Reflections on the Brexit Debate
Brexit has taken Debating London on quite a journey this year. In April, we brought Brexiters, Bremainers, and undecided voters together to discuss how to make sense of the EU debate. In June, the night before the referendum itself, we held our own debate, inviting six of our members to sit on the panel and asking three of them to swap sides and defend the opposite of what they actually believed. In July, we held our post-mortem, bringing the panel back to share their experiences of debating Brexit in front of a live audience, and inviting two guest speakers to talk us through what happens next.
You can follow this link to watch the video of our People’s EU Debate and listen to a recording of our follow-up discussion: what next after Brexit? We’ve been blessed to have some phenomenal debaters on our panels and hear from some experts in the field including an immensely powerful speech from former the BBC’s former Head of Political Research, David Cowling, on what needs to be done to heal the divisions so brutally exposed by the referendum.
As for my own conclusions on what will surely go down as one of the most politically turbulent episodes of British history in my lifetime at least, there are a few things that come to mind:
Caught inside the London Bubble
It had genuinely been my hope going into this that our work would help people make up their minds about where they stood on Brexit. What became clear as the dust settled on June 24th is that the views of Londoners had next to no impact on the overall result. No meaningful impact can be had on the way big questions of public policy and national values are debated without getting out of London and reaching out to the whole country and its diverse blend of communities and attitudes.
Appreciating the role of emotion
When you spend so much time training yourself to think logically and analyse information dispassionately, you end up taking quite a dismissive condescending attitude towards the role of emotions — at least I did anyway. Reaching out to people who disagree with you and asking them to listen requires first and foremost an ability to empathise with their point of view. The depth of feeling on both sides that this referendum revealed, from the disdain for experts by leavers and the blanket labelling of leave voters as racists by remainers, has surely made restoring empathy between both sides a top priority for the new Prime Minister.
A crisis in public debate
After the People’s EU Debate on June 22nd, many of the audience voters came up to me afterwards to say it was the best debate on the EU they had seen so far. As flattering as that was, when a group of lay-speakers outshines the leading politicians of the land in a public debate, it gives you more cause for concern than celebration. I attended a few of the public debates contested by leading MPs and MEPs too and was taken aback by the prevalence of empty assertions, personal attacks, and untested assumptions. If we are to reverse this decline in the quality of public debate, then we the voters need to stop judging our politicians by how much we trust them not to mislead us and start equipping ourselves to more effectively hold them to account.
What next for Debating London?
Well, we postponed a pre-planned debate on the ethics of keeping animals in zoos — there are more things we want to talk about other than Brexit — so that’s what we will be debating next on Wednesday 20th July.
Like all our public debates, it’s free of charge and open to all, so please do come along! Here are all the details.
