David Deutsch on Brexit
In this interview, David Deutsch speaks about why he supported Vote Leave in the 2016 EU Membership referendum. He discusses error correction in the British parliamentary system and outlines his views on some of the most common Vote Remain arguments. The original interview was conducted by Joe Boswell and transcribed in January 2020.
I have taken a few small editorial liberties in this transcription, but have taken care to preserve the original intention. Please note that my hosting of this transcript does not indicate my support for Vote Leave.
Boswell: David, you’re best known as a physicist and an author. That’s certainly how I first came across you but it was in 2016 when I first noticed you had this unexpected connection to Brexit. I remember that in the middle of one of those pre-referendum BBC debates Michael Gove made use of your name.
Deutsch: No one was more surprised.
Boswell: He was citing you as a prominent British scientist that agreed with his position. I’ve since learned that Dominic Cummings, Leader of the Vote Leave campaign and now an adviser to Boris Johnson has credited you in the spectator with making the best argument for Brexit, namely this argument concerning error correction which we’ll talk about.
Deutsch: Yes. By the way, that’s very nice of him but he also said that did not affect the campaign.
Boswell: Okay well maybe I’ll have some effect now if we can get the word out as it were. But before we get to the argument itself, how did you get wrapped up in all this?
Deutsch: For many years I didn’t think the issue was at all important. I voted for staying in the Common Market during the first referendum although that was because I believed what we were promised: that there was no intention to make this into a European super-state, it was a purely economic arrangement and that the chronic problems that existed even at that time, like the Common Agricultural Policy, were to be reformed.
I was also reassured because people started talking about a two-track Europe where one track would be Britain and some other countries that would not have ever-closer Union and then the others would have ever-closer Union. There’d be two groups of countries in friendly economic relationships with each other. Even in this referendum, I could easily have voted Remain if Mr. Cameron’s proposals had been taken seriously and if they hadn’t sent him home in humiliation.
Boswell: What were the long-term problems, in your mind, facing the EU that were growing overtime?
Deutsch: There was the Common Agricultural Policy and also for Britain the Fisheries Policy. It’s only a small thing economically but it’s significant of the problems that arise and normally within the British system would get solved.
Then there were issues like freedom of movement; I’m actually in favor of greater immigration but concerned by the freedom of movement in the sense that it was up to the Europeans whom the British government could deport. You might say this was only a handful of people in the end but again it was a niggling problem that was thought important by a lot of people and which the British political system had no purchase on.
An even smaller one I suppose is that we couldn’t remove the tampon tax and we found it difficult to forbid the export of live animals. People will say we could have done that, that “there would have been a way of doing that” but this is another example of the fact that in Britain there’s a clear path. If you have a grievance you can join a pressure group and the pressure group will pressure the government, or you can see your MP and the MP will see the grievance building up and so on. Europe is structured in such a way that it’s very difficult to know whom to address your grievance to or what they could do about it.
Boswell: This brings us to this concept of error correction which sounds like a harmless bit of jargon but for you is a very deep fundamental principle. Can you lay that out for us?
Deutsch: Yes and where you are getting that wrong. So this is the political theory of Karl Popper whom I follow in this and other matters in his political philosophy he had a definition of democracy which famously does not include anything about elections. Elections are simply the best-known way of achieving what Popper said was the essence of democracy. The criterion for democracy is that governments and policies can be removed without violence, so the more a system is conducive to removing rulers and policies without violence, early in the game, the more it is democratic according to Popper.
That is the most important criterion in politics, more important than choosing the right rulers in the first place. That’s because of fallibilism. Any system that purports to know in advance what the consequences of a ruler or a policy are going to be is based on a fundamental error of fallibilism. Systems that try to do that clamp down on progress because they entrench the ruler or the policy.
Boswell: So it’s your view that UK institutional, traditions and culture do a better job of error correction and have done historically. But what is it about the UK and the EU that makes them so different?
Deutsch: Well, there are many aspects to this. One thing that goes in that direction is the first past the post electoral system. I must say that formal systems are not what it’s all about, it’s really about how individuals think of their relationship with the government, with the state, and with other individuals. It goes very deep and it is because of that that certain institutions have certain properties. Now a property of first-past-the-post (FPTP) that I particularly favor and that Popper favored is that the government is maximally vulnerable to changes in opinion in the electorate. It only takes a few percentage points change in the electorate to make a large change in Parliament and possibly remove the government and replace it with another government.
