Referendums and the flawed politics of simple solutions

Nov. 5 is the day when the UK remembers, with bonfires and fireworks, its favorite political bogeyman: Guy Fawkes, who plotted to blow up the Houses of Parliament on that date in 1605. This year, citizens of the UK, as they held the matches to their bonfires, likely held in equipoise to this memory the most inflammatory flashpoint in modern British politics — Brexit.

On June 23, 2016, the country voted via a referendum called by then-Prime Minister David Cameron to leave the EU. It was a vote whose result he said he would honor, even if his own government’s position was clearly pro-Remain; this meant that, when the result came in, he had to resign.

That was the first episode in the more than three years of turmoil flowing from the events of that day, the latest of which came last week, when current Prime Minister Boris Johnson called for a snap election in December after finding himself unable to convince Parliament to approve his Brexit deal before his Oct. 31 deadline. This will be the UK’s third general election in less than five years.

If Johnson fails to win a majority on Dec. 12, he would be the third PM to fall on the sword of Brexit — and conceivably not the last. A political event that was supposed to lead to a clear direction for the UK on the question of leaving the EU or staying within the bloc has instead produced a deep and abiding chasm in British society — between “Leavers” and “Remainers” — that acts as a badge of political identity overriding all others.

Many good pieces have been written in recent times — including on these pages last week by Bill Emmott, a former editor of The Economist — on the confused political thinking and “random contingencies” that led to the shock result of the Brexit referendum in 2016. But, as the British public prepares once again to be inundated with campaign messages and political crossfire, it is worth scrutinizing the meaning and validity of referendums themselves.

Is a referendum, which appears to embody the idea of democracy in its most direct and transparent form, actually a reliable method of resolving questions of great importance to a society? Or does it actually end up inadvertently undermining its more conventional cousin, representative democracy? Is a referendum’s apparent capacity to quantify public opinion, and therefore clarify future political action, an illusory one? I’d argue that it is, and we can pick out some of its flaws as a political mechanism through looking at the Brexit vote.

Referendums often illustrate no greater truth than a drifting consensus captured and frozen at a particular moment in time

Chandrahas Choudhury

First, a referendum in a parliamentary democracy represents a kind of contradiction. It is an occasion on which Parliament, which should be, and is in fact, sovereign, transfers its sovereignty to the people for the duration of a day and agrees to be bound by the popular will.

Parliament, the embodiment of representative democracy, is a political mechanism developed and refined over many centuries of trial and error to navigate and resolve differences in political opinion. Legislators are elected from multiple political parties at the end of a period of political competition and enjoy a stable tenure, usually of five years.

Referendums, on the other hand, for all their promise of unfiltered direct democracy, are highly susceptible to influence from short-term trends and conjunctures, and are often instituted in an ad hoc manner (multiple British prime ministers, from Tony Blair onwards, had been promising a referendum on the EU, and Cameron only held one because he was so convinced — incorrectly, as it turned out — that the status quo of Remain would win the day).

Often, as with the Brexit issue and the very narrow margin of victory of Leave over Remain, referendums illustrate no greater truth than a drifting consensus captured and frozen at a particular moment in time, even as society itself moves on and finds a new equilibrium. A Brexit referendum held today would likely yield a completely different result from the one in 2016 (which is not an argument to hold another one, as some parties desire).

Further, in a referendum, much depends on the way the key question is phrased — and how many possible answers it allows. In the Brexit vote, the question seemed unambiguously clear and cogent: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” But such a question actually eliminates the most sensible option (which was in fact the position of many euroskeptic parliamentarians): That the UK should attempt to renegotiate the terms of its membership in the EU.

Reducing the question to a simple in/out choice ignored the costs, difficulties and challenges of following through with one of the options — and has since led to three years of parliamentary chaos because a satisfactory legislative form cannot be found for that choice. And the referendum, in effect, endorsed extreme political risk-taking. Even if the UK had crashed out of the EU on Oct. 31 with no deal, that would still have allowed Johnson, the most prominent of the Leavers, to claim righteously that he was, after all, implementing “the will of the people.”

In short, referendums often encourage what the political scientist Andrew Glencross, the author of a recent book on Brexit, calls “the flawed politics of simple solutions.” This is the reduction of complex issues to binaries, and the reversal of political authority such that Parliament, which is chosen by citizens, must now also implement choices made by citizens.

When the UK goes to the polls in five weeks, more than three years after the Brexit referendum, the main issue will still be Brexit.