In May 2016, Nigel Farage, the leader of UKIP was interviewed by the Daily Mirror two months before the referendum on membership of the European Union (EU). He told them that, as far as he was concerned, a narrow vote to remain in the EU would not be final: “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way. If the remain campaign win two-thirds to one-third that ends it.” The actual result of course was the other way round - a 52% victory for the leave campaign. However, Farage, UKIP, and their fellow-travellers in other parties now assert that their narrow victory represents the ‘will of the people’ and oppose a further referendum. Indeed, some claim that people who oppose leaving the EU (and high court judges that decide that changing the laws of the UK requires a Parliamentary vote) are ‘traitors’ and ‘enemies of the people’.
Farage’s comments reveal the basic secret of referendums: a political party only promotes a referendum when they think they can win it. If they succeed (even by a small margin), they declare this to be the final decision of the people. If they lose, they wait a few years until they estimate they have a better chance of success and then demand that a further referendum is needed. This is usually justified by saying that changes in circumstances invalidate the previous ‘will of the people’.
This has already happened in the case of the EU. The first referendum was not the one on 27th June 2016, but the one in June 1975, two years after the UK joined what was then called the ‘European Communities’ (EC). As with the referendum this year, the one in 1975 was the product of political opportunism. The governing party at the time was deeply divided, although the main opposition party was largely united in favour of remaining. A referendum therefore was a device to allow the prime minister of the day to remain in office even though several members of his cabinet publicly disagreed on this - the most fundamental political issue of the day. The prime minister in 1975 was Harold Wilson and the divided party was the Labour Party. The opposition Conservative Party, then led by Margaret Thatcher, strongly supported remaining in the EC.
The result in 1975 was a vote in favour of remaining in the EC of 67%. This majority was indeed large enough to ‘settle the question’, but only for about 20 years. By the general election of 1997, several candidates stood for the ‘Referendum Party’ formed by, controlled and funded by Sir James Goldsmith. This campaigned for another referendum - a demand eventually adopted by UKIP, which absorbed most of the Referendum Party’s support when it closed after the death of Goldsmith. Opponents of the EU clearly did not feel bound by the decisive vote in the earlier referendum. They did, however, argue that the ‘will of the people’ expressed in 1975 should be overturned because the public had been misled about the true nature of the EU: that they had never been told that it would involve a surrender of sovereignty. I have shown in a previous post that this is untrue, and that the official leaflet sent to every household before the referendum in 1975 explicitly stated that entry into the EC would involve some loss of sovereignty. However, opponents of the EU were correct in thinking that increased immigration from the EU (coupled with a generation of spurious tabloid newspaper reports about EU regulations on straight bananas and the like) would give them a chance of victory.
There is a similar trajectory with the referendum on Scottish independence. In 2014, 55% voted to remain part of the UK, compared with 45% who voted to leave. Despite promises before the referendum that this would be a final decision, the Scottish National Party (SNP) leadership started to call for a second referendum only two years later, immediately after the referendum to leave the EU. This was ostensibly because ‘circumstances have changed’, but really because the SNP had experienced a surge in support at the general election in 2015 and therefore believed that a second referendum would go their way.
The Scottish and EU referendums both illustrate a further secret: that referendums impede effective policy-making. During the EU referendum campaign, the Leave side failed to state what their alternative to the EU would be. Options ranged from those who, like Michael Gove, seem to envisage the future of the UK as a sort of West European version of North Korea - free of all foreign treaties but with nuclear weapons - to those like Boris Johnson, who argued that the UK could somehow miraculously gain all the advantages of being in the EU single market but without incurring any of the costs. This division of opinion has continued in the current government, which has responded by not having any overt strategy for leaving the EU at all (other than repeating the meaningless sentence that ‘Brexit means Brexit’). The pro-independence side in the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014 likewise failed to clarify how an independent Scotland would function. The Scottish National Party based its claim that Scottish public finances would be viable on a price of oil double the current price in world markets, assumed that an independent Scotland could join the sterling area without any cost, and proposed that membership of the EU after independence would somehow occur automatically.
This confusion and vagueness means that people voting in these referendums were not presented with a clear choice between alternatives. Even if they had been, their vote could never represent the ‘will of the people’. This is because there is no way that all 60 million British people can have a single will, fixed for all eternity. Instead, people vote on a particular day for many different reasons. In some cases, this follows careful reflection. But many are instead swayed by scare stories or dubious campaign promises (such as the claims that leaving the EU would release millions of pounds a day for the NHS, or that the country would shortly be invaded by the population of Turkey). Some even vote for no reason at all: ‘that it will stir things up a bit’ (a good argument for jumping off a cliff if you are feeling bored). This all means that the result of a referendum will probably vary from one year (or even one day) to the next.
Arguing that one referendum is the irrevocable ‘will of the people’ is therefore nonsense. It is also a denial of democracy. It is rather like saying that because the Labour Party won a large majority in the 1997 General Election, this represented the ‘will of the people’, and that no further general elections should be held. Democracy means the right of the voters to change their mind, whether it is about the politicians they choose to represent them or the issues they vote on in a referendum.
