Thursday, October 11, 2018

Respect

We must respect the referendum result. It's a mantra you hear from all sides. I agree. We must. It's just that I don't think that what they call respecting the result is respect at all.

Very roughly, 17 million voted to leave, 16 million voted to remain, 12 million didn't vote (and several million more people who are directly affected were disenfranchised for a variety of reasons). To leavers and remainers alike, respecting the result apparently means accepting the absolute authority of the 17 million, whilst totally disregarding the other 28 million. As a democrat, this troubles me.

What we should respect is the referendum vote as a whole and that showed a dissensus. It wasn't a mandate to remain, but it also wasn't a mandate to leave regardless of the consequences. It signalled an unexpected problem, one that had to be dealt with.

There was an additional difficulty in that there were plenty of divisions in both camps. This wasn't a problem for Remain, as all they were saying was that their political differences would be fought out under the unchanged existing arrangements. Leave proposed change and so were obliged to explain what that change would be. Yet they couldn't agree amongst themselves. Leaving the EU, yes, but how? What would be Britain's new place in the world? All they offered were quarrels, slogans and appeals for faith, not practical plans. This is not what anyone needed.

The referendum did not give us a decision, merely a direction. A democratic response would have been to involve all parties in investigation and deliberation. Perhaps it could have been managed through a Parliamentary inquiry. Ideally, additional participatory elements could have been introduced - such as citizens' juries. Then it would have been possible to present clear, detailed findings on the future options and their consequences so that we could reach a final authoritative decision - whether by Parliament or by another popular vote - before approaching the EU with our decision. That would have respected the result.

I don't need to tell you that this isn't what happened. The reason why is that we tried to deal with a novel situation using old, ill-suited structures. The British electoral and Parliamentary systems are based on winner-takes-all. After the referendum no thought was given as to who should deliver the result or what the result really meant. The Conservative government alone had to interpret and implement the referendum, which they considered binding. The result was hardly democratic, especially as May's misconceived election lost the Tories their majority. Parliamentary arithmetic delivered a wrecking power to a small minority faction - the Brexit ultras. Not only that, but agreement with the sectarian DUP handed them a veto over constitutional arrangements, not only in Northern Ireland, where they were the only party to oppose the Good Friday Agreement and where they supported Brexit despite Northern Ireland's strong vote to remain, but in the country as a whole.

The result is predictable confusion. Policy is being driven by the extremes, a fraction of the leave vote. The EU made the different options available for a future arrangement absolutely clear. The government is yet to choose, pushing for some impossible compromise. Article 50 was sent without any agreed position. Remarkably, with the two year negotiating timetable drawing to a close, there is still no agreement within the government on their starting position. The public are little clearer either as battle rages over propaganda and sound bites, rather than authoritative information. Meanwhile, remain voters, locked out of the whole process, are mounting a vociferous public campaign for a second referendum. It's a mess.

There was hardly any questioning as to whether Brexit should be handled by the Conservatives alone. It was automatically assumed that they would, despite the complexity of the issue and the ambiguities of the result. This is mainly because we have an unreflective self-confidence in our democracy. We don't acknowledge constitutional flaws. We talk of it rhetorically, but rarely critically. Brexiters assert that leaving is an assertion of democracy, though their understanding of it appears to be the imposition of their will on those who vehemently reject it (and who may now constitute a majority of the electorate).

It's the old parable of motes and beams. Brexiters like to rant about the EU's democratic deficit, but perhaps we need to look at ourselves. As we fail to respect and consider the whole of the referendum vote, I can't help thinking that the democratic deficit is really on our side.

Wednesday, October 03, 2018

Tragicomedy

It's political party conference season; a time for dysfunctional obsessives to meet in a posh hall somewhere and squabble.

First, it was the Liberal Democrats. I think. I can't really remember.

