Showing posts with label referendum. Show all posts
Showing posts with label referendum. Show all posts
Saturday, 17 August 2024
Tuesday, 22 October 2019
Wednesday, 30 May 2018
How to defeat fake news: Lessons from Ireland's abortion referendum
Fintan O'Toole in The Guardian
In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on abortion, we should not lose sight of what did not happen. A vote on an emotive subject was not subverted. The tactics that have been so successful for the right and the far right in the UK, the US, Hungary and elsewhere did not work. A democracy navigated its way through some very rough terrain and came home not just alive but more alive than it was before. In the world we inhabit, these things are worth celebrating but also worth learning from. Political circumstances are never quite the same twice, but some of what happened and did not happen in Ireland surely contains more general lessons.
If the right failed spectacularly in Ireland, it was not for want of trying. Save the 8th, one of the two main groups campaigning against the removal of the anti-abortion clause from the Irish constitution, hired Vote Leave’s technical director, the Cambridge Analytica alumnus Thomas Borwick.
Save the 8th and the other anti-repeal campaign, Love Both, used apps developed by a US-based company, Political Social Media (PSM), which worked on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns. The small print told those using the apps that their data could be shared with other PSM clients, including the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Vote Leave.
Irish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.
Fake ‘facts’: A Save The 8th no campaign poster. Photograph: Laura Hutton/Alamy Live News
In all the excitement of what happened in Ireland’s referendum on abortion, we should not lose sight of what did not happen. A vote on an emotive subject was not subverted. The tactics that have been so successful for the right and the far right in the UK, the US, Hungary and elsewhere did not work. A democracy navigated its way through some very rough terrain and came home not just alive but more alive than it was before. In the world we inhabit, these things are worth celebrating but also worth learning from. Political circumstances are never quite the same twice, but some of what happened and did not happen in Ireland surely contains more general lessons.
If the right failed spectacularly in Ireland, it was not for want of trying. Save the 8th, one of the two main groups campaigning against the removal of the anti-abortion clause from the Irish constitution, hired Vote Leave’s technical director, the Cambridge Analytica alumnus Thomas Borwick.
Save the 8th and the other anti-repeal campaign, Love Both, used apps developed by a US-based company, Political Social Media (PSM), which worked on both the Brexit and Trump campaigns. The small print told those using the apps that their data could be shared with other PSM clients, including the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee and Vote Leave.
Irish voters were subjected to the same polarising tactics that have worked so well elsewhere: shamelessly fake “facts” (the claim, for example, that abortion was to be legalised up to six months into pregnancy); the contemptuous dismissal of expertise (the leading obstetrician Peter Boylan was told in a TV debate to “go back to school”); deliberately shocking visual imagery (posters of aborted foetuses outside maternity hospitals); and a discourse of liberal elites versus the real people. But Irish democracy had an immune system that proved highly effective in resisting this virus. Its success suggests a democratic playbook with at least four good rules.
Fake ‘facts’: A Save The 8th no campaign poster. Photograph: Laura Hutton/Alamy Live News
First, trust the people. A crucial part of what happened in Ireland was an experiment in deliberative democracy. The question of how to deal with the constitutional prohibition on abortion – a question that has bedevilled the political and judicial systems for 35 years – was put to a Citizens’ Assembly, made up of 99 randomly chosen (but demographically representative) voters. These so-called ordinary people – truck drivers, homemakers, students, farmers – gave up their weekends to listen to 40 experts in medicine, law and ethics, to women affected by Ireland’s extremely restrictive laws and to 17 different lobby groups. They came up with recommendations that confounded most political and media insiders, by being much more open than expected – and much more open than the political system would have produced on its own.
It was these citizens who suggested entirely unrestricted access to abortion up to 12 weeks. Conservatives dismissed this process, in Trump style, as rigged (it wasn’t). They would have been much better off if they had actually listened to what these citizens were saying, and tried to understand what had persuaded them to take such a liberal position. The Irish parliament did listen – an all-party parliamentary committee essentially adopted the proposals of the Citizens’ Assembly. So did the government. And it turned out that a sample of “the people” actually knew pretty well what “the people” were thinking. If the Brexit referendum had been preceded by such a respectful, dignified and humble exercise in listening and thinking, it would surely have been a radically different experience.
Second, be honest. The yes side in the Irish debate handed its opponents a major tactical advantage but gained a huge strategic victory. It ceded an advantage in playing with all its cards turned up on the table. Technically, the vote was merely to repeal a clause in the constitution. There was no need to say what legislation the government hoped to enact afterwards. But the government chose to be completely clear about its intentions. It published a draft bill. This allowed opponents of reform to pick at, and often distort, points of detail. But it also completely undercut the reactionary politics of paranoia, the spectre of secret conspiracies. Honesty proved to be very good policy.
Yes campaigners did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause
Third, talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody. The reactionary movements have been thriving on tribalism. They divide voters into us and them – and all the better if they call us “deplorables”. The yes campaigners in Ireland – many of them young people, who are so often caricatured as the inhabitants of virtual echo chambers – refused to be tribal. They stayed calm and dignified. And when they were jeered at, they did not jeer back. They got out and talked (and listened) without prejudice. They did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause. They risked (and sometimes got) abuse by recognising no comfort zones and engaging everyone they could reach. It turned out that a lot of people were sick of being typecast as conservatives. It turned out that a lot of people like to be treated as complex, intelligent and compassionate individuals. A majority of farmers and more than 40% of the over-65s voted yes.
Finally, the old feminist slogan that the personal is political holds true, but it also works the other way around. The political has to be personalised. The greatest human immune system against the viruses of hysteria, hatred and lies is storytelling. Even when we don’t trust politicians or experts, we trust people telling their own tales. We trust ourselves to judge whether they are lying or being truthful. Irish women had to go out and tell their own stories, to make the painful and intimate into public property.
This is very hard to do, and it should not be necessary. But is unstoppably powerful. The process mattered, political leadership mattered, campaigning mattered. But it was stories that won. Exit polls showed that by far the biggest factors in determining how people voted were “people’s personal stories that were told to the media”, followed by “the experience of someone who they know”.
Women, in the intimate circles of family and friends or in the harsh light of TV studios, said: “This is who I am. I am one of you.” And voters responded: “Yes, you are.” If democracy can create the context for that humane exchange to happen over and over again, it can withstand everything its enemies throw at it.
It was these citizens who suggested entirely unrestricted access to abortion up to 12 weeks. Conservatives dismissed this process, in Trump style, as rigged (it wasn’t). They would have been much better off if they had actually listened to what these citizens were saying, and tried to understand what had persuaded them to take such a liberal position. The Irish parliament did listen – an all-party parliamentary committee essentially adopted the proposals of the Citizens’ Assembly. So did the government. And it turned out that a sample of “the people” actually knew pretty well what “the people” were thinking. If the Brexit referendum had been preceded by such a respectful, dignified and humble exercise in listening and thinking, it would surely have been a radically different experience.
Second, be honest. The yes side in the Irish debate handed its opponents a major tactical advantage but gained a huge strategic victory. It ceded an advantage in playing with all its cards turned up on the table. Technically, the vote was merely to repeal a clause in the constitution. There was no need to say what legislation the government hoped to enact afterwards. But the government chose to be completely clear about its intentions. It published a draft bill. This allowed opponents of reform to pick at, and often distort, points of detail. But it also completely undercut the reactionary politics of paranoia, the spectre of secret conspiracies. Honesty proved to be very good policy.
Yes campaigners did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause
Third, talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody. The reactionary movements have been thriving on tribalism. They divide voters into us and them – and all the better if they call us “deplorables”. The yes campaigners in Ireland – many of them young people, who are so often caricatured as the inhabitants of virtual echo chambers – refused to be tribal. They stayed calm and dignified. And when they were jeered at, they did not jeer back. They got out and talked (and listened) without prejudice. They did not assume that an elderly lady going to mass in a rural village was a lost cause. They risked (and sometimes got) abuse by recognising no comfort zones and engaging everyone they could reach. It turned out that a lot of people were sick of being typecast as conservatives. It turned out that a lot of people like to be treated as complex, intelligent and compassionate individuals. A majority of farmers and more than 40% of the over-65s voted yes.
Finally, the old feminist slogan that the personal is political holds true, but it also works the other way around. The political has to be personalised. The greatest human immune system against the viruses of hysteria, hatred and lies is storytelling. Even when we don’t trust politicians or experts, we trust people telling their own tales. We trust ourselves to judge whether they are lying or being truthful. Irish women had to go out and tell their own stories, to make the painful and intimate into public property.
This is very hard to do, and it should not be necessary. But is unstoppably powerful. The process mattered, political leadership mattered, campaigning mattered. But it was stories that won. Exit polls showed that by far the biggest factors in determining how people voted were “people’s personal stories that were told to the media”, followed by “the experience of someone who they know”.
Women, in the intimate circles of family and friends or in the harsh light of TV studios, said: “This is who I am. I am one of you.” And voters responded: “Yes, you are.” If democracy can create the context for that humane exchange to happen over and over again, it can withstand everything its enemies throw at it.
Sunday, 14 January 2018
With Farage rattled and MPs flexing their muscles, the real Brexit battle is just beginning
Toby Helm and Michael Savage in The Guardian
When Nigel Farage emerged from a meeting in Brussels with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier shortly after midday last Monday his increasingly gloomy mood had darkened further. “The message I got was that they will be happy to trade chocolate and cheese and wine freely with us but when it comes to services, forget it. It ain’t going to happen. I think we are going to have a very bad deal.”
In the early hours of 24 June, 2016, the former Ukip leader, who had, arguably, done more than anyone to deliver the Leave vote, toured TV stations, triumphantly hailing the UK’s “independence day”. In Farage’s view it was not only a defining moment for Britain. It was also one that would demonstrate to other EU member states with strong or emerging eurosceptic movements – he cited Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Austria – that there was another way. “The EU is failing, the EU is dying. I hope that we have knocked the first brick out of the wall,” he declared in the glow of victory.
Nineteen months on, that joy and optimism have been replaced by doubt and fear. These days Farage is a genuinely worried man. He deeply regrets that the Leave campaign effectively “shut up shop” the day after the referendum, believing it was job done. The result of doing so, he told the Observer on Friday, was that the Leave side is now being seriously outgunned by well-funded, well-organised supporters of Remain who are intent on overturning the referendum result.
Three days after his meeting with Barnier, Farage went on TV again and said he was coming round to the view that a second referendum might be the only way to regain the initiative, to cement Brexit and shut down the issue for a generation. He said then that he thought Leave would win again, and by a bigger margin.
But on Friday he was less sure – and revealed the real depth and root of his anxieties. The momentum, he made clear, was running away from the Leavers. They had vacated the field for Remain to run all over. Anti-EU MPs were making a grave mistake, he argued, if they believed that parliament and the British people would just accept any deal that Theresa May could extract. Leavers needed to mobilise for the cause.
“There is no Leave campaign,” Farage said. “I think Leave is in danger of not even making the argument.” He added: “I feel like I did 20 years ago when it looked like we were heading into the euro. We had to set up Business for Sterling to stop it.” Things felt eerily familiar now. “The Remain side is making all the running. They have a majority in parliament and unless we get ourselves organised we could lose the historic victory that was Brexit.”
With the clock ticking, and with parliament having voted to trigger the article 50 process that puts the UK on the legal track to leave the EU on 29 March next year, it is still extremely difficult to see how the Brexit train can be derailed entirely.
But Farage’s interventions over recent days are highly significant, and about far more than the rogueish populist yearning to be back in the headlines. He is nothing if not a shrewd interpreter of prevailing political and public moods. “He is dangerous – and brilliant, in equal measure,” says one ardent Tory MP from the Remain side. “We know that from painful experience.”
Farage fears a very soft Brexit as much as no Brexit at all. And he is not alone in spotting that the forces favouring soft Brexit – in Westminster at least – are now in the ascendancy. It is not just pro-Remain Labour MPs who are marshalling their troops to great effect to demand that their party and parliament as a whole backs as close a relationship as possible with the EU after March next year.
Where John Major and David Cameron had rightwing Eurosceptic rebels to deal with, May, with no Commons majority, now finds her biggest problems coming from those on the pro-EU left flank of the Tory party. Her chaotic reshuffle last week added new recruits to that ever more confident rebel army, among them sacked education secretary and Remainer Justine Greening.
At prime minister’s questions last Wednesday, the day after she left the cabinet, Greening arrived early. When anti-Brexit Tory rebel Dominic Grieve came into the chamber, Greening caught his eye and patted on the vacant seat by her side in a gesture that invited him to be her new neighbour in the naughty soft Brexit corner. Grieve duly accepted.
“It was a fantastic moment for us,” said another in the group, who added that May had made a big mistake ousting the MP for Putney from the cabinet. “A Remainer, from Rotherham, educated at a state school. Who just happens to be in a same sex relationship. How many bloody boxes does she tick for us? For too long this party has been run by a few rightwingers intent on destroying our country. Now we are taking the party back.”
Ryan Shorthouse, director of the modernising Tory pressure group, Bright Blue, said: “Before Theresa May became prime minister, for decades Conservative governments only really faced concerted pressure on the backbenchers from the right of the party. Now, there is a group of high-profile and senior backbenchers on the ‘one nation’ wing who are increasingly co-ordinated, empowered and outspoken.”
