Why DID we vote leave?
We must now build a new deal with Europe, but the nature of the deal we should aim for is unclear
A lot of people in Britain believe we should never have been given a referendum on whether we should leave the EU in the first place. They believe it is too complex a subject for the public to understand, and that our leaders, whom we elect to make decisions on our behalf, shirked their responsibility by putting such an important decision to the people.
You may agree with this viewpoint or you may not. One thing is certain though — disentangling ourselves from the EU through a public decision was always going to be tricky, and we’re beginning to see why in the aftermath of the vote.
The choice the UK faced was a strange one. We could remain a member of the European Union, and while to many it’s still a slightly mysterious body, we at least know roughly where we stand within it. On the other hand, we could choose to leave, and get… well, that depends on who you ask. Multiple models were suggested for Britain’s relationship with the EU post-Brexit, but then many leave campaigners rejected all of these and claimed we’d get a ‘bespoke’ deal.
This was the source of a lot of the confusion over ‘the facts’ — most of the time the two campaigns had different figures because they were anticipating different post-Brexit scenarios.
In theory, it would have been better to negotiate an exit deal with the EU before holding the referendum, but in practice, this probably wouldn’t have worked. There would be little incentive for the EU to spend time and resources negotiating a deal for Britain which may never have to be used, and if they were to propose one, they could have just chosen to offer a terrible deal, in order to persuade UK voters to vote remain.
It had to be the case then that if we were going to vote, we’d be voting without truly understanding what we were voting for.
The problem now, though, is that it’s unclear what type of deal our next Prime Minister should be trying to pursue. We know from the results that the majority want to leave, but we don’t know what type of situation they want to enter. Did the Leave campaign win because the people want to control immigration? If that’s the case, it would be silly to enter the free market and accept freedom of movement; that’s a situation which no one wanted. Or was it an issue of democracy? In that case, free movement is fine, but we should probably try and make sure we’re bound by as little EU regulatory legislation as possible. Perhaps instead it was just a middle finger to the establishment, in which case it’s potentially achieved its aim in getting Cameron to step down, and we may as well stay in the EU after all. Or maybe the British population has been secretly mad this whole time about the EU’s treatment of it’s poorer Eurozone members in southern Europe, and we should cut all ties with an organisation our people are so ideologically dead set against…
It made sense for David Cameron, as a Remain campaigner, to step down. His ideal post-Brexit deal would involve as much integration as possible with the Union, which almost certain isn’t what the Leave voters had in mind. The problem is though, do the Tory leadership runners understand any better? Does Michael Gove truly understand what the leave vote signalled? If not, we could end up negotiating a deal which both remain and leave voters are unsatisfied with, which would mean the referendum just served to make everyone unhappy (and to propel whoever wins the leadership contest to power.)
Interestingly, this leadership contest could be where the issue is decided. If the candidates’ manifestos contain different layouts for how they want our relationship with Europe to look, the winner will claim a mandate to carry theirs out. This is hardly democratic though; Conservative MPs will narrow down the five choices to just two next Tuesday, and only Conservative Party members get to choose between the final two.
If a general election is called, the wider public may get a choice. The Tories would stand by whatever deal their leader had set out, and the other parties would choose their own (the Lib Dems’ Tim Farron has already pledged to stand on a ‘remain’ platform.) This though would still be problematic; elections are fought on a multitude of issues, and a win for one party would not necessarily be an endorsement for their vision of the UK’s future relationship with the EU.
It’s ironic, then, that while many voted to leave the EU because of its supposedly undemocratic nature, our new deal with the Union may itself be decided in the corridors of power, with no real input from the public, and what we end up with could be completely divorced from what leave voters wanted in the first place.
