In November of 2004, just as a harsh winter began to bite, an election of sorts was held across Ukraine. The democratic foundation of any country is, of course, free and fair elections. But these elections, which according to those who counted the ballots had been won by Victor Yanukovych, had not been conducted in a way that would allow anyone to believe (or pretend) that they were either free or fair.
The ways in which Yanukovych and his partners in crime attempted to cheat their way to victory were crude. Even though personal recording devices were not then as ubiquitous as they are today, there was still plenty of evidence of ballot stuffing. There was recorded evidence of people filling in reams of ballot sheets, there was recorded evidence of officials at polling stations deleting records, hiding stamps, changing vote counts, and then there was also evidence of vote numbers being manipulated right at the level of the national Central Election Committee.
In response, the people of Ukraine went to the streets. Their votes had been stolen. Their wishes had been arrogantly and illegally ignored. What was at stake at that time was something of vital importance, the very essence of democracy. What was to come over the next 62 days became known as the Orange Revolution. Democracy had been subverted, and so democracy had to be restored. Through the bitter cold, Kyiv’s central Maidan square was occupied by protesters until firstly the illegally- “won” election result was annulled, and until new elections took place, and until Victor Yuschenko, Ukraine’s rightful President, was inaugurated.
Fast forward
Fast forward 12 years, to the 2016 vote of the British public regarding that country’s membership of the European Union. While that vote was not stolen in the same crude way of ballot boxes being stuffed and polling station officials acting illegally, was that vote “democratic”? Did the in/out referendum on the UK’s membership of the EU meet democratic standards?
The Brexit debate is very, very complicated, and that’s an understatement. In the three years since that vote took place the UK has descended, sadly, into a twilight world where debates are no longer about the weather, or what’s for dinner, over kitchen tables and at pub bars across the country ordinary men and women are debating what the backstop is, what they think it might mean, and coming up with ingenious ways to “solve” it. Here’s my advice: leave it to the experts. Real experts in trade, customs, technology, and security. That point in campaigning for a Brexit outcome where Michael Gove, now a cabinet minister, said “I think this country has had quite enough of experts” is only part of the problem that has led the UK to this current precarious situation. A larger part of the problem is that a new reality emerged where there was no reality, no objective facts, and all opinions had become deemed to be equal.
Gove may believe that the country has had enough of experts, and I disagree. These are opinions, and while we are all entitled to them one of these two opinions is smarter than the other. But what we are not entitled to, or, rather, what the people who pulled off the Brexit win are not entitled to, is to keep the prize of victory if there were elements of the way they got their result that crossed several lines. The democratic standard is “free and fair”, was the Brexit vote held in a way which is worthy of those descriptors?
The current political and media-level debate about what kind of Brexit might or might not happen, should the debate here, in this space where (ideally) the public is informed, be more about the nature of the whole set of circumstances that led to that 52%/48% result? The question should be: Has British democracy been subverted?
Fair?
There were several layers of lies that contributed to the Brexit outcome. There were the lies that came from the media, for many years, blaming the EU for all kinds of manufactured outrages. So much hold did those lies have that when British citizens have been asked for examples of EU laws that somehow affected the UK in a malign way, the best answer most could come up with was “bendy bananas” and, though it is bananas, that is a fact.
Then there were the lies that politicians told to the electorate. Some of those lies were very deliberate, like misrepresenting (on the side of a bus) the cost of EU membership for the UK.
There isn’t space in a dozen articles to list all of the lies, but a little research offers up a few resources claiming to have reasonably comprehensive lists. So, the first test of democratic standards, is that “fair” in politics now? To simply deceive people? Or is blatant dishonesty going to be allowed to become the new political norm that we should all accept? Is that democracy?
The Leave campaigns have also been found guilty of breaking election financing laws. Actual crimes have been committed. There is no “did they?/didn’t they” debate. Laws were broken. Fact.
Free?
Investigating the question of whether the Brexit campaign resulted in a free-will expression of voters’ wishes reveals an even greater problem. It is well known that Russia took more than a passing interest in the debate, it would be an ominous sign for democracy is foreign interference is now not also just permitted, but our new “norm.”
What Russia did had (as is their way) many facets to it. We know, for a fact, that one of the main financial backers of Brexit, Arron Banks, had several contacts with the Russian embassy in London as he was preparing to make the single largest donation in British political history. Russia interfered in a public way through the biased messages it sent to readers and viewers of their western propaganda outlets, British broadcasting regulators have found these outlets in breach of standards on more than one occasion, which proves this point, but sadly the fines they are allowed to impose are puny. More subtly, Russia attacked (and continues to attack) individual voters though their infestation of online discourse, abusing the freedoms and openness of social media platforms to unleash wave after wave of trolls to pollute public discourse and to push for the result that Putin dreams of; a weaker EU, less able to respond to him in harmony. People were exposed, deliberately, to an (almost) unprecedented propaganda campaign, unknowingly, of course.
There is no doubt that Russia sought to exert influence over the outcome. And there is no doubt that Russia did have an influence on the outcome, which, remember, was a very close run thing. Inevitably, therefore, the questions are asked whether the effect of these Russian influence operations “tipped the scale” or not. Why would that matter? Even if the effect of the Russian influence operation could be quantified, surely the fact alone that this did happen is more than enough to call the result into question? To borrow an analogy from the Netflix film The Great Hack, if an athlete is caught doping there isn’t a commission to sit and work out if s/he might have got their gold medal anyway without the cheating, maybe just by a smaller winning margin, no, the athlete is stripped of their medal.
The analogy above is not about Russia though, The Great Hack is a documentary about another way in which democracies, globally, have been disrupted by another malicious actor, a now-defunct company called Cambridge Analytica. In part The Great Hack tells the story also of how Facebook was used as a conduit for carrying the tailored and targeted messages that are at the core of the work of Cambridge Analytica, and certainly Facebook should be taking more responsibility for the role their platform played, but Cambridge Analytica is the main story and The Great Hack is a must-watch film.
What The Great Hack fails to highlight sufficiently is the role that certain US right-wing political actors played in establishing it, but what the documentary does not gloss over is the fact that the technology on which this firm secured results for their clients was once classified, by the British government, as weapons-grade. What Cambridge Analytica did, on behalf of Brexit, was wage psychological warfare on the British electorate. Through personal profiles, also amassed through abuse of Facebook, Cambridge Analytica set about manipulating the mind state of regular folk up and down the United Kingdom.
It might be argued that behavioral change is something that is the core principle behind all manner of things, like advertising campaigns. True. And that all kinds of companies, Google, for example, employ algorithms and do so to filter what kind of content we both do and don’t see. Also true. But has a weapons-grade system of manipulation been unleashed on a population in peacetime before?
Does any of this point towards a “free” expression of the will of the people? One of the crutches that those still trying to make Brexit happen is the misplaced notion that this is “democracy” and so the result must be implemented. Wrong. The conduct of the Brexit campaign may not have included the crude stuffing of ballot boxes, but in just the same way as democracy had been subverted in Ukraine in 2004, democracy was subverted in the UK in 2016. The technology and the methods were different, but democracy and democratic standards must be restored.
In Ukraine we took to the streets, the UK is different, in the coming weeks there parliament must ensure that they restore democracy by rejecting the current crazy intention to let the UK leave with no deal, and then do two more things, to call for a new referendum, and call for a full and independent inquiry into how the country got to this abyss in the first place.
