June 29, 2016
Project Fact – comes after the fact
I’ve just been re-reading my previous blog post. I think I underplayed my concerns about the absence of facts in the campaigning that has led to Brexit. Project Fear was a disastrous strategic and tactical miscalculation. The effect of engaging a scare-mongering tone was (for Cameron and others) to become the Boys Who Cried Wolf. Not enough people took the Remain Camp seriously, because they were not rigorous enough in their own case-making. They sounded shrill rather than factual. Tone matters.
And now (now – when it is too late), Project Fact begins. Suddenly, social media is awash with useful articles about legal facts and precedents that turn out to matter, and which pretty much prove that the case for Remaining was very, very badly presented. Where was Alastair Campbell when you needed him? Where were the communications professionals? Where indeed.
To misquote Churchill: never before has so much communication been so badly managed by so few to create so much mess. Fingers crossed for a way out of all this.
5 Comments
Communication – yes indeed. People had been crying out for information to make an informed decision since the announcement. Was the attitude that people should use Google or Gov.uk to work it out?
Did the powers that be think the default would be to Remain as change couldn’t be understood and hence people would just “stick”…
I recently had dinner with an MP at the Commons (get me) and she told me that the Gov is incredibly focussed on Data and Analytics following the events leaden up to the last General Election. We had a fun discussion about the Data Science piece in the last series of House of Cards (the Netflix version)…
It’s all very well to say there’s an interest in data and how technology can help, but you actually need to do something and it’s quite difficult. If some of the vast Gov legacy IT spend could be diverted into looking at what the electorate might be thinking, it could help all of us. It could help the decision makers. People selling us holidays and food wouldn’t dare run their businesses without considering the power of data and communication…
Interesting angle, Mike. One thing’s for sure. They did NOT know what people were thinking – on either side of the debate. If what you think is sensible is read as scare-mongering, you need to adjust your message, not protest about how thick people are !
Thanks again – Mark
Yes- a failure as a campaign. Too much Osbourne doom and gloom v the cheeky chappy music hall act of Boris and Farage. The key demographic was C2DE in the North and Midlands and that was realised far too late. The general level of political and economic education in the UK is so poor that even if people had had all the facts they “craved” they would have difficulty processing them. Dennis Skinner was what was needed,but he went Brexit pretty early.
Thanks John. I agree with most of what you say. But, as well as the lack of appeal to C2DE in the North and the Midlands, I was also bothered by the lack of facts available to everyone nationally. The trouble with scare-mongering is that it destroys trust. So you don’t know a fact when you hear one. Hence the Cry Wolf point. What a screw up.
IMHO the debate on both sides was a national disgrace. That coupled to the widely held view that the electorate doesn’t have the intelligence to process all the relevant facts in order to make the correct decision for themselves, makes the communication of all said facts crucial. Alas post referendum we are still in a vacuum as to what happens next. Scary that the politicians still seem to be blind to this…
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