Case Study 2: Brexit and the Information Environment — "Take Back Control" and the £350 Million Bus

Overview

The United Kingdom's June 2016 referendum on European Union membership — the Brexit vote — stands as one of the most consequential democratic decisions in modern British history. It also became one of the most studied cases in the emerging literature on misinformation in democratic referenda. This case study examines the information environment surrounding the Brexit campaign, with particular attention to the £350 million bus claim, the broader voter information environment, and what the Brexit experience reveals about misinformation, democracy, and epistemic standards in political campaigns.

Background: The Brexit Campaign

The Brexit referendum, held on June 23, 2016, asked voters whether the UK should remain in or leave the European Union. The result — 51.9% to 48.1% in favor of Leave — was narrow, consequential, and bitterly contested in the years that followed.

The formal campaign period was preceded by years of public debate about EU membership, shaped by decades of often inaccurate and inflammatory reporting about EU regulations in portions of the British press (particularly Rupert Murdoch's The Sun and the Daily Mail and Daily Express groups). This pre-campaign information environment — what journalist Nick Davies called the "Eurosceptic press" — created a baseline of skepticism and hostility toward the EU that the Leave campaign could build upon.

During the official campaign period (April–June 2016), two formal campaigns on each side were officially designated:

  • Vote Leave (officially designated Leave campaign): Led by Vote Leave Limited, chaired by Dominic Cummings (campaign director), with prominent politicians including Boris Johnson and Michael Gove as figureheads.
  • Britain Stronger in Europe (Remain campaign): Led by Stuart Rose, supported by the Cameron government, EU institutions, international organizations, and most of the UK establishment.

The £350 Million Claim: Anatomy of a Political Misinformation

The most prominent and consequential claim of the Brexit campaign was Vote Leave's assertion that EU membership cost the UK £350 million per week, emblazoned on the side of a campaign bus and used repeatedly in speeches by Boris Johnson, Michael Gove, and others. The claim was accompanied by the implication that this money would be redirected to the National Health Service after Brexit.

Why the Claim Was False

The £350 million figure was challenged repeatedly and thoroughly during the campaign:

The rebate: The UK had a significant negotiated rebate from EU membership costs, obtained by Margaret Thatcher in 1984. This rebate reduced the gross contribution to a net contribution of approximately £136 million per week. The UK never actually paid £350 million; this money never left British accounts.

Receipts from the EU: The net figure was further reduced by EU spending in the UK — agricultural subsidies, regional development funds, research grants, and other payments that returned money to UK recipients. After accounting for these receipts, the net cost to the UK was approximately £110–120 million per week by most estimates, not £350 million.

The NHS claim: The suggestion that £350 million per week would be "redirected" to the NHS was not a commitment made by any Leave politician with the authority to make it, and was contingent on a claim (the £350 million figure) that was false.

Institutional Reactions

The UK Statistics Authority (UKSA), an independent body established to promote and safeguard the production and publication of official statistics, took the highly unusual step of publicly rebuking Vote Leave's use of the £350 million figure during the campaign, writing to Vote Leave to state that the figure was "misleading and undermines trust in official statistics." The head of UKSA wrote directly to Boris Johnson, noting that continued use of the figure undermined statistical integrity.

The claim was rated as misleading or false by every major fact-checking organization in the UK: Full Fact, Channel 4 FactCheck, BBC Reality Check, and others. The Institute for Fiscal Studies, among the most respected economic research bodies in the UK, repeatedly and publicly disputed the figure.

Despite this, Vote Leave continued using the claim throughout the campaign, and it appeared on every side of the campaign bus throughout the UK.

Why the Claim Persisted

Several factors explain why the £350 million claim persisted despite comprehensive debunking:

Source credibility asymmetry: For Remain-leaning voters and for voters skeptical of official statistics (which already existed in some proportion), the UKSA's rebuke confirmed the figure was false. For Leave-leaning voters already skeptical of establishment institutions, the same UKSA rebuke may have been seen as part of the "establishment" trying to suppress legitimate concerns — an example of how institutional debunking can backfire in contexts of high institutional distrust.

Simplicity vs. complexity: The £350 million claim was simple, memorable, and emotionally resonant. The accurate explanation — accounting for rebates, receipts, and net contributions — was complex and required several steps of reasoning. In a media environment that rewards simplicity and brevity, the false claim had an inherent virality advantage.

The "liar's dividend" dynamic: Some Leave voters may have "believed" the £350 million claim not as a literal statistical fact but as a symbolic expression of a more general claim — that EU membership costs the UK more than it receives in return — even if the specific figure was wrong. This quasi-expressive belief is difficult to address through literal fact-checking.

