No.8 - Letting Some Fresh Air into the Brexit Debate
Dear James,
I very much appreciate your reply to my letter and your honesty. You are clearly in the middle of much heart searching.
You are right to say that my central point is that we should have another referendum. In fact, I am saying that we should now have a proper referendum based on the myriad of new facts that have become available to the country since July 2016.
Allow me to present my reasons for my position. I shall start with the nature of democracy itself and our democracy in particular. Ours is a representative democracy. For over two hundred years our system has allowed each voter to choose a candidate to represent them in parliament. There are two most important aspects to this form of democracy. Firstly the voter gifts his own judgement to the judgement of his/her elected representative for the duration of a parliament. Secondly, every decision made by that representative and that parliament is technically reversible because there is the promise of an election (currently every five years). Thus the fundamental basis for British democracy is the ability to change a policy through the change of government. The concept of a referendum on the contrary, is a one-off, theoretically irreversible decision. Referenda are extremely rare in the UK and, as you may know, only three nationwide referenda have been held - two about the Common Market/EU (1975 and 2016) and the other on the AV question (2011). In many respects a referendum contradicts the basic elements of representative democracy and for this reason it is seen by many constitutional lawyers as being an 'alien device’. For this reason, a referendum has been seen as non-binding on governments.
However, we have to face the fact that the 2106 referendum was held - mainly as a device to solve the Tory Party’s civil war. The 2016 referendum was rushed, deficient in facts, rife with false claims by both sides and delivered at a time when a good part of the country was angry at being ravaged by the Tory Party’s austerity programme. Many voters were rightly angry with the elites and were persuaded by populists to adopt the EU as a convenient scapegoat. The result was close. As Mrs May is constantly reminding us, 17.4m people voted to leave. What she forgets to remind us is that 16.1m people voted to remain. The gap was much closer than she feels comfortable in admitting. In 2017 Mrs May called an election in an attempt to convert the the referendum into a ‘representative’ expression of the referendum’s result. It failed miserably and you are now a minority government in thrall to ten DUP MPs. I believe that the electorate was trying to tell you something. I believe they were trying to tell you that every true democracy should have the right to change its mind. To quote David Davis in 2012, ‘A democracy that cannot change its mind is no longer a democracy’. We had a referendum and we now need to check that referendum. To paraphrase Mr Davis, ‘A referendum which cannot change its mind is no longer a referendum’.
Mrs May has worked hard to come up with the Withdrawal Treaty now under consideration. I applaud her resilience. However the information presented in that treaty has given the country a clear comparative base for making a much better informed decision. We can either accept her deal (a vote for more poverty, less money for the NHS etc), crash out (disaster) or to vote again. You say that another vote would be even more divisive. I disagree. The next vote, given sufficient time, would be based on a comparison of the huge volume of facts that have emerged in the two and a half years since the first vote. Claims of ‘Project Fear’ would be revealed as ‘fear mongering’ - the claims that the original fears of Messers Carney and Osborne were wrong have in reality been born out by the 10-15% reduction in the value of sterling, the reduction of GDP growth to from 2.5% to 1.5% and the collapse of inward investment. The only thing the Remainers got wrong was the threat of an immediate post-referendum recession. That will only come once we actually leave the EU’s embrace.
The simple fact is that with the EU determined to maintain its huge internal market, there was only ever a very small area for a compromise. Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement is that compromise and it leaves the UK as poorer and a rule taker. The great compromises and EU concessions that Mrs May envisioned were never real, never possible and, in effect, the only logical options ever open to us were getting out completely or staying in (in Tory terms, Boris Johnson or Dominic Grieve). The last two and a half years of fruitless negotiation have been the slow and painful realisation of this fact and look where we are now!
When I spoke about the fresh air to be let into the future debate, I was referring to the fact that, whether we stay in or leave, the country cannot revert, once the Brexit questions have been resolved, to the political status quo. Our nation faces fundamental questions of equality, social mobility, inclusion and exclusion. These are the real sources of the result of the 2016 referendum. Much of the country is angry but the problems do not stem from our membership of the EU. They come from ourselves and our history. We need new, radical ideas that will combine the best of what we have with a willingness to abandon the worst of what we have. In a way it is not just our country facing such big questions. The world faces a crisis of capitalism. We need to preserve the best of that system while abandoning its worst defects. Whoever takes over our country next, must face this challenge. Nothing less will do.
I look forward to hearing your contribution to the Brexit debate in parliament next Monday (if called).
Kind regards,
Brian