Government by Referendum

Government by referendum QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 1 25/01/2018 15:15 ii POCKETPOCKET POLITICSPOLITICS SERIES EDITOR: BILL JONES SERIES EDITOR: BILL JONES Pocket politics presents short, pithy summaries of complex topicsPocket on politics socio- presents political issuesshort, pithyboth insummaries Britain and of overseas.complex Academicallytopics on socio-political sound, accessible issues bothand aimedin Britain at the and interested overseas. Academicallygeneral reader, sound, the accessibleseries will andaddress aimed a subject at the interested range includinggeneral political reader, ideas, the series economics, will address society, a subjectthe machinery range of includinggovernment political and international ideas, economics, issues. society, Unusually, the machineryperhaps, ofauthors government are encouraged, and international should issues.they choose, Unusually, to offer perhaps, their authorsown areconclusions encouraged, rather should than they strive choose, for mere to offeracademic their own conclusionsobjectivity. Therather series than will strive provide for mere stimulating academic intellectual objectivity. accessThe series to the will problems provide of stimulating the modern intellectual world in aaccess user- friendly to the problems of the modernformat. world in a user-friendly format. Previously published The TrumpPreviously revolt publishedEdward Ashbee ReformThe of Trumpthe House revolt of LordsEdward Philip Ashbee Norton Lobbying: An appraisal Wyn Grant Power in modern Russia: Strategy and mobilisation Andrew Monaghan Reform of the House of Lords Philip Norton QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 2 25/01/2018 15:15 Government by referendum Matt Qvortrup Manchester University Press QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 3 25/01/2018 15:15 Copyright © Matt Qvortrup 2018 The right of Matt Qvortrup to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 5261 3003 7 paperback First published 2018 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire Printed in Great Britain by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 4 25/01/2018 15:15 Mr. Alan Clark (Kensington and Chelsea): On a point of order, Madam Speaker. I am most grateful for your allowing me to raise a point of order that relates to the language in which we communicate in this Chamber. Your predecessor once rebuked me for using the language of the Common Market: I said ‘faute de mieux’, for which he immediately called me to order. The word ‘referendum’ is being scattered about, but, although my hon. Friend the Member for Lichfield (Mr. Fabricant) used the correct plural, I have often heard colleagues refer to ‘referendums’, which is an exceedingly ugly term. May we have from you, Madam Speaker, a ruling, or at least an expression of preference, as to whether we continue to use the Latin word, which many would think historically appropriate in the Chamber, or whether you have no objection to the continual Anglicisation of the term and the use of the word ‘referendums’? Were you to express a preference for the Latin form, which I hope you will, you would certainly be striking a blow for classical revivalism. Madam Speaker: The right hon. Gentleman raises an esoteric point, albeit hardly a point of order: more a matter of taste. I notice that, in the public Bills list, the word ‘referendums’ is used in relation to Scotland and Wales. The word ‘referendum’ was first used in English 150 years ago, according to the Oxford English dictionary, which I have just consulted, and I imagine that, after 150 years, the House is now used to it. The plural is a matter of taste, but I have always preferred the use of the English language to any Latin form; I hope that that provides some guidance. From Hansard, 3 June 1998, col. 282 QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 5 25/01/2018 15:15 QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 6 25/01/2018 15:15 Contents List of figures and tables page viii Acknowledgements ix Introduction 1 1 The world history of referendums 4 2 The history of the referendum in Britain 20 3 Brexit campaign: the anatomy of a bitter divorce battle 46 4 The myth of populist referendums 65 Concluding unscientific postscript 78 Further reading 86 References 88 Index 97 QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 7 25/01/2018 15:15 List of figures and tables Figures 1 Total number of referendums and plebiscites in Free, Partly Free and Not Free states 1973–2016 page 67 2 Average number of referendums per year in Free states 1973–2016 69 3 Referendums in democratic countries: constitutional, ad hoc and citizens’ initiatives 1900–2016 70 4 Average annual number of plebiscites in Not Free and Partly Free states 75 Tables 1 Referendums in the United Kingdom 1973–2014 39 2 Selected opinion polls: Scottish independence, 