Why referendums are pretty much always bad

In the video above, I talk about the possibility of a nationwide referendum on net zero - as in, a referendum to decide whether net zero should be the goal of any British government or not going forward. As dumb as it sounds, it is a lot more likely to happen than you might think. I talk about why it’s looking more and more likely, what might happen if a referendum on net zero was called, and why I think the result would be what I think it would be. To stress, I think a referendum on net zero would be a terrible idea. In fact, I think referendums in general are awful.

Referendums are seen by supporters of direct democracy as the ultimate form of voting, the purest form of democracy imaginable. Except, they do not function that way at all in practice. Democracy that works accepts that we need people to run the country and that we should have a way of getting rid of a government and replacing it if they do a bad job. That’s what democracy truly is - a safety valve guarding against tyranny. It is not a way to make the people get to decide on absolutely everything themselves. Because that isn’t possible, really. And even if we could decide on everything, it would suck. We need leaders. The right used to believe in things like hierarchy. They were right about that.

We have had two national referendums in the UK over the last two decades. Both of them were held on issues that hardly anyone gave the slightest shit about across the country before the referendums were called: electoral reform and membership of the EU. Both were matters of political expedience: one because the Lib Dems had formed a coalition with the Tories and were obliged to seek a change in the voting system by dint of their membership; the other, a way for Cameron to try and ward off the threat posed by Farage and UKIP. Neither referendum made our democracy better - in fact, there is a strong argument that both referendums made our democracy much weaker.

The AV referendum blew up the coalition. It was never quite the same afterwards. I think we would have been better governed over the four years between the AV referendum and the 2015 general election had the referendum never taken place. The EU referendum was even worse. It flung onto a parliament that did not want to leave the EU a demand via the referendum to do something they didn’t believe in. It resulted in a schism between our elected officials and the result of a referendum that the British constitution was in no way capable of handling. Our democracy hasn’t yet recovered fully, I would argue.

The destabilising effect of the EU referendum is still being felt, with trust in elected officials at an all time low. That’s because we still have elected officials who are scared of the public and more specifically, the result of a referendum that happened almost a decade ago. Until we fix that issue and have politicians who aren’t afraid to say what’s what, we will keep coming back to this problem.