So in the British system with FPTP the Prime Minister wakes up every morning afraid that something might happen that day that will shake his hold on power and that if people change their minds he will lose at the next election, or the election could come early. If it hadn’t been for these constitutional changes that messed some of this stuff up then he could be removed and if he was, the opposition would get into power and they would be in charge right now.
Any other system dilutes this feature. If a government under a proportional representation system loses a few percentage points of support, the first thing they will try to do is form a new coalition. Likely they will already be in a coalition, so this will change the electoral logic of the coalition, so they will form a different coalition. So it can easily happen that a swing in the population in the electorate in one direction, let’s say to the right, causes the government to move to the left because the left-wing government will ally with an even more left-wing party which they had previously been able to rule without.
This isn’t just a theoretical thing, it happens all the time in non-FPTP electoral systems. We’ve seen in the last few elections that even the FPTP system is not immune to this. It can happen, you know we’ve had coalitions, but it’s much rarer in FPTP systems and when it does happen the logic of the system is to go back to evenly balanced.
Boswell: So error correction is preserving both leadership and accountability. If a third party, like the Lib-Dems or UKIP, gain seats through advocating a particular policy, like Brexit, then one would hope that one of the major parties would say, “I need to suck up that policy to prevent the opposition getting in”.
Deutsch: Yes and generally, if they’re in power, they will do it in such a way as to make it more palatable to them and their voters/constituents. If they’re in opposition they will do the same, and who wins depends on who has the best arguments about how to accommodate this new problem. If they’re wrong, they will get to implement their wrong policy; that is crucial and that’s why power and responsibility go together. If you have a system that allows those in power to do what they think is right, then it will be clear whose fault it is when it goes wrong and it will also be clear that it was the opposition’s fault for opposing it.
If everything goes right, you learn, make progress, and improve how society works. This is how political knowledge is created, as opposed to persisting in a perpetual state of argument about what would be right if only we had our way, but never know if that’s exactly it and no one ever getting proven wrong.
Boswell: We’ve discussed the UK context, but what is it about the EU that fails these tests of fallibilism and error correction?
Deutsch: [The EU] seems to have been designed to make it difficult to know who is responsible for a policy. The policy is decided by consensus, avoiding confrontation and trying to accommodate different strands of opinion within the policy. Therefore no great changes of policy ever happen, only tweaks to the policy and this is the case even huge problems are perceived by the electorate, such as immigration, waves of immigrants. It’s not that the wrong policy was implemented and then it would now be corrected and replaced by better policy, it’s that no policy was implemented and the EU is just unable to formulate one because there is no party in power in the EU. There is no Prime Minister or President who is the leader of something with an ideology that could be proven wrong.
Boswell: I remember being struck by something that you said to me in private a few months ago, about how the UK Parliament sits opposite each other. I was sat in the balcony a few months ago watching it. It is like a great theater, set with the speaker in the middle whereas the EU sits in a circle and this symbolizes a difference. [The UK has] a culture where you can point at the person who’s responsible and shout at them. You [can] force them to take responsibility for what they’re doing. [In the EU system] it is all about consensus but an artificial consensus.
Deutsch: Yes, and wheeling and dealing to make the policy in a closed room, where the voters are represented by the number of delegates that they make and that those can form into a coalition. Maybe that coalition wasn’t even envisaged before the election; that coalitions form policies that weren’t envisaged before the election, that was never voted on. They can’t be voted on again because if you vote one way or another a different coalition will form that you can’t predict.
This fact that the legislature sits in a circle and the British one sits facing each other, at two swords lengths apparently, is indeed emblematic. Although, I have to keep saying that the real nature of institutions is in culture. They are in human minds: their ideas, how they are implemented in terms of buildings and laws and constitutions and so on, is a secondary thing but it is in this case emblematic.
Another instance of the same thing is the British legal system which is adversarial and is in contrast to, perhaps all or maybe just most, European countries where it’s not. [In European countries] the idea is that everybody is there to find the truth. You can’t find the truth that way, you’ve got to have the advocacy of something and confronting the opposing arguments with each other.
