Saturday 15 December 2018

On referendums

Brexit so far
Well here we are, unsurprisingly the Brexit process hasn’t gone well (who'd of thunk it?), it’s not quite the eleventh hour yet but time is getting on. We have an ‘agreement’ but we are constantly told by high profile leavers and remainers that it’s rubbish. We’re told by all of Theresa May’s political opponents that it’s just about the “worst possible” and we are constantly told by the media that there is no way it will get through parliament. Well I guess we’re going to see soon. May has pulled the vote once but she can't do so forever. A couple of days ago she faced a no confidence motion from her own MPs which of course she won 200 to 117 (i.e. 63% confidence), but with over a third voting against her. Still, as bad as it was, it’s still a clear win, and it’s better than when Jeremy Corbyn faced the same and lost badly with only 40 votes against 172, (i.e <19% confidence), and he’s still here!

First off, I should of course point out that I voted to remain, however my general feeling about the EU is that it is a flawed, bloated, overreaching, bureaucratic behemoth. It’s just that at the end of the day I believe that the degree to which we have become integrated with it, and the actual costs vs benefits mean that it is on balance probably better to try and reform it from inside than to walk away.
I reckon the costs and the knock-on impacts of leaving will negatively affect the UK economy for at least a couple of decades, and that there will be innumerable undesirable social, economic, cultural, trade, scientific/academic and security (military and law enforcement) consequences, to name but a few areas.
The recent announcement on the UK being excluded for definite from the top tier of the Gallileo GPS project is just one example of the kind of knock-on consequence we could do without. To be fair this particular one has been trailed for a while during the negotiations but to be honest it seemed like a no brainer to sort out and I actually expected agreement. I wonder how much of the decision is based on other EU countries wanting the work that UK industries had on the project, and I speculate that such attitudes are going to prevail in negotiations for a future trade deal, making it much harder to finalise than the withdrawal agreement. We’ve already seen Spain murmuring about using Gibraltar as a bargaining chip and French using fishing access, but I’m sure the list will grow.

Current trajectory seems to be drawing us towards a second referendum on the deal, as if the first one wasn’t divisive enough! it’s even worse in Scotland where it’d be the third highly divisive ballot in less than five years. However the government’s inability to get parliament to agree to what it has drawn up and the EU’s apparent intransigence regarding further modification to the leaving agreement does seem to be giving us no choice but to let the people decide on the final step. Even at this late hour I expect the EU to offer a few additional crumbs but I doubt it will assuage enough of the rabid Tory leavers in Lord Snooty’s gang, er sorry I mean Rees-Mogg’s ERG.

Second referendum
Here’s the thing about referendums; they can be highly divisive when they are held on questions that have emotive connotations (such as sovereignty and constitutional change). When the result is close they don’t appear to settle things, and people won’t accept they lost when they feel they are within touching distance of winning. Both the EU and Scottish refs prove that beyond doubt. That’s why it seems to make sense to set a line considerably more than 50% + 1 vote for any referendum which enacts large scale change and is in effect irreversible (yes we could rejoin the EU but not with our current deal and only with agreement of the other 27 members, meaning it’s not our decision). The reason we don’t have a similar rule for normal elections is because in those cases people get a chance to review their decision every four or five years and vote differently if they realise the last time was a bad mistake. Requiring for example, 60% to vote for a change would give a much stronger mandate for that change and put those not voting for it in a very clear (but still sizeable) minority.

The other thing about referendums for radical change is they should be very clear about what is on offer otherwise you could be pitting a harsh gritty reality against a prettily painted fantasy which will inevitably become the former but only once people have voted for it, and then it’s too late to change their mind. The EU referendum clearly suffered from this, despite the subsequent cries of “leave means leave”. Simply put ‘leaving’ means different things to different people, and then there’s the method of exit: for example, you can leave a house by many different routes, you can open the front door and walk outside, or you can climb out the attic skylight take a run and leap off the roof, or anything in between. It is not a stretch to say that many of the things promised by assorted ’leavers’ were fantastical and unrealistic, and even some of those that weren’t were contradictory with things others ‘promised’. That alone makes any government negotiations difficult, after all they can only negotiate us to one leaving position not the many contradictory ones demanded by numerous factions and groups. Thus it sadly makes sense to allow the people yet another vote on whether the finally negotiated reality of exiting the EU matches, or comes close to what they actually want.