Motivated reasoning: Voters already disposed to vote Leave for other reasons (immigration concerns, sovereignty arguments, skepticism of the EU project) were motivated to believe claims that supported their preferred outcome.

The Broader Information Environment

The £350 million claim was the most prominent but by no means the only significant misinformation element of the Brexit campaign. A broader assessment of the information environment reveals several important patterns:

The £350 Million's Symbolic Function

Research by political scientists including Harold Clarke and Matthew Goodwin, and by media scholars including Katharine Viner and Paul Waugh, suggests that for many Leave voters, the bus slogan operated less as a precise factual claim than as a symbol of a broader argument: that EU membership represented a poor deal for Britain. In this "expressive" mode, the claim's literal falsity was less important to believers than its symbolic truth in articulating their economic and political concerns.

This distinction between literal and expressive belief is analytically important for understanding how misinformation operates in referendum contexts. Voters who "believe" a false claim may not believe it in the same way they believe a verifiable fact — they may hold it as an expression of broader attitudes. This makes straightforward fact-checking less effective, because the claim is not being used purely as a factual assertion.

Immigration Misinformation

Beyond the £350 million claim, the Brexit campaign featured significant misinformation and misleading communication on immigration. Vote Leave's controversial "Breaking Point" poster, featuring a photograph of refugees (mostly in Slovenia, not the UK) with the caption "The EU has failed us all — we must break free of the EU and take back control of our borders," was criticized by UK police as potentially inciting racial hatred. It appeared on the same day as the murder of pro-Remain MP Jo Cox.

More broadly, Vote Leave's communications on immigration systematically conflated EU free movement rights (which did create a legal route to UK residency for EU nationals) with claims about illegal immigration and asylum (which were not affected by EU membership). This conflation was well-documented by fact-checkers but widely believed.

The "Project Fear" Counter-Framing

The Remain campaign also engaged in what critics characterized as misleading communication — specifically, the use of economic forecasts and warnings that Brexit opponents labeled "Project Fear." The Remain campaign and the Treasury issued predictions of significant short-term economic disruption following a Leave vote (including claims about immediate recessions and house price crashes that did not materialize in the predicted timeframe and form).

While these predictions were based on genuine economic modeling rather than deliberate fabrication, their uncertainty was not always adequately communicated, and some predictions were overstated. The "Project Fear" counter-narrative, used by Leave supporters to dismiss economic concerns about Brexit, benefited from the fact that some Remain warnings proved exaggerated.

This created a symmetrical misinformation dynamic that muddied the epistemic waters: both sides had claims that were contested, overstated, or eventually proven wrong, making it harder for neutral observers to distinguish more reliable from less reliable claims.

Voter Knowledge Before and After

Research on what Brexit voters knew — and believed — at the time of the referendum and in its aftermath reveals concerning patterns.

Pre-Referendum Knowledge

A major survey by the Hansard Society and others conducted shortly before the referendum found that:

  • Only 34% of respondents knew that the UK had a rebate from its EU contributions (meaning most people's mental model of UK payments to the EU may have been closer to the £350 million gross figure).
  • Voters systematically overestimated immigration from the EU: median respondents estimated that 25 out of every 100 UK residents were EU immigrants, when the actual figure was about 5 in 100.
  • Voters from lower-education backgrounds were more likely to hold inaccurate beliefs about EU costs and immigration.

These knowledge gaps meant that the £350 million claim and immigration-related misinformation fell on relatively fertile epistemic ground: many voters lacked the accurate baseline knowledge that would have allowed them to immediately recognize the claims as false.

Post-Referendum Regret

Post-vote surveys and subsequent polling documented the "Bregret" phenomenon — voters who expressed regret about their Leave vote, at least partially motivated by learning that Leave campaign claims had not been delivered or had been false. A 2019 YouGov poll found that 6% of Leave voters wished they had voted Remain, and approximately one-third of Leave voters expressed some regret about specific claims that had been made.

A notable specific incident: within hours of the Leave result, Nigel Farage appeared on television and stated that the £350 million weekly NHS claim was "a mistake" and one he would not have made — an acknowledgment that the claim had been false, delivered after the vote was concluded.

Implications for Democratic Theory

The Brexit case raises profound questions about the epistemic requirements of democratic referenda:

Deliberative democracy theory holds that legitimate democratic decisions require informed participation. If a substantial proportion of voters based their decisions on claims that were factually false — about EU costs, about immigration — can the referendum outcome be said to reflect informed democratic consent?

