The events of recent weeks prove that there is no broad agreement for any version of Brexit. In this post, Charles Turner argues that such major institutional changes require more than mere majorities, they need overwhelming consensus, which is currently nowhere to be found.
‘Stamina is not a policy’ one Tory MP is reported to have said to Theresa May before the confidence vote last Wednesday evening. Along with a refusal to see the writing on the wall after more than a third of her MPs voted against her, it does though seem to be acting as a substitute for one. The prime minister’s Brexit deal as it stands has no chance of being accepted by the House of Commons in January – many who voted for her in the confidence vote will vote against it – and whatever assurances she gains about the Irish backstop from her European tour are unlikely to get it passed. If she knows all this then it raises the prospect that she is playing for time and gambling on putting pressure on MPs to support it at the last minute, knowing that the alternative is leaving the EU with no deal. It is a high stakes strategy that points to the basic problem with Brexit itself, which is that there is no broad consensus for any version of it.
In the two and half years since the referendum, nothing has been done to build up such a consensus, or even to formulate concrete proposals about reform of particular sectors of the economy. May’s confrontation with the House of Commons liaison committee the other week, and her call for the people whose will is supposed already to be unified to ‘come together’, point this up perfectly.
It is often said that when major political or constitutional change is proposed in a polity with a longstanding and stable tradition, the burden of proof weighs more heavily on those who want the change than with those who don’t. That is why such change more often than not requires a two-thirds majority. The referendum of 2016 specified no such requirement, which does make the 52%-48% margin look decisive. When remain voters retort that it is nonetheless too close to be safe, leavers claim it was ‘the largest exercise in democracy the UK has ever seen’. Sometimes they recall, too, that MPs voted by six to one to hold the referendum in the first place, thereby hoping to lay an image of near unanimity about one thing over the top of an image of almost total division about a different thing. It’s a bit like arguing that Magnus Carlsen really thrashed Fabiano Caruana in the world chess championship recently because everyone at the International Chess Federation had agreed that the match itself should take place. Only he didn’t; the match was very close, going 12 games without a decisive result before it was settled by a tie-break.
As soon as the result was known in June 2016, leave campaigners should have acknowledged that the country was divided, and sought to reach out to remain voters. One way in which they could have done so was by offering some ideas about how the country might be transformed, and feeding them into a national all-party committee of politicians and experts, tasked with the job of coming up with a vision for Britain’s post-Brexit future. It could have sat for a fixed period of, say 3 years, after which Article 50 might then have been triggered and negotiations completed efficiently and speedily.
Agriculture could have been a starting point: the average age of farmers is way too high, and the one size fits all Common Agricultural Policy works poorly for the UK with its peculiar patterns of land ownership. The Brexiteers could have told us how they were going to modernize our agriculture outside the EU, how we might take inspiration from our neighbour The Netherlands, which manages – though inside the EU! – to be the world’s second-biggest food exporter by value after the US despite the fact that it is 270 times smaller than them, and more densely populated than us. Instead, the nearest we got was Owen Paterson banging the drum for GM crops and Andrea Leadsom saying ‘the uplands can do the butterflies’. Since then it has been all about our tiny fishing industry.
On trade, the Tory MP for Richmond Rishi Sunak has long been an advocate of turning places like Hull and Newcastle and Southampton into free ports connected to industrial development zones, something that, Mr. Corbyn take note, genuinely is made difficult by EU membership, yet his voice has been absent from mainstream media discussions. His proposals might be mad and they might involve tarmacking over the whole of the New Forest, but at least they are something, some vision of a very different and actually more modern Britain.
Instead, the leading voices for Brexit, those in what Barry Sheerman MP called ‘The European Research Group that does no research’, have offered nothing beyond a vague sense that if we merely alter the terms under which we trade with the rest of the world we will be more prosperous, or failing that, more free.
If May is still in post in the new year and her stalling tactics succeed, it will be a remarkable political coup, for it will mean that a sovereign parliament, with a flourishing system of party competition, has handed that sovereignty temporarily to the people but then, having failed to think about how to get it back, allowed itself to be ridden over roughshod by a non-military executive, one whose plan for post-Brexit Britain has no majority support in parliament.
