Are referendums the best way of determining important political and constitutional questions? Samuel Redfern
Upper Sixth Nothing inspires more mania within Westminster politics than the menace of Theresa May’s dancing and the referendum. We live in ‘Brexit Britain’. With a majority of seventy four seats, the United Kingdom is the Conservative Party’s canvas: Boris Johnson is the paint, Dominic Cummings is the artist and the Civil Service is a wonky, crooked easel. Yet how did we arrive at this point? The European referendum of 2016, and indeed those referenda which preceded it, have fundamentally changed the nature of British politics in a way that pundits could never predict. The effectiveness of the referendum in effectuating that change is a matter of contention. The referendum is now an established part of our constitution within UK politics, indeed, to the extent that it is unthinkable a government of the day would institute significant upheaval without appealing to the masses. Clement Atlee once conceived of the referendum as being “a tool of dictators and demagogues” - a contrivance that was alien to the stability engendered in politics by Burke’s ‘trustee model’ of representation. Yet this erstwhile peculiarity on the peripheries of mainstream discourse has been a tool utilised by successive governments twelve times since 1973. Adhering to Rousseau’s conception of the ‘general
will’, referendums can resolve divisive issues through a form of direct democracy, providing a solution to volcanic political questions that transcend partisan lines. However, all governments are unpopular. Given the chance, people will inevitably vote against what is perceived as a distant, egotistical establishment. Critics of referendums thus focus upon its susceptibility to a vitriolic form of populism in which the ‘general will’ is pitted against a faceless establishment elite, whether this is the ‘unelected bureaucrats’ of Brussels or the self-serving ‘Old Boys’ of Eton. It is thus conceivable that the wider electorate is likely to be driven by populist agitation, instigated by popular demagogues who lament the flaws of the present, whilst harking back to an often fallacious conception of the past; a past in which the curviness of bananas was out of the clutches of fastidious continental bureaucrats, and in which the spectre of the one-size-fits-all ‘Euro Condom’ was merely a delirious nightmare. It must also be considered that referendums can be used irresponsibly as a tool of party management to placate a particularly disobedient wing of
a political party. In this sense, rather than being a tool of national political arbitration, the referendum serves a disciplinary end in the context of Westminster party politics. Referendums thus reduce complex institutional questions to an abstract proposition, contracting abundantly complex issues into a binary proposition: yes or no, in or out. The effectiveness of referendums in answering political questions is determined by the nature of the question being asked, therefore meaning referendum ‘success’ is a matter of degrees. Referendums are the purest form of democratic decision-making within the UK, thus meaning the outcome of such questions are uncorrupted by the filter of representative democracy. This demonstrates the will of the people without the tainted influence of MPs and vested interests. Indeed, this reality is acknowledged by Downing Street’s ‘chief bruiser’, namely the infamous Dominic Cummings, who (probably) conceptualised Britain as a urinal: the “people pissing in it are MPs” and the referendum functions as a disinfectant, trying to stop the smell. Aside from this crude conceptualisation, the purity of decision-making afforded to the body politics by referenda is the single greatest strength of this instrument in resolving constitutional questions. This was most pertinently exemplified by the 2014 ‘Scottish Independence Referendum’, whereby the Scottish electorate resolved to maintain the union with a 55.3% ‘No’ vote and a 44.7% ‘Yes’ vote with a turnout of 84.6%. Such a referendum stemmed from the SNP’s disaffection with Westminster politics and a sense of Scottish nationalism that had developed from the establishment of the Scottish Parliament at Holyrood in 1999. The significant turnout coupled with a decisive vote for unity exemplifies the extent to which a referendum was able to satisfy the political question of Scottish
[I]t is unthinkable a government of the day would institute significant upheaval without appealing to the masses.
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