This question is genuinely difficult. No democratic theory requires that every voter be perfectly informed; most theories accept some level of voter ignorance as compatible with democratic legitimacy. But systematic, deliberate misinformation that shapes the outcome of a consequential vote seems to exceed the level of ignorance that deliberative theories can accommodate as legitimate.

The UK Supreme Court's 2019 prorogation case involved this question tangentially, with the question of whether false or misleading advice could affect the legal validity of governmental decisions — a legal analog to the epistemic questions democratic theorists wrestle with.

Referendum Design and Epistemic Vulnerability

Referenda, as direct democratic mechanisms, may be particularly vulnerable to misinformation effects compared to representative elections. In representative elections, repeated interactions between voters and representatives, the role of party reputations built over time, and the presence of knowledgeable intermediaries (journalists, political analysts) may provide some protection against the worst effects of campaign misinformation. In a single binary referendum on a complex question, there is less structural protection against the simple, emotional claim.

The Brexit experience has informed subsequent discussions about referendum design: whether complex issues should be subject to direct referendum at all, what disclosure requirements should apply to referendum campaigns, what role independent fact-checking organizations should have, and whether campaign misinformation should carry legal consequences.

Comparison to Other Cases

The Brexit information environment can be compared usefully to other cases of misinformation in democratic referenda:

The 2016 U.S. presidential election: Similar patterns of simple, emotionally resonant false claims (about immigration, crime, economic statistics) amplified through partisan media ecosystems, resistant to institutional debunking.

Italian constitutional referendum (2016): Also held in 2016, also characterized by significant campaign misinformation and the emergence of social media as an amplification channel for false claims.

Catalan independence referendum (2017): A more extreme case in which the disputed constitutional legitimacy of the referendum itself became intertwined with significant misinformation from both the Catalan and Spanish governments.

The comparative pattern suggests that referendum-based direct democracy, conducted without adequate epistemic infrastructure (fact-checking, media literacy education, campaign disclosure requirements), is structurally vulnerable to misinformation effects. This does not make referenda illegitimate as democratic tools, but it does suggest that the democratic value of referenda depends critically on the quality of the information environment in which they are conducted.

What Was Done to Combat Brexit Misinformation?

Formal Fact-Checking Operations

Several established fact-checking organizations — Full Fact, Channel 4 FactCheck, BBC Reality Check — published detailed analyses of claims made by both campaigns throughout the official campaign period. The UKSA issued its unprecedented public rebukes of Vote Leave's statistical misrepresentation. These interventions were publicly visible and received significant coverage.

The Electoral Commission

The Electoral Commission (UK's electoral regulator) investigated the campaigns and ultimately found that Vote Leave had breached campaign finance rules in a separate matter (coordinated spending with another Leave campaign organization, BeLeave). This investigation did not address the content of campaign communications, reflecting the UK's long-standing tradition of treating campaign speech as free expression not subject to truth requirements.

Limitations

The fact-checking operations, while valuable, faced the same limitations documented in the academic literature: they primarily reached audiences already skeptical of the claims being checked, and had limited penetration into the media ecosystems where Leave voters who believed the false claims received their information. The asymmetry between the simplicity of the false claim and the complexity of the accurate correction was a structural disadvantage.

Discussion Questions

  1. Was the £350 million bus claim straightforward misinformation, a contested political interpretation, or something in between? How does your answer affect what you think should have been done about it?

  2. The "Project Fear" counter-narrative used by Leave supporters to dismiss Remain warnings created a symmetrical epistemic muddiness. How should voters navigate situations where claims on both sides are contested or uncertain?

  3. Does the Brexit experience suggest that referenda on complex questions are epistemically problematic? If so, what are the implications for direct democracy more broadly?

  4. Nigel Farage acknowledged within hours of the result that the £350 million claim was wrong. What, if anything, should follow from this post-vote acknowledgment?

Sources and Further Reading

  • Clarke, H. D., Goodwin, M., & Whiteley, P. (2017). Brexit: Why Britain Voted to Leave the European Union. Cambridge University Press.
  • Benkler, Y., Faris, R., & Roberts, H. (2018). Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. Oxford University Press.
  • Waterson, J., & Mason, R. (2016, October 17). Nigel Farage drops NHS claim. The Guardian.
  • Full Fact. (2016). The Brexit referendum: A fact-checkers guide. FullFact.org.
  • UK Statistics Authority. (2016, May 27). Letter to Boris Johnson MP: Statistics on the UK's contribution to the EU. UKSA.
  • Levy, D. A. L., Newman, N., & Fletcher, R. (2016). Reuters Institute Digital News Report 2016. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism.
  • Goodwin, M., & Heath, O. (2016). The 2016 referendum, Brexit and the left behind. Political Quarterly, 87(3), 323–332.