Boswell: I’m very enamored of Jonathan Haidt, a social scientist who says that reasoning is not a solo process, you almost can’t do it. Confirmation bias means that everybody, no matter how rational they believe they are, really wants [their opinion] to be true and will fight for it, and that a person on their own can’t do science. They have to be immersed in a culture of criticism where they’re terrified of peer review. Truth is approached socially as opposed to a purely rational way.
Deutsch: Yes, Popper also said this, that science is a social process and there too the emphasis is on facilitating the removal of bad ideas or the modification of bad ideas, in the light of experiment and also in the light of criticism.
Boswell: Do you think these mechanisms of error correction explain the relative political stability of Britain through the centuries compared to Europe? [Europe] tends to go for these massive projects: Communism, Fascism, the EU system. [These projects] seek total control but are vulnerable to a tipping point where suddenly 51% of forces are against them and collapse occurs.
Deutsch: It’s certainly true that Britain is famous for political stability over decades and centuries. If you don’t think it’s due to that, if it isn’t due to the political culture of Britain, then you have a hard time explaining this blatant difference between Britain, the rest of Europe, and also other countries.
The 20th was the high tide of both totalitarianism (Fascism, Nazism and Communism) and also Nationalism; this sort of engulfed Europe and even in places where it didn’t get into power it affected the political system and influenced everything. I do not think it is a coincidence that in Britain it never even got close to power and this was the same over a longer time scale as well. Political philosophers in Europe held it as uncontroversial that the British political system was very stable and that this was something they wanted to emulate.
*Boswell: Your explanation makes sense to me. The institutions that correct errors and build consent before grievances rise to violence create stability. *
Deutsch: It is stability, despite rapid change, that’s the difficult thing. You can have stability for decades and sometimes even centuries if you keep things the same, but stability under rapid change is very difficult to achieve and it requires these institutions of criticism.
Boswell: You might say that the situation we’re facing in the UK at the moment, this complete political deadlock is a result of the referendum suddenly springing Brexit upon us, as opposed to where imagined naturally by the FPTP [system].
Deutsch: Absolutely, I think the referendum is very alien to the British way of doing politics. It arose as a desperate measure because other problems were building up and were not being solved and politicians were getting used to dissipating responsibilities. They were used to saying, “it’s EU rules”, or, “we can’t do this”, or “we’re going to negotiate this”, rather than saying, “We think this is right and it’s going to have good effects and you’ll see”, “we’re now sticking our necks out because if it’s deemed to be not true we know the other party is going to come in”.
That is what should have happened now with the EU. I would have expected that the grievances of the Leavers and the ones who felt passionately about it would be putting pressure on the existing parties to accommodate that in their policies and that eventually, it might have led to a party adopting Leave as its party policy.
At the same time, parties' policies on relations with the EU would have had that pressure on and it was happening. UKIP was rising and the tensions within both major parties were rising. Normally this would have led to creative thinking about other policies and since that didn’t happen, or at least didn’t happen fast enough, Mr. Cameron decided to risk referendum which if it had gone his way would have enabled him to say, “it wasn’t me it was the people and the people can’t be removed from office. They have spoken and therefore we’re going to do what they say.” [But he also] had to say, well if they say the other thing then we’ll do what they say. That clashed with all the other institutions of government, because it meant that suddenly Parliament was being told to implement something they don’t believe in.
The whole structure of the British parliamentary system is that people implement what they believe in, and only then is their responsibility.
Boswell: How far back do you think this distinction between the UK way of life and European way of life goes? [For instance] English individualism v.s. European collectivism?
Deutsch: Although indeed, one notable difference in culture between Britain and the rest of Europe is the British emphasis on individualism, I think that is not the heart of the matter because Britain has had periods of collectivism. After World War Two, the Labour government came in and instituted a regime that is more left-wing than any regime instituted elsewhere in Western Europe and yet unlike everywhere else where highly left-wing regimes were instituted. Britain embarked on it, seriously tried it out, and then eventually rejected most of it but kept some of it. We still have the NHS, we’re still proud of that, we still have all sorts of reforms regarding education, some of which were disasters but some of which were good. All of them were implemented by people who believed in them and who were therefore either proved right or wrong by events.