2014 43 3 Demographic drivers of Leave/Remain vote shares 62 QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 8 25/01/2018 15:15 Acknowledgements The author wishes to thank Laurence Morel, Marc Plattner, Vernon Bogdanor, David Altman, Matthew Shugart, Mogens Hansen, Laurence Whitehead, Philippe Schmitter, Yanina Welp, Guy Lachapelle, Thomas Webster, Bill Jones, Tony Mason and Arend Lijphart for critical discussions in the process of writ- ing this book. The author is especially grateful to Sebastian Qvortrup, BA (Hons), for critical proofreading and suggestions. London, 10 August 2017 QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 9 25/01/2018 15:15 QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 10 25/01/2018 15:15 INTRODUCTION 1 Introduction ‘REFERENDUMS’, wrote a columnist in The Observer in July 2016, ‘are the nuclear weapons of democracy. In parliamentary systems they are redundant. Seeking a simplistic binary yes/no answer to complex questions, they succumb to emotion and run amok. Their destructive aftermath lasts for generations’ (Keegan 2016: 43). It is a fair bet that the author did not vote for Brexit. The issue here is not to claim that politicians and pundits are fickle and unprincipled. The question here is an empirical one; was the pundit correct? Are there more referendums now than in the past? And, if so, has that made the world become more democratic? Could it be that referendums are linked with the growth in social movements in recent years and the tendency to use alternative channels to challenge the status quo (see Della Porta 2006)? Or, conversely, is the undeniable prominence of referendums under- mining representative democracy, as some (Topaloff 2017) have suggested? Or is the growing number of referendums just an indication of a weaker political class prone to miscalculations, as others (Glencross 2016) have suggested? All these questions are addressed in the following pages. However, the process did not quite follow the plan initially expected or planned. That is in the nature of things. The chapters in this short book were originally intended to form part of a coherent and theoretical whole; to show how the use of the referendum followed a strict, almost Hegelian pat- tern of the ‘unfolding of freedom’ throughout the ages – as the QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 1 25/01/2018 15:15 2 GOVERNMENT BY REFERENDUM German idealist philosopher might have put it. Yet the more I looked at the particular cases – especially the referendums in the United Kingdom held during the governments of Harold Wilson (1974–76) and David Cameron (2010–16) – the more it became clear to me that there were different, sometimes competing, patterns. Rather than following G.W.F. Hegel, I came to a con- clusion much like the one Ludwig Wittgenstein reached when he wrote his Philosophical Investigations. As this book is written in the same spirit of this much more illustrious work, I feel justified in quoting the Austrian philosopher at length: After several unsuccessful attempts to weld my results together into such a whole, I realized that I should never succeed. The best that I could write would never be more than philosophical remarks; my thoughts were soon crip- pled if I tried to force them on in any single direction against their natural inclination. – And this was, of course, connected with the very nature of the investigation. For this compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss- cross in every direction. – The philosophical remarks in this book are, as it were, a number of sketches of land- scapes which were made in the course of these long and involved journeys. The same or almost the same points were always being approached afresh from different direc- tions, and new sketches made. Very many of these were badly drawn or uncharacteristic, marked by all the defects of a weak draughtsman. And when they were rejected a number of tolerable ones were left, which now had to be arranged and sometimes cut down, so that if you looked at them you could get a picture of the landscape. Thus this book is really only an album. (Wittgenstein 1953: vii) This book, then, is a series of ‘remarks’ and ‘sketches’, which together form a mosaic rather than a coherent whole. In the first chapter the world history of the referendum is outlined. A chapter follows this on the British experience up to 2010. This was initially intended to be a short overview of the previous referendums – and a detailed analysis of more recent votes. However, when researching the book I noticed QVORTRUP 9781526130037 PRINT.indd 2 25/01/2018 15:15 INTRODUCTION 3 that the referendum on European Economic Community (EEC) membership in 1975 (in effect the first Brexit referendum) in important respects mirrored the vote in 2017 – and yet in other ways was completely different.

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