Brexit: The Arguments for a Second Referendum or “People’s Vote”
[N.B. This is a second draft under review and will undoubtedly undergo some editing for clarity and consistency]
Politics is often a confusing subject — we are rarely taught it formally, our media consumption tends to be biased, and publications are often more interested in opinion and viewership/readership than facts or education.
This is the first instalment of ‘Politics Primer’, a series of articles, the objective of which is to provide straightforward fact-based explanations of the main current issues and questions in politics. Our intended audience is people who are becoming interested in politics, but want to better understand what terms actually mean, how these ideas work, and what’s happening in politics at the moment.
I’ve tried to write it less as a dry textbook or Wikipedia entry, and more as an informal guide. While we’re aiming to make this series fact-based, it doesn’t mean that it’ll be entirely neutral — there will sometimes be opinion, but it should be clear when that’s the case, and we don’t want to beat anyone over the head with things they don’t know about, or disagree with us on. With time, we’ll aim to return to each piece and provide linked sources throughout, but are happy to provide further reading to anyone upon request in the meantime.
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Given recent events in the last 2 weeks, there has been a lot of talk about new/second referendums (dubbed by some as a “People’s Vote”), as well as about the deadlock happening in Brexit discussions, and all the difficulties that are happening as a result.
The main problem at the moment is this: in order for us to leave the European Union, we must reach an agreement of HOW to leave which is acceptable to the EU, our parliament (that is, a sufficient number of MPs), our government (the Conservatives, with support from the DUP), and the Conservative party itself (as it has many factions within the party itself, all with different ideas).
Any agreement must ultimately command the support of a majority of MPs — not all MPs have to vote, so the numbers who vote in favour of it must outnumber the ones who vote against it, though it’s hard to say exactly how many people need to be won over to voting in an agreement’s favour as some MPs might ‘abstain’ and not vote either for or against it.
Our government (usually called “‘the executive”, in contrast to the wider parliament which is “the legislature”), which is made up of the Prime Minister and her Cabinet (e.g. the Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Secretary of State for Education etc.) have their own ideas, and they are the ones ultimately responsible for overseeing the negotiations with the EU, and guiding the process more generally. In fact, they’ve been responsible for almost all of the Brexit process, as parliament have only become meaningfully involved very recently, which is why the disagreement over the deal has actually become a more obvious problem; before Parliament were meaningfully involved, the Government could do whatever they want, and largely ignore what MPs were saying.
Within the Conservative party (and in Labour too, to a lesser extent) there are a number of different groups who have different views on what Brexit should be like — some don’t think it should happen at all, others think we should have a ‘softer’ Brexit (we’ll come back to that), others think May’s deal is the one to vote for, and another lot think that leaving with No Deal is the best idea.
May’s main problem is that because she has a very small working majority she needs the support of the DUP, and ALL of her MPs to have a chance of passing anything in parliament that the other parties disagree with. Her proposal is unacceptable to all the other parties. Often, where a government has more parliamentary support (they have a lot more seats/MPs than the opposition), they can pass most things that they want. In this case though, it’s the disagreement amongst Conservative MPs that means she can’t scrape together enough support to approve her deal.
Similarly, because the referendum was so simplistic (effectively “do you want to leave or remain?”) it didn’t tell us what people who voted to Leave wanted except to leave the political union. For example, some Leave voters wanted to leave all European things including the economic institutions (the ‘single market’ and the ‘customs union’), while other Leave voters assumed that we would stay in an economic union, and leave only the political union. This lack of understanding of what the electorate actually want, in meaningful detail, meant that defining what “Leave” or “Brexit” means is very hard, and nobody currently has the right answer as to what is the most democratically popular idea. May, and some of the more hard-line Leave voices, claim that the referendum gave a clear mandate for leaving absolutely everything European, but this is simply not the case.
So, given that May cannot pass her current deal through Parliament, what are the options from here?
(1) No Deal Brexit — She could give up entirely on getting a Brexit agreement, wait for the ‘Article 50’ deadline (March 29th) to pass, and then we’d end up leaving the EU without her having to do anything. No Deal is currently the default position. This would be VERY bad, and we’ll come back to why later.
(2) A Different Deal — She could change what she’s proposing in her agreement. The issue here is two-fold, as not only would her new proposal have to get support from a majority of MPs, but any major changes would have to be agreed to by the EU.
There are many proposals that the EU might agree to, such as taking a similar deal to other nations, like Norway. Equally, there are some things some MPs might demand, like removing the ‘Irish backstop’, which the EU would simply never agree to.