*Boswell: I’ve come to ask you about Brexit, but now you’re giving succor to the Socialists. Perhaps Britain is the one place where socialism has worked and could work again. *
Deutsch: I think socialism qua economic theory has never worked anywhere but Britain is certainly one of the few places where full-blown socialism was tried and did not cause permanent damage. It did not degenerate into communism, totalitarianism, authoritarianism, which is what it normally tends to do. It showed no such tendency in Britain.
Boswell: What is the distinction between the UK model and the European model, if not individualism versus collectivism?
Deutsch: I think it is institutions of criticism, of error correction, and therefore of consent, so that they become institutions of consent when they’re working.
Boswell: That word you just used, “consent”, is the big one as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like to force people and if I want them to do something, I make it my business to persuade them or give up. I never want to go beyond that.
Deutsch: I couldn’t agree more. There’s a very nice quote by Popper where he says something like: “A rationalist is a person who would rather not get his way because he’s failed to persuade other people than to get his way by forcing other people.”
I entirely agree with that and there are many issues where I think the country is going the wrong way, but you know if I were magically given the power to get my way I certainly would not use it. That would destroy everything.
Boswell: In this spirit of Popperian criticism, I feel I should put to you some of the best Remain arguments. I put out a call on my Facebook page a few days ago, to ask people, “What is the most important reason for staying in?"
The first and foremost was the prevention of war. Isn’t it the case that economic integration has fostered this unprecedented period of peace and stability in Europe? That as important as error correction might be, isn’t the prevention of war more important?
Deutsch: I think it isn’t factually true that the EU or the common market has prevented war. There was a theory, even before World War One, that the economics of different countries would become so integrated that war would be impossible and it simply wasn’t true. When political forces made countries aggressive, they naturally thought that that was more important than they connect. If you’re going to have a war you know that it’s not going to promote economic well-being at least in the short run.
Boswell: You don’t think that if Hitler had been tied into the European Union he wouldn’t have been Hitler or Hitler wouldn’t have emerged.
Deutsch: Yes, if you put it like that it’s absurd.
Boswell: But is it absurd? Germany was in a position of humiliation after World War One and had felt belittled by the rest of the European powers. That’s what made Nazism attractive. If they’d been engaged in a positive, fruitful trading relationship then perhaps the emotional impetus for fascism wouldn’t have been there.
Deutsch: I think that being subordinated to France would not have helped in that respect. That is not the change that happened after World War Two. Germany had set itself on a new course in 1945 by being defeated in war. The Nazi ideology had been tested to destruction; it simply wasn’t true that if one has a strong enough will one can conquer and that racial superiority will give you the good things in life. They nationally changed their opinion of what gives you the good things in life to the right one and they made a national policy of pursuing that. Why they have been successful and the reason that Germany is not dangerous now is that change of mind which happened before they joined the EU (the common market). The healing was perhaps a reason they joined, the enemy in the common man, there’s perhaps a reason why they joined, not vice-versa.
Boswell: The second most important argument is the economic argument. Europe will always be our closest geographical neighbor, so if we’re going to be involved in a monogamous trading relationship with somebody, shouldn’t it be Europe? It’s much easier to ship things over the channel than it is across the Atlantic or to or to India. Do we have more sovereignty involved in trading relations with America than we do with Europe?
Deutsch: I have heard that argument many times in many different forms. Of course, we should trade with our neighbors. We should trade with everyone and, by the way, long-range trade is easier than it ever was before and an increasing proportion of our trade is at a much longer range. The distance doesn’t matter, we should trade with everyone and I’m also in favor of reducing tariffs so that tariff harmonization and so on should become less and less important. Now it is true that sometimes political considerations override economic welfare considerations and governments do unwise things, like at the moment increasing tariffs and having trade wars. This is a terrible idea and it has been tried again and again, but I don’t think that belonging to a monopolistic trade entity is the solution to this. Even if it was, subordinating one’s political system to that entity is not advocated by anyone. No one in Canada advocates that they should become the 51st state to get a couple of percentage points on their GNP. If those percentage points are available, they’re available through trade not through subordinating Canada to the federal government in the US.
*Boswell: When I voted Remain in the referendum one of my thoughts was: “I think it would be good if power could be concentrated at many levels appropriate to the problems it solves.” I quite like the local government in the UK (English, Welsh, Scottish, Northern Irish) but I recognized that at the higher level there are problems, like climate change, international terrorism or the power of international corporations which are much more powerful than individual states. In a way I quite like a supranational institution that is capable of standing up to them.
