Referenda and Finality
It takes only a cursory glance at referenda to realise that they have a troubled history. Some have advanced the humble referendum as the true essence of democracy while others look at such enterprises as New Zealand’s last few citizen’s initiated referenda and conclude that it would at least help if they were all binding. Sometimes people are happy with the idea of the referendum and sometimes people are not. Sometimes it is the wording of the question that attracts ire. It makes you wonder: do referenda ever represent a final say?
Let’s take Brexit. Personally, I think the Campaign was not fought on a fair footing: leave is all very well but remain? What a pathetic, boring and energy sapping term. How we frame and name things matters a lot. Think of Dihydrogen Monoxide and how it was put about as a scary chemical when it was water all along. Think of the difference between “please leave” and “piss off”. That last example is great, because we might not even think of those things as being the same (even though in both cases we want another party to leave). Remain is like this.
On the face of it, “Remain” carries connotations of “leave things as they are” or “remain in the current relationship”. Euroscepticism (remember when we used to call it that) has long been a part of British politics… certainly one that’s noticeable in foreign countries like NZ… and the reason for this is that the relationship with Europe and/or the EU is frequently seen as being problematic. In this context, when we think about Soft Brexiters, it seems to me that many of them don’t really want Brexit… to them Brexit meant “reform is impossible/not on the table, so leaving is better than the status quo.” And then there are the Remainers who have become Soft Brexiters. How can we call the result valid when the way the proposition was framed was more than the “Should we stay or should we go?” it was framed as?
This is also something that is brought up by Australian republicans. I don’t think much of the arguments for a republic NZ (they tend to be a mixture of idiotic, NZ is independent you ninnies, and patronisingly paternalistic, which is terribly ironic) and I rather suspect the Australian ones are the same. But the Australian republican movement is entirely correct to wonder if it is was fair to propose a fairly unpopular form of republicanism versus something which people tend to be entirely meh with (republicans and monarchists are typically both minorities). Specifically Wikipedia tells me it looked like this:
A proposed law: To alter the Constitution to establish the Commonwealth of Australia as a republic with the Queen and Governor-General being replaced by a President appointed by a two-thirds majority of the members of the Commonwealth Parliament.
As it happens I should point out that while I kind of like the status quo, philosophically I cannot rationalise electing heads of state regardless. How can you elect a representative of a nation? The act of voting means that you split the country up: any elected representative belongs to their voters. Even worse, I am not sure why a head of state even exists in the first place. This, I freely admit, is not a pro-monarchy argument but it is an argument that says, rationally speaking, something like the above is a defensible form of republicanism (appointment by lot would also work). But “lol, elections” is a common mentality, hence:
The common elements within the no campaign were the view that the model proposed was undemocratic and would lead to a “politician’s republic”, playing to a general distrust of politicians.
Perhaps it shouldn’t surprise that common ground was found here: apoliticism is a selling point of lot based systems (whether lottery of birth or normal lottery). But you can definitely see that this particular referendum is an illustration of the abstract point, right? It’s just that here Australians were explicit about what the proposition was and there was no “Brexit means Brexit” silliness involved. I am suggesting that the model proposed in the referendum was equivalent to a soft or hard Brexit position being voted on by Brits last year. Rather than:
Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?
It should be said that this question wasn’t pulled out of a hat. Perhaps the explicitness of the Australian referendum was thought to be not neutral or perhaps the way I interpret remain was not believed or perhaps both or perhaps neither: I don’t know. But there’s another referendum from last year which was very keen on explicit choices:
David Seymour (ACT’s representative in the Cross-Party Group) said that the planned order made sense, as the public would need to see the alternative designs before deciding on a change.[76]Professor John Burrows, chair of the Flag Consideration Panel, agreed that familiarity with proposals is a prerequisite for a properly informed decision about them.[16]
By the logic of the NZ flag change referenda, there is no basis to label Brexit a democratic decision. Even now we have no idea what exactly Brexit means and the whole thing is just extremely confused. The possibility that lies were told about what would happen to the money (i.e. it won’t go to the NHS) is also being bandied about. On the other hand, like many NZers, I was a strong critic of the processes and logic of the flag change referendum (although as one of our complaints was that there was no groundswell, no equivalent of the Eurosceptics, some important distinctions exist). Wikipedia even summarises this position prematurely:
Denis O’Rourke said that the shortlisting process was undemocratic because the Flag Consideration Panel would select the final flag design options on behalf of New Zealanders, and asking the public to choose between alternative designs before asking if they wanted a change was intentionally manipulative.
Both of these positions are correct, in my view. By asking us to vote for a design, the implication was made that change was going to happen. By not asking us about potential designs, how could we really make a choice? The trouble is that we could have done both in one election and saved a bit of money. All we had to do was ask in the first one something like, “Knowing that one of the above would become the new flag, would you support a new flag?”
I’ve been talking about Brexit here because it’s an example of a referendum that I think should happen again, but differently (the remain thing). In fact, I think it is a referendum where a lot of people voted to Leave as a protest vote about the relationship of the UK to the EU. That is, there are Eurosceptics who would like to leave the EU and there are Eurosceptics who want to reform but remain in the EU (there I go saying remain). The trouble is that they won.¹ In other words, I have been trying to offer a logical suggestion for why we shouldn’t accept last year’s vote as the final say. And the reason I have come up with is that it was undemocratic: firstly, for the remain-thing; and, secondly for not offering a real choice.