Next up, Labour revived some old traditions, like poisonous infighting over procedural and organisational changes designed to strengthen the position of one faction over another. The rest of the time it produced some welcome, if unexciting, mildly social democratic policies, a determination to avoid taking a remotely coherent position on Brexit (why should it? It's only the most important and pressing question of the last fifty years), and presided over a festival of jew hatred while denying its existence.

But nothing, absolutely nothing, could prepare me for the Conservative Party in full derangement. Where to begin? How about Theresa May fighting for her Chequers plan for Brexit (rejected as unacceptable and unworkable by the EU) while simultaneously attacking the Northern Ireland backstop (agreed with the EU and part of an agreement she signed last December)? Yep, that was an interesting one. As was her triumphant announcement that she was stripping British citizens of the right to live and work in the rest of the EU so that we could have a shortage of health care workers, teachers, and agricultural labourers. Then there was Hunt gratuitously insulting the EU, on whose goodwill we depend, and the next day denying he had said any such thing, claiming he had been misquoted despite the fact that he hadn't been and that anybody could watch the videos of his speech on YouTube. You could add in Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg without needing any further comment. The ignorant xenophobic nationalism of many the old guard reactionaries, allied with alt-right recruits and UKIP returnees, was even more unpleasant than usual.

But then came the moment of real horror; the denouement of the whole grisly masquerade. At a time of national and political crisis, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland took to the conference platform to deliver the most important set-piece speech of her career. She entered, gyrating like an arthritic bendy toy, to Abba's "Dancing Queen."

This dear reader is British Politics.


Tuesday, October 02, 2018

Back to basics

Democracy is such a nice word, and that's the problem. When I started teaching politics in evening classes around thirty-five years ago, this was my first warning to 'A' and 'O' level students. Beware nice words that are not clearly defined. I used to use an example of a speech where a leading politician used four different, and contradictory, definitions of the word 'democracy' in only three sentences. This is very, very basic political theory. Yet it seems to evade the minds of politicians, journalists, commentators, and partisans, all of whom tend to define democracy as the system that enables them to win. How else can you explain Brexiters' argument that the 2016 referendum was an exercise in democracy and that another referendum in 2019 would be a betrayal of democracy? It's ludicrous.

In fact, referendums are only democratic in the crudest of senses. They make decisions on a predetermined issue, solely on the basis of a majority of votes, without any regard to the interests or opinions of the minority, however large, or of those who are directly affected but not enfranchised.

Here's another concept for beginners from those early classes. The British constitution is usually described as unwritten, but is better defined as uncodified. This makes it flexible, to the point of being haphazard. Referendums are not formally part of our constitution for the simple reason that they undermine the processes of representative democracy. Yet they have crept in as a practice for political convenience. But because the principle and purposes of referendums haven't been defined, we have no rules about the issues on which they can be called, their construction and timing, the extent of the mandate they confer, the principles of the franchise on which they are held, or the majorities required for an authoritative decision. The result is that we have had a number of referendums all fought on different ad hoc rules.

We are now facing a revolutionary constitutional and economic change - and yes this is a revolution - brought about by a flimsy majority of votes from a minority of the electorate in one of the worst constructed and managed referendums imaginable. There was even no clarity as to whether the referendum result was binding or not! And that is before we get into the issue of the criminal abuse of funding and the possibly corrupt misuse of data.

There were other constitutional anomalies as well that the referendum neither recognised nor had any mechanism for dealing with. Britain is made up of constituent nations, each with devolved governments and different political traditions. Scotland and Northern Ireland voted decisively to remain in the EU. Where do they stand now? In addition, Northern Ireland's constitution had been redefined by the Anglo-Irish Treaty and the Belfast Agreement that ended a thirty-year civil war and had given another EU state, the Republic of Ireland, a constitutional role in its governance. The referendum allowed Scottish and Northern Irish opinion to be overruled by English votes. There was no safeguard for Gibraltar either, which voted 96% in favour of remain.

This neglect of constitutional and democratic basics struck me when I read a Rafael Behr article from last month. He made three very good points.