This week will be another crucial one in the parliamentary battle on Brexit, over which Farage is agonising. The EU withdrawal bill will complete its third reading and report stage in the Commons on Wednesday before heading to the House of Lords, where it faces a mauling, not least from dozens of pro-Remain peers who favour a second referendum.
Before Christmas, Grieve, a former attorney general, led a successful Tory rebellion against hard Brexit to ensure MPs will have to vote for a new statute before any Brexit deal can be agreed. The effect is to give MPs a vote – and an effective veto, on the outcome of negotiations with Brussels – something the hard Brexiters were determined to resist.
This week the focus will be on Labour, as a growing number of Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs put pressure on their leader to adopt a firmer pro-EU, pro-single market line. Upwards of 60 Labour MPs are now believed to back permanent membership of the single market and customs union after Brexit and are ready to rebel.
Labour has already come a long way down the soft Brexit road – but not far enough for dozens of its MPs. Last summer, shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer shifted to support membership of the single market and customs union during a post-Brexit transition of up to four years.
He is now being urged to go much further. This weekend, in a sign of that pressure, the leadership announced it would back an amendment tabled by former shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, which he drew up in the belief it would leave the party effectively backing single-market membership for the long term.
The amendment says that, after the final Brexit deal is done and known, Labour will insist on a full independent economic analysis, involving the National Audit Office, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the government actuary’s department, and the finance directorates of each of the devolved administrations, before MPs vote on the final deal.
Chuka Umunna, one of the Labour MPs leading cross-party efforts to secure a soft Brexit, sees this as a step forward, though still an insufficient one.
“This is a significant move, which shows we are rightly focusing on the need to demonstrate what the economic impact of Theresa May’s Tory Brexit will be on people’s lives.
“If such an assessment is not carried out, or if it is and concludes that a Tory Brexit deal would be bad for the economy, we should oppose it. Labour should be clear that at a minimum we should back single market and customs union membership (or full participation) for good.” Meanwhile peers – including many who take the Tory whip – are joining cross-party alliances in an attempt to secure long-term single-market and customs membership.
Some are also planning amendments calling for a second referendum before the UK leaves the EU – the same suggestion as that made by Farage on Tuesday.
On Saturday it emerged that, following Farage’s meeting with Barnier in Brussels last week, it will be the turn of Tory Remainers Grieve and Anna Soubry and Labour MPs Leslie, Umunna and Stephen Doughty to bend the ear of the man leading the EU negotiations on Brexit.
Their meeting with Barnier will be another blow to Farage – and further confirmation of his growing conviction that victory for Leave on the night of 23 June 2016 was far from the end of the story.
When Nigel Farage emerged from a meeting in Brussels with the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier shortly after midday last Monday his increasingly gloomy mood had darkened further. “The message I got was that they will be happy to trade chocolate and cheese and wine freely with us but when it comes to services, forget it. It ain’t going to happen. I think we are going to have a very bad deal.”
In the early hours of 24 June, 2016, the former Ukip leader, who had, arguably, done more than anyone to deliver the Leave vote, toured TV stations, triumphantly hailing the UK’s “independence day”. In Farage’s view it was not only a defining moment for Britain. It was also one that would demonstrate to other EU member states with strong or emerging eurosceptic movements – he cited Denmark, Italy, Sweden and Austria – that there was another way. “The EU is failing, the EU is dying. I hope that we have knocked the first brick out of the wall,” he declared in the glow of victory.
Nineteen months on, that joy and optimism have been replaced by doubt and fear. These days Farage is a genuinely worried man. He deeply regrets that the Leave campaign effectively “shut up shop” the day after the referendum, believing it was job done. The result of doing so, he told the Observer on Friday, was that the Leave side is now being seriously outgunned by well-funded, well-organised supporters of Remain who are intent on overturning the referendum result.
Three days after his meeting with Barnier, Farage went on TV again and said he was coming round to the view that a second referendum might be the only way to regain the initiative, to cement Brexit and shut down the issue for a generation. He said then that he thought Leave would win again, and by a bigger margin.
But on Friday he was less sure – and revealed the real depth and root of his anxieties. The momentum, he made clear, was running away from the Leavers. They had vacated the field for Remain to run all over. Anti-EU MPs were making a grave mistake, he argued, if they believed that parliament and the British people would just accept any deal that Theresa May could extract. Leavers needed to mobilise for the cause.
“There is no Leave campaign,” Farage said. “I think Leave is in danger of not even making the argument.” He added: “I feel like I did 20 years ago when it looked like we were heading into the euro. We had to set up Business for Sterling to stop it.” Things felt eerily familiar now. “The Remain side is making all the running. They have a majority in parliament and unless we get ourselves organised we could lose the historic victory that was Brexit.”
With the clock ticking, and with parliament having voted to trigger the article 50 process that puts the UK on the legal track to leave the EU on 29 March next year, it is still extremely difficult to see how the Brexit train can be derailed entirely.
But Farage’s interventions over recent days are highly significant, and about far more than the rogueish populist yearning to be back in the headlines. He is nothing if not a shrewd interpreter of prevailing political and public moods. “He is dangerous – and brilliant, in equal measure,” says one ardent Tory MP from the Remain side. “We know that from painful experience.”
Farage fears a very soft Brexit as much as no Brexit at all. And he is not alone in spotting that the forces favouring soft Brexit – in Westminster at least – are now in the ascendancy. It is not just pro-Remain Labour MPs who are marshalling their troops to great effect to demand that their party and parliament as a whole backs as close a relationship as possible with the EU after March next year.
Where John Major and David Cameron had rightwing Eurosceptic rebels to deal with, May, with no Commons majority, now finds her biggest problems coming from those on the pro-EU left flank of the Tory party. Her chaotic reshuffle last week added new recruits to that ever more confident rebel army, among them sacked education secretary and Remainer Justine Greening.
At prime minister’s questions last Wednesday, the day after she left the cabinet, Greening arrived early. When anti-Brexit Tory rebel Dominic Grieve came into the chamber, Greening caught his eye and patted on the vacant seat by her side in a gesture that invited him to be her new neighbour in the naughty soft Brexit corner. Grieve duly accepted.
“It was a fantastic moment for us,” said another in the group, who added that May had made a big mistake ousting the MP for Putney from the cabinet. “A Remainer, from Rotherham, educated at a state school. Who just happens to be in a same sex relationship. How many bloody boxes does she tick for us? For too long this party has been run by a few rightwingers intent on destroying our country. Now we are taking the party back.”
Ryan Shorthouse, director of the modernising Tory pressure group, Bright Blue, said: “Before Theresa May became prime minister, for decades Conservative governments only really faced concerted pressure on the backbenchers from the right of the party. Now, there is a group of high-profile and senior backbenchers on the ‘one nation’ wing who are increasingly co-ordinated, empowered and outspoken.”
This week will be another crucial one in the parliamentary battle on Brexit, over which Farage is agonising. The EU withdrawal bill will complete its third reading and report stage in the Commons on Wednesday before heading to the House of Lords, where it faces a mauling, not least from dozens of pro-Remain peers who favour a second referendum.
Before Christmas, Grieve, a former attorney general, led a successful Tory rebellion against hard Brexit to ensure MPs will have to vote for a new statute before any Brexit deal can be agreed. The effect is to give MPs a vote – and an effective veto, on the outcome of negotiations with Brussels – something the hard Brexiters were determined to resist.
This week the focus will be on Labour, as a growing number of Jeremy Corbyn’s MPs put pressure on their leader to adopt a firmer pro-EU, pro-single market line. Upwards of 60 Labour MPs are now believed to back permanent membership of the single market and customs union after Brexit and are ready to rebel.
Labour has already come a long way down the soft Brexit road – but not far enough for dozens of its MPs. Last summer, shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer shifted to support membership of the single market and customs union during a post-Brexit transition of up to four years.
He is now being urged to go much further. This weekend, in a sign of that pressure, the leadership announced it would back an amendment tabled by former shadow Scottish secretary Ian Murray, which he drew up in the belief it would leave the party effectively backing single-market membership for the long term.
The amendment says that, after the final Brexit deal is done and known, Labour will insist on a full independent economic analysis, involving the National Audit Office, the Office of Budget Responsibility, the government actuary’s department, and the finance directorates of each of the devolved administrations, before MPs vote on the final deal.
Chuka Umunna, one of the Labour MPs leading cross-party efforts to secure a soft Brexit, sees this as a step forward, though still an insufficient one.
“This is a significant move, which shows we are rightly focusing on the need to demonstrate what the economic impact of Theresa May’s Tory Brexit will be on people’s lives.
“If such an assessment is not carried out, or if it is and concludes that a Tory Brexit deal would be bad for the economy, we should oppose it. Labour should be clear that at a minimum we should back single market and customs union membership (or full participation) for good.” Meanwhile peers – including many who take the Tory whip – are joining cross-party alliances in an attempt to secure long-term single-market and customs membership.
Some are also planning amendments calling for a second referendum before the UK leaves the EU – the same suggestion as that made by Farage on Tuesday.
On Saturday it emerged that, following Farage’s meeting with Barnier in Brussels last week, it will be the turn of Tory Remainers Grieve and Anna Soubry and Labour MPs Leslie, Umunna and Stephen Doughty to bend the ear of the man leading the EU negotiations on Brexit.
Their meeting with Barnier will be another blow to Farage – and further confirmation of his growing conviction that victory for Leave on the night of 23 June 2016 was far from the end of the story.
Wednesday, 20 December 2017
May can berate Putin. But Brexit is his dream policy
As the Russian leader tries to diminish Europe, he finds ideologues such as Boris Johnson are doing the job for him
Rafael Behr in The Guardian
With lighter diplomatic baggage, Boris Johnson might have been a hit in Moscow. The foreign secretary’s artfully dishevelled, pseudo-Churchillian kitsch is not to everyone’s taste, but it could work in the bombastic idiom of Russian politics.
But as Theresa May’s emissary to the court of Vladimir Putin later this week, Johnson faces a tough audience. May has accused the Kremlin of aggressively targeting an international order based on law, open economies and free societies. In a speech last month, the prime minister listed offences including territorial theft from Ukraine, cyber-attacks on ministries and parliaments, meddling in elections, and spreading fake news to sow discord.
Russian interference in British democracy is currently being investigated by the Electoral Commission and parliament’s culture, media and sports committee. The latter’s chair, Tory MP Damian Collins, has signalled that he doesn’t believe recent claims by Twitter and Facebook that Kremlin-funded efforts to boost Brexit in 2016 were negligible.
He is right to be sceptical. The tech companies have a record of stonewalling any suggestion that their business model has been co-opted for organised malfeasance. They have commercial incentives to duck moral responsibility for the sinister content shared on their networks. It is beyond doubt that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a hefty Russian boost. Facebook has removed tens of thousands of pages believed to be involved in sabotage of French and German elections. British ballots are unlikely to have escaped dirty money and molestation by troll battalions.
That doesn’t mean Brexit is a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind. Mistrust of the EU was not made in a factory outside St Petersburg. To connect tweets in Murmansk to a leave majority in Merthyr Tydfil misses the point about misinformation. The goal is not always to execute a specific outcome but to stoke existing tensions, nurture rage, exacerbate polarisation and shroud everything in such a fog of lies that truth becomes ungraspable. The purpose of fake news is to debase the currency of all news, and so undermine the foundations of pluralistic politics.
The advantage to Russia is in weakening western governments and their alliances. Putin despises Nato and EU influence in countries that were, until 1991, Soviet territory. He sees their sovereignty as fictions imposed by enemies. Undermining European and US resolve to uphold their borders is his goal.
There is a strain of Brexitism that is complicit in that project, regardless of whether leave campaigns knowingly or unwittingly took laundered roubles. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin is no secret: he has pushed the Kremlin line on Ukraine, preposterously depicting Crimea’s annexation as a defensive answer to EU provocation. He has described Russian military support for Syria’s murderous president Bashar al-Assad as a “brilliant” manoeuvre.
Putinophilia has the same cause as Farage’s Trump fandom. It is the nationalist’s fetish for a strongman, combined with nostalgia for the days when the world was run as a game between big countries using little countries as chips. It is unresolved grief at the UK’s 20th-century relegation from the ranks of imperial pawn-pushers.
That slow-burn trauma is analogous to the more sudden loss of status mourned by Russia, the reversal of which is Putin’s mission in life. During the cold war, British ideologues who swallowed a Kremlin agenda and regurgitated it as their own used to be called “useful idiots”. The difference now is they aren’t confined to the far left. Some of them are in government.
We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there
The Brexit delusion is that enslavement by Brussels inhibits our promotion back to the global power premier league. Boris Johnson is not immune to this fantasy. He would rather be a foreign secretary in the 19th-century style of Lord Castlereagh, carving out spheres of influence at the Congress of Vienna, than yawn through EU council meetings.
It is true that the EU empowers smaller countries. Witness the clout that Ireland has had in Brexit talks. But Britain has also benefited from aggregating its medium-sized might with Germany, France and 25 other nations. That is not a Brussels empire. It is a model of peaceful, collaborative power without historical equal.
May once understood this. In the referendum campaign she made a solid case for EU membership on the grounds that it could “maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world”. When she now promises a “deep and special partnership”, she is not just talking about trade, she is pledging loyalty to European democracy as one of its few significant military underwriters. When the prime minister berates Putin for undermining institutions that uphold the rule of law, she is signalling strategic solidarity, not economic alignment, with the EU.
