Three absurdities laid bare by that poisonous referendum

Back in the 1960s, JWT London was without a significant retail account. (In keeping with our brand positioning, we did have Asprey’s.) So in the hope that he would help us plug this great gap in our brand portfolio, we took on someone who had been a Marks & Spencer graduate trainee, and the first thing he encouraged us to do was spend quite a lot of our own money on some retail research.

I forget the detail but not the main picture. What we discovered about people’s attitudes to Marks & Spencer was unambiguously clear. If you were under 40, M&S was where your mother bought her clothes – and you would rather die than do the same.

We took these findings to M&S’s management, who listened politely. They thanked us for our interest and told us that, as retailers, they had their ear to the ground. They were in constant shop-floor contact with their customers and therefore knew their opinions and preferences with far greater accuracy than any piece of so-called research could reveal – so thank you again and goodbye.

It was clear to us, and a few years later it became clear to them, that Marks & Spencer was dangerously out of touch with its public. Back then, M&S was not a serious advertiser, and one of advertising’s under-recognised by-products is the light it sheds on your reputation. You cannot conscientiously develop an advertising campaign without learning what people think about you. Marks & Spencer was flying blind.

Post-Brexit, endless commentators have pointed out how our political leaders had lost touch with the people. The Remain campaign, championed by the then Prime Minister, confidently implored its supporters to vote Remain – and in their millions, they did the opposite.

Above: A lie

As both M&S and the government discovered to their cost, staying in touch with real people isn’t nearly as easy as it is sometimes thought to be. It needs numbers, yes; but it needs more than numbers. You need to feel as well as calculate. You need to be constantly on guard against wishful thinking and self-deception.

At the 2015 general election, 63% of those who voted did so for parties other than the Conservatives. In all, 3.9 million people voted for UKIP. Alarm bells should have been ringing.

But when Parliament reassembled just 11 days later and Cabinet members walked into the chamber, the clear evidence of their eyes must have dispelled any lingering misgivings they may have felt. They had A MAJORITY! For the first time in more than 20 years, they had A MAJORITY! And UKIP? UKIP had been all but obliterated. In that reassuringly blue-dominated chamber, there sat just one lonely, isolated, demoralised UKIP MP. Such was the evidence of their eyes, the Tories could feel that they had the whole country behind them. From that moment onwards, they were hopelessly, irredeemably, delusionally out of touch.

Any sane electoral system, of course, would have delivered at least 80 UKIP members to Parliament in May 2015. Had there been 80 massed UKIPers glaring at Cameron at every Prime Minister’s Questions for more than a year, can anyone doubt that the government’s strategy and tactics would have been materially different?

Can we really go on pretending that our voting system is fit for purpose?

For Want of a Nail…

In 2016, the lie above was widely and repeatedly published in the UK.

As a result, many Britons voted to Leave when they would otherwise have voted to Remain.

As a result, Britain left the European Union.

As a result, three other European countries conducted referendums.

As a result, the European Union imploded.

I can’t, of course, prove any of the above. But one thing I know: it’s far more likely to be true than is the original lie.

Had a dodgy marketer repeatedly implied in a commercial advertisement that their chocolate spread might help its readers lose weight, they would have been dealt with severely, publicly reprimanded and perhaps denied access to further advertising space.

The perpetrators of the £350m lie, however, which may have affected the lives of tens of millions of people and may well have changed the future course of an entire continent, remain unpunished.

And while I fully understand the difficulties of policing political and campaigning advertising material, this case is now a precedent. The clear message to future campaigners is this: you may tell any lie, however blatant, in the promotion of your cause – and you may tell it again and again and again, and you need fear no consequence.

Can we really allow this convention to stand?

The third absurdity is of course the cause of the first two: the referendum itself.

As Richard Dawkins wrote in Prospect, published before voting day: “We live in a representative democracy, not a plebiscite democracy… to call a referendum on a matter as important and fraught with complicated and intricate detail as EU membership was an act of monstrous irresponsibility.”

Are we really going to leave ourselves open to more?