Remember when the liberal Left supposedly championed people who never went to university? Now it seems to hold them in contempt
Source - Daily Telegraph 23/11/23
When you are on the side of liberal enlightenment, you can usually rely on a university study coming along to help you make your point. Ever since June 24, 2016, diehard Remain campaigners have been trying to make out that Leave voters were too thick to know what was good for them, and finally they have the scientific “proof”. A study of 6,366 people by Bath University’s School of Management claims that 73 per cent of those in the highest cognitive group voted Remain, compared with only 40 per cent in the lowest cognitive group.
To be fair to Chris Dawson, who led the study, he doesn’t quite try to make out that all Brexiteers were stupid, and says there is a large overlap, with some clever people actually voting Leave. But he does assert that an awful lot of people weren’t intelligent enough to sift through information during the campaign which was “contradictory, false and often fraudulent, especially regarding the pro-Leave campaign”.
This is where his scientific method sinks into mere assertion, because he doesn’t appear to have asked his cohort what inspired them to vote Leave or Remain, nor quantified how much false information they were exposed to from either campaign. How many Remain voters, for example, were swung by the claims made by the Treasury that the economy would crash by 6 per cent and unemployment would soar by 500,000 in the two years after a Brexit vote? Those warnings, and many like it, were presented as if they were fact rather than feeble pieces of modelling – which only ever considered possible negative outcomes from Brexit – and which turned out to be very far wide of the mark.
It may very well be that more manual and elementary workers – whom you might expect to perform less well in cognitive tests – voted Leave. But there is a very good reason for that, which has nothing to do with them being unable critically to analyse competing electioneering claims. On the contrary, such people correctly worked out that they were the losers from EU free movement. If you were a well-paid professional living in London, free movement could mean cheaper plumbers and nannies. But if you were a plumber or nanny, it could mean competition for your job, suppressing your earnings power.
A while ago I was speaking to a Leave-supporting lorry driver – just the sort that diehard Remainers seem to think were harming the nation by voting the way they did. Had he got it wrong? Not a bit of it. He hadn’t had a pay rise for years, he said, until the competition from overseas hauliers had dropped away after Brexit. Then he had had four pay rises in a year, with a 40 per cent uplift in total. You can argue that making it harder for EU-based hauliers to operate in Britain has harmed the economy as a whole, but it certainly hadn’t harmed him – he voted the way that he correctly surmised would suit his personal interest.
There is a wider point to be made here. The liberal Left used to be the champions of people who hadn’t been to university, and perhaps hadn’t performed well at school. Now it seems to hold them in contempt. Remain campaigners risk demonstrating what the political philosopher Michael Sandel has called the “tyranny of merit”. How much longer before the enlightened liberals demand universal suffrage be ended, and that you need a degree to be able to vote?
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