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The debate over a second referendum The case for a new referendum

It is time to shed fantasies and consider realities, says , the deputy chairman of the People’s Vote

THE BREXIT reality of 2019 bears no resemblance to the Brexit fantasy promised in the 2016 referendum. So we now need a People’s Vote to check whether the public still want to quit the .

But that is not the only reason for a new referendum. Parliament is deadlocked. Many MPs don’t want the government’s miserable deal and they do not want to crash out of the EU with no deal either. What is more, all other versions of Brexit can only be delivered by first signing up to the prime minister’s deal, otherwise they themselves are fantasies. With Parliament unable to decide what to do, the only sensible way forward is to ask the people what they want.

These two reasons are connected. If had been able to deliver a Brexit that met the promises of 2016, Parliament would not be deadlocked. MPs would be giving her deal the thumbs up. But the prime minister could not deliver the “cake-and-eat-it” fantasy of , the former , for the simple reason that it does not exist. In the real world, you cannot have your cake and eat it. You need to make trade-offs.

Let us recall for a moment the Leave campaign’s main economic promises. Britain would keep access to the EU’s but without following its rules. And Britain would cut lots of other amazing trade deals around the world. Mrs May’s deal achieves none of this. We will lose partial access to the EU market, which is responsible for roughly half our trade, and that will make us poorer.

We will follow lots of its rules but will no longer have a role in making them, becoming what Mr Johnson rightly calls a “vassal state”. We will not take back control, the Brexit slogan of 2016; we will lose control.

Meanwhile, the prime minister has agreed an arrangement that could keep us indefinitely inside the EU’s customs union, making it virtually impossible to cut trade deals with other countries. Even worse, we will have to follow the bloc’s trade policies without a vote on them—again losing, rather than taking back, control.

The one key promise that may be kept, although we will not know the details for years, is to end free movement of people into Britain from the EU. But this could be a two-edged sword. As fewers nurses, midwives and other key workers come here from Europe and more return home, according to a report in April from the Nursing and Midwifery Council, it is becoming even more apparent how valuable they are.

Brexiters now say it would be undemocratic to hold a People’s Vote as that would overturn the “will” of the people. What nonsense. As David Davis, the government’s first Brexit secretary, used to say: “If a democracy cannot change its mind, it ceases to be a democracy.”

So much has changed in the past two and a half years that the people have every right to change their “will”. It is not just that the prime minister’s deal is so much worse than the fantasy of 2016. is now in the White House undermining the rules-based world order, and ’s agents are accused of poisoning people in . The geopolitical case for working together with our European friends to solve common problems and grasp common opportunities is even stronger than it was.

Another argument against a People’s Vote is that it would further divide an already angry country. While we should not pretend that our country can miraculously come together, a new referendum could be part of the healing process.

Part of the answer is to engage in an honest debate rather than to peddle fantasies. One of the dishonesties of the Leave campaign was the claim that the government would have tens of billions of pounds more to spend each year if we quit the EU. It is exactly the opposite, as an analysis of the government’s deal by Institute for Fiscal Studies shows.

More and more politicians are calling for the “dividend” we would get from staying in the EU to be spent on tackling the underlying causes of Brexit. These include funds for parts of the country starved of investment and areas where there have been sudden or significant population changes. If this is done, a People’s Vote could help bring the country together.

Yet another argument against a new referendum is that it would betray those who voted to leave the EU. But it is worth reflecting for a moment that it was the architects of the Leave campaign who betrayed these voters. Mr Johnson and , the other key leader of the official Leave campaign, made promises they could not deliver. We have wasted far too much time on fantasies. A mature democracy deals in realities. We must now check whether the people want the reality of this particular Brexit or the reality of staying in the EU.

Hugo Dixon is the deputy chairman of the People’s Vote, and the editor-in-chief and chairman of InFacts, both advocacy groups supporting a new Brexit referendum.

The debate over a second Brexit referendum Can a country ever recover from a rough referendum?

Canada’s experience shows the difficulties, says Michael Ignatieff, a former politician and president of Central European University

As Britain twists and turns in the agonies of Brexit politics, it may be salutary to look at other countries’ experience of similar torments. had two referendums, in 1980 and 1995, on the future of the relationship between Quebec and the rest of Canada. The one in 1980 ended in a clear victory for Canada, but the 1995 result was a near death experience.

Quebeckers were asked whether Quebec should stay in Canada or become a sovereign state. The Canada side prevailed, but by a wafer-thin margin of 50.58%. So if a British person asks a Canadian (they rarely do) if referendums are a good thing, a Canadian is likely to shudder. Even Quebec sovereigntists, who almost won, have been heard to admit that the experience was terribly divisive.