It might be worse than that, for in the House of Commons last Monday, May told Anna Soubry that to have a peoples’ vote now would be a betrayal not of the 52% but of those of her fellow citizens who, in the referendum of 2016, had voted ‘for the first time in 40 years’. People who are disenfranchised or marginalized or poor or downtrodden, who don’t or can’t get out much, not even as far as the ballot box, deserve justice, support and a great deal more money, but they should not be the basis for transforming the UK’s position in the world. That requires an economic and political and cultural plan that commands the widest possible support. There is no such plan, no consensus, which is why Ken Clarke suggested that MPs take back control of brexit and cancel it. He was right. MPs, it’s up to you. Just get on with it. You never know, if you succeed, May’s last act as Prime Minister might be to send the letter to the EU that revokes Article 50.
This article gives the views of the author, not the position of LSE Brexit or the London School of Economics.
Charles Turner is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick.
I’m sorry you didn’t like the result Charles, but you cannot simply change the rules because of it. Most of this mess has been caused by remainers creating as much frustration to the referendum result as possible. If they had accepted democracy and the government had not pandered to them; the majority of problems would not have arisen!
“There is no such plan, no consensus, which is why Ken Clarke suggested that MPs take back control of brexit and cancel it. He was right.” How on earth would this be anything else than a “major constitutional change” which, according to the title of the article, requires “overwhelming consensus”? I don’t see anything like that consensus now.
There was “overwhelming consensus” when the referendum was called that it should be called and that the result should be respected. I remember Conservatives, Labour and Liberal Democrats all voted for calling the referendum and hardly anyone in those parties suggested before the referendum that a Leave vote, however narrow, should not be honoured.
The articles and columns keep coming at a rate of knots, and have been sonce the LSE Brexit blog got up and running. It is academic, but the same as in other MSM blogs, the intensity is very high and, say with the D Telegraph, there is a very high turnover of articles. Some very salient issues never seem to get proper debate however. No sooner is there a comment getting too close to the truth but the article gets moved on.
In this case, the meme that the Brexit referendum should have been decided by supermajority is maintained with the implication that the result should be overturned. The same logic, however, is never applied to the major constitutional change in 1972, which was voted on in 1975, and the other absolute shocker, the change from EEC to EU, which was not voted on either way, by simple- or super-majority, never gets a mention.
“There is no such plan, no consensus, which is why Ken Clarke suggested that MPs take back control of brexit and cancel it. He was right.” How on earth would this be anything else than a “major constitutional change” which, according to the title of the article, requires “overwhelming consensus”? I don’t see anything like that consensus now.
The consensus was made on the 2016 vote.
The second vote also took place in the snap election, Lib Dem’s were the only party standing on remain.
They were wiped out!
There is your answer!!’
Whether one voted remain or leave we did not expect
the disrupters in parliament to sacrifice hard earned democracy that is destroyed by those who feel they know better than the plebs!
Those who want to reverse for short term gain will get a shock after the event.
The EU leaders are purposely refusing to ease a situation over the Irish border, because they know that it increases the likelihood of remaining and cancelling Brexit.
A losers vote is nothing but a Trojan horse.
Who runs this country?
The people of the U.K. or European dictators?
Walk away, walk away now, watch the panick evolve in Europe, they will be the ones begging us to deal.
I’m is not a risky strategy at all.
How far will airbus go without wings?
Speaking of Ken Clarke, avuncular he used to be. I could never make up my mind about his tenure in Hong Kong, but didn’t like the way Thatcher left the people their at the mercy of the PRC’s C Party. Any old China hand would have known how it would pan out. Anyway, there are internationalists, progressives, democrats, cosmopolitanists, diehard nationalists and so on. A lot of these descriptions is strategic or tactical name-calling. If some sucker nation-state’s citizens who has not the wherewithal to escape taxation is paying for your travel expenses, for your fat salary and is also paying your expense account and in due course your fat pension, it is easy to pose as an internationalist-cosmopolitan person of the world. These days, they are ten a penny, such posers. Some of these only appear to be posers, as they are indeed doing sterling work on behalf of the nation-state, but many, such as Ken Clarke, have taken a predatory position vis-a-vis nation-states. The country’s taxpayers are good for real productive endeavour and, if supportive of world government through transnational corporate management, the sucker-citizen may have a modest seat on the gravy train; a gravy train again entirely supported by productive and law-abiding citizens. While the predatory phase lasts, people must be kept under control. If that fails, the nation-state in question is put in the naughty corner until it comes to its senses. The socalled progressives are supporting world government. They are not cosmopolitan or internationalists. They are, however, idiots useful to certain international interests. For all the mainstream media softsoaping of certain issues, there are issues which cannot be swept under the carpet indefinitely.
Correction. Ken Clarke did not have tenure IN Hong Kong.
Of course, one of the issues with the first referendum was that it was all smoke and mirrors and a con trick played on us by the last parliament led by David Cameron. Firstly he told us he had renegotiated out position in the EU – which he had not!
