The brexit mandate is dead in a ditch: 17. 4 million leave voters didn’t know what they were voting for | thearticle

As Britain teeters on the edge of a no-deal crash-out from the EU, it is worth reflecting that parliament’s determination to honour the ‘will of the people’ is mandated upon its willingness

to ‘respect’ the result of a referendum from which no coherent “will’ can be derived. Outrageous? This claim is actually quite modest and simply draws attention to something that is

stunningly obvious. Just as the naked emperor’s new clothes melted away, the foundation of the ‘will of the people’ myth – that, in the 2016 referendum, 17.4 million Leave voters knew what

they were voting for – is so obviously false, you might wonder if it was even worth saying, were it not for the fact that many politicians, journalists and commentators are continuing this

conversational stranglehold on the Brexit debate. The supposed ‘will of the people’ depends on the claim that the 17.4 million Leave voters knew what they were voting for. The truth of this

claim requires that whatever Brexit proposal is enacted is identical in detail to that intended by each of the 17.4 million, alongside our willingness to swallow an indigestible range of

impossible things: knowledge that Johnson would deliver, that May would fail, Cameron wouldn’t even try, and that events of October 31 2019 will involve 17.4 million payouts by the

bookmakers. Let’s try to get a clearer view of the problem. Any knowledge-claim requires an ‘object’; something capable of being known. The object, moreover, must be taken as possessing some

measure of semantic stability – such that if different people can be said to know it, the statements they make about it cannot irresolvably contradict each other because they will share a

common set of conditions which render them true. This is clearly not the case in the referendum, with the putative object, ‘Leave’. For one thing, it is unarguably true that the set of

people claiming that, in voting ‘Leave’, they knew what they were voting for, does not map onto a set of consistent statements describing what it was they voted for. Contrary to the basic

requirement for a legitimate knowledge-claim, there is no universal agreement on what it was they knew. If they knew anything at all, it was unique to each voter. But, far worse, since the

referendum, the government (and parliament) has failed to settle on a coherent, consistent, agreed account of what form Brexit must take. This forces the conclusion that there was, at the

time of the referendum and since, nothing for anyone to posit as a potential object of knowledge. Quite simply, the ‘Leave’ box of the referendum was not merely beyond the reach of anyone’s

knowledge, it was completely devoid of meaning. And if parliament does finally manufacture (not discover) a workable Brexit, this cannot be seen as suddenly rendering a false knowledge-claim

in 2016, now, in 2019, true in 2016. It may be helpful here to imagine a variation on the ‘shell’ game where objects are placed under cups which are then shuffled. Upon turning over a cup

to reveal an object, you may declare “This is the object I chose”, which implies no knowledge-claim about the formerly hidden object. You knew you were making a choice, but you chose the

cup, not the object. This implies no preference for one object over the other two. Only if there was a supporting knowledge-claim to the effect that, “I knew this object was under this cup”,

could a preference claim hold good. Crucially, it cannot legitimately be argued that your choosing the object could be taken as expressing a preference for that object or an endorsement of

its quality. This is also the case with the question of Brexit and the inability of the referendum to supply a mandate. “’Leave’ is what I voted for”, or “’Leave’ is how I voted” can

legitimately be asserted but imply no relevant knowledge-claim. The reference they have is to the action of voting, the physical marking of the box designated ‘Leave’ (the selecting of the

cup), and the knowledge they manifest is the awareness of actually performing this task. Clearly, a knowledge-claim which can only go this far is incapable of manifesting a preference, an

endorsement, a ‘will’ with regard to the object. Through its superficially appealing, reductionist simplicity, the referendum failed to adequately specify a potential object of any

knowledge-claim, precipitating the situation in which, over three years after it was supposedly clearly expressed, the ‘will of the people’ remains yet undiscovered. The history of Brexit’s

evolving identity since 2016 ought to have demonstrated beyond question that what lurked in the ‘leave’ box in the referendum was unknowable. Once alternatives were touted, each claiming to

uniquely represent the national ‘will’, the notional authority of the referendum to deliver a mandate collapsed, since the claim upon which its authority rests, that “17.4 million leave

voters knew what they voted for”, conspicuously fails. You may be wondering, “If all this is so straightforwardly obvious why is it that Brexiters and Remainers alike appear not to have

noticed?” I sympathise. The simple answer is many of them have noticed but, through fear (of telling ‘Leave’ constituents they didn’t know what they were voting for), or for advantage (by

claiming a mandate for their personal Brexit), they prefer to keep schtum. The emperor’s clothes which conceal the obvious failure of the knowledge-claim (and the ‘will’, and the mandate) is

a confusion between a psychological account and a logical one. This confusion is evident when, in attempting to justify their knowledge-claim, Brexiters commit to the unsustainable belief

that a description of their psychological state – mental images of booming exports, or sepia-tinted elysian daydreams – is sufficient to justify a knowledge-claim about what they voted for.

Brexiters are liable to dismiss my argument as portraying Leave voters as too stupid to understand the Brexit issue. This is a misrepresentation arising from the (possibly deliberate) error

of prioritising the psychological state of the voters over the semantic imperatives governing the possibilities of what their vote could actually mean. My argument is entirely agnostic

regarding the intelligence or understanding of voters. Returning to the ‘shell’ game, the psychological state of the chooser can support a knowledge-claim about the cup but not about the

object hidden under it. The psychological state of the chooser is an insufficient basis for any knowledge claim beyond simply reporting what is in her own mind. The required knowledge-claim

fails, not because there is some inadequacy in the mental contents, the intelligence, the thinking, reasoning and understanding of the chooser or the ‘Leave’ voter. It fails because a

knowledge-claim requires there be an object capable of being known that can stand in the appropriate relationship to the individual making the knowledge-claim. When ‘Leave’ voters claim that

“We knew what we were voting for” they refer to their awareness of the contents of their own individual minds. Unfortunately, this psychological account does nothing to link that knowledge

with any mandate for Brexit. In sustaining the “Leave knew what they were voting for” myth, Brexiters rely upon a fallacious equivalence; assuming a semantic equivalence between their

psychological state when casting their vote and the state of affairs signified by the vote itself. Consequently, the kindest construal of the Leave vote bestows upon it the performatory

force of granting license to a(ny) government to retroactively construct the knowledge the voters possessed and to subsequently inform them what they had really voted for _when they knew

they were voting for it_. This is hardly satisfactory. Perhaps, however, the authority of the referendum can be salvaged by recasting the act of voting as a performative ‘licensing’ of

government to determine Brexit. The advantage of this interpretation is that it involves no knowledge-claim. It simply signals a commitment on the part of the voter that the government be

able to decide. Note, however, that this supposed advantage is illusory; achieved only at the considerable expense of divorcing the mandate-giving significance of the vote from the

knowledge-claim. Government would have to abandon its claim that it receives its mandate from the knowledge-claim and the ‘will of the people’. In other words, it loses the very democratic

warrant it claims to both have and require for its particular Brexit proposal. And, so, we arrive at a further similarity with the shell game: the shell game is most often used to commit a

fraud.