncertainty.
On which note, I should acknowledge that Brexit might actually be a good idea, and those who supported it might have an analysis that shows this. Obviously I don’t think this is the right reading, but if it is, then there is a whole other story about the perverse incentives that fooled whole swathes of society into believing that Brexit was a terrible idea.
If we are going to move past soapbox moralising we should start to consider the design of systems that allow incentives to line up as they did. First past the post elections, referendums and the media’s incentive to tacitly collude with politicians to create gratifying narrative arcs should all be part of the debate. So too should the failure of political discourse to pay close attention to public opinion as revealed through surveys and ethnography, fixated as it is with Westminster rumours and intrigue. Without improvements, poor governance is inevitable.
[Edit: looking through Cummings blog he has an interesting post appealing for ideas on alignments of incentives.]