Deutsch: I think that argument for Remain mixes two very different things. One is the issue of international cooperation and the other is the issue of what political system should be subordinated to which other ones.
Now we have international cooperation of many different kinds. NATO is an international organization for the control and direction of violence and even so, it never purports to override the sovereignty of its members. International Cooperation is a good and necessary thing and regarding the environment, we have long-standing international agreements that work very well on Antarctica and for the sea and on the ozone layer and all sorts of things. Countries that participate in these things do not usually demand political control of other countries.
Boswell: This point is going to sound absurd but I think a lot of people at the back of their minds think, “Doesn’t advantage to top-down control exist?” An argument that’s often made to me and came up on my Facebook thread is that I don’t trust British democracies. [For instance,] I hate Thatcherism and I have friends who used to work in the post office. It was EU regulation that prevented them from having to do unlimited overtime and they see the EU a provider of rights. What would you say to someone like that?
Deutsch: The current political stance, which is nobody’s idea, let me repeat it’s nobody’s idea of what is right, it’s just something that emerges from the mists, even if you thought that happened to be best for Britain now. The EU is still something that is preventing Great Britain from making changes for the better. We were talking earlier about the benefits of socialism to Britain; those things could not have been tried if Britain had been a member of the EU at the time. It would have been against EU law. Certainly, the whole point of harmonization and ever closer Union is that individual countries' experimentation is limited. The British experiment with socialism had good effects and bad effects and the good effects were retained and the bad effects were abandoned and the EU has never done anything like that in its entire history. It’s structured in such a way that it shouldn’t be able to. Perhaps I shouldn’t mention that systems that are good at error correction make more errors, and that sounds paradoxical but they make more errors than systems that are bad at error correction. Until, of course, the catastrophe happens so systems which are bad at error correction fudge and fudge and fudge until at some point everything breaks and they’re forced to do something new usually at random. Usually, it’s the case that the devils have changed places and the lash goes on.
Boswell: Let me hit you with another counter-argument. Since you don’t think referendums are a good idea, wasn’t the first one illegitimate? We didn’t know what leaving meant, should we have another one to specify what Leave means? Do you think a four percent difference between the sides was enough to justify this dramatic change of policy? Should we Remain now and then, as you say, practice it in the future through this gradual process?
Deutsch: If there’s anything worse than having a referendum to decide a national issue, it’s having one and not implementing the results. That is what has caused a lack of confidence in the legitimacy of the whole system, not just the referendum. If there were a second referendum people would know that the arguments for the illegitimacy of the first one would apply double in the case of the second. People would then move on to the third one, so long as the outcome of the referendum isn’t implemented nobody is proved wrong. No one can say, “Now we know what would happen”. We don’t know what will happen, all we know is what happened after the referendum not what happened as the result of implementing it. Now if the Remainders had taken my view about what politics should be about, then as soon as they lost the referendum they should have transformed themselves into a Rejoin movement not a movement to delegitimize the national vote. If they are right then leaving will be a disaster and we would have left ages ago. Leaving would be a disaster and they would have swept into power with plans to rejoin. Those plans would have been endorsed by a general election, not by a referendum. The prediction comes from explanatory theories and we can’t have an explanatory theory about the growth of knowledge.
Boswell: I think some people listening to that would say that it’s all very well having the scientific mindset, that we should have an experiment to decide the outcome, but isn’t there so much a stake? Won’t there EU nationals in this country who might face deportation? Perhaps not on purpose, but through bureaucracy? And since the economic slump will hit the poorest hardest, is it worth taking a risk?
Deutsch: There is a general answer to that question which is also why it is more important than any specific policy. It is that making a policy of not experimenting, which means not implementing what anyone thinks, is the right thing to do. But implementing something else that no one thinks is the right thing to do is a recipe for stasis and stasis in politics is hell on earth. Mistakes will always be made, that’s another aspect of populist philosophy. We have to recognize that we’re fallible and that there is no way of choosing a ruler or choosing a policy with perfect knowledge of the outcome. There can be no guarantee if it will be good or bad. Creativity is needed to do good things and creativity is in response to problems.