So the wise thing for politicians to do who oppose leaving the EU is to go along with the pretence of negotiation for a number of months until it becomes apparent, even to the British electorate, that leaving the world’s largest trading area will reduce our standard of living, not significantly reduce immigration and not generate some mythical income for the NHS. Then, the Government can claim that ‘circumstances have changed’ and go for a further referendum that they would hope to win. This is, of course, more or less what the Government is doing at the moment.
Farage’s comments reveal the basic secret of referendums: a political party only promotes a referendum when they think they can win it. If they succeed (even by a small margin), they declare this to be the final decision of the people. If they lose, they wait a few years until they estimate they have a better chance of success and then demand that a further referendum is needed. This is usually justified by saying that changes in circumstances invalidate the previous ‘will of the people’.
This has already happened in the case of the EU. The first referendum was not the one on 27th June 2016, but the one in June 1975, two years after the UK joined what was then called the ‘European Communities’ (EC). As with the referendum this year, the one in 1975 was the product of political opportunism. The governing party at the time was deeply divided, although the main opposition party was largely united in favour of remaining. A referendum therefore was a device to allow the prime minister of the day to remain in office even though several members of his cabinet publicly disagreed on this - the most fundamental political issue of the day. The prime minister in 1975 was Harold Wilson and the divided party was the Labour Party. The opposition Conservative Party, then led by Margaret Thatcher, strongly supported remaining in the EC.
The result in 1975 was a vote in favour of remaining in the EC of 67%. This majority was indeed large enough to ‘settle the question’, but only for about 20 years. By the general election of 1997, several candidates stood for the ‘Referendum Party’ formed by, controlled and funded by Sir James Goldsmith. This campaigned for another referendum - a demand eventually adopted by UKIP, which absorbed most of the Referendum Party’s support when it closed after the death of Goldsmith. Opponents of the EU clearly did not feel bound by the decisive vote in the earlier referendum. They did, however, argue that the ‘will of the people’ expressed in 1975 should be overturned because the public had been misled about the true nature of the EU: that they had never been told that it would involve a surrender of sovereignty. I have shown in a previous post that this is untrue, and that the official leaflet sent to every household before the referendum in 1975 explicitly stated that entry into the EC would involve some loss of sovereignty. However, opponents of the EU were correct in thinking that increased immigration from the EU (coupled with a generation of spurious tabloid newspaper reports about EU regulations on straight bananas and the like) would give them a chance of victory.
There is a similar trajectory with the referendum on Scottish independence. In 2014, 55% voted to remain part of the UK, compared with 45% who voted to leave. Despite promises before the referendum that this would be a final decision, the Scottish National Party (SNP) leadership started to call for a second referendum only two years later, immediately after the referendum to leave the EU. This was ostensibly because ‘circumstances have changed’, but really because the SNP had experienced a surge in support at the general election in 2015 and therefore believed that a second referendum would go their way.
The Scottish and EU referendums both illustrate a further secret: that referendums impede effective policy-making. During the EU referendum campaign, the Leave side failed to state what their alternative to the EU would be. Options ranged from those who, like Michael Gove, seem to envisage the future of the UK as a sort of West European version of North Korea - free of all foreign treaties but with nuclear weapons - to those like Boris Johnson, who argued that the UK could somehow miraculously gain all the advantages of being in the EU single market but without incurring any of the costs. This division of opinion has continued in the current government, which has responded by not having any overt strategy for leaving the EU at all (other than repeating the meaningless sentence that ‘Brexit means Brexit’). The pro-independence side in the Scottish referendum campaign in 2014 likewise failed to clarify how an independent Scotland would function. The Scottish National Party based its claim that Scottish public finances would be viable on a price of oil double the current price in world markets, assumed that an independent Scotland could join the sterling area without any cost, and proposed that membership of the EU after independence would somehow occur automatically.
This confusion and vagueness means that people voting in these referendums were not presented with a clear choice between alternatives. Even if they had been, their vote could never represent the ‘will of the people’. This is because there is no way that all 60 million British people can have a single will, fixed for all eternity. Instead, people vote on a particular day for many different reasons. In some cases, this follows careful reflection. But many are instead swayed by scare stories or dubious campaign promises (such as the claims that leaving the EU would release millions of pounds a day for the NHS, or that the country would shortly be invaded by the population of Turkey). Some even vote for no reason at all: ‘that it will stir things up a bit’ (a good argument for jumping off a cliff if you are feeling bored). This all means that the result of a referendum will probably vary from one year (or even one day) to the next.
Arguing that one referendum is the irrevocable ‘will of the people’ is therefore nonsense. It is also a denial of democracy. It is rather like saying that because the Labour Party won a large majority in the 1997 General Election, this represented the ‘will of the people’, and that no further general elections should be held. Democracy means the right of the voters to change their mind, whether it is about the politicians they choose to represent them or the issues they vote on in a referendum.
So the wise thing for politicians to do who oppose leaving the EU is to go along with the pretence of negotiation for a number of months until it becomes apparent, even to the British electorate, that leaving the world’s largest trading area will reduce our standard of living, not significantly reduce immigration and not generate some mythical income for the NHS. Then, the Government can claim that ‘circumstances have changed’ and go for a further referendum that they would hope to win. This is, of course, more or less what the Government is doing at the moment.