Secondly I wanted him (and other governments for many years previously) to renegotiate the whole constitution of the EU to make it more democratic – not just change our relationship with the EU but make it a more comfortable organisation to belong to. This would naturally allow the whole membership’s electorate to vote on its acceptability.
Thirdly, Cameron should never have asked for a binary answer to such a complex question. At the very least it should have automatically called for a second referendum when and if a decision was made to change the status quo – like “Leave”!. In fact a better option would have been, using feedback from MPs, to ask questions about what people felt was wrong with the EU so the questions could have been around those issues.
Most of all there should have been provision made for actions to take, to cover the potential outcomes of the referendum decision. Instead of this Cameron and Osborne ran and hid like cowards instead of trying to manage it properly like grown up people.
The first referendum, in 1975, was indeed all smoke and mirrors and a con trick, but nothing to do with the Cameron government. As for the binary question, that was the only sensible option. The alternative to Remain was Leave. The object of the exercise, remember, was to undermine UKIP. Many people wanted out, period. Not half in and half out. Not getting off the bus and being caught with one leg in the door and being dragged along as one commenter so aptly put it. Many people are confused by the smoke and mirrors emanating and put up by the Remoan gang. Leave meant becoming sovereign and independent, not being caught until the dying days of the EU with vassal status. The attempt to have a socalled Withdrawal Agreement was a fudge for a start, but, charitably, if it was not a fudge from the start, May has been a terribly incompetent negotiator. The UK could do nothing definite before its independence day, so any agreement would have been perfunctory and only binding the UK to the EU, seeing that the EU wanted to be difficult. That much was clear from before the referendum. To have a Brexit referendum at all, the binary choice was the only option. Anything otherwise would have made no sense, would have been a nonsense, a fudge.
The first referendum in 1975 was certainly a con trick.
This is all very well, but the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon treaty were major constitutional changes that were introduced with a 0% threshold (no public vote), no demonstrable consensus and no overwhelming majority in Parliament. Suddenly we are told that to reverse these changes on a simple majority is ‘undemocratic’. Give us a break!
I do have some sympathy for that argument, though you could argue that both treaties were part of the evolution of the EEC into the EC and the EU. There is a debate to be had about whether these treaties turned the EEC into a fundamentally different animal from what it had been before. But these changes were ratified by the member states in the way they each saw fit. Lisbon was passed in parliament by a majority of 90, so I take your point that the consensus was hardly overwhelming. But leaving the EU is a far bigger change than the Lisbon treaty introduced.
@Charles: “But leaving the EU is a far bigger change than the Lisbon treaty introduced.” Which raises the obvious questions: what is a “big change” for you, and what “overwhelming consensus” should be required?
Perhaps we can de-Brexit this discussion as follows. As far as I know, the Scottish Independence Referendum of 2014 was advisory, but it was also announced prior to the referendum that a simple majority for independence would result in Scotland leaving the UK, (See for example https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-27906062 ) . Would you and the author of the article assert that it should not have been this way, and that for example a supermajority, or a majority in each region of Scotland, should have been prerequisite for independence? (I suppose there is no argument that independence would have been, constitutionally, a “big change” for Scotland.)
I’m in favour of supermajority requirements for all such referenda. I suppose that makes me a conservative in that respect.
@Charles: at least you are consistent in insisting on supermajorities if the status quo is to be changed in both cases (Brexit referendum and Scottish independence). It is difficult to refute a position that is consistent, but I disagree with you. If the Scots had voted 52-48 for independence I would have wanted the result to be honoured, even though I would have been very upset about it. I value the UK, but I don’t think it would be right to force Scotland to be part of it if 52% of Scots were against.
I’m not that consistent. If Leave, or the SNP, had won by only one vote, would I still have wanted the result to be honoured? Er … To be honest my response is to run away and hide and say that, like you, I am not a fan of referenda, at least not as a way of deciding complex constitutional issues.
Where was the supermajority in 1972 and 1975 and 1992 and so on?
Thanks for your reply. The final Maastricht Bill was passed through Parliament only on a second vote. there was a majority against on the first vote. John Major had to make the second vote, a ‘Vote of Confidence in the Government’ in order to force it through.
It’s interesting that after losing this vote the subject of super majorities has raised its head. Charles is suggesting that somehow the super majority is the way forward, but the precedent is ‘simple majority’…as far as I am aware it is the principle that has been used in every EEC/EC/EEU related referendum. Countries throughout the EU have ratified changes based on the principle, some with margins tighter than our referendum.