This is chasing a bolting horse when the stable door hangs off its hinges. We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there. Brexit has already fractured an alliance that will be hard to repair. May will never be a friend of Putin, but he doesn’t need her friendship when she is committed to a policy he would choose for her anyway.
Rafael Behr in The Guardian
With lighter diplomatic baggage, Boris Johnson might have been a hit in Moscow. The foreign secretary’s artfully dishevelled, pseudo-Churchillian kitsch is not to everyone’s taste, but it could work in the bombastic idiom of Russian politics.
But as Theresa May’s emissary to the court of Vladimir Putin later this week, Johnson faces a tough audience. May has accused the Kremlin of aggressively targeting an international order based on law, open economies and free societies. In a speech last month, the prime minister listed offences including territorial theft from Ukraine, cyber-attacks on ministries and parliaments, meddling in elections, and spreading fake news to sow discord.
Russian interference in British democracy is currently being investigated by the Electoral Commission and parliament’s culture, media and sports committee. The latter’s chair, Tory MP Damian Collins, has signalled that he doesn’t believe recent claims by Twitter and Facebook that Kremlin-funded efforts to boost Brexit in 2016 were negligible.
He is right to be sceptical. The tech companies have a record of stonewalling any suggestion that their business model has been co-opted for organised malfeasance. They have commercial incentives to duck moral responsibility for the sinister content shared on their networks. It is beyond doubt that Donald Trump’s presidential campaign had a hefty Russian boost. Facebook has removed tens of thousands of pages believed to be involved in sabotage of French and German elections. British ballots are unlikely to have escaped dirty money and molestation by troll battalions.
That doesn’t mean Brexit is a conspiracy that blew in on the east wind. Mistrust of the EU was not made in a factory outside St Petersburg. To connect tweets in Murmansk to a leave majority in Merthyr Tydfil misses the point about misinformation. The goal is not always to execute a specific outcome but to stoke existing tensions, nurture rage, exacerbate polarisation and shroud everything in such a fog of lies that truth becomes ungraspable. The purpose of fake news is to debase the currency of all news, and so undermine the foundations of pluralistic politics.
The advantage to Russia is in weakening western governments and their alliances. Putin despises Nato and EU influence in countries that were, until 1991, Soviet territory. He sees their sovereignty as fictions imposed by enemies. Undermining European and US resolve to uphold their borders is his goal.
There is a strain of Brexitism that is complicit in that project, regardless of whether leave campaigns knowingly or unwittingly took laundered roubles. Nigel Farage’s admiration for Putin is no secret: he has pushed the Kremlin line on Ukraine, preposterously depicting Crimea’s annexation as a defensive answer to EU provocation. He has described Russian military support for Syria’s murderous president Bashar al-Assad as a “brilliant” manoeuvre.
Putinophilia has the same cause as Farage’s Trump fandom. It is the nationalist’s fetish for a strongman, combined with nostalgia for the days when the world was run as a game between big countries using little countries as chips. It is unresolved grief at the UK’s 20th-century relegation from the ranks of imperial pawn-pushers.
That slow-burn trauma is analogous to the more sudden loss of status mourned by Russia, the reversal of which is Putin’s mission in life. During the cold war, British ideologues who swallowed a Kremlin agenda and regurgitated it as their own used to be called “useful idiots”. The difference now is they aren’t confined to the far left. Some of them are in government.
We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there
The Brexit delusion is that enslavement by Brussels inhibits our promotion back to the global power premier league. Boris Johnson is not immune to this fantasy. He would rather be a foreign secretary in the 19th-century style of Lord Castlereagh, carving out spheres of influence at the Congress of Vienna, than yawn through EU council meetings.
It is true that the EU empowers smaller countries. Witness the clout that Ireland has had in Brexit talks. But Britain has also benefited from aggregating its medium-sized might with Germany, France and 25 other nations. That is not a Brussels empire. It is a model of peaceful, collaborative power without historical equal.
May once understood this. In the referendum campaign she made a solid case for EU membership on the grounds that it could “maximise Britain’s security, prosperity and influence in the world”. When she now promises a “deep and special partnership”, she is not just talking about trade, she is pledging loyalty to European democracy as one of its few significant military underwriters. When the prime minister berates Putin for undermining institutions that uphold the rule of law, she is signalling strategic solidarity, not economic alignment, with the EU.
This is chasing a bolting horse when the stable door hangs off its hinges. We may never know how much influence the Kremlin had in the referendum, but we can be sure its result was popular there. Brexit has already fractured an alliance that will be hard to repair. May will never be a friend of Putin, but he doesn’t need her friendship when she is committed to a policy he would choose for her anyway.
Friday, 8 December 2017
The Brexit monomania built on blind faith
Tim Harford in The FT
For Christmas reading, the British political establishment might pick up something by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. Lord of the Flies is his most famous work, with its grim suggestion that the line between innocent children and murderers is thin. For an insight into Brexit Britain’s current predicament after a week of chaos, however, I recommend The Spire.
The book is a study of monomania. Dean Jocelin has visions of adding to his cathedral a 400-foot steeple, an expression of human prayers reaching into the heavens. But the intensity of his ambition blinds him to his other duties and threatens both the cathedral and the community around it. As Jocelin himself admits, “at the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing”.
For Christmas reading, the British political establishment might pick up something by William Golding, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1983. Lord of the Flies is his most famous work, with its grim suggestion that the line between innocent children and murderers is thin. For an insight into Brexit Britain’s current predicament after a week of chaos, however, I recommend The Spire.
The book is a study of monomania. Dean Jocelin has visions of adding to his cathedral a 400-foot steeple, an expression of human prayers reaching into the heavens. But the intensity of his ambition blinds him to his other duties and threatens both the cathedral and the community around it. As Jocelin himself admits, “at the moment of vision, the eyes see nothing”.
It is impossible to miss the analogy. The UK is being driven by visionary enthusiasts for Brexit just as surely as Jocelin’s attendants had to bend to his will. Whether their visions are realistic is quite another question. Last summer David Davis, the man charged with delivering Brexit, predicted that the UK would be able to negotiate a free trade area “massively larger than the EU” within two years. That was 17 months ago. Whatever Mr Davis was gazing at back then, it wasn’t reality.
Then there are those wretched experts, who tell Jocelin that his spire is impossible. The master builder, Roger Mason, confronts him with an inescapable dilemma: if the spire’s structure is too lightweight, the next storm will blow it down; a sturdier structure will warp the cathedral beneath it, or sink into the swamp.
Jocelin berates him for lack of faith; the dean wants to have his cake and eat it. Nor can evidence dissuade him. When Mason digs into the cathedral’s non-existent foundations, showing Jocelin the soft earth writhing under the weight of the building, the zealot’s faith is strengthened. If the current cathedral stands on foundations of mud, isn’t that proof that miracles are possible?
Brexit, of course, is not only possible but almost inevitable. But the promises that have been made cannot be fulfilled any more than Jocelin’s spire could safely be built. We cannot “have access” to the single market (that is, remain in it) while also ending freedom of movement; we cannot leave the customs union without introducing a customs border. The discovery of the week — surprising to nobody who has been paying attention — is that this customs border can be located on neither land nor sea.
Jocelin ignores the experts. “I thought it would be simple,” he says. “I had to build in faith, against advice. That’s the only way.” And it proves all too easy to ignore those who might restrain him. One faithful priest, “Father Anonymous”, is too boring to notice. In another life, perhaps he would have been an economist. Others, Jocelin remarks sharply, would profit if the project was thwarted. It is true that sometimes the experts have an eye on their own finances. They may nonetheless be right.
Admittedly, pure determination sometimes finds a way. Monomaniacs change the world, sometimes for the better. One recalls the description of Steve Jobs in his early years at Apple, generating a “reality distortion field” that could redefine what was possible by “sheer mental force”.
Even The Spire was inspired not by folly, but by a triumph. For more than 15 years Golding was a teacher in the shadow of Salisbury Cathedral, whose 404-foot spire has been the tallest in the country for nearly five centuries. Perhaps long-forgotten experts once warned that it could never be built.
Whether Brexit eventually turns into something worth admiring will be for future historians to judge. For now, Golding invites us to ponder the cost. Jocelin’s ambition requires an army of builders to deliver it; that army murders an innocent person.
“Let it be so,” says Jocelin to the heavens. “Cost what you like.”
The project takes a toll in ways that blinkered Jocelin did not consider and takes too long to notice. Letters from allies go unanswered. Urgent business is postponed. The cathedral starts to die; the congregation leaves.
Observers of British politics will not find the parallel hard to discern: the centre ground has been hollowed out, the economy is faltering, respect for basic norms of truth-telling are in tatters, and the union itself is under strain.
Jocelin slowly realises the toll his project is taking on those around him, but since he is doing the work of God, any price must be worth paying. British politicians obey the will not of God, but of the British people as expressed in a referendum. It seems to amount to the same thing.
In the end, Jocelin is stripped of his job and his dignity. The long-predicted storm comes. Reality asserts itself. The vision, the visionary and the spire itself crack under the strain.
“I thought I was doing a great work,” Jocelin confesses. “And all I was doing was bringing ruin and breeding hate.”
And yet the spire does not fall. That is where Golding leaves us: the project cannot go on, but it cannot be undone. Disaster hangs in the air. “Has it fallen yet?” asks the stricken Jocelin. Not yet.
Friday, 27 October 2017
My fantasy Corbyn speech: ‘I can no longer go along with a ruinous Brexit’
Alastair Campbell in The Guardian
Last week I wrote a speech for Theresa May, which concluded with an announcement that she had decided Brexit was impossible to deliver. Sadly she didn’t listen, and so onwards she leads us towards the cliff edge. I am hoping for better luck with Jeremy Corbyn, fantasising that he delivers this speech to a rally of his faithful Momentum followers …
“Thank you for that wonderful reception. Yes, yes, I know my name. ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. Yes, that’s me. Now please stop singing and sit down. Please.
“I will be honest with you. I didn’t want the job. I didn’t think I would get the job. I wasn’t sure I could do the job. But thanks to you I got it. Thanks to you I now have the confidence to do it. I approach the challenge of being prime minister not with fear or trepidation but with confidence that our time is coming. That it is our duty now to serve. Protest is one thing. Government is another. And we must now prepare, genuinely prepare, as a government in waiting.
“If I become prime minister it is Brexit that will define my leadership. As a result of what happened on 23 June 2016 I have no choice in the matter. The people’s choice dictates that it is so.
I have concluded that rejecting this vision of Brexit is the only route to the vision of the world that drives us
“It is clear to me the constructive ambiguity of our position on Brexit is no longer tenable. It is fine for a party of protest. It is not good enough for a party one step away from government.
“Let’s imagine this entirely credible scenario. As the current chaos inside the government continues, Mrs May falls. The Tories try to foist another prime minister on us, chosen by their ageing membership. But we and the public won’t wear it. We force an election. We win an election. I am prime minister. Now the hard part begins.
“What does our ‘jobs-first’ Brexit mean then, in power? What is a jobs-first Brexit if our leaving the single market hurts growth, as every analysis in the world says it will? What is a jobs-first Brexit dependent on trade if trade slows and even grinds to a halt with the absence of a proper customs infrastructure at our ports, the absence of good trade deals not just with the EU but with the 66 countries with whom we have deals as part of the EU? What is a jobs-first Brexit if firms decide that if the UK leaves the EU, they leave the UK, and take their jobs and their tax take with them?
“And how can we fund all the things in our election manifesto that we need and want to fund in the future if our economy tanks?
“At Labour’s party conference, I said that our continued membership of the EU would prevent us from implementing many of the plans in our manifesto. I am grateful to the New European, which sought legal advice in Brussels and established this was not the case. So the question becomes, not ‘What do we lose by staying in?’, but ‘What do we lose by coming out?’
“The dominance of the hard right is clear in their pressing Mrs May to walk away from the negotiations, crash out of the EU, into the World Trade Organisation. I am of the internationalist left. We exist to fight the nationalist right, not to dance to its tune. We believe in support for the many, not the prosperity of the few. It is the nationalist right that is leading the Brexit Mrs May is pursuing, whatever the cost. It is their only route to the vision of the world that drives them. And, today I want to tell you – I have concluded that rejecting this vision of Brexit is the only route to the vision of the world that drives us. In this debate, they are the reactionaries, we and the Europeans the progressives.
“Take back control, they said. But what kind of control? Their control. Their right to dump decades of law with their ‘great repeal bill’, and bring about their vision of a low-tax, low-regulation economy, public services there for profit not public, employment and environmental rights shredded, one of the great powers of the world reduced to a gigantic Cayman Islands. That is their dream. And many of those who voted for Brexit, in the poorest areas, the places we represent, they will be the hardest hit. As the reality of power nears, I must tell you, candidly, that I can no longer go along with it. Not now. Not in two years. Not ever.
“No deal, I must warn you, would be a catastrophe. So if Mrs May is still prime minister, and presents the no-deal option to parliament, be in no doubt – we will vote against it. We will press for a deal with keeps us in the single market and the customs union, to protect trade and avoid chaos.
“But today I want to go further. The referendum was close. It was not, contrary to the claims of the Brextremists, ‘clear’, let alone ‘overwhelming’. Millions are deeply concerned about what is happening to our country. I believe people have a right to change their minds as this all unfolds. And politicians have a duty to reflect that, and to give proper vent to the debate it represents.
“Democracy is a process, not a moment in time. If the government falls, and we win an election, then we can put a different vision of Brexit to the country, and we will. If we can bring about a fresh election, this is the Brexit policy you will be voting for.