It is self-deception to think that the status quo is going to be satisfactory for everyone forever. It’s already not satisfactory for a lot of people. We take it for granted that the whole political system is about grievances. Ancient declarations talk about the right of the people to petition for redress of grievances and that doesn’t mean that there are 37 grievances and once they’ve all been met we won’t have grievances anymore. Quite the contrary, grievances are always coming up, disagreements about what is right are always coming up and the paramount consideration is how to resolve those. Not just [resolving them] without violence but long before violence is even on anyone’s mind.
As soon as they become serious enough to affect 1 or 2 percent of the vote in an election, politicians and think tanks and intellectuals and academics and that the whole country will be thinking about how to solve it and how to persuade people that one’s idea is the right one to solve it. That’s more important than getting any one thing right once and for all because once and for all will never happen.
Boswell: One final remain argument I’d like to put to you, which I think is the most profound and the one that speaks to people most deeply, is the argument about racism. I tried to be rational when I was listening to the referendum debates and I found myself more stupid by the end of it. I learned almost nothing from watching weeks of Question Time episodes but what swung it for me was the day that breaking point Nigel Farage poster came out and Joe Cox was shot. I just thought, “There’s absolutely no way I’m voting with those guys”. How do you speak to that instinct?
Deutsch: Interestingly, the Vote Leave campaign thought that that poster and the UKIP side of the Leave argument cost them votes and almost cost them the referendum. That is their opinion, I don’t think anyone hates UKIP more than Vote Leave. They thought that this tendency almost cost them the referendum. Because tiny numbers of people are fanatically racist, a larger number of people are inclined to be persuadable by arguments with a tinge of racism because two legitimate considerations sometimes overlap with arguments that have a tinge of racism and they find themselves allies with people whom they might not agree with. Those groups together do not amount to anything like a majority, therefore no matter how much you fire up those people to vote for you you’re not going to win the referendum.
Many of the major players in Vote Leave are like me constitutionally and emotionally in favor of more immigration so I mean I can’t get my head around the idea that I shouldn’t be in favor of Leave because it’s racist because that’s opposite to my understanding.
Boswell: The argument should not be about who is in favor, such as if Mr. Putin is in favor of one or the other.
Deutsch: If Mr. Trump is in favor of one or the other that doesn’t alter who is right.
Boswell: No, it’s an ad hominem thing, and one should not make that a consideration. I agree with you in my head but with my fear of being anywhere near to racism, I feel nervous about filming and broadcasting this conversation with you. To advocate for Brexit is to be on that side and I think a lot of people feel that it runs very deep, which in a way is a wonderful thing, that people should feel deeply opposed to racism.
Deutsch: People have put this argument to me, not in the way that you just did but in the form, “Well you make a reasonable argument but most of the people who are on your side in this are not reasonable.” Now I think that isn’t true, I can’t remember anyone whom I’ve spoken to on the Leave side making a racist argument. Maybe some of them are in their hearts racist but they know that that won’t speak to other Leavers. It’s also a fact that in all the surveys you see that Britain is one of the least bigoted countries in the EU. That’s another ironic thing about your argument concerning racism.
You haven’t mentioned the argument that you are a racist which one often hears as well. I think it is very unfair to the British people to characterize large-scale political movements as being motivated by racism. People just don’t think like that in this country, which is related to the fact we were talking about earlier, that nationalism, which was the scourge of Europe from the mid-nineteenth century up to the mid-twentieth century, never got a hold in Britain.
Boswell: It is something to be very proud of. I have to say, speaking to you, I’ve discovered a hitherto hidden streak of patriotism. I always thought patriotism in Britain was about the flag and the army and all those things, like the Second World War, but you make me realize that the UK is about things that I do care personally about, such as consent, military discipline, tolerance, and moderation.
Deutsch: I entirely agree and note that I am an immigrant. It is often immigrants who appreciate what is best about Britain. I’m reminded of a quotation which George Mukesh made in his book “How to be an Alien”, which is the quintessential book on Britishness by an immigrant written just after World War Two. He was a refugee and he quotes a poem by Alice Dewar Miller who’s an American poet and the line he quotes is:
I have seen much to hate here— much to forgive,
But in a world where England is finished and dead,
I do not wish to live.
I think that is precisely true as well as rather painfully sentimental.