It must be said that I am not a fan of flag change in NZ² but aside from that I strongly believe there was only the faintest veneer of democracy in that process. Yet, I don’t think we should do that again when undemocracy says re-do Brexit??? Well, the resolution is simple: referenda should reflect groundswells. I see the place of referenda in democracies as an expression of popular sentiment (an alternative to revolt: democratic-political protest) rather than the top-down farce of the flag change. Brexit, as I have said, did reflect the normalised position of Euroscepticism: that’s a massive difference. The Australian referendum did that too. (Also the ideal referendum is binding, unless we want to just have a single-issue survey which is what a top-down referenda should only ever be seen as.)
New Zealand’s State Owned Assets Partial Privatisation referenda also offer further insights seeing as it was deeply flawed despite having a clear question and an existing discourse. Partial Privatisation is, again, something I disagree with (it seems I am a fan of the status quo once more) and 67% of the country agrees with me. Except, the turnout was only 45%. That’s simply awful. In truth, statisticians have told me that 80% is considered appropriate a response rate (same idea) for a survey which makes 45% look even worse than it already seems. Yet, I think we have to appreciate that a referendum is a little bit more than “just” a survey (ironically, official surveys are mandatory in NZ, but voting is not compulsory). The problem with the Partial Privatisation referendum is more that turnout was depressed because the government said it wasn’t going to matter and because it was on an issue that the government had explicitly campaigned on. Both these points are deeply problematic.
Until recently, I didn’t know who to vote for in the upcoming election. Then James Shaw apologised for the Greens’ immigration policy. I can’t, in good faith, vote for any party that disagrees with my views on immigration, you see, and the Greens now no longer do so. But if I only cared about immigration I could have gone on to vote for ACT. This is the problem with John Key’s views on the referendum:
He had also gone on to call the referendum “an utter waste of money” as he had no intention of honouring its results, claiming the Government had been re-elected at the 2011 general election partially on the basis of the pending shares sell-off.[6]
The only way to really know if people were for that position (the only memorable substantive policy of the Key-era National party) is via referendum. It could just have been that National were preferred for whatever else it was peddling or that it was the “better than the alternatives” party. Mandate on a single issue is where the referendum dwells. A party’s electoral mandate reflects an holistic package.
It was also pretty terrible to just reject out of hand the possibility of following the democratic will of the referendum and while this may have been the primary means of depressing turnout, the more insidious issue is the conflation of an election and a referendum.
The Scottish Independence referendum and the potential of another offers a great way to round out this discussion. If you ask me³ the proposal for a second one is seen as being a great example of sour grapes. To be fair, it is a bit like Argentina and the Falklands or the UN and basically any independence referendum that doesn’t vote for “independence”. After all it wasn’t that long ago and there were no immediate problems with it. Except, yes, there is the small matter of Brexit. I think it is fair to suggest that the result of Scotland’s referendum was contingent on expectations about the possibility of Brexit (i.e. very, very low, nil… really). Certainly, when the Scots were thinking about what being part of the UK meant, they would have been thinking about their EU status (I mean, an independent Scotland’s EU status was a big question I remember people talking about). So the relevance of the result post-Brexit is cast in doubt.
The trouble with Scotland having another independence referendum is that Brexit doesn’t mean anything. It hasn’t happened yet and it may not even happen. How it will happen if it does happen is unclear and, critically, what it means to be a Scotland in a post-Brexit UK won’t be apparent for a while. Frankly, the longer Brexit exists as some unclear thing, the more likely it is that it doesn’t happen with another referendum being rolled out. Hence, the timing of the proposal matters a lot too and I can’t look that up right now. Which is to say, the result will remain real for the foreseeable future… and it is far too early to start wondering whether or not it is appropriate to to first trial a EU-less UK or abandon ship before the reality of an EU-less UK is made clear.
When we consider the above discussion, I appear to be suggesting that a referendum is only “final” when it is democratic. And I have suggested that a democratic referendum is a real choice that doesn’t mislead through ambiguity or through obfuscation of the original issue. That last bit is also why a referendum has to represent an ongoing social discourse: where else does the issue come from? Furthermore, a referendum is only really democratic when the government lets it be and doesn’t act in a manner that devalues the exercise. A democratic referendum is a valued referendum.
But Finality also depends on relevance. With the Scottish-Brexit situation we see a within generation change in relevance: the reality of the Indy Ref is not the reality we inhabit today. And over time it obviously becomes apparent that political thought changes, consider my critique of the deep state, even if the idea of generation (at least in the sense we think of when we talk about, e.g. Millennials) is dubious. A Final Referendum is a Still Relevant Referendum.
So given this Framework, should there be another Brexit referendum? Well, Brexit is still relevant so long as you don’t believe “leave” voters thought there was an idea of how to Brexit. If you do believe that, given in this day and age it is obvious no-one knows how to Brexit, then you can’t look back and say that result is relevant: there is critically important new information that changes everything. But I have already said that the process was undemocratic but the question was real… so, in that sense, my framework of finality says the 2016 Brexit Referendum was not the Final Say on the Matter, but different interpretations of events to me could make the framework conclude differently.
¹ This isn’t an illogical suggestion, by the way. I was once at an economics lecture that explained that knowing that other jurors have voted the defendant guilty/not guilty, when you have the deciding vote, can lead to rationally changing one’s mind in a fashion that doesn’t reflect one’s honest interpretation of the evidence. Basically, I am suggesting “reformists”, like everyone else, expected a remain vote so felt free to try and encourage reform by upping the number of leave votes.
² Again, aside from anything else, many moronic arguments abound, e.g. that any 100 old flag would have identity invested in it doesn’t mean that there isn’t identity invested in the current one, it just means we’d have got more than merely used to, say, Laser Kiwi. Also, you don’t see Indonesians and Poles clamouring for change, do ya? It was both a vanity project and an exercise in insecurity.
³ If my mouse hadn’t died I’d have quote some stuff (probably) and certainly had a link to the Wikipedia page but it did die, so you just read what you just read. Such is life.