How to Be a Patriot by Sunder Katwala

Author:Sunder Katwala [Katwala, Sunder]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2023-04-14T21:30:24+00:00

An (unfashionable) defence of the EU referendum

Many people who regret Brexit have a simple explanation: blame David Cameron. The former Prime Minister is charged with sacrificing a vital national interest for internal party management, because he failed to recognise the dangerous simplicities of direct democracy.

David Cameron gambled politically and lost. He overestimated his own persuasive powers and ended his premiership. But I do not find the idea that all of this trouble could have been avoided, simply by not holding a referendum, at all persuasive. Simply as a counter-factual scenario, it seems difficult to sustain the idea that a referendum could have been long avoided after 2014, certainly under almost any conceivable Conservative-led government. There may be much to criticise in how the referendum was won and lost, and especially in how both the winners and losers responded to the close result. But I think the somewhat unfashionable case that the referendum was necessary, and probably unavoidable, remains fairly strong.

A blanket case against referendums is too simplistic. They are the only legitimate way to settle some kinds of political question, especially those with the highest stakes. As the United Kingdom is now explicitly a Union of consent, questions about which state to be part of will require referendums to ratify any future change. The Good Friday settlement recognises that potential route to Irish reunification. The 1998 referendums on the Good Friday Agreement, in both Northern Ireland and the Republic, offer a paradigm example of the constructive use of referendums to entrench a fragile political agreement in broad public consent. Other referendums – on Scottish and Welsh devolution, a Mayor for London, and the largely forgotten 2011 referendum on electoral reform – demonstrate an emerging practice of setting big ‘rules of the game’ issues about the constitutional framework by referendums, without using them for domestic policy issues, like tax, climate change or the NHS.

One risk of the 2016 referendum was to amplify tensions between direct and representative democracy. Yet the decision to hold an EU referendum was clearly a product of our representative democracy. It arose from pressure in parliament and contested arguments within and between parties. The Commons finally voted by 544 votes to 53 to hold the referendum (though most of those voting for it would be advocating a Remain vote) because opposition MPs recognised that parties advocating a referendum had won a majority of both seats and votes in the 2015 General Election. On the eve of the referendum, 66 per cent of the public, including most Remain voters, thought it was the right way to settle the question while 24 per cent thought it was a bad choice. (There was a still-narrower majority – by 55 per cent to 33 per cent – days later once the result was known.1) The wide margin of that Commons vote makes it impossible to deny that, as a political community, those on different sides of the Brexit argument did agree that a referendum would settle this question. As David Cameron

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