Does it matter what Vote Leave said about the single market?
There is an ongoing debate about whether Vote Leave campaigners were clear before 23 June that their position was that the UK should leave the single market.
That debate is, however, irrelevant. It really does not matter what Vote Leave said. There is simply no mandate either way. The only mandate is that the UK leave the EU. It is now up to Parliament to decide how that mandate should be honoured, and deciding (for example) to stay in the EEA would be an entirely democratic response to the 23 June vote.
Why doesn’t it matter what Vote Leave said? The short and complete answer is that – unlike in a general election – voters who voted Leave were not voting for a Vote Leave (let alone a Leave.EU) platform. They were voting – only – to leave the EU.
That that is so can be demonstrated by considering the position of a voter who believed on 23 June that the UK should leave the EU but that the EEA was right way forward. Which way should she have voted? There is no doubt that, given the question on the ballot paper (which was silent on the EEA or single market), she should have put her cross in the “leave” box. And it beggars belief that Vote Leave campaigners would have suggested she do anything else. But her vote was not a vote to leave the single market or to turn down EEA membership.
It is not clear – and will never be clear – how many voters took that view. All one can say is that it was a view shared by a number of Leave campaigners, such as Richard North (see his blog at www.eureferendum.com) and, at various stages, other Leave supporters such as Owen Paterson, and even Nigel Farage and Arron Banks. Many voters may not have had any clear view on the point. But some voters’ main reason for voting Leave could well have been concerns about the UK becoming dragged into the Euro or a European army, or dislike of the Common Agricultural Policy or Common Fisheries Policy: all concerns highlighted by Leave campaigners but fully addressed by leaving the EU and joining the EEA. Such voters may also have valued their rights to work and study freely across Europe, their rights to have their qualifications recognised across Europe, and wanted to retain the economic and cost-saving benefits of common regulatory regimes such as the medicines regime. These are all matters protected in the EEA. And even voters concerned about control of migration may, reasonably, have concluded that the emergency brake in Article 112 EEA Agreement was good enough to deal with their concerns (indeed, Leavers such as Daniel Hannan have accepted that if the Cameron deal of February 2016 had contained such a brake, Remain might well have won).
The key point is that any such voter should have voted – and would have been advised by Vote Leave to vote – to leave the EU. But if such a voter were now told she had voted against the EEA, she would rightly object that she had done no such thing. She could – also rightly – go on to point out that there is a crucial difference between a general election, where you choose between defined platforms and choose one platform warts and all, and a referendum with a simple binary choice on one policy issue, where the only issue decided is the issue actually on the ballot paper, not the various sub-issues discussed during the campaign.
The true position is that it is now up to our democratically elected politicians to decide whether the EEA is the right option. Of course, they will want to – and should – be mindful of whether that delivers what the electorate, or at least the bulk of it, wants (or is prepared to live with as part of a compromise). But that electorate includes not only the unknowable number of “Leave” voters for whom the EEA delivers what they wanted, but also the over 48% who voted to stay in the EU, and who can reasonably be supposed to prefer that option to options that seek to sever the UK further from the rest of the continent, probably losing the advantages of EEA membership set out above. Politicians may – properly – decide that, on its merits, the EEA is not the right way forward. But that argument on the merits cannot properly be shut down by false claims that that option is foreclosed by the 23 June vote. As a matter of basic constitutional principle, is the job of elected politicians to represent, and take into account the views of, all their voters, and not just the subset who happened to agree with Vote Leave’s views on the single market – whatever they were.