In a province where a bloke perhaps named Patrick O’Brien might actually be a unilingual Francophone, while un mec called Olivier Duchesneau might actually be an Anglophone, where origins and loyalties have been mixed up over centuries of living together, referendums split families and people right down the middle. “Never again” is the view shared by both sides now.

We haven’t had a referendum since, and in a recent Quebec election, the national question was a non-issue. This may be of some reassurance to those in Britain who fear that a second referendum will lead to a third and a fourth, the neverendum nightmare. Canada suggests otherwise. It doesn’t mean our existential question is settled or will go away, any more than Brexit is likely go to away. It just means that no one wants to take a question like this to the people again.

So the settled Canadian view is that referendums are truly terrible ways to decide existential questions. That’s what you have parliaments and politicians for.

A lot of people on both sides of the Brexit debate in Britain might now be inclined to wearily agree. But that is no longer the issue. The question now is what to do when a Parliament is so divided that there is no longer a majority for any course of action. Referendums may be a near-death experience, but what’s the alternative when politicians can’t get a deal through the legislature? Do you then go back to the people one more time?

Now that Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal has failed in Parliament, we enter, as she said before the vote, “uncharted territory’”. She has come out against a referendum herself, but she might find that the only way she can cling to office would be to gamble on one in which her deal was the first option on the ballot paper, exit without a deal the second, while the third would be remain.

If her deal squeaked home, she could then take it back to the House of Commons and if approved, as would be likely, she could end her premiership by implementing it. If the people vote for the other alternatives, she is through.

Labour opposes a referendum. The party wants an election, because it thinks it can win despite two years of hedging on the fundamental question. Strategic ambiguity is sometimes the only game an opposition can play, but this isn’t one of those times. The election would be, in effect, a referendum on Brexit and on the botched process which politicians must take the blame for. If Mr Corbyn thinks he can win by waffling or changing the subject to social justice, he may be in for a shock.

A referendum, in other words, won’t happen because millions of people are campaigning for it to happen. It will happen if Mrs May changes her mind and bets her premiership on winning one; and if Mr Corbyn concludes he can’t get an election but hopes a referendum defeat for Mrs May will hasten the day he becomes prime minister.

While we wait to see what these tarnished figures decide to do in their moment of extremity, the larger question remains: what is the damage that referendums inflict, long term, to confidence in representative government?

The pessimistic view is that referendums weaken parliamentary institutions and the of representation itself. The more optimistic view is that referendums are a necessary incursion of popular, direct democracy when representative institutions fail to do their jobs.

My own, relatively optimistic view, is that the Brexit experience has given everyone who cares about democracy a crash-course on the limitations of both representative and direct democracy. In so doing, it should make us all a little wiser about what ought to be subjected to referendums and what must be properly left to our representatives.

The recourse to referendums is the trap you fall into when party discipline decays and parliamentary institutions lose their credibility with the public. All of us need to rediscover what our representatives are for: to study the questions we are too busy to study ourselves and to deliberate on them, in committees and in the legislature, while consulting with us, whenever they can, about what is right for the country.

We now know when referendums are truly necessary: when representative government is unable to resolve a question and when an election is unlikely to resolve it either. The “uncharted territory” that Britain now enters after this week’s failed parliamentary vote may be such an occasion.

The larger lesson is that the legitimacy and effectiveness of democratic institutions is always a work in progress. Democracy is the place where we learn, painfully, what works and what doesn’t about governing ourselves. The history of British democracy is one long, painfully learned lesson about exercising and controlling power. Brexit is not so much exposing the weaknesses of democracy as pointing out, once again, how democracy should operate.

Democracy then re-enforces these lessons with rewards and punishments. A prime minister who called a referendum because he had failed to unify his party on Europe deserves to lose power and did. A prime minister who negotiates a deal she can’t sell to her own people won’t hold power long. An opposition leader who fudges national questions in order to hold his coalition together deserves to lose, and might just do so.

The point is that Brexit is a nightmare, but it is also a lesson—bracing, unnerving, even liberating—in what democracy is and must be.

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Michael Ignatieff is a former Canadian politician, political writer and currently the president of Central European University in Budapest.

The debate over a second Brexit referendum How Britain embraced referendums, the tool of dictators and demagogues

We can go from “the people’s vote” to “a people’s veto,” says Robert Saunders of Queen Mary University of

With the possible exceptions of race, sex and Theresa May’s dancing, no subject has inspired more hysteria in British politics than the referendum.

In 1945 denounced it as “alien to all our traditions” and an “instrument of Nazism”. , the prime minister who would hold Britain’s first national referendum in 1975, had previously dismissed the idea as “contrary to our traditions” and “not a way in which we can do business”, scoffing that a referendum would probably abolish the income tax. His Conservative opponent, , called the referendum “a device of dictators and demagogues” that would be dangerous to minorities and destructive of parliamentary sovereignty.