May has painted herself into a corner at the moment, because she’s said she will not change any of her “red lines” (the major restrictions on what she’s willing to accept in a deal, like allowing free movement of people, which is a requirement of being in a ‘single market’), so there’s not really a whole lot she can change to encourage people to support a different deal. If she changed her mind on ditching some of her red lines, then she might be able to put a different deal to parliament, have it passed, and we’d leave the EU under those terms. However, given her unwillingness to do so up to this point, this seems unlikely.
(3) General Election — Either May could call a general election, or MPs could pass a motion of ‘No Confidence’ in May (they’ve tried once, and it failed, but they could do it again), which would force an election too, unless Labour managed to find enough MPs to set up a working government instead, but the numbers of MPs that all the parties have make this quite a difficult target to reach. When people refer to the “parliamentary arithmetic” of the situation, they basically mean that finding enough MPs to get a majority for something is really hard given the current strength of each party in this Parliament; if one of the factions was more powerful in terms of MPs, then this would be less of an issue.
The problem with this is that Brexit isn’t really a party political issue — some Labour voters are Leavers, some Conservative voters are Remainers, and unless parties ran on a very clear proposal of what Brexit should look like (e.g. “we will push to leave, but renegotiate a Norway-style deal”), then this isn’t really going to clear anything up; we’ll probably still not know what the country wants from Brexit, because the parties don’t want to limit themselves to one particular idea, and risk losing voters who prefer other ideas.
MPs are also conflicted by lots of different considerations — representing their constituents’ interests (this is technically their job), representing their constituent’s beliefs (this isn’t their job, because in theory we choose them to make decisions for us using their best judgement), and keeping their party happy i.e. ‘toeing the party line’. A general election doesn’t help to end this problem, as at least 2 of these things are usually in conflict when it comes to Brexit.
(4) Parliamentary votes — Parliament hosts a series of votes to explore what alternative ideas would be able to get enough parliamentary support i.e. they gauge what ideas might win between crashing out with no deal, stopping Brexit altogether, pursuing a Norway-style model etc. This would certainly help to bring clarity, and end the deadlock, though it would risk the public feeling like the democratic voice was being overlooked in favour of the opinions of our representatives. This approach also assumes that MPs would be given a ‘free vote’ where their party doesn’t demand that they vote a certain way.
(5) Take it to the People — We undertake some kind of democratic exercise which will help us to better understand what the public now wants, and then expect parliament will follow the ‘will of the people’ that we’ve established from this. The most widely-discussed way of doing this would be a new and more clearly defined referendum, with multiple questions to give us richer answers (e.g. would you like to Leave or Remain; if we leave would you want to leave the single market, the customs union, the ECJ etc.), or a ‘Citizen’s Assembly’, where a representative sample of the public would be brought together to discuss it and work it out, as happened in Ireland recently for their abortion debate.
So, we’ve established that there are clear problems in fixing the deadlock with May proposing a different deal (2), and holding a general election (3). A series of parliamentary votes could certainly help, though it risks leaving the public feeling alienated (4), and we shouldn’t remotely consider a no-deal (1). By elimination, this leaves us with taking the matter back to the people in some way (5), and that’s without even having discussed the positive reasons for doing so!
Before we move on to looking at the benefits and reasons for a second referendum (rather than just ruling out other alternatives), let’s take a brief moment to consider why No Deal should really not be an option.
No Deal means not only defaulting to ‘WTO terms’ for our trade, but also losing ALL of the agreements governing bigger picture questions like security, medicine, freight, air travel etc.
Even if we decided to leave all of the main institutions of the EU (a very ‘Hard’ Brexit), we would want to do so in a considered way with time to solve the big questions about non-trade issues. This is why many Brexit arrangements have involved having an ‘implementation period’ after the day we leave the EU, to help make sure that we can smooth out the change from being a member one day, to not being one in the next. Crashing out with ‘No Deal’ means very serious risks to our supply chains (i.e. how goods get in to and out of the country), which is especially important when it comes to food and medicine. Crashing out also threatens our security, as we are then excluded from various European crime and intelligence resources which help us to protect the country’s safety.
Equally, while certain commentators say that WTO terms are fine, these people usually have a clear agenda. Effectively, no countries trade just on WTO terms, they usually have other trade agreements to go along with it. At the moment we have absolutely none agreed, and wouldn’t do so for a fair while. In the short term that likely means a collapse in our agricultural industries (because of cheap imports flooding the market), and a lot of complications for our export industries, as we’d likely remove all barriers to imported trade like product certifications, safety inspections etc., so people we in turn try to export to couldn’t trust the quality and provenance of our products.
If we’re on WTO terms, some commentators claim we could just remove all tariffs (charges placed on imports) and let goods flow in, though by doing so not only would we risk the industries we have that are protected from cheap imports (especially the case when it comes to agricultural goods), but we would also give away one of the crucial bargaining chips we have when it comes around to negotiating trade deals. If we’ve already given other countries the right to trade with us with no barriers or restrictions, what else do we have to offer them in exchange for accessing their markets freely too?