“We will take over the negotiations from Mrs May and her hapless, hopeless team. We will review what progress has been made and assess whether Brexit can be delivered on the timescale set out under the article 50 process she triggered.
“If we conclude, as on any current assessment seems likely, that Brexit cannot be delivered without real damage to our economy, that a jobs-first Brexit is impossible, that it will mean lower growth, higher prices, higher unemployment, more austerity, cuts to public services, customs chaos, the return of a hard border in Ireland and the potential undoing of the Good Friday agreement, the loss of security cooperation with our partners, then I will revoke article 50.
“I am clear that a referendum decision can only be overturned by another one, and so we will legislate for a new referendum, and the choice we will put before the British people is between staying in, or leaving on the terms then on offer.
“If, as I believe they will, the British people opt to reverse their decision of last June, that will put us in a strong position then to succeed where David Cameron failed, and win the argument for a reformed EU that works for all.
“Comrades, this has been a lot to take in. But I believe it is the right course for our party, for our movement, and most important of all, for the country.
“This is our country too. This is our time. Let’s take back control of our destiny, and build a country future generations will be proud to call home. Thank you.”
Last week I wrote a speech for Theresa May, which concluded with an announcement that she had decided Brexit was impossible to deliver. Sadly she didn’t listen, and so onwards she leads us towards the cliff edge. I am hoping for better luck with Jeremy Corbyn, fantasising that he delivers this speech to a rally of his faithful Momentum followers …
“Thank you for that wonderful reception. Yes, yes, I know my name. ‘Oh Jeremy Corbyn’. Yes, that’s me. Now please stop singing and sit down. Please.
“I will be honest with you. I didn’t want the job. I didn’t think I would get the job. I wasn’t sure I could do the job. But thanks to you I got it. Thanks to you I now have the confidence to do it. I approach the challenge of being prime minister not with fear or trepidation but with confidence that our time is coming. That it is our duty now to serve. Protest is one thing. Government is another. And we must now prepare, genuinely prepare, as a government in waiting.
“If I become prime minister it is Brexit that will define my leadership. As a result of what happened on 23 June 2016 I have no choice in the matter. The people’s choice dictates that it is so.
I have concluded that rejecting this vision of Brexit is the only route to the vision of the world that drives us
“It is clear to me the constructive ambiguity of our position on Brexit is no longer tenable. It is fine for a party of protest. It is not good enough for a party one step away from government.
“Let’s imagine this entirely credible scenario. As the current chaos inside the government continues, Mrs May falls. The Tories try to foist another prime minister on us, chosen by their ageing membership. But we and the public won’t wear it. We force an election. We win an election. I am prime minister. Now the hard part begins.
“What does our ‘jobs-first’ Brexit mean then, in power? What is a jobs-first Brexit if our leaving the single market hurts growth, as every analysis in the world says it will? What is a jobs-first Brexit dependent on trade if trade slows and even grinds to a halt with the absence of a proper customs infrastructure at our ports, the absence of good trade deals not just with the EU but with the 66 countries with whom we have deals as part of the EU? What is a jobs-first Brexit if firms decide that if the UK leaves the EU, they leave the UK, and take their jobs and their tax take with them?
“And how can we fund all the things in our election manifesto that we need and want to fund in the future if our economy tanks?
“At Labour’s party conference, I said that our continued membership of the EU would prevent us from implementing many of the plans in our manifesto. I am grateful to the New European, which sought legal advice in Brussels and established this was not the case. So the question becomes, not ‘What do we lose by staying in?’, but ‘What do we lose by coming out?’
“The dominance of the hard right is clear in their pressing Mrs May to walk away from the negotiations, crash out of the EU, into the World Trade Organisation. I am of the internationalist left. We exist to fight the nationalist right, not to dance to its tune. We believe in support for the many, not the prosperity of the few. It is the nationalist right that is leading the Brexit Mrs May is pursuing, whatever the cost. It is their only route to the vision of the world that drives them. And, today I want to tell you – I have concluded that rejecting this vision of Brexit is the only route to the vision of the world that drives us. In this debate, they are the reactionaries, we and the Europeans the progressives.
“Take back control, they said. But what kind of control? Their control. Their right to dump decades of law with their ‘great repeal bill’, and bring about their vision of a low-tax, low-regulation economy, public services there for profit not public, employment and environmental rights shredded, one of the great powers of the world reduced to a gigantic Cayman Islands. That is their dream. And many of those who voted for Brexit, in the poorest areas, the places we represent, they will be the hardest hit. As the reality of power nears, I must tell you, candidly, that I can no longer go along with it. Not now. Not in two years. Not ever.
“No deal, I must warn you, would be a catastrophe. So if Mrs May is still prime minister, and presents the no-deal option to parliament, be in no doubt – we will vote against it. We will press for a deal with keeps us in the single market and the customs union, to protect trade and avoid chaos.
“But today I want to go further. The referendum was close. It was not, contrary to the claims of the Brextremists, ‘clear’, let alone ‘overwhelming’. Millions are deeply concerned about what is happening to our country. I believe people have a right to change their minds as this all unfolds. And politicians have a duty to reflect that, and to give proper vent to the debate it represents.
“Democracy is a process, not a moment in time. If the government falls, and we win an election, then we can put a different vision of Brexit to the country, and we will. If we can bring about a fresh election, this is the Brexit policy you will be voting for.
“We will take over the negotiations from Mrs May and her hapless, hopeless team. We will review what progress has been made and assess whether Brexit can be delivered on the timescale set out under the article 50 process she triggered.
“If we conclude, as on any current assessment seems likely, that Brexit cannot be delivered without real damage to our economy, that a jobs-first Brexit is impossible, that it will mean lower growth, higher prices, higher unemployment, more austerity, cuts to public services, customs chaos, the return of a hard border in Ireland and the potential undoing of the Good Friday agreement, the loss of security cooperation with our partners, then I will revoke article 50.
“I am clear that a referendum decision can only be overturned by another one, and so we will legislate for a new referendum, and the choice we will put before the British people is between staying in, or leaving on the terms then on offer.
“If, as I believe they will, the British people opt to reverse their decision of last June, that will put us in a strong position then to succeed where David Cameron failed, and win the argument for a reformed EU that works for all.
“Comrades, this has been a lot to take in. But I believe it is the right course for our party, for our movement, and most important of all, for the country.
“This is our country too. This is our time. Let’s take back control of our destiny, and build a country future generations will be proud to call home. Thank you.”
Saturday, 21 October 2017
Referendums get a bad press – but to fix Britain, we need more of them
Voting once every five years alienates us from politics. Participatory rather than representative democracy would allow us more say in how we run the country.
George Monbiot in The Guardian
You lost, suck it up: this is how our politics works. If the party you voted for lost the election, you have no meaningful democratic voice for the next five years. You can go through life, in this “representative democracy”, unrepresented in government, while not being permitted to represent yourself.
Even if your party is elected, it washes its hands of you when you leave the polling booth. Governments assert a mandate for any policy they can push through parliament. While elections tend to hinge on one or two issues, parties will use their win to claim support for all the positions in their manifestos, and for anything else they decide to do during their term in office.
If you raise objections to their policies, you’re often told, “If you don’t like it, stand for election.” This response is revealing: it suggests that only 650 people out of 66 million have a valid role in national politics, beyond voting once every five years. Political control under this system is so coarse and diffuse that democracy loses all but its crudest meaning.
It is astonishing that we put up with this. The idea that any government could meet the needs of a complex, modern nation by ruling without constant feedback, and actual rather than notional consent, is preposterous.
Last week I considered some ideas for creating a more participatory economy. This column explores the potential for a more participatory democracy. I’m not proposing we abandon representative democracy, but that we temper it with meaningful deliberation and consent.
I recognise that this is an unpropitious time to call for more referendums. But the Brexit vote was the worst possible model for popular decision-making. The government threw a massive question at an electorate that had almost no experience of direct democracy. Voters were rushed towards judgment day on a ridiculously short timetable, with no preparation except a series of giant lies.
Worse still, an issue of astonishing complexity was reduced to a crude binary choice. Because the only options presented were in or out, everyone knows what the majority voted against; no one knows what kind of Leave it voted for. Why could we not have had a multiple choice, presenting the different ways in which we could have stayed in or left Europe? Without permission to make a nuanced decision, we had no incentive to achieve a nuanced understanding.A lively and intelligent politics demands an active and empowered electorate that can hold its representatives constantly to account. I propose three models that we could draw upon.
The first is the Swiss system. There, the people vote in about 10 or a dozen referendums a year, clustered into three or four polling days, challenging federal laws or proposing constitutional amendments. Referendums are triggered when someone can gather enough signatures. These plebiscites foster a strong sense of political ownership: people perceive that government belongs to them. This might explain why, in its survey of 40 nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development discovered the Swiss had the highest levels of trust in government. Far from causing voter fatigue, the process stimulates a rich culture of engagement, debate and persuasion. Across the year, about 80% of the electorate vote in referendums.
When I mention the Swiss system, people tend to react with horror. What if, as they often do in Switzerland, people make conservative choices? Well, they are entitled to their conservatism. A true democracy reveals the character of a nation: in Switzerland it is generally conservative. And if you don’t like it, you have the opportunity, through the debates surrounding these plebiscites, to change people’s minds. (There is, however, an argument for preserving some constitutional norms, to prevent majorities from oppressing minorities).
The second model operates in Reykjavík, the Icelandic capital. Here anyone can propose an idea for improving the city or allocating its infrastructure budget, and anyone can vote for or against it. The most popular ideas are submitted to the city council. The scheme has been remarkably successful: 58% of the city’s people have taken part so far and 200 of their proposals have been adopted by the council. The result is better amenities and a resurgence of civic life.
The third, most radical, model is the Kurdish system. Particularly in Rojava, in northern Syria, but throughout the Kurdish region, the people have sought to introduce a system first proposed by the US ecologist Murray Bookchin and refined and adapted by the imprisoned leader of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s called democratic confederalism. Here, power is devolved not from the top down but from the bottom up: the primary political unit is a local assembly representing a village or an urban district. These assemblies then elect people to represent their interests in wider confederations, which in turn choose members to provide a voice in the region as a whole (Ocalan rejects the idea of the nation state). The federal government is purely administrative: it does not make policy but implements the proposals passed up to it by the assemblies.
The introduction of this system has been bumpy: perhaps unsurprisingly in a region under constant military attack. But it has been accompanied so far by a great enhancement of the representation of women, the development of a cooperative economy and stronger environmental protection. There’s a danger in this model of photocopy democracy – political control becomes fainter and greyer as decisions are passed upwards – which might permit political capture. There’s also a danger of granting excessive power to civil servants. But already the system, though haltingly, seems to be creating an oasis of democracy and trust in the Middle East’s political desert.
So how do we decide whether and how to reform British politics? Democratically, of course. The first step should be a constitutional convention, composed of citizens chosen by lot, accompanied by a small number of parliamentarians (to encourage parliament to accept the results). Its purpose would be to identify the principles that could govern our politics, then put them to the vote in a multiple-choice referendum. What does democracy mean, if the people are not allowed to choose their political system?
While I voted remain, my aim is to make the most of Brexit. In the chaos that will accompany our departure from Europe lies an opportunity to do everything differently. Taking back control? Yes, I’m all for it.
George Monbiot in The Guardian
You lost, suck it up: this is how our politics works. If the party you voted for lost the election, you have no meaningful democratic voice for the next five years. You can go through life, in this “representative democracy”, unrepresented in government, while not being permitted to represent yourself.
Even if your party is elected, it washes its hands of you when you leave the polling booth. Governments assert a mandate for any policy they can push through parliament. While elections tend to hinge on one or two issues, parties will use their win to claim support for all the positions in their manifestos, and for anything else they decide to do during their term in office.
If you raise objections to their policies, you’re often told, “If you don’t like it, stand for election.” This response is revealing: it suggests that only 650 people out of 66 million have a valid role in national politics, beyond voting once every five years. Political control under this system is so coarse and diffuse that democracy loses all but its crudest meaning.
It is astonishing that we put up with this. The idea that any government could meet the needs of a complex, modern nation by ruling without constant feedback, and actual rather than notional consent, is preposterous.
Last week I considered some ideas for creating a more participatory economy. This column explores the potential for a more participatory democracy. I’m not proposing we abandon representative democracy, but that we temper it with meaningful deliberation and consent.
I recognise that this is an unpropitious time to call for more referendums. But the Brexit vote was the worst possible model for popular decision-making. The government threw a massive question at an electorate that had almost no experience of direct democracy. Voters were rushed towards judgment day on a ridiculously short timetable, with no preparation except a series of giant lies.
Worse still, an issue of astonishing complexity was reduced to a crude binary choice. Because the only options presented were in or out, everyone knows what the majority voted against; no one knows what kind of Leave it voted for. Why could we not have had a multiple choice, presenting the different ways in which we could have stayed in or left Europe? Without permission to make a nuanced decision, we had no incentive to achieve a nuanced understanding.A lively and intelligent politics demands an active and empowered electorate that can hold its representatives constantly to account. I propose three models that we could draw upon.
The first is the Swiss system. There, the people vote in about 10 or a dozen referendums a year, clustered into three or four polling days, challenging federal laws or proposing constitutional amendments. Referendums are triggered when someone can gather enough signatures. These plebiscites foster a strong sense of political ownership: people perceive that government belongs to them. This might explain why, in its survey of 40 nations, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development discovered the Swiss had the highest levels of trust in government. Far from causing voter fatigue, the process stimulates a rich culture of engagement, debate and persuasion. Across the year, about 80% of the electorate vote in referendums.