Super majority is simply a dangerous change to the due process of democracy, a tool for those who wish to retain a status quo and deny the majority of a nation’s population it’s right to a change in whatever form. Even if you accept the theory you must surely see that those in favour of the status quo will be the ones setting the threshold, the higher the bar, the less likely a change is….When you look at the discontent now over a 52/48 result, imagine how that would be magnified if it was for instance 65/35 and no change would be possible.
Ok let’s qualify that.
For vague questions like ‘should Scotland be an independent country’ I do think supermajorities are a good idea.
For referenda which are for the ratification or approval of specific courses of action of legislative measures, or for things that parliament has already approved, a simple majority would suffice. I am no expert but I believe that this is the way referenda are used in places like Switzerland. An example might be a proposal to abolish car parking charges at hospitals. MPs could choose simply to do this, but as the measure is unambiguous, and simple enough for everyone to understand what it entails (including loss of revenue for hospitals etc), they might put it to a public vote.
By and large though I am not a fan of referenda at all.
“In the two and half years since the referendum, nothing has been done to build up such a consensus.”
… and whose fault is that?
When Obama won the presidency, the Republic Party immediately decided to try their best to ensure than he didn’t get a second term. They labelled his policies as extreme and complained that he was being divisive. The Remain side have been working straight out of the Republican Party handed book:- 52% of the electorate are ignorant old racists who wish to divide the country. Many postings in the Guardian comments column are as extreme as those in Brietbart. (“F*** old people, I hope they all die soon.”)
You can only build up a consensus if people are not being divisive and the Remain side have been determinedly divisive. Suppose they had worked with the Leave side and tried to get the best exit deal for Britain. By now we have been in one of two positions. Either we would have got a better deal. Or Remain could have said that they had backed the negotiations all the way and it was now time to reassess where we are. As it is Tony Blair and the like have been going around Europe encouraging the EU not to make any concessions and promising that they will engineer a second referendum. If we don’t Brexit now, then we will have a democracy subject to veto by elite. Which is no democracy.
From Wikipedia: “List of people associated with the London School of Economics: George Soros, billionaire investor, philanthropist and political activist.”
Says it all, doesn’t it?
It probably says it all about you. Here are some more people associated with the LSE for you to get your teeth into
Imre Lakatos
Karl Popper
Karl Mannheim
Morris Ginsberg
Imre Lakatos
Karl Popper
Karl Mannheim
Morris Ginsberg
These people are all dead.
George Soros is alive. He currently has more influence.
Hi Teejay,
It would not surprise me if Karl Popper’s theory of empirical falsification and Imre Lakatos’ wonderful book “Proofs and Refutations” had more influence today than George Soros, for all his millions. But perhaps not in the Brexit debate, where empirical falsification, proofs and refutations are rare (on either side).
I was more interested in their shared ethnic origin. Which seemed to be the point of the comment about Soros.
It says nothing about me. You know nothing about me. But we all know a lot about George Soros don’t we? Financing the destruction of the West. Banned in his own country of origin. LSE tainted by association
.
@GeoffG: Thank you for pointing that out. Which institution of higher education would you recommend we send our children to so that they avoid all contact with such dangerous individuals?
By the way, I would like to add Jim Hacker to the list of notable persons associated with the LSE. I’m sure that if he were Prime Minister now things would be going differently, but I don’t suppose the script-writers could have come up with something more incredible than reality.
France is in chaos and on the verge of bankruptcy. There are riots in Belgium, Netherlands & Sweden against the EU & the UN’s Migration Pact. Italy, Greece & Spain are bankrupt. And anti-Brexiteers want to remain in the EU for “economic reasons?” We live in the Age of Absurdity.
For referendums such as the EU one and Scottish independence, there is a compromise to be had between a simple and super majority for change: a significant majority of 55%. This ensures the public’s decision is fairly stable without making change very difficult to achieve. But it’s too late now for Brexit – the people voted to leave and, crucially, Parliament backed them up. It’s just a question now of how well we should cook the goose.
I’d hope in the future that the Government will never resort to such a referendum, let alone one that was hastily cobbled together in six months. Indeed, cancel Brexit and let our elected representatives decide, for people are too easily swayed by a big red bus.
Constitutional change was foisted upon us with the Maastricht Treaty and the Lisbon Treaty also. The rise of UKIP and the forces acting on David Cameron to compel him to offer a referendum was a direct result of the British government acting to change our constitution without any democratic mandate to do so.
The result of this is that now the government has to undo constitutional changes made without the consent of its own people. You reap what you sow!