First,
Most British citizens went about their lives unbothered by the European Union. Brussels was an object of compulsive loathing for only a tiny number. Their good fortune was to find in David Cameron a malleable prime minister who could be pressed into calling a referendum on a question few voters had ever thought to ask themselves. The cranks got their hobby horse into the political Grand National – and, credit where it’s due, they won.
Withdrawal from the EU was only the concern of a small minority, predominantly on the fringes of the right with a few nationalist leftists in tow. They only managed to get their referendum by being such a bloody nuisance in the Conservative Party that Cameron decided that the best way to shut them up was to give them their heart's desire. Taking the path of least resistance is one of the most frequently made political mistakes - that and fatalism.

If you want to see where the referendum came from, look back to 1997 and the short-lived Referendum Party of James Goldsmith. It was a single issue party campaigning for a referendum on EU membership. It won 2.6% of the votes in the general election of that year. The reason why it focused on calling for a referendum was because the constitutional processes of representative democracy would never have produced a decision to leave the EU. It could only be done if they found a way to by-pass formal democratic politics. In this sense, the referendum was anti-democratic.

Secondly, Behr mentioned some focus group research:
Many recall the 2016 campaign as a time of anxiety, even trauma. They resented being forced to choose between options they felt ill-equipped to evaluate, and are in no hurry to relive the experience. 
Just as there was little demand for a referendum, so there was not much conviction about the vote. Though people are always reluctant to admit error, the fear of widespread disorder if Brexit doesn't happen is based on the assumptions of a committed minority that their obsessions are widely shared (this is a common cognitive bias - the false consensus effect). Outside that minority, the referendum itself was the only thing that made people think that it might be a good idea to leave. Why call one at all otherwise? After all, the leave campaign kept saying that there was no trade offs, no downsides, that we would be better off, and that it would be a cost-free choice.

Even so, the reality is that the referendum showed no consensus at all. The vote was close to being 50/50. As well as the divisions between the UK's nations, it's the generational one that is startling - and potentially highly significant. Young people are overwhelmingly pro-EU and around 70% voted to remain. Brexit was the choice of the old. The evidence is that this demographic divide is growing wider. The ethnic division was pretty stark too. The attempt, particularly by the left, to portray Brexit as a working class vote is only partially sustainable if you redefine the working class as solely white. Even then the generational differences are striking. Geography and demography divide us. The purpose of democracy is to recognise, represent, and manage these divisions, not to deny them by burying them under a crude concept of majority rule.

Finally, Behr reckons that while people like me obsess, the electorate aren't listening.
It is possible that all of the ideological and technical squabbling, the factional bickering that has consumed politics since the referendum, will turn out to have been only the preamble. And what it will all come down to in the end is a contest between two gut propositions that have very little to do with the EU. For leave: just get on with it. For remain: please just make it stop.
And I have bad news for both remainers and leavers. It isn't going to stop. If we leave, we face either the catastrophe of no deal, or difficult decades of arguments and adjustments to whichever new status as a third country our government chooses for us as we sort out our future as a poorer, more isolated nation. If we manage to avert disaster and remain, then we will have a decade to undo the damage that has already happened; to recover from the disinvestment - most notably in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing, and financial services, the collapse in investment since the referendum, the lower growth, and the wrecking of our international reputation and prestige as other nations shake their heads at our collective nervous breakdown, while wondering about the UK as a secure place to do business.

Given the pusillanimity of the current crop of politicians - the ideologically blinded leading the  unprincipled cowards - I see little way out other than a second referendum. It is just as an obnoxious option as the first, with an equally uncertain result. Of course, if we do leave, the campaign to rejoin will begin. Necessity will probably bring an end to this wasteful and destructive episode as we try and get back. It may also be a chance to think about those basic principles of democratic governance that we carelessly disregarded and make sure that we are never hijacked by political adventurers and charlatans in the future.

And if we do apply to rejoin and are accepted back, please let's not hold a referendum.