When I mention the Swiss system, people tend to react with horror. What if, as they often do in Switzerland, people make conservative choices? Well, they are entitled to their conservatism. A true democracy reveals the character of a nation: in Switzerland it is generally conservative. And if you don’t like it, you have the opportunity, through the debates surrounding these plebiscites, to change people’s minds. (There is, however, an argument for preserving some constitutional norms, to prevent majorities from oppressing minorities).
The second model operates in Reykjavík, the Icelandic capital. Here anyone can propose an idea for improving the city or allocating its infrastructure budget, and anyone can vote for or against it. The most popular ideas are submitted to the city council. The scheme has been remarkably successful: 58% of the city’s people have taken part so far and 200 of their proposals have been adopted by the council. The result is better amenities and a resurgence of civic life.
The third, most radical, model is the Kurdish system. Particularly in Rojava, in northern Syria, but throughout the Kurdish region, the people have sought to introduce a system first proposed by the US ecologist Murray Bookchin and refined and adapted by the imprisoned leader of the banned Kurdish Workers’ Party, Abdullah Ocalan. It’s called democratic confederalism. Here, power is devolved not from the top down but from the bottom up: the primary political unit is a local assembly representing a village or an urban district. These assemblies then elect people to represent their interests in wider confederations, which in turn choose members to provide a voice in the region as a whole (Ocalan rejects the idea of the nation state). The federal government is purely administrative: it does not make policy but implements the proposals passed up to it by the assemblies.
The introduction of this system has been bumpy: perhaps unsurprisingly in a region under constant military attack. But it has been accompanied so far by a great enhancement of the representation of women, the development of a cooperative economy and stronger environmental protection. There’s a danger in this model of photocopy democracy – political control becomes fainter and greyer as decisions are passed upwards – which might permit political capture. There’s also a danger of granting excessive power to civil servants. But already the system, though haltingly, seems to be creating an oasis of democracy and trust in the Middle East’s political desert.
So how do we decide whether and how to reform British politics? Democratically, of course. The first step should be a constitutional convention, composed of citizens chosen by lot, accompanied by a small number of parliamentarians (to encourage parliament to accept the results). Its purpose would be to identify the principles that could govern our politics, then put them to the vote in a multiple-choice referendum. What does democracy mean, if the people are not allowed to choose their political system?
While I voted remain, my aim is to make the most of Brexit. In the chaos that will accompany our departure from Europe lies an opportunity to do everything differently. Taking back control? Yes, I’m all for it.
Thursday, 20 April 2017
George Osborne: history will not be kind to a man whose flaws led to Brexit
Larry Elliott in The Guardian
Had things turned out differently, George Osborne would now be counting down the days to becoming prime minister. His close friend David Cameron had pledged to stand down before the next general election and a smooth transition was planned. As the architect of Cameron’s unexpected overall majority at the 2015 election, Osborne appeared to have the keys to 10 Downing Street there for the taking.
Instead, he is living proof of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure unless they are cut off in midstream at an opportune moment. Osborne will be remembered as the austerity chancellor who got the Brexit referendum campaign spectacularly wrong and was then brutally sacked by Theresa May.
His personal responsibility for last June’s referendum needs to be put into perspective. He was against the decision to hold a plebiscite and told Cameron he was taking an unnecessary risk. Once the decision had been taken, however, he took control of the campaign and opted for the same strategy that had proved successful in the Scottish referendum of 2014 and the general election the following year: a warning that a vote for change would have severe economic costs.
This time it didn’t work. In part, that was because the EU referendum was an opportunity to protest about low pay, welfare cuts and stagnant living standards. In part, it was because the Conservative-supporting papers – who had backed Osborne when he was taking on Alex Salmond and Ed Miliband – came out strongly against what they called Project Fear. In part, it was due to overkill.
When it became clear that many voters were impervious to the warnings, Osborne doubled down. He warned that the economy would plunge into an immediate recession in the event of a vote for Brexit. He said he would be forced to bring in an emergency budget that would raise taxes and cut spending by £30bn. But there was no last-minute swing to remain and when Cameron stepped down as prime minister on the morning after the referendum, Osborne’s days were numbered. A political career that saw him become an MP before his 30th birthday, shadow chancellor before he was 35 and chancellor before turning 40 was effectively over at the age of 45.
Osborne’s rise was smoothed by the financial crisis of 2007 and the deep recession that followed. As shadow chancellor, he had two main lines of attack: Labour had failed to regulate the City properly and had borrowed too much.
The first charge was justified, and Osborne responded by giving far more power to the Bank of England to ensure there was no repeat of the reckless lending seen before 2007. The global nature of the crisis meant the second charge was specious, but Osborne showed himself to be a master of the political dark arts by making it stick.
As Labour turned in on itself during the leadership contest that followed the 2010 election, Osborne said he had no choice but to impose a tough austerity package because Labour had “failed to mend the roof while the sun was shining”. The new chancellor said voters should blame Gordon Brown for the spending cuts and the tax increases he had been forced to impose. Voters believed Osborne in 2010 and carried on believing him right up until the 2015 election.
Unfortunately, Osborne’s economic strategy proved less successful than his political strategy. The economy had been on the mend by the time of the 2010 election, but too much austerity too soon resulted in growth slowing down. Plans to tackle the deficit in one parliament proved wildly optimistic.
By halfway through the 2010-15 parliament, Osborne was in a spot. He had claimed – correctly – that the UK economy had been too dependent on debt in the years before the crisis, but now found that the economy was flatlining.
His solution was to get a moribund housing market moving by giving banks and building societies money to lend. A growing economy allowed Osborne to claim that his critics were wrong and that austerity had worked. Collapsing oil prices led to falling inflation and a surge in living standards that peaked around the time of the 2015 election. It was little more than a sugar rush, but Osborne was seen as a political wizard.
He capitalised on victory in 2015 by announcing a fresh assault on the deficit. There would be fresh cuts in spending by government departments and £12bn of additional welfare cuts in order to put the public finances back in the black by the end of the parliament. Osborne softened the blow by announcing a souped-up national minimum wage and outlining plans to create a “northern powerhouse”. At the Conservative party conference in October 2015, he made a clear leadership pitch with his “we are the builders” speech. It was the moment his career peaked.
Whatever his tenure as editor of the Evening Standard has in store, history is unlikely to be kind to Osborne, and not just because the referendum campaign went so badly wrong. He marketed himself as a one-nation Conservative, yet targeted the poor for spending cuts. He made deficit reduction the acid test of his chancellorship, yet austerity will continue deep into a third parliament. He said he would sort out Britain’s structural problems, but will leave parliament with the economy as dependent on debt and low-skill, low-productivity jobs as it has ever been. Those failures helped create the conditions for Brexit – and for his political demise.
Had things turned out differently, George Osborne would now be counting down the days to becoming prime minister. His close friend David Cameron had pledged to stand down before the next general election and a smooth transition was planned. As the architect of Cameron’s unexpected overall majority at the 2015 election, Osborne appeared to have the keys to 10 Downing Street there for the taking.
Instead, he is living proof of Enoch Powell’s dictum that all political careers end in failure unless they are cut off in midstream at an opportune moment. Osborne will be remembered as the austerity chancellor who got the Brexit referendum campaign spectacularly wrong and was then brutally sacked by Theresa May.
His personal responsibility for last June’s referendum needs to be put into perspective. He was against the decision to hold a plebiscite and told Cameron he was taking an unnecessary risk. Once the decision had been taken, however, he took control of the campaign and opted for the same strategy that had proved successful in the Scottish referendum of 2014 and the general election the following year: a warning that a vote for change would have severe economic costs.
This time it didn’t work. In part, that was because the EU referendum was an opportunity to protest about low pay, welfare cuts and stagnant living standards. In part, it was because the Conservative-supporting papers – who had backed Osborne when he was taking on Alex Salmond and Ed Miliband – came out strongly against what they called Project Fear. In part, it was due to overkill.
When it became clear that many voters were impervious to the warnings, Osborne doubled down. He warned that the economy would plunge into an immediate recession in the event of a vote for Brexit. He said he would be forced to bring in an emergency budget that would raise taxes and cut spending by £30bn. But there was no last-minute swing to remain and when Cameron stepped down as prime minister on the morning after the referendum, Osborne’s days were numbered. A political career that saw him become an MP before his 30th birthday, shadow chancellor before he was 35 and chancellor before turning 40 was effectively over at the age of 45.
Osborne’s rise was smoothed by the financial crisis of 2007 and the deep recession that followed. As shadow chancellor, he had two main lines of attack: Labour had failed to regulate the City properly and had borrowed too much.
The first charge was justified, and Osborne responded by giving far more power to the Bank of England to ensure there was no repeat of the reckless lending seen before 2007. The global nature of the crisis meant the second charge was specious, but Osborne showed himself to be a master of the political dark arts by making it stick.
As Labour turned in on itself during the leadership contest that followed the 2010 election, Osborne said he had no choice but to impose a tough austerity package because Labour had “failed to mend the roof while the sun was shining”. The new chancellor said voters should blame Gordon Brown for the spending cuts and the tax increases he had been forced to impose. Voters believed Osborne in 2010 and carried on believing him right up until the 2015 election.
Unfortunately, Osborne’s economic strategy proved less successful than his political strategy. The economy had been on the mend by the time of the 2010 election, but too much austerity too soon resulted in growth slowing down. Plans to tackle the deficit in one parliament proved wildly optimistic.
By halfway through the 2010-15 parliament, Osborne was in a spot. He had claimed – correctly – that the UK economy had been too dependent on debt in the years before the crisis, but now found that the economy was flatlining.
His solution was to get a moribund housing market moving by giving banks and building societies money to lend. A growing economy allowed Osborne to claim that his critics were wrong and that austerity had worked. Collapsing oil prices led to falling inflation and a surge in living standards that peaked around the time of the 2015 election. It was little more than a sugar rush, but Osborne was seen as a political wizard.
He capitalised on victory in 2015 by announcing a fresh assault on the deficit. There would be fresh cuts in spending by government departments and £12bn of additional welfare cuts in order to put the public finances back in the black by the end of the parliament. Osborne softened the blow by announcing a souped-up national minimum wage and outlining plans to create a “northern powerhouse”. At the Conservative party conference in October 2015, he made a clear leadership pitch with his “we are the builders” speech. It was the moment his career peaked.
Whatever his tenure as editor of the Evening Standard has in store, history is unlikely to be kind to Osborne, and not just because the referendum campaign went so badly wrong. He marketed himself as a one-nation Conservative, yet targeted the poor for spending cuts. He made deficit reduction the acid test of his chancellorship, yet austerity will continue deep into a third parliament. He said he would sort out Britain’s structural problems, but will leave parliament with the economy as dependent on debt and low-skill, low-productivity jobs as it has ever been. Those failures helped create the conditions for Brexit – and for his political demise.
Wednesday, 15 March 2017
Theresa May is dragging the UK under. This time Scotland must cut the rope
George Monbiot in The Guardian
Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it?
It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin.
But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal. If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result.
On the eve of the first independence referendum, in September 2014, David Cameron exhorted the people of Scotland to ask themselves: “Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?” Thanks to his machinations, the probable answer is now: yes.
In admonishing Scotland for seeking to protect itself from this chaos, the government applies a simple rule: whatever you say about Britain’s relationship with Europe, say the opposite about Scotland’s relationship with Britain.
In her speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference, Theresa May observed that “one of the driving forces behind the union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united”. She was talking about the UK, but the same remorseless logic applies to the EU. In this case, however, she believes that our strength and security will be enhanced by leaving. “Politics is not a game, and government is not a platform from which to pursue constitutional obsessions,” she stormed – to which you can only assent.
A Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, Jamie Greene, complains that a new referendum “would force people to vote blind on the biggest political decision a country could face. That is utterly irresponsible.” This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Before the last Scottish referendum, when the polls suggested that Scotland might choose independence, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, warned that “we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country … No one has thought any of this through.” Now, as foreign secretary, he assures us that “we would be perfectly OK” if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.
Independence supporters gather in Glasgow’s George Square after Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second referendum.
The frantic attempts by government and press to delegitimise the decision by the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to call for a second independence vote fall flat. Her party’s manifesto for the last Scottish election gives her an evident mandate: it would hold another referendum “if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.
Contrast this with May’s position. She has no mandate, from either the general election or the referendum, for leaving the single market and the European customs union. Her intransigence over these issues bends the Conservative manifesto’s pledge to “strengthen and improve devolution for each part of our United Kingdom”.
Her failure to consult the governments of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland before unilaterally deciding that the UK would leave the single market, and her refusal to respond to the paper the Scottish government produced exploring possible options for a continued engagement with the EU after Brexit testify to a relationship characterised by paternalism and contempt.
You can see the same attitude in the London-based newspapers. As the last referendum approached, they treated Scotland like an ungrateful servant. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are … They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” Melanie Reid sniffed in the Times. Now the charge is scheming opportunism. “We hope the Scottish people call Sturgeon out for her cynical, self-interested game-playing,” rages the Sun’s English edition. If you want to know what cynical, self-interested game-playing looks like, read the Sun’s Scottish edition. It says the opposite, contrasting the risks of independence with “the stick-on certainty of decades of Tory rule with nothing to soften it”, if Scotland remains within the UK.
