andrewducker | How would I avoid the current Brexit disaster?

I got into a discussion about Brexit and what, if anything, can be done about it. And I've been thinking about what I'd do if I was suddenly in charge today. Or, indeed, what I'd have done if I was in charge of the country the day after the referendum.

Now, this isn't going to be a "Wave my magic wand and cancel Brexit" post. Because (a) that's a bit dull as a counterfactual and (b) while I think that having the referendum was a really, staggeringly, stupid thing to have done I also think that asking the public their opinion and then saying "And now we're going to completely ignore you" is how you destroy whatever remaining faith that anyone has in the political system, and push people into violent response instead.

So I'd hold another referendum. But I wouldn't just re-run the previous one, because frankly I reckon that doing a stupid thing twice, because you think that the second time you _might_ win is just asking for trouble.

What I'd do, instead, is take a leaf out of the New Zealand Referendum Approach:
1) Ask the public if they want change.
2) Ask them what kind of change they'd like.

So, having ascertained that the public were unhappy with the current relationship with the EU, and having given them some time to examine the fallout, I'd set up a referendum with multiple options, using instant run-off voting to let people fully express what outcome they wanted.

The options would be something like these ones, and people would be asked to rank them in order of preference. The option getting the least votes would be discarded, and all of the people who voted for it would get their votes moved to their next preference. Repeat until someone gets at least 50% of the vote.

This would mean that you wouldn't have a "Leave" campaign. You'd have a "WTO" campaign, which wouldn't be able to try and reassure people that nothing would really change (As numerous Leave backers did). And a just-like-Norway campaign. And a just-like-Switzerland campaign. And a just-like-Canada campaign. And a full-membership-of-the-EU campaign. Each having to actually discuss the different approaches, and why their one was better than the others.

And you'd, hopefully, get an idea not just of "Should we leave or not", but also "Where should we go?". And a more nuanced discussion of costs and benefits than "I hate them!" vs "You're fascists!"

Now, I fully concede that the government might not be able to then achieve what the public asked for. They might _want_ to join the EEA, but be told to sod off by Norway. But then they'd have to try and get as close as possible to that, rather than saying "We got a split vote and a country which is pulling in two different directions, so we're going for the most extreme Brexit possible".

(Which isn't what most people want - actual British attitudes are more nuanced than that.)

Of course, I _don't_ run the country. And instead the person who does is concentrating on not splitting the Conservative Party rather than anything actually useful.

Crossposts: https://andrewducker.livejournal.com/3674746.html

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

cmcmck

I've nothing against those who voted out because I know a lot of people thought long and hard like those of us who voted in.

But I've a great deal against that ass Cameron for asking the damnfool question in the first place!

And as to the present Tory outfit, don't get me going on them!

From:

tobyaw

That seems like a move away from a the big, clearly-defined question — membership of the EU — instead replacing it with a series of very vague possible outcomes, most of which would at most be setting a direction for negotiations. The leave scenarios depend on many other countries agreeing.

None of them is a clear decision to be made only by the voting public, so how could we have a sensible referendum on them?

And since one of the few things we have learned from the EU referendum is that economic forecasts are largely hogwash, I’m deeply sceptical that there could be any kind of informed discussion of costs and benefits.

From:

andrewducker

It's incredibly clear to me that "Membership of the EU" is not a clearly-defined question. Because it tells us very little about what the future actually entails.

Freedom of movement? No idea.
Able to trade services? No idea.

What "Leaving the EU" means is such a range of options that it actually tells us nearly nothing.

From:

tobyaw

Membership is clear cut, even if details of the future relationship with Europe are unclear.

Freedom of movement? A big part of the leave campaign; would be hard to imagine any outcome other than the end of free movement.
Able to trade services? Obviously an outcome of the negotiations.

A lot of what you want to know are outcomes of this multi-year process; they cannot be known up front. Any pretence of certainty would be a lie. (Who can guess what the 27 nations will agree to?)

From:

skington

OK, but you can't have the end of freedom of movement and still abide by the Good Friday Agreement. (It's arguable if you can have the end of freedom of movement and any kind of frictionless trade deal, let alone a trade deal involving services, but even if you could fudge it somewhat, the