At least this time people would be voting with a decent amount of information and surely that’s a good thing?

But perhaps my view is clouded by being a 'remainer', so in the interest of balance let’s see what a hard-core ‘leaver’ has to say about the use of referendums: 

David Davis quoted from Hansard 26th Nov 2002:

“…….Referendums should be held when the electorate are in the best possible position to make a judgment. They should be held when people can view all the arguments for and against and when those arguments have been rigorously tested. In short, referendums should be held when people know exactly what they are getting. So legislation should be debated by Members of Parliament on the Floor of the House, and then put to the electorate for the voters to judge.

We should not ask people to vote on a blank sheet of paper and tell them to trust us to fill in the details afterwards. For referendums to be fair and compatible with our parliamentary process, we need the electors to be as well informed as possible and to know exactly what they are voting for. Referendums need to be treated as an addition to the parliamentary process, not as a substitute for it.”

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200203/cmhansrd/vo021126/debtext/21126-17.htm


If nothing else a second referendum of the proposed exit agreement would meet Davis’ criteria. The reality of leaving the EU has been “rigorously tested” and we’ve got a rough ballpark idea of what we will/or won’t get.

As it happens I absolutely agree with Davis’ words, and at the time of the Scottish independence referendum I felt that the SG (SNP) 'white paper' “Scotland’s Future” was unrealistic and speculative to a degree where it was unlikely to bear more than a passing resemblance to the eventual reality of leaving the UK and hence should it come to pass I favoured some sort of referendum on whatever was eventually negotiated. Thankfully it never came to pass. However I do note that after initial reticence the SNP/SG appear to have fallen in behind a second ref on the EU issue; one wonders what view they would take on that process should they get their wish and have yet another Scottish independence vote which they won.

Is it wise to have a second EU referendum?
Now there’s a question, one might easily ask if it was wise to hold the first EU vote in such a vague manner,  but without it they could never have started serious negotiations. As Davis also said in 2002, a pre-legislative referendum is probably the worst type; but in this case you needed it to start the process. The mistake was in not realising that a further decision would be needed once the reality became clearer. In retrospect it should always have been made clear that there would be a vote to start the process and then at some point a vote to decide on whether the negotiated settlement was what people wanted. Maybe that’s how future pre-legislative referendums should be laid out, so that people don’t get the idea they can vote for vague outcomes and that’s the end of it.

If it is held it may resolve the ‘will we won’t we’ issue but if there is an option to remain then it will further divide the country and could potentially spark civil unrest in some places if the original 'leave' vote is overturned. No doubt there will be trouble, ably stirred up by a number of political groups. And it is likely also to seriously empower some more extreme politicians as many people become disillusioned with the current lot. The political landscape could change a lot

If you don’t think that a referendum result can change the political landscape that much look at the SNP and their post 2014 polls. The real danger with a second referendum on an EU deal that results in us remaining is that if for example 35-40% of the electorate are so cheesed off that they vote for whatever ‘hybrid leaver alliance party’ springs up as a result, they could dominate the electoral process in many constituencies stealing votes from both the Tories and Labour.

In Scotland we have spent most of the last four years since the independence referendum arguing about independence almost as if the referendum never happened, all the while the SG appears to be loosing its grip on the basic day to day business of health, education, policing etc, and this is to some extent what has been happening with the UK government for two years and no matter what happens next it is a situation that will likely continue. If we end up remaining after a second ref then the day to day business of UK politics will potentially be consumed by ad-nauseam arguments over this ‘unresolved’ issue (see Scotland).

If there is one thing we can take from this situation is that Davis was right in 2002, referendums of this type are a very bad idea.