Whenever I visit Scotland, I’m reminded that Britain is politically dead from the neck down. South of the border, we tolerate repeated assaults on the commonweal. As the self-hating state destroys its own power to distribute wealth, support public services and protect the NHS from ruin; as it rips up the rules protecting workers, the living world, our food, water and the very air we breathe; as disabled people are pushed off a cliff and poor people are evicted from their homes, we stand and stare. As the trade minister colludes with the dark money network on both sides of the Atlantic, threatening much that remains, we shake our heads then turn away.
Sure, there are some protests. There is plenty of dissent on social media; but our response is pathetic in comparison with the scale of what we face. The Labour opposition is divided, directionless and currently completely useless. But north of the border politics is everywhere, charged with hope, anger and a fierce desire for change. Again and again, this change is thwarted by the dead weight of Westminster. Who would remain tethered to this block, especially as the boat begins to list?
Scotland could wait to find out what happens after Brexit, though it is hard to see any likely outcome other than more of this and worse. Or it could cut the rope, pull itself back into the boat, and sail towards a hopeful if uncertain future. I know which option I would take.
Here is the question the people of Scotland will face in the next independence referendum: when England falls out of the boat like a block of concrete, do you want your foot tied to it?
It would be foolish to deny that there are risks in leaving the United Kingdom. Scotland’s economy is weak, not least because it has failed to wean itself off North Sea oil. There are major questions, not yet resolved, about the currency it would use; its trading relationship with the rump of the UK; and its association with the European Union, which it’s likely to try to rejoin.
But the risks of staying are as great or greater. Ministers are already trying to reconcile us to the possibility of falling out of the EU without a deal. If this happens, Britain would be the only one of the G20 nations without special access to EU trade – “a very destructive outcome leading to mutually assured damage for the EU and the UK”, according to the Commons foreign affairs committee. As the government has a weak hand, an obsession with past glories and an apparent yearning for a heroic gesture of self-destruction, this is not an unlikely result.
On the eve of the first independence referendum, in September 2014, David Cameron exhorted the people of Scotland to ask themselves: “Will my family and I truly be better off by going it alone? Will we really be more safe and secure?” Thanks to his machinations, the probable answer is now: yes.
In admonishing Scotland for seeking to protect itself from this chaos, the government applies a simple rule: whatever you say about Britain’s relationship with Europe, say the opposite about Scotland’s relationship with Britain.
In her speech to the Scottish Conservatives’ spring conference, Theresa May observed that “one of the driving forces behind the union’s creation was the remorseless logic that greater economic strength and security come from being united”. She was talking about the UK, but the same remorseless logic applies to the EU. In this case, however, she believes that our strength and security will be enhanced by leaving. “Politics is not a game, and government is not a platform from which to pursue constitutional obsessions,” she stormed – to which you can only assent.
A Conservative member of the Scottish parliament, Jamie Greene, complains that a new referendum “would force people to vote blind on the biggest political decision a country could face. That is utterly irresponsible.” This reminds me of something, but I can’t quite put my finger on it.
Before the last Scottish referendum, when the polls suggested that Scotland might choose independence, Boris Johnson, then London mayor, warned that “we are on the verge of an utter catastrophe for this country … No one has thought any of this through.” Now, as foreign secretary, he assures us that “we would be perfectly OK” if Britain leaves the EU without a deal.
Independence supporters gather in Glasgow’s George Square after Nicola Sturgeon’s call for a second referendum.
The frantic attempts by government and press to delegitimise the decision by the Scottish first minister, Nicola Sturgeon, to call for a second independence vote fall flat. Her party’s manifesto for the last Scottish election gives her an evident mandate: it would hold another referendum “if there is a significant and material change in the circumstances that prevailed in 2014, such as Scotland being taken out of the EU against our will”.
Contrast this with May’s position. She has no mandate, from either the general election or the referendum, for leaving the single market and the European customs union. Her intransigence over these issues bends the Conservative manifesto’s pledge to “strengthen and improve devolution for each part of our United Kingdom”.
Her failure to consult the governments of Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland before unilaterally deciding that the UK would leave the single market, and her refusal to respond to the paper the Scottish government produced exploring possible options for a continued engagement with the EU after Brexit testify to a relationship characterised by paternalism and contempt.
You can see the same attitude in the London-based newspapers. As the last referendum approached, they treated Scotland like an ungrateful servant. “What spoilt, selfish, childlike fools those Scots are … They simply don’t have a clue how lucky they are,” Melanie Reid sniffed in the Times. Now the charge is scheming opportunism. “We hope the Scottish people call Sturgeon out for her cynical, self-interested game-playing,” rages the Sun’s English edition. If you want to know what cynical, self-interested game-playing looks like, read the Sun’s Scottish edition. It says the opposite, contrasting the risks of independence with “the stick-on certainty of decades of Tory rule with nothing to soften it”, if Scotland remains within the UK.
Whenever I visit Scotland, I’m reminded that Britain is politically dead from the neck down. South of the border, we tolerate repeated assaults on the commonweal. As the self-hating state destroys its own power to distribute wealth, support public services and protect the NHS from ruin; as it rips up the rules protecting workers, the living world, our food, water and the very air we breathe; as disabled people are pushed off a cliff and poor people are evicted from their homes, we stand and stare. As the trade minister colludes with the dark money network on both sides of the Atlantic, threatening much that remains, we shake our heads then turn away.
Sure, there are some protests. There is plenty of dissent on social media; but our response is pathetic in comparison with the scale of what we face. The Labour opposition is divided, directionless and currently completely useless. But north of the border politics is everywhere, charged with hope, anger and a fierce desire for change. Again and again, this change is thwarted by the dead weight of Westminster. Who would remain tethered to this block, especially as the boat begins to list?
Scotland could wait to find out what happens after Brexit, though it is hard to see any likely outcome other than more of this and worse. Or it could cut the rope, pull itself back into the boat, and sail towards a hopeful if uncertain future. I know which option I would take.
Thursday, 13 October 2016
Don’t call for another referendum – they cause more problems than they solve
Amol Rajan in The Independent
Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.
As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.
This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.
First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather.
Many journalists ply their trade because it is politics by other means. I joined this profession for several reasons, including the need to make a living and the absence of suitable alternatives. But one of the main reasons was that I believe very strongly in democracy – a political idea – because it is a way of diffusing power so that it is not just concentrated among the rich and the few.
As a democrat, even a radical democrat, for years I harboured an instinctive fondness for referendums. Give the people a say. Let them decide. All that stuff. But judging by the experience of Britain's most recent referendum, I have changed my mind. I now think fewer would be preferable.
This is not necessarily because I think the wrong result transpired. Rather it is because I can see the problems with referendums more clearly now. I reckon there are at least four.
First, they too often turn on variables unrelated to the question at hand, such as whether a particular leader is popular that month. Colombia's rejection of a peace deal may have turned on the weather.
Second, they give excessive influence and airtime to single-issue campaigners and fringe groups who don't belong in, or represent, the mainstream.
Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.
Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.
And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.
It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.
The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.
Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.
Third, they reduce very complex issues to binary decisions, ignoring the fact that politics is full of trade-offs; leaving the European Union, for instance, can mean many different things.
Here's just such a trade-off: you can lower immigration levels, but you'll be poorer in the short-term as you probably have to leave the single market. It's what people voted for – even if they didn't realise it. But now there's a huge move in parliament to pretend this trade-off didn't happen. You see it in the intellectually docile terminology of hard versus soft Brexit, as if there were only two options from the infinite variety of potential end results to the coming negotiation.
And that is the fourth problem with referendums: the losers often have nowhere to go. You end up with a hugely disenfranchised constituency, who are either agitating for another go or nurse such a constant grievance that they undermine the whole electoral system. That is what is happening now.
It is right and proper that parliament should scrutinise the negotiation undertaken by Theresa May and her team, but what cannot happen is a re-run of the EU referendum. The result is in – and it is clear. Yet the attempt to cobble together a parliamentary coalition against leaving the single market is a giant festival of sour grapes masquerading as patriotism and belief in democracy.
The shenanigans this week illustrate exquisitely how, far from encouraging participation and supporting democracy, referendums generally end up subverting it.
Brexit – that dreaded, bizarre word, simultaneously so empty and so full – has come to define this government though nobody knows what it means and nobody has a clue how to deliver it. Under the guise of fortifying our democracy, it has started to consume it. That's not what plebiscites are meant to do.
Sunday, 4 September 2016
The BBC’s fixation on ‘balance’ skews the truth
Catherine Bennett in The Guardian
As any young Earth creationist will confirm, the BBC occasionally fails in its objective of due impartiality. Only last week, it reported on a fossil find in Greenland, without bothering to balance this with a contribution from a fundamentalist Christian, such as Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence.
If the US might seem like a long way to go for comment, the BBC’s referendum coverage demonstrated that, when balance is at stake, a contributor’s passion can be quite as compelling a qualification as his or her expertise, reputation or, even, connection with the subject under discussion. Moreover, Pence has a long acquaintance with creationism.
It was never clear, at least to this listener, why Steve Hilton, a US resident who once fell out with the last prime minister, became one of the anti-EU stars of the BBC’s Brexit coverage, to the point of assisting with analysis on referendum night. But in line with BBC impartiality guidelines that are enforced, arguably to the point of misrepresentation, when the corporation feels threatened, he was no doubt balanced by a yet more embittered – but pro-Remain – ex-Cameron adviser with a similarly touristic stake in the outcome.
To be fair to Mr Hilton, he could hardly be blamed for embracing a dazzling career in EU punditry when the BBC pressed it upon him, nor was his inexplicable prominence the most bizarre or regrettable aspect of the coverage which, according to polling by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), played the biggest part in the referendum in keeping the British public informed. Throughout a debate the ERS describes as “dire”, the BBC was the source of information most commonly cited as important. The final level of public understanding, after a four-month campaign, is well illustrated, says its new report, by the great spike on 24 June in the number of people googling “What is the EU?” “We would argue,” say the authors, “that the levels of knowledge reported by members of the public were too low throughout.” This, despite demonstrably high levels of public interest and lavish airtime for the individuals they describe as “big beasts”.
Among their recommendations for better informed plebiscites, as referendums become more commonplace, are longer campaign periods and an independent body empowered to correct misleading statements such as the untruth – holy writ according to Gisela Stuart, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – that Britain sends a weekly £350m to the EU. Further public understanding might be achieved, it says, if broadcasters attempted more “deliberative” as opposed to tit-for-tat coverage of the type that infuriated complainants to the BBC’s Feedback programme long before they could be written off as sore losers.
If there are pointed lessons here for some BBC programme-makers, who must bear partial responsibility for the final level of public bafflement, maybe they shouldn’t be blamed for submitting to management orders, issued when the now forgotten escort fan and culture secretary, John Whittingdale, was emitting worrying noises. The EU referendum guidelines effectively ordained that BBC coverage would adhere, in the aim of impartiality, to traditional, binary practices, despite this being a non-party political debate to which any number of non-affiliated, non big beasts might have more insights to contribute than Westminster’s in-fighters. In Johnson’s case, these amounted to: “We export French knickers to France... Are the French really going to put tariffs on our French knickers when we buy so much of their cheese and their champagne? Of course they’re not!”
Questioned about the many, normally respected authorities whose research indicated more problematic economic outcomes, Johnson’s ally, Gove, urged voters to shun the Nobel laureates’ paperwork. “We have to be careful about historical comparisons, but Albert Einstein during the 1930s was denounced by the German authorities for being wrong and his theories were denounced and one of the reasons of course he was denounced was because he was Jewish. They got 100 German scientists in the pay of the government to say that he was wrong and Einstein said, ‘Look, if I was wrong, one would have been enough.’”
“For me,” writes Professor John van Reenen, formerly of the LSE, now at MIT and one of the economists thus likened by Gove to an antisemitic, government-owned Nazi, “it simply capped off a frankly disgusting campaign, one where the Leave side simply impugned the motives of ‘the experts’ rather than seriously engaging with the substance of the economic debate.”
But the Leave side might not have got away with this ugliness, nor Remain with prattling about imminent apocalypse, had not the BBC, as well as enabling an often asinine level of argument, allowed its obsession with balance to dictate that any carefully argued observation on Brexit, deserving of analysis, be promptly followed by its formal opponent’s unsubstantiated bluster.
As any young Earth creationist will confirm, the BBC occasionally fails in its objective of due impartiality. Only last week, it reported on a fossil find in Greenland, without bothering to balance this with a contribution from a fundamentalist Christian, such as Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence.
If the US might seem like a long way to go for comment, the BBC’s referendum coverage demonstrated that, when balance is at stake, a contributor’s passion can be quite as compelling a qualification as his or her expertise, reputation or, even, connection with the subject under discussion. Moreover, Pence has a long acquaintance with creationism.
It was never clear, at least to this listener, why Steve Hilton, a US resident who once fell out with the last prime minister, became one of the anti-EU stars of the BBC’s Brexit coverage, to the point of assisting with analysis on referendum night. But in line with BBC impartiality guidelines that are enforced, arguably to the point of misrepresentation, when the corporation feels threatened, he was no doubt balanced by a yet more embittered – but pro-Remain – ex-Cameron adviser with a similarly touristic stake in the outcome.
