There’s been a lot of talk about the nature of democracy of late in Britain. It has been shaped by the idea that to oppose the referendum result is inherently undemocratic – it’s the will of the people, goddamnit, is heard a lot now, particularly from the Conservative side of the House. What it has made me consider is the nature of the British form of democracy and how it actually functions; as well as how the EU referendum was essentially a perversion of it that has led us all into a place where the entire unwritten constitution is in its greatest crisis perhaps since the Restoration.
Consider for a moment referenda of the past. The 1975 one on Europe was based around the idea that Britain had been taken into the EEC by the government of the time and the referendum was simply about ratifying that agreement. The Wilson Labour government ran the referendum on the basis of wanting to rubber stamp a recent change and if a No vote had occurred, reversing such a trajectory would have still been somewhat reasonably painlessly possible. Next comes the AV referendum. This was strange as you had a coalition government that was split down the middle on what result was desired. But ether way, we were constitutionally covered: if the Lib Dems got AV via the referendum, the Lib Dems would have had to vote for the boundary changes. It was all tied together as a piece (even though the Tories complained about it at the time, the Lib Dems actually gave the Tories an out in the whole Lords debacle that they refused to take). The Scottish 2014 referendum saw a nationalist party whose whole raison d’etre is Scottish independence, who had recently gained a majority and thus were in a place to enact their historic mission. Making Scotland an independent country off the back of that mandate was a step too far (even the SNP would agree on that), so we had a referendum. Lose (as happened) and the SNP has to accept that Scotland wants an SNP government but not be an independent country, at least for the time being; win and it ratifies the government’s position.
That brings us to the central problem with the EU referendum. It was done unwillingly by the then Tory prime minister, not as a way of ratifying something he wanted to do but for the exact opposite reason: he wanted the referendum to reject once and for all something he never wanted to do in the first place. As a result, when the vote went the opposite way to the one he desired, he departed as prime minister – and it has been left to those who have picked up the pieces in his wake to interpret the referendum result as best they can. The fact that it has come to this, where Brexiteers are trying to bypass the parliament they so desperately wanted to make supreme, is inevitable in retrospect.
Britain is a representative democracy. We should only have referenda as a way of the government of the time asking to do something it feels supersedes its mandate as a government and needs ratifying directly from the people. It should never be used, as has been done in the EU referendum, as an attempt to reject something the government of the day does not want to do. That way lies anarchy – a new government, trying to interpret the motives of the electorate, not based on a manifesto that has been voted on but rather what a simple yes or no question might mean for the future of the entire country, the old government having had no plan to implement the implications of the referendum vote since it never planned on the result going the way it did.
I think one of the questions of our age is: do you want to live in a representative democracy or a direct democracy? I have no doubt whatsoever which one I prefer.
Redndead says
Frankly, I want to live in a true democracy, one where the complexiion of HOC more closely reflects the votes of the people – and if that means UKIP of BNP getting the odd MP, so be it.
Our elective dictatorship with gerrymandered constituencies that haven’t changed hands in over 100 years is no shining beacon.
We have had the decimation of steel, coal and manufacturing foisted on us by one side, pointless illegal and costly wars by the other.
In Germany after WW2, we put in place a system that makes it very difficult for anything other than coalitions to be in place, we made sure German workers are on company boards.
Germany – even having absorbed the former GDR – has thrived in relative terms.
By comparison, excluding the funny money of the City, our economy has been decimated by partisan chancellors looking to score points at our expense.
Brexit is merely the latest lunatic fringe event that comes with unfettered one party rule
X says
I don’t agree with Tony Ben about much, but I do agree with his reasons for opposition to PR: with PR, all the voters can do at an election is stir the pot’ of representations in Parliament, changing its composition slightly, but with every chance that some of the same old faces end up back in government, just in a slightly changed composition.
Whereas with our system, we can (and do) chuck the whole lot out and let another lot in: we did it in 1979, in 1997, in 2010.
I much prefer a system where if we don’t like what a government is doing we can chuck it out, rather than one where if we don’t like what a coalition of Party A & Party B is doing the most we can do is end up with a coalition of Party B & Party C.
X says
(Or worse, with a Borgen-style five- or six-party government : how then do we make sure to get the whole lot out if they fail?)
Paul Clark says
Surely the purpose of the 1975 referendum was to paper over the cracks in the Labour Party, just as the purpose of the 2016 referendum was to do the same thing for the Tories.
In the long term, Wilson’s gamble failed and Labour’s divisions over Europe helped usher in almost two decades of Tory rule.
Cameron’s gamble failed more spectacularly in the very short term, though its long-term consequences we do not yet know.