The negative Brexit campaigns by the Remain and Leave camps are a failure of democracy, an expert on how power and influence works has said.
Howard Parry-Husbands, the managing director of full-service research consultancy Pollinate, says that current Western democratic systems are skewed to favour short-term, negative and polarising messaging, whether in a corporate or political sphere.
Parry-Husbands was presenting on the power of positive marketing at Exponential’s Brand Summit in Hobart today.
He says that the lifespan of capitalism is about to run dry and current democratic structures that favour this are creaking at the seams.
An example of this decay led to last week’s unexpected Brexit result where nearly 52% of the UK population voted to leave the European Union, despite it being hugely disadvantageous to the country’s economy.
“Both parties created negative campaigns and feasted on a polarised [society]," Parry-Husbands says.
"There’s a schism in British society – an age schism and to an extent an income schism (which they played on)."
Parry-Husbands said poor weather may also have contributed to younger votes staying away from the polls, but ultimately negative rhetoric and marketing worked because the campaign period was held during a short period of time, so it didn't allow for meaningful engagement or debate.
“If you hold a rolling plebiscite for a year, where people think about it, talk about it, turn up to the Parliament and chat about it to politicians every week for a year, you’d probably get a completely different result, but that would require a completely different democracy," he says.
“Our democracy currently fails, it’s the same in the US and in Australia. We seem to think that only having two parties that can represent points of view means the whole world is down to a black or white choice.
"[In reality] it’s not. We live in world of extremely complex problems and it’s a failure of leadership to explain these complex problems.”
Worryingly, Husband-Parry doubts that a positive focus from the Remain camp would have made a difference because the system is broken.
He says a model of democracy that works better can be found in Germany, where a range of minority parties form government and their politics is based on consensus of a wide range of viewpoints.
“The negative frame that we are seeing is about the structural institutions we see across Western society and I don’t think they work terribly well at the moment,” he adds.
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