To be fair to Mr Hilton, he could hardly be blamed for embracing a dazzling career in EU punditry when the BBC pressed it upon him, nor was his inexplicable prominence the most bizarre or regrettable aspect of the coverage which, according to polling by the Electoral Reform Society (ERS), played the biggest part in the referendum in keeping the British public informed. Throughout a debate the ERS describes as “dire”, the BBC was the source of information most commonly cited as important. The final level of public understanding, after a four-month campaign, is well illustrated, says its new report, by the great spike on 24 June in the number of people googling “What is the EU?” “We would argue,” say the authors, “that the levels of knowledge reported by members of the public were too low throughout.” This, despite demonstrably high levels of public interest and lavish airtime for the individuals they describe as “big beasts”.
Among their recommendations for better informed plebiscites, as referendums become more commonplace, are longer campaign periods and an independent body empowered to correct misleading statements such as the untruth – holy writ according to Gisela Stuart, Michael Gove and Boris Johnson – that Britain sends a weekly £350m to the EU. Further public understanding might be achieved, it says, if broadcasters attempted more “deliberative” as opposed to tit-for-tat coverage of the type that infuriated complainants to the BBC’s Feedback programme long before they could be written off as sore losers.
If there are pointed lessons here for some BBC programme-makers, who must bear partial responsibility for the final level of public bafflement, maybe they shouldn’t be blamed for submitting to management orders, issued when the now forgotten escort fan and culture secretary, John Whittingdale, was emitting worrying noises. The EU referendum guidelines effectively ordained that BBC coverage would adhere, in the aim of impartiality, to traditional, binary practices, despite this being a non-party political debate to which any number of non-affiliated, non big beasts might have more insights to contribute than Westminster’s in-fighters. In Johnson’s case, these amounted to: “We export French knickers to France... Are the French really going to put tariffs on our French knickers when we buy so much of their cheese and their champagne? Of course they’re not!”
Questioned about the many, normally respected authorities whose research indicated more problematic economic outcomes, Johnson’s ally, Gove, urged voters to shun the Nobel laureates’ paperwork. “We have to be careful about historical comparisons, but Albert Einstein during the 1930s was denounced by the German authorities for being wrong and his theories were denounced and one of the reasons of course he was denounced was because he was Jewish. They got 100 German scientists in the pay of the government to say that he was wrong and Einstein said, ‘Look, if I was wrong, one would have been enough.’”
“For me,” writes Professor John van Reenen, formerly of the LSE, now at MIT and one of the economists thus likened by Gove to an antisemitic, government-owned Nazi, “it simply capped off a frankly disgusting campaign, one where the Leave side simply impugned the motives of ‘the experts’ rather than seriously engaging with the substance of the economic debate.”
But the Leave side might not have got away with this ugliness, nor Remain with prattling about imminent apocalypse, had not the BBC, as well as enabling an often asinine level of argument, allowed its obsession with balance to dictate that any carefully argued observation on Brexit, deserving of analysis, be promptly followed by its formal opponent’s unsubstantiated bluster.
Similarly, no more attention would be devoted to a striking near-consensus of economic opinion than to its negation by a speaker representing a groupuscule of eight. Admittedly, this was tough on the eight. Professor Patrick Minford was working hours to which no elderly economist should be subjected. But that’s just one of the costs of the BBC’s “regulated equivocation”, as its critics call a habit that has previously embarrassed the corporation when applied to climate change and the MMR. Until recently, it considered the climate change denier Nigel Lawson as fine a match for peer-reviewed research as it now believes him a trusted guarantor of post-Brexit glories, possibly forgetting his earlier history of shadowing the deutschmark.
In his 2011 report on BBC science coverage, the geneticist Professor Steve Jones criticised the “over-rigid” insistence on due impartiality that could give “undue attention to marginal opinion”. But once again, in referendum coverage, the corporation actively required its journalists to supply this phony balance, even when that meant, as Jones put it on science, allowing rhetoric – say Gove’s “hostages” in a car – “to give the appearance of debate”.
As with climate change, implicit in extreme BBC impartiality is a distinctly un-BBC like, post-truth proposal that, since all opinions merit equal coverage, the public might as well give up on evidence-based argument. So much was plainly stated by Today’s Nick Robinson when he assured voters who were, in huge numbers, seeking information from the BBC that the debate was all “claims and counterclaims”, “guesswork”. “No journalist,” he declared, “no pundit, no expert can resolve these questions for you.” Whether the imaginary £350m claimed by Johnson and Gove would ever be imaginarily spent on the NHS was not, it presumably followed, a lie for the BBC to repeatedly expose, but “a matter of judgment”.
Whichever side you were on, the BBC’s coverage was not, as the ERS is not the first to point out, such as to create unalloyed confidence in the outcome. Even the winners would discover, shortly after voting, that one big beast (Gove) had never meant it about the NHS’s £350m; that another (Hannan) saw no connection with reduced immigration. That ERS idea, the official fact checker, has already been derided as a “stuck-up quango”. But would the ERS be asking if the BBC had done its job?
In his 2011 report on BBC science coverage, the geneticist Professor Steve Jones criticised the “over-rigid” insistence on due impartiality that could give “undue attention to marginal opinion”. But once again, in referendum coverage, the corporation actively required its journalists to supply this phony balance, even when that meant, as Jones put it on science, allowing rhetoric – say Gove’s “hostages” in a car – “to give the appearance of debate”.
As with climate change, implicit in extreme BBC impartiality is a distinctly un-BBC like, post-truth proposal that, since all opinions merit equal coverage, the public might as well give up on evidence-based argument. So much was plainly stated by Today’s Nick Robinson when he assured voters who were, in huge numbers, seeking information from the BBC that the debate was all “claims and counterclaims”, “guesswork”. “No journalist,” he declared, “no pundit, no expert can resolve these questions for you.” Whether the imaginary £350m claimed by Johnson and Gove would ever be imaginarily spent on the NHS was not, it presumably followed, a lie for the BBC to repeatedly expose, but “a matter of judgment”.
Whichever side you were on, the BBC’s coverage was not, as the ERS is not the first to point out, such as to create unalloyed confidence in the outcome. Even the winners would discover, shortly after voting, that one big beast (Gove) had never meant it about the NHS’s £350m; that another (Hannan) saw no connection with reduced immigration. That ERS idea, the official fact checker, has already been derided as a “stuck-up quango”. But would the ERS be asking if the BBC had done its job?
Wednesday, 20 July 2016
There could still be a second referendum in Britain – if EU leaders listen
Vernon Bogdanor in The Guardian
A change to free movement could persuade the British public to vote again. And it can be done: treaties that stand in the way of reality have been changed before.
Despite the rhetoric of ever closer union, the member states are no longer prepared to sacrifice more of their sovereignty. Germany has no appetite for fiscal union, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has said that integration has gone “too far”. Poland has no wish to adopt the euro; there is clearly little desire for a common migration policy; and anti-EU feeling is growing throughout the continent. The EU has become economically, politically and culturally too diverse for any drive towards ever closer union to be successful.
More often than not, a political union of separate states requires an act of will brought about by force or an external threat – as with the United States in the 18th century and Germany in the 19th. The EU is in no position to produce such strength of feeling, so it seems certain to remain an association of states committed, as the European federalist Andrew Duff has lamented, to “never closer union”. The trend towards intergovernmentalism rather than supranationalism – where a power greater than the states takes control – was vividly illustrated when the eurozone crisis was handled largely by the council, made up of EU heads of governments, rather than the commission, which has the sole power to initiate laws.
The EU must now face reality. That means formally recognising the council as the supreme executive of the union, downgrading the commission so that it becomes, as the Gaullists have long wanted, a secretariat of the council without the power to initiate legislation. That would undermine the arguments of Eurosceptics, who thrive on the anathema of an unelected and unaccountable legislative body, something that Britain found particularly difficult to accept.
Further, so long as the idea of “ever closer union” remains enshrined in the EU, it will give eurosceptics a handle for criticism; and it allows the European court of justice to extend its remit too widely. The court should be an arbiter, not a missionary to eliminate states’ rights. So the EU must state clearly that ever closer union is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.
The EU must also face reality on freedom of movement. That principle was first outlined in the 1950s in conditions very different from those of today, by six member states at a similar stage of economic development and before the era of inexpensive mass transit. It is no longer suitable when Europe consists of 27 member states at very different stages of economic development. It not only imposes strains on the more affluent countries, stimulating the growth of the radical right, but also deprives the less affluent members of their most able and energetic citizens. Modifying this principle would also help Britain to negotiate continued access to the internal market.
It is said that the treaties preclude any interference with freedom of movement. Yet treaties intended to enforce the stability and growth pact, designed to limit the power of national governments, have been disregarded when necessity required. Adoption of the euro was supposed to be irreversible; yet, it is claimed Schauble urged Greece to abandon the euro and leave the Eurozone. Treaties, after all, are human constructs. If they stand in the way of reality, members can and should agree to revise them.
The EU needs not only long-term reform but also immediate measures to prove its value to the ordinary citizen. Tusk has rightly said that Europeans want not more Europe, but better Europe. Many Europeans have benefited from the single market, most obviously in cheap airfares – now, as the banker Sir Martin Jacomb has argued, is surely the time for a radical extension of free market rules into the energy and digital areas, and an effort to ensure that professional qualifications are genuinely transferable across Europe. This would provide citizens with concrete benefits, which would do more than a host of declarations or institutional reforms to prove the value of the European project.
Frankfurt tries to tempt the bankers fleeing a post-Brexit Britain
The British contribution to Europe was always to insist that rhetoric is subordinated to reality. Realism is now desperately needed if the European project is to be rescued from the elitist and technocratic establishment which currently dominates it, and which is losing it the support of its people. Perhaps if EU leaders listen to what citizens are saying, it might even be possible to persuade the British public to have second thoughts in a second referendum.
A change to free movement could persuade the British public to vote again. And it can be done: treaties that stand in the way of reality have been changed before.
EU flags flying at half mast at the European commission to mark the Bastille Day attack. ‘As Donald Tusk declared before the referendum, the EU needs to take a “long hard look at itself and listen to the British warning signal”.’ Photograph: Darko Vojinovic/AP
How should Britain leave the European Union? The question hangs over Theresa May’s new administration as it considers when to invoke article 50, which will lay out the procedure for a withdrawal agreement, and indicate what sort of future relationship Britain wants with the EU.
Will it be membership of the European Economic Area, like Norway? A trade agreement with the EU, or reliance on World Trade Organisation rules? Yet the future relationship depends not only on the conditions in Britain but also on developments in the EU. And in that respect there are encouraging signs that European leaders are, at long last, listening to what their peoples have been telling them.
As Donald Tusk, president of the European council, declared before the referendum, the EU needs to take a “long hard look at itself and listen to the British warning signal”. After the vote for Brexit, that is needed more than ever. During the campaign much was made of the dangers of an overweening Europe, aiming to become a federal superstate. Yet things have changed following theeurozone and migration crises.
How should Britain leave the European Union? The question hangs over Theresa May’s new administration as it considers when to invoke article 50, which will lay out the procedure for a withdrawal agreement, and indicate what sort of future relationship Britain wants with the EU.
Will it be membership of the European Economic Area, like Norway? A trade agreement with the EU, or reliance on World Trade Organisation rules? Yet the future relationship depends not only on the conditions in Britain but also on developments in the EU. And in that respect there are encouraging signs that European leaders are, at long last, listening to what their peoples have been telling them.
As Donald Tusk, president of the European council, declared before the referendum, the EU needs to take a “long hard look at itself and listen to the British warning signal”. After the vote for Brexit, that is needed more than ever. During the campaign much was made of the dangers of an overweening Europe, aiming to become a federal superstate. Yet things have changed following theeurozone and migration crises.
Despite the rhetoric of ever closer union, the member states are no longer prepared to sacrifice more of their sovereignty. Germany has no appetite for fiscal union, and Wolfgang Schäuble, Germany’s finance minister, has said that integration has gone “too far”. Poland has no wish to adopt the euro; there is clearly little desire for a common migration policy; and anti-EU feeling is growing throughout the continent. The EU has become economically, politically and culturally too diverse for any drive towards ever closer union to be successful.
More often than not, a political union of separate states requires an act of will brought about by force or an external threat – as with the United States in the 18th century and Germany in the 19th. The EU is in no position to produce such strength of feeling, so it seems certain to remain an association of states committed, as the European federalist Andrew Duff has lamented, to “never closer union”. The trend towards intergovernmentalism rather than supranationalism – where a power greater than the states takes control – was vividly illustrated when the eurozone crisis was handled largely by the council, made up of EU heads of governments, rather than the commission, which has the sole power to initiate laws.
The EU must now face reality. That means formally recognising the council as the supreme executive of the union, downgrading the commission so that it becomes, as the Gaullists have long wanted, a secretariat of the council without the power to initiate legislation. That would undermine the arguments of Eurosceptics, who thrive on the anathema of an unelected and unaccountable legislative body, something that Britain found particularly difficult to accept.
Further, so long as the idea of “ever closer union” remains enshrined in the EU, it will give eurosceptics a handle for criticism; and it allows the European court of justice to extend its remit too widely. The court should be an arbiter, not a missionary to eliminate states’ rights. So the EU must state clearly that ever closer union is unlikely to occur in the foreseeable future.
The EU must also face reality on freedom of movement. That principle was first outlined in the 1950s in conditions very different from those of today, by six member states at a similar stage of economic development and before the era of inexpensive mass transit. It is no longer suitable when Europe consists of 27 member states at very different stages of economic development. It not only imposes strains on the more affluent countries, stimulating the growth of the radical right, but also deprives the less affluent members of their most able and energetic citizens. Modifying this principle would also help Britain to negotiate continued access to the internal market.