No Deal was always a negotiation tactic (the other party should believe you might walk away, so you can be more demanding), but it was never seriously intended by anyone to be a real-life proposition. A No Deal situation would be catastrophic for this country, which is why so many politicians of every stripe are talking about taking it off the table.
You can find an abundance of other sources which can explain these ideas in far more technical detail (we may even write one ourselves), and I’ll likely go back and link those in later drafts of this piece.
So, returning to a new referendum (or similar), let’s explore why it’s not only a good choice because the other ones are bad or imperfect, but also because it’s a good idea in its own right. I’ll focus for now on a new referendum, though the same arguments apply to a ‘Citizen’s Assembly’.
(A) Clarity — the most important reason for a second vote would be to ask the questions that should’ve been asked the first time around. We have no idea what the public really think about the different ways of leaving the EU. Even if there wasn’t a Remain option, it would be a worthwhile exercise in discovering what the UK public feel about the level of involvement they want with the EU — perhaps we should stay very close, but just a step away (Norway style), perhaps we should be only a step away from a complete divorce (Canada Plus), or maybe we want to close the door entirely (Hard Brexit). A new vote would give a clear democratic mandate to whatever is decided, and politicians wouldn’t be able to take cover behind the uncertainty that exists now. The deadlock would end, and we’d finally understand the real will of the people.
(B) Demographic Changes — As crass as it may sound, a disproportionately large number of Brexit voters have died, and a lot of young people (who are disproportionately likely to vote to Remain) have come of voting age. Indeed, if all ages voted the same way as 2016, on the basis of anticipated deaths since the referendum, the weekend before last marked the country’s turning point from Leave to Remain. What was the will of the people in June 2016 is now, in fact, not the will of the people in January 2019, and even less so in March 2019 and beyond. As Brexit is a major constitutional change, and not a case of “just do it because it’s been voted for, and you can change it later”, it’s fair to say that testing the will of the people again, given the other factors looked at here, is a reasonable democratic exercise.
(C) Great Understanding & Confirmation — the Leave campaign told some pretty spectacular porkies that trusting voters relied upon when making their decision. Now that we know a lot more about what Brexit might look like (there’s no £350m extra per week for the NHS, no “easiest trade deal in history” waiting for us, and all the rest of it), and the potential benefits that some Leave voters were won over by turned out to be false, it’s reasonable to see if opinions have changed. This is one of the most significant changes to how our country operates, and if we have a confirmation prompt from something as mundane as Microsoft Word to save changes to a document before quitting, surely having an equivalent for serious changes to the country is just a commonsense measure? If Leave for any reason is no longer the winning option, then it didn’t deserve to be, and if it is the leading choice then we’ll have a far clearer idea of what kind of Leave we need to pursue, and far less room for anyone to challenge the democratic will behind it.
(D) Integrity — While there is certainly a fair bit of truth to “everybody lies” in politics, the Leave campaign peddled a lot more ‘untruths’ than Remain did. More pressingly though, there is fairly clear evidence that there was undue influence in the referendum, caused by both ‘dark money’ from overseas (while we cannot be certain at this stage, it’s likely that Russia funded Brexit groups to destabilise the UK and EU), as well as serial overspending and misconduct from the Leave campaign(s). Others might argue that the government’s pro-Remain pamphlet it sent out wasn’t fair play either. Suffice to say that the waters were muddied enough that having a ‘cleaner’ referendum with more stringent controls on campaign spending and conduct will allow for a result with greater integrity. No matter your views on Brexit, Leave or Remain, Hard or Soft, expecting high democratic standards should be something we can all agree on and demand from our political system.
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In conclusion, we’ve established that the default of No Brexit is unacceptable, and that the only way to actually get any progress on making Brexit happen (or not) is by doing something different. May’s strategy of renegotiation won’t work, elections won’t really clear the air, and while parliament can discuss which of May’s red lines it’d like to drop, they’re still feeling around in the dark trying to grasp what it is the public actually wants. The only democratic way to proceed and clear this unbreakable deadlock is to take the matter back to the people. You can’t really have ‘too much’ democracy.
Note that at no point have I brought up the thin margin that Leave beat Remain by. To my mind, that’s not really relevant. The reason for a second/new referendum are all of the other factors, not because there was only a few % in it. If that were a sound argument, then we might end up holding endless referendums as the winner orbits around a 50/50 split. Nor is recommending a People’s Vote a secret code for “keep running votes until they give us the right answer”. It’s clear that multiple additional referendums would be unreasonable, but ONE more has many good reasons supporting it.
