What qualities would you say define what it means to be British? A sense of fair play is certainly one. So, too, is the idea that everybody should get a chance. Nothing annoys us Brits more than somebody gaining an unfair advantage. Just look at what happens if they try to cut to the head of a queue. What you might not realise is that there is an equation to explain Britishness.
Regression to the mean was first outlined by Sir Francis Galton, godfather of statistics (and so much else - he was the epitome of that very British thing, the Victorian polymath). Through simple experiment, he discovered the phenomenon best explained as a bell curve (or normal distribution). Over time or within large enough samples, many characteristics trend towards the middle of a range.
Bookies rely on this to average out their losses. It is the basis for probability, so if you are building a propensity model, you are using it. Galton proposed a number of ways in which this could be applied in the real world, most controversially in the realm of eugenics. His thinking around intelligence is still regularly co-opted by extremists, for example.
When it comes to Britishness, it is this idea of the common middle ground which suggests regression as its model. We like the idea that things even out over time - it is why there is such outrage that the extremes of the range, especially in terms of wealth, have become so stretched in recent years. It will take much longer for regression to come into play when the top 1 per cent seem to have broken free of all constraints.
So how can we use this to predict the outcome of the referendum on EU membership? First of all, look at the results of General Elections since 1945. Convervatives have held a majority for 36 of the 71 years, with Labour in power for 30. The recent coalition government - that most British of solutions if you think about it - had five years at the helm. It is a picture of swings between the two main parties with the electorate seeming to want to balance out long periods of one party in power with letting the other side have a go. That is probably why we saw Conservative/Liberal Democrat power sharing in 2010 and a hard-to-predict outcome in 2015.
When it comes to voting on European membership, there is only a sample of one - the 1973 referendum which took us into the EU. That means - if you buy-in to the concept of regression to the mean as the model underpinning Britishness - that the result this time ought to balance out the previous vote. In other words, regressing to the mean will see a result in favour of Leave.
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