It is said that the treaties preclude any interference with freedom of movement. Yet treaties intended to enforce the stability and growth pact, designed to limit the power of national governments, have been disregarded when necessity required. Adoption of the euro was supposed to be irreversible; yet, it is claimed Schauble urged Greece to abandon the euro and leave the Eurozone. Treaties, after all, are human constructs. If they stand in the way of reality, members can and should agree to revise them.
The EU needs not only long-term reform but also immediate measures to prove its value to the ordinary citizen. Tusk has rightly said that Europeans want not more Europe, but better Europe. Many Europeans have benefited from the single market, most obviously in cheap airfares – now, as the banker Sir Martin Jacomb has argued, is surely the time for a radical extension of free market rules into the energy and digital areas, and an effort to ensure that professional qualifications are genuinely transferable across Europe. This would provide citizens with concrete benefits, which would do more than a host of declarations or institutional reforms to prove the value of the European project.
Frankfurt tries to tempt the bankers fleeing a post-Brexit Britain
The British contribution to Europe was always to insist that rhetoric is subordinated to reality. Realism is now desperately needed if the European project is to be rescued from the elitist and technocratic establishment which currently dominates it, and which is losing it the support of its people. Perhaps if EU leaders listen to what citizens are saying, it might even be possible to persuade the British public to have second thoughts in a second referendum.
Monday, 27 June 2016
How to stop Brexit: get your MP to vote it down
Geoffrey Robertson in The Guardian
It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.
It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.
Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.
It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.
Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated
Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.
Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.
In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership.
So how should MPs vote come November, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduces the 2016 European Communities Act (Repeal) Bill? Those from London and Scotland should happily vote against it, following their constituents’ wishes. So should Labour MPs – it’s their party policy after all.
By November, there may be other very good reasons for MPs to refuse to leave Europe. Brexit may turn out to be just too difficult. Staying in the EU may be the only way to stop Scotland from splitting, or to rescue the pound. A poll on Sunday tells us that a million leave voters are already regretting their choice: a significant public change of mind would amply justify a parliamentary refusal to Brexit. It may be, in November, that President Donald Trump becomes the leader of the free world – in which case a strong EU would become more necessary than ever. Or it may simply be that a majority of MPs, mindful of their constitutional duty to do what is best for Britain, conscientiously decide that it is best to remain.
There is no point in holding another referendum (as several million online petitioners are urging). Referendums are alien to our traditions, they are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy. The only way forward now depends on the courage, intelligence and conscience of your local MP. So have your say in the traditional way: lobby him or her to vote against the government when it tries to Brexit, because parliament is sovereign.
It’s not over yet. A law that passed last year to set up the EU referendum said nothing about the result being binding or having any legal force. “Sovereignty” – a much misunderstood word in the campaign – resides in Britain with the “Queen in parliament”, that is with MPs alone who can make or break laws and peers who can block them. Before Brexit can be triggered, parliament must repeal the 1972 European Communities Act by which it voted to take us into the European Union – and MPs have every right, and indeed a duty if they think it best for Britain, to vote to stay.
It is being said that the government can trigger Brexit under article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, merely by sending a note to Brussels. This is wrong. Article 50 says: “Any member state may decide to withdraw from the Union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.” The UK’s most fundamental constitutional requirement is that there must first be the approval of its parliament.
Britain, absurdly, is the only significant country (other than Saudi Arabia) without a written constitution. We have what are termed “constitutional conventions”, along with a lot of history and traditions. Nothing in these precedents allots any place to the results of referendums or requires our sovereign parliament to take a blind bit of notice of them.
It was parliament that voted to enter the European Economic Community in 1972, and only three years later was a referendum held to settle the split in Harold Wilson’s Labour party over the value of membership. Had a narrow majority of the public voted out in 1975, Wilson would still have had to persuade parliament to vote accordingly – and it is far from certain that he would have succeeded.
Petition for second EU referendum may have been manipulated
Our democracy does not allow, much less require, decision-making by referendum. That role belongs to the representatives of the people and not to the people themselves. Democracy has never meant the tyranny of the simple majority, much less the tyranny of the mob (otherwise, we might still have capital punishment). Democracy entails an elected government, subject to certain checks and balances such as the common law and the courts, and an executive ultimately responsible to parliament, whose members are entitled to vote according to conscience and common sense.
Many countries, including Commonwealth nations – vouchsafed their constitutions by the UK – have provisions for change by referendums. But these provisions are carefully circumscribed and do not usually allow change by simple majority.
In Australia, for example, a referendum proposal must pass in each of the six states (this would defeat Brexit, which failed in Scotland and Northern Ireland). In other countries, it must pass by a very clear majority – usually two-thirds. In some US states that permit voting on public legislative proposals, there are similar safeguards. In the UK (except, under a 2011 act in the case of an EU expansion of power), referendum results are merely advisory – in this case, advising MPs that the country is split almost down the middle on the wisdom of EU membership.
So how should MPs vote come November, when Prime Minister Boris Johnson introduces the 2016 European Communities Act (Repeal) Bill? Those from London and Scotland should happily vote against it, following their constituents’ wishes. So should Labour MPs – it’s their party policy after all.
By November, there may be other very good reasons for MPs to refuse to leave Europe. Brexit may turn out to be just too difficult. Staying in the EU may be the only way to stop Scotland from splitting, or to rescue the pound. A poll on Sunday tells us that a million leave voters are already regretting their choice: a significant public change of mind would amply justify a parliamentary refusal to Brexit. It may be, in November, that President Donald Trump becomes the leader of the free world – in which case a strong EU would become more necessary than ever. Or it may simply be that a majority of MPs, mindful of their constitutional duty to do what is best for Britain, conscientiously decide that it is best to remain.
There is no point in holding another referendum (as several million online petitioners are urging). Referendums are alien to our traditions, they are inappropriate for complex decision-making, and without careful incorporation in a written constitution, the public expectation aroused by the result can damage our democracy. The only way forward now depends on the courage, intelligence and conscience of your local MP. So have your say in the traditional way: lobby him or her to vote against the government when it tries to Brexit, because parliament is sovereign.
W ill article 50 ever be triggered?
Jon Henley in The Guardian
When David Cameron delivered his resignation speech outside No 10 on Friday, he said he would leave the task of triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty – the untested procedure governing how an EU member state leaves the bloc – to his successor.
This has prompted much speculation – and a glimmer of hope for those who want Britain to remain in the European Union. Cameron, they argue, had repeatedly said during the campaign that article 50 would be triggered immediately if Vote Leave were to win the Brexit referendum.
By not doing so, the theory is, and by bequeathing the responsibility to whoever succeeds him, Cameron has handed the next prime minister a poisoned chalice. Given the dramatic reaction to Brexit – on world stock markets, on the foreign exchanges, in Scotland, across Europe – and with the enormity of the consequences of leaving the EU now plain, who will dare pull the trigger?
One consequence of this, as a below-the-line commenter argued on the Guardian website, is that Cameron has effectively snookered the Brexit camp: they may have won the referendum, but they cannot use the mandate they have been given because if they do so they will be seen to be knowingly condemning the UK to recession, breakup and years of pain.
This could mean, as lawyer and writer David Allen Green has suggested in a blogpost, that “the longer article 50 notification is put off, the greater the chance it will never be made ... As long as the notification is not sent, the UK remains part of the EU. And there is currently no reason or evidence to believe that, regardless of the referendum result, the notification will be sent at all.”
Is this feasible? Certainly, leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson and Matthew Elliott, who ran Vote Leave, have said very clearly they are in no hurry to push the button.
They argue it is far more sensible to hold informal talks with Brussels, and other member states, in order to arrive at the outline of a possible settlement before locking Britain into the strict two-year timeframe within which article 50 negotiations must be concluded (and if they are not, Britain risks having to leave the EU with no deal at all).
In Brussels and other EU capitals, the UK’s heel-dragging is already causing great frustration. European foreign ministers and EU leaders have lined up this weekend to impress on Britain the need for urgency. Brexit talks must begin “immediately”, they said, so as to avoid a sustained period of uncertainty and instability that, with Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, could do great damage to the already weakened bloc.
© Reuters
This has prompted much speculation – and a glimmer of hope for those who want Britain to remain in the European Union. Cameron, they argue, had repeatedly said during the campaign that article 50 would be triggered immediately if Vote Leave were to win the Brexit referendum.
By not doing so, the theory is, and by bequeathing the responsibility to whoever succeeds him, Cameron has handed the next prime minister a poisoned chalice. Given the dramatic reaction to Brexit – on world stock markets, on the foreign exchanges, in Scotland, across Europe – and with the enormity of the consequences of leaving the EU now plain, who will dare pull the trigger?
One consequence of this, as a below-the-line commenter argued on the Guardian website, is that Cameron has effectively snookered the Brexit camp: they may have won the referendum, but they cannot use the mandate they have been given because if they do so they will be seen to be knowingly condemning the UK to recession, breakup and years of pain.
This could mean, as lawyer and writer David Allen Green has suggested in a blogpost, that “the longer article 50 notification is put off, the greater the chance it will never be made ... As long as the notification is not sent, the UK remains part of the EU. And there is currently no reason or evidence to believe that, regardless of the referendum result, the notification will be sent at all.”
Is this feasible? Certainly, leading Brexit campaigners, including Boris Johnson and Matthew Elliott, who ran Vote Leave, have said very clearly they are in no hurry to push the button.
They argue it is far more sensible to hold informal talks with Brussels, and other member states, in order to arrive at the outline of a possible settlement before locking Britain into the strict two-year timeframe within which article 50 negotiations must be concluded (and if they are not, Britain risks having to leave the EU with no deal at all).
In Brussels and other EU capitals, the UK’s heel-dragging is already causing great frustration. European foreign ministers and EU leaders have lined up this weekend to impress on Britain the need for urgency. Brexit talks must begin “immediately”, they said, so as to avoid a sustained period of uncertainty and instability that, with Euroscepticism on the rise across the continent, could do great damage to the already weakened bloc.
© Reuters
Martin Schulz, the president of the European parliament, expects Cameron to formally announce Britain’s EU exit on Tuesday evening.But there seems to be no immediate legal means out of the stalemate. It is entirely up to the departing member state to trigger article 50, by issuing formal notification of intention to leave: no one, in Brussels, Berlin or Paris, can force it to. But equally, there is nothing in article 50 that obliges the EU to open talks – including the informal talks the Brexit leaders want – before formal notification has been made.
“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University. “Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”
The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, has said he expects Cameron to initiate the process on Tuesday evening, making the formal announcement that Britain intends to exit the EU at the summit dinner he is due to address before going home and leaving – for the first time – the other 27 member states to discuss Britain’s situation without him the following day.
The European council has confirmed that notification does not have to be in writing, but could be in the form of a formal statement to the summit – so Cameron had better be careful about what exactly he says.
© PA 10 highest votes for LeaveBut reports in German newspaper
“There is no mechanism to compel a state to withdraw from the European Union,” said Kenneth Armstrong, professor of European law at Cambridge University. “Article 50 is there to allow withdrawal, but no other party has the right to invoke article 50, no other state or institution. While delay is highly undesirable politically, legally there is nothing that can compel a state to withdraw.”
The president of the European parliament, Martin Schulz, has said he expects Cameron to initiate the process on Tuesday evening, making the formal announcement that Britain intends to exit the EU at the summit dinner he is due to address before going home and leaving – for the first time – the other 27 member states to discuss Britain’s situation without him the following day.
The European council has confirmed that notification does not have to be in writing, but could be in the form of a formal statement to the summit – so Cameron had better be careful about what exactly he says.
© PA 10 highest votes for LeaveBut reports in German newspaper
Süddeutsche Zeitung, among others, that an increasingly frustrated EU could, if push comes to shove, decide to consider the referendum result itself as “an official wish to leave” seem unreliable. “The notification of article 50 is a formal act and has to be done by the British government to the European council,” an EU official told Reuters.
“It has to be done in an unequivocal manner, with the explicit intent to trigger article 50. Negotiations to leave and on the future relationship can only begin after such a formal notification. If it is indeed the intention of the British government to leave the EU, it is therefore in its interest to notify as soon as possible.”
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, has said “de facto ejection” is a possibility unless Britain gets a move on, but it is unclear on what grounds that could happen. Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty allows the EU to suspend a member if it deems it to be in breach of basic principles of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law. But that would be the nuclear option.
The situation could get quite nasty, quite quickly. Politically, the pressure on Cameron – and on his successor, whoever that may be – could be extreme. But legally, there does not appear to be any easy way out. If Britain so chooses, this could become a standoff that could drag on for years.
“It has to be done in an unequivocal manner, with the explicit intent to trigger article 50. Negotiations to leave and on the future relationship can only begin after such a formal notification. If it is indeed the intention of the British government to leave the EU, it is therefore in its interest to notify as soon as possible.”
Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister, has said “de facto ejection” is a possibility unless Britain gets a move on, but it is unclear on what grounds that could happen. Article 7 of the Lisbon treaty allows the EU to suspend a member if it deems it to be in breach of basic principles of freedom, democracy, equality and rule of law. But that would be the nuclear option.
The situation could get quite nasty, quite quickly. Politically, the pressure on Cameron – and on his successor, whoever that may be – could be extreme. But legally, there does not appear to be any easy way out. If Britain so chooses, this could become a standoff that could drag on for years.
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