This week in Brexitland, March 7, 2024
Why the myth of the 52% still holds so much sway over British political discourse
As I’ve mentioned here before, so much of the current madness within the Conservative party stems directly from Brexit. Part of that is that it hasn’t worked out as planned; part of it was the fact that the People’s Vote campaign and the 2017 general election result threatened the very idea of Brexit happening at all, raising the emotional defence of the project amongst Brexiters. But a much larger reason is simply this: the Tories look at the 52% Leave vote in 2016 and think to themselves over and over again, “That should be our vote. There is 52% of the electorate out there that is ours for the taking. We just need to give that 52% exactly what they want and then we can be in government for decades to come.”
This has driven the Tories mad because the 52% as a bloc of voters who all want the same things is a myth. They do not exist. The Leave-Remain factions which have been treated as the new political teams in Britain, with left and right obsolete, all part of a “realignment” of British politics, are not real either. Not in the way Tory strategists keep thinking that they are, anyhow. People voted to leave or remain in the EU in 2016 for a huge number of often completely contradictory reasons. That applies to any vote in democratic history, of course, it’s just that this warped logic only gets applied to the 2016 EU referendum and its result.
The Brexiters within the Conservative party cannot admit this to themselves, because if you fess up to the fact that the reasons for the 52% voting to leave the European Union in 2016 were all over the place, the result a product of that particular moment in time, you rob the whole thing of its power. And I don’t think either side is ready to do that yet. For Leavers it was destiny, the thing we were always going to do. This manifests itself in the ridiculous idea perpetuated by Brexiters that not only did everyone know exactly what they were voting for in 2016, they all voted the way they did for the exact same reasons.
On the other side of the coin, Remainers can often fall into the idea that the 2016 result was manufactured or corrupt in some way, thus strangely giving that 52% figure an unintended power. No one feels ready to say it was an odd-ball result, a mixture of the Leave campaign being good and the Remain one crap, David Cameron and the way he handled the whole thing start to finish, and the mood the country was in during the early summer of 2016. It shouldn’t have any greater meaning than that - yet because of what's happened since, it must have a greater meaning for those still invested in it.
Referendums are deeply terrible idea. One of the worst things we’ve ever come up with as a society. Yet I say that knowing at some point in the relatively near future, we’re going to have to have one to rejoin the European Union. So, I’ll have to support the idea of it then, at least in practice. With the sign off to it being hopefully “never again”.
What if democracy doesn’t work all that well when instead of being about picking the best candidate to make decisions for us, we all vote on a binary question without really knowing all of the variables involved in that decision? Well, you get what we’ve had since 2016, a right old mess. We were always going to get chaos, whichever side won. Cameron should never have promised the referendum and then called it, and certainly not called it when he did. And yet his punishment for this is becoming the Foreign Secretary. Don’t expect anything to change any time soon.
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Of course, the attempt to settle the schisms in the Tory Party was the trigger point for Cameron to promise and run a Referendum that dragged Britain and it's economy out, to obviously flounder, with 3 studies showing GDP losses between 4%-5.5% or £100bn p.a., including £40bn in lost tax revenue. For the Tory Party, always the interests of the Tory Party come before those of the country. But they are so incompetent that they can't even get that right.
If the Tory Party had wanted to do Referenda well, they would have needed only to look at two examples where they have been done well and copy them, but no, that was unthinkable for the arrogant Tories. Switzerland has up to 4 Referenda p.a.. It makes the campaign for change sign up to a manifesto as to what they want to offer. This is backed up by courts, so if they even talk about offering something different to what is on their manifesto, the court nullifies any vote in their favour. There is no way the UK result would have reached this high bar, with leaders of the leave campaign offering different versions of Leave and changing the offer, every few days. If they had not offered this broad range of versions of Leave, there is no way they would have got it over the line. The whole thing is a gigantic and obvious political fraud.
Even closer to the UK is the Republic of Ireland, with it's own harsh papal do's and don'ts recently ringing in it's ears. To go from that to become a modern liberal, largely secular state was a tall order. They put together citizens assemblies to talk through issues and make recommendations to politicians and the public before they held Referenda. The country has been transformed from retrogressive to one arguably more liberal than N.I., where the Unionists used to cite papal interference in law and government that made life there for them supposedly intolerable. Now it is the DUP looking the illiberal side of Ireland's coin.
With the Tory Party being the dominant governing force in Britain, re-joining against their opposition might look difficult or risky to the EU. However, if by Jan '25, opinion polls and other election indicators are proved correct and the Tories are almost wiped out ( most recent projection was 25 seats and potentially 4th place), then the mood music on re-joining might suddenly look very different.
Add to that, Starmer knows he has to turn the economy around to some extent within 2-3 years to be able to spend and invest, or this coming Labour government could be quickly defeated again and in this era of volatile opinion and rapid change, it might be their last ever term of majority government.
Remember: "Nobody is suggesting we leave the Single Market.....it would be mad" etc. Farage.
Starmer needs to start with a deal that looks like the Single Market and Customs Union, if not in name or completed form, negotiating while maintaining EU standards and building trust. The LibDems have a 4 point plan to join the Single Market. Reformed PR voting would enable re-joining much sooner as the Tories and other right wing parties ( Reform UK, Ukip, DUP) would almost certainly never be back in with an overall majority based on proper proportionality of voter choice.
Stable predictable and predominantly centrist governments based on PR voting stretching into the future will be the basis on which the EU will be confident to welcome the UK back into the fold. Alternatively, the destruction of the Tory party to the point where there is little for them to build on to enable them to return under the present FPTP system, might be enough for the EU to trust the UK to let us return.
Referenda are not nevessarilly bad.
New Zealand seems to do them well, often as a two stage process.
Are you happy with the status quo and if not which option would you like to be worked on?
And then some time later with the status quo v the worked up alternative with known advantages/disadvantages.
In Ireland referenda after cutizens' assemblies seem to work well.
They have brought about same-sex marriage and access to abortion after the CAs have done in depth thinking.