Why Remain Lost, Why Leave Won

Brexit is now 10 years old, and one staggers at the wild, disordered propaganda that is still being broadcast on behalf of Remain.

Item: Campbell and Stewart struggle to explain how “charlatans, liars” etc. like Johnson and Farage were successful.

Item: Osborne and Balls puzzle about whether the “lost decade” occurred before 2016 or afterwards.

Item: Barnier is wheeled out by the Guardian to make the highly dubious offer of allowing us back into the European Union on terms close to which we enjoyed when we left.

You are all fools.

Brexit was inevitable.

This is a philological argument.

Respect philology, you politicians. It is the study of words and the love of truth combined. It is, as Julius Charles Hare said almost 200 years ago, more or less the same thing as philosophy.

My argument is this.

If those who wanted to stay in the EU had called their movement ‘Stay’ rather than ‘Remain’ then they would have been successful.

But the battle was between ‘Leave’ and ‘Remain’.

‘Leave’ is short and is English. It sounds Anglo-Saxon.

‘Remain’ is two-syllabled. It looks French.

Choosing the word ‘Remain’ was a terrible mistake.

It is as if those who wanted to leave the EU had chosen the word ‘Depart’ for their campaign. Départ is the French for what happens after the referee shows you a red card for covering your mouth: mere ignominious getting-booted-out.

‘Depart’ is weak and would have lost. ‘Remain’ is weak and did lose.

‘Stay’ is strong and might have won. But ‘Leave’, also strong, did win.

Consider the etymologies of the good words:

• Leave: Verb: Old English lǣfan ‘bequeath’, also ‘allow to remain, leave in place’ of Germanic origin; related to German bleiben ‘remain’. Noun: Old English lēaf ‘permission’, of West Germanic origin; related to lief and love.
• Stay: Late Middle English (as a verb): from Anglo-Norman French estai-, stem of Old French ester, from Latin stare ‘to stand’; in the sense ‘support’ and stay, from Old French estaye (noun), estayer (verb), of Germanic origin.

Isn’t it ironic that the original meaning of ‘leave’ is remain? But set that to one side. Leave, even in the sense of ‘go away’, has a positive valency: it has all positive values, being related to ‘love’ and probably also the root which gives us ‘liberty’ and ‘liberal’.

‘Stay’ is also a good monosyllable. It is related to the old words which also gave us ‘statue’ and ‘state’: it has solidity and dependability about it. Also, significantly, when one stays, one chooses to stay on one’s own account.

So words with opposite meanings, but both good.

Now consider of the etymologies of the bad words:

• Remain: Late Middle English: from Old French remain-, stressed stem of remanoir, from Latin remanere, from re- (expressing intensive force) + manere ‘to stay’.
• Depart: Middle English: from Old French departir, based on Latin dispertire ‘to divide’. The original sense was ‘separate’, also ‘take leave of each other’, hence ‘go away’.

Imagine if the Leave campaign had been called ‘Depart’. It sounds pedantic: it alludes to division, hence cutting into two. It is negative. It is passive. It is the language of an airport: going because one has to, herded through a gate. It has nothing of the positive valency or deliberate activity of ‘Leave’.

And in the same way, ‘Remain’ has bad connotations. Think of the negative meanings of ‘remainder’ = bits left over, or ‘remains’ = what one leaves behind after one dies. Plus: ‘You leave, I remain’ is the language of a Frenchman talking to an Englishman. We could translate it as ‘You are free, I am trapped’. Why? Because ‘Remain’ is not only from French but originally from Latin, where ‘remanere‘ is an intensive form of ‘manere‘, which means ‘to stay’. Fine, but the root of the word is manus or hand. Yes, indeed. One is a slave if one is in someone else’s hand. To ‘remain’ is to stay in the hand, to remain uneMANcipated, to be MANipulated: all related words.

The EU has big hands, like Kenny Everett in the 1980s.

Those who wanted to remain in the European Union should have used the good old English word ‘Stay’ for its suggestion of stability, sturdiness, standing firm. And for its single syllable. ‘Remain’ asked us to stay in the hands of our unaccountable imperial overlords, whereas the ‘Leave’ asked us to love and be free.

Thus ‘Remain’ went to its inevitable doom.

That is my argument. And it is a priori. But since I am at least half historian, I wanted to substantiate what I am saying with a bit of a posteriori too: a bit of research. Here it is.

The European Union Act 2015 laid down the terms of the referendum and the form of the question to be put to the people. But the question that would be put was already decided in 2013, though it was put to the test again in 2015. Let me list the variants considered by the Electoral Commission in 2013 and 2015.

The first wording considered was:

Do you think the United Kingdom should be a member of the European Union?

This was rejected by the Electoral Commission on the grounds that certain members of the public might not know that the United Kingdom was already a member of the European Union. Well, one has to laugh.

The second wording, therefore, was:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union?

Not ‘stay in the’. The Electoral Commission worried that this way of phrasing it – with a Yes or No answer – could lead to positive or negative associations. This is even though “there was no evidence to suggest that this wording resulted in participants changing their voting preference in any way”. Perhaps the worry was that ‘Yes’ is usually positive. I don’t know. However, it changed it so it was not a question to be answered by Yes or No but by alternatives more substantial.

The third wording, which it considered the most neutral, was:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

Remain a member of the European Union

Leave the European Union

They continued to worry about this, and went over it again in 2015, submitting various versions of the question for comment and criticism. The word ‘stay’ was used in one variant, but it was opposed to ‘get out’, and, for some unstated reason, the opposite of ‘leave’ was always taken to be ‘remain’. No one in an official position thought of opposing ‘stay’ and ‘leave’.

But apparently some of the critics and commentators did. For me, this is something of a surprise. I formed the a priori argument above before I knew any of this. Nothing new under the sun, etc. But listen to the Electoral Commission:

3.45 During the first stage of this 2015 research, some participants spontaneously suggested changing ‘remain’ to ‘stay’. We then tested the ‘remain’ or ‘leave’ question, replacing the word ‘stay’ for ‘remain’: “Should the United Kingdom stay a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” The corresponding answer option was: “Stay a member of the European Union.”

3.46 There was no clear preference for using ‘remain’ or ‘stay’ in the question. Some participants noted that it did not matter which was used as they both mean the same thing. Overall, however, there was a slightly stronger preference for the word ‘remain’.

3.47 Those who preferred ‘remain’ felt that it was more formal or professional, and therefore more suited to a referendum question. A couple of those who preferred ‘remain’ suggested that ‘stay’ felt like a ‘command’ word – feeling it was strong and directive.

This is wonderful support for what I am arguing here. ‘Remain’ was more formal and professional. Yes, indeed. More bureaucratic. And wholly out of balance with the word ‘Leave’. None of these geniuses seems to have noticed that there were more bureaucratic words for ‘Leave’, e.g. Depart and of course the Shakespearian word Exit.

Of course, it was the word ‘Exit’ that was made into the memorable term Brexit, coined in 2012, and voted word of the year in 2016.

Anyhow, again, no one worried about ‘leave’ or the relative status of ‘leave’ and remain/stay. They did worry about ‘remain’ and considered ‘stay’ and even noticed that ‘stay’ was informal, ‘remain’ informal, but saw no need to maintain balance across the two terms, the term for in and the term for out. This seems to me to have been a grave oversight.

The Electoral Commission (and for this see sections 4.60 and 5.25), in short, as I don’t want to quote more than I have to, had one reason for choosing ‘Stay’ and one for choosing ‘Remain’. The reason for ‘Stay’ was that it is “used in everyday language and conversation”. The reason for ‘Remain’ is that it is “more formal and therefore more suited to be in a referendum question”.

And the Electoral Commission, a bunch of dim bureaucrats, chose ‘Remain’.

If you are not convinced by this argument, consider how weak ‘Remain’ sounds next to ‘Stay’. To stay is to hold, to hope, to be strong, to be fast. To remain is – to be left behind as everyone else leaves. It is to be chosen last. It is to be in someone’s hand.

Imagine that  your wife considered leaving you, and that you pleaded with her, and that she was eventually convinced, and that she said, ‘I’ll remain‘, instead of saying ‘I’ll stay’.

It is weak, and I still find it remarkable that I have never seen this recognised anywhere. ‘Remain’ sounded weak, and ‘Leave’ sounded strong, and in a world of fine margins, I’ll wager that was enough to firm up the minds of many in the middle.

Words matter.

Postscript. This is a separate point, but it needs to be made abruptly. A lot of commentators are using the anniversary of Brexit to blame our current condition in the UK and elsewhere on Brexit (and Trump). These geniuses should consider that the pushback and vituperation and malingering and subversion and ginamillerism and peoplesvotism and pandemicitude and climateballs and blacklivesmattering and the DEIfication of the Remainer class was not only a consequence of Brexit (and Trump) but a cause of quite a lot and maybe most of what has happened since 2016.

James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.