Dominic Cummings was part of the backroom staff from the Vote Leave campaign. He is one of the slippery individuals behind the £350 million a week for the NHS claim. A website called The London Economics (HERE) is suggesting Mr Cummings, in an article on Spectator Blogs (HERE) from January 2017, has actually admitted it was lies like the £350 million that won it. I am not sure he is quite so open about it as London Economics imply but he comes very close to saying without the lies they would have lost.
However, I think his article means we can be confident that Brexit is a passing fad, albeit one that will take some time to clear. For him the referendum was simply about convincing enough people to vote for an idea, it could have been that the world is flat for example. You might be able to do it but it wouldn't actually make the earth flat, even if everyone believed it was. Brexit is a bit like this. Convincing 52% of the populace that Brexit will be a good thing does not mean that it is.
The article contains virtually nothing about what Brexit will achieve. This should not be a surprise since we remainers know that no good will come of it. Note the extent of the thinking behind Mr Cummings' campaign, given in answer to his own rhetorical question: why do it [leave the EU]?:
"I thought that Leaving would improve the probability of 1) Britain contributing positively to the world and 2) minimising dangers. I thought it would: minimise Britain’s exposure to the problems caused by the EU; improve the probability that others in Europe would change course before more big crises hit, e.g. by limiting free movement which is the biggest threat to continued free trade; require and therefore hopefully spark big changes in the fundamental wiring of UK government including an extremely strong intelligent focus on making Britain the best place in the world for science and education; improve the probability of building new institutions for international cooperation to minimise the probability of disasters".
You might note there is no practical or tangible benefits about Brexit beyond the hope of a probability things might improve or that big changes might be "sparked". Even the things he thinks need to be improved are amazingly nebulous, "contributing positively" to the world for example - what does that even mean? Trying to rationalise it is a waste of time since he himself says:
"I’ve learned over the years that ‘rational discussion’ accomplishes almost nothing in politics, particularly with people better educated than average". He follows this with:
"High prestige pundits and editors yield great power over the stories told (and have far more power over politicians like Cameron, unfortunately, than they realise) but the field is not based on real expertise. Fields dominated by real expertise are distinguished by two features: 1) there is enough informational structure in the environment such that reliable predictions are possible despite complexity and 2) there is effective feedback so learning is possible. Neither condition applies generally to politics or the political media".
"Despite the rise of social media most people get most of their news from TV. TV coverage of politics rarely illuminates much because there is no clear way to decide who is right about anything. The format makes it almost impossible for any useful discussion to happen. Interviewers, politicians, and pundits talk past each other with no clarity about assumptions. Questions are vague, often meaningless, posed by interviewers who rarely have more than a thin bluffer’s understanding of any policy issue and the same is usually true of those answering; the more famous the interviewer, the less likely it is they know anything about, say, education policy and like David Cameron they are bluffing. (As soon as a story is deemed ‘political’ it is taken out of the hands of specialists (who are very rarely actually specialists anyway) and given to ‘political’ hacks who have no idea of the policy.)"
I think he is right about this stuff but he is wrong to think economics is not dominated by what he calls "real expertise". It is and the majority of economists, perhaps 99%, said we would be worse off if we left the EU. The fact it hasn't yet happened does not mean it won't.
Anyone who cannot bring any rational thinking or hard facts to a case is, I always believe, a bit of a charlatan and the leave campaigns had plenty of them. They used emotion to convince people. Listen to this from Mr Cummings's article:
"The models honed by VICS [a database] also were used to produce dozens of different versions of the referendum address (46 million leaflets) and we tweaked the language and look according to the most reliable experiments done in the world (e.g. hence our very plain unbranded ‘The Facts’ leaflet which the other side tested, found very effective, and tried to copy).
This is why it was impossible to argue during the campaign against a committed leaver. It is hard to counter emotion with facts. It is also why remain will win in the end. Sooner or later the facts will come through. Emotions are strong for a while but soon fade, while facts are like the Rock of Gibraltar, so solid and immovable you sometimes forget they are there. Yes, you can persuade with emotion but the earth is not flat and sooner or later everyone will realise it.