So there’s nothing new in recent warnings, from Barry Gardiner on the left or Theresa May on the right, that a “People’s Vote” would be “a gross betrayal of our democracy” that “undermines the whole principle of democracy in this country”. Yet the referendum is now an established part of our constitution: for better or worse, a tool that has been used 12 times since 1973 can no longer be described as “alien to all our traditions”.

From Harold Wilson to , prime ministers have repeatedly called in the electorate as a political bomb-disposal unit, tasked with defusing explosive issues on their own backbenches. Yet in deploying the referendum as a tool of party management, they have failed to evolve any serious rules about when to use them, why or how. The history of Britain’s referendum debate offers some useful pointers, both on how we might use the device in future and on how a second referendum could avoid the pitfalls of the first.

The referendum entered the mainstream of British debate in the early twentieth century, in a context not so different to the present. A fragmented Parliament had been rocked by a series of volcanic political questions— subjects, like votes for women, tariff reform and Home Rule for , that stirred passions which could not easily be contained within conventional party lines.

For A.V. Dicey, the most distinguished constitutionalist of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the referendum offered a partial solution. The device, he argued, would free great questions of policy from party or personal loyalties. To use a modern example, a voter could support Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister, while rejecting his views on Brexit. Crucially, for Dicey, the referendum was to be used to endorse or reject proposals that had already been approved in Parliament. He called this “the People’s Veto”, acting as a restraint on parliamentary adventurism, not as a means of compelling it to act.

Resistance to that idea centred on three key criticisms. First, it was argued, referendums would reduce complex political questions to simple Yes/No propositions, overriding concerns about detail or the costs and trade-offs involved. To take another contemporary example: a referendum on David Cameron’s promise to reduce immigration to “the tens of thousands”, or to eliminate the structural deficit by 2015, might well have been carried; but the verdict would have said nothing about who should be excluded, or how the deficit should be closed.

Second, critics warned of the danger to responsible government. Ministers, they predicted, would promise referendums for party purposes, while disclaiming responsibility for the result. A government that had been defeated in the country could continue cheerfully in office, enacting policies it did not believe in; while those who had actually argued for the change could wash their hands of its consequences. The result would be irresponsible government, removing a security against dishonest campaigning.

Finally, it was feared that the referendum would promote authoritarianism. Voters who opposed its decisions would no longer be challenging a government or a political party; they would be pitting themselves against “the will of the people”. There would be little room for minorities under this system, or for the concept of “loyal opposition”.

The 2016 vote fulfilled many of these fears. It reduced a question of mind-bending complexity to an abstract proposition, onto which voters could project incompatible versions of Brexit. It placed extraordinary power in the hands of two campaign vehicles that were under no responsibility to deliver on their promises; indeed, within days of the vote, the winning side had erased most of its website, like a drugs cartel torching the evidence before the police arrived. Moreover the 2016 vote has imported a theocratic principle into British politics, in which competing sects stalk the political landscape, warning heretics and unbelievers that “Brexit is our God, and Theresa/Boris/Jeremy is its prophet”. The result turbo-charged the most dangerous idea to which a democracy can fall victim: the fallacy that “the will of the people” forms a single, unitary intelligence, issuing instructions to which all must bend the knee. It is a fantasy made possible only by the ruthless suppression of dissenting voices, casting critics as traitors, MPs as “saboteurs” and judges as “enemies of the people”.

Trying to solve the problems of one referendum by launching another might seem the political equivalent of drinking through a hangover. But Parliament is deadlocked and no party has a united position that it could put to a general election. We cannot break that deadlock by repeating the flawed exercise of 2016. But the Diceyan model of a “People’s Veto” offers something more hopeful.

A vote on a concrete proposition, whether Theresa May’s deal, “Norway Plus” or an alternative, would focus debate on the strengths and weaknesses of a specific policy, not on the abstract utopias (and dystopias) that predominated in 2016. Its advocates would be those charged with implementing it, in the knowledge that their claims would be judged against results if they won. The principle of responsible government could be enhanced, not diminished, by such a vote.

At present, both Mrs May and Mr Corbyn oppose a further referendum. If that changes, it will not be for reasons of constitutional principle, but because they cannot make a decision on Brexit without blowing their party to pieces. If we want to avoid deepening our political crisis, we need to think more carefully about the form such a referendum might take.

The path from “the People’s Vote” to a “People’s Veto” marks a return to an older constitutional tradition. It might just turn the referendum from a problem into a solution.

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Robert Saunders is a senior lecturer in history and the deputy director of the Mile End Institute at Queen Mary University of London. He is also the author of “Yes to Europe!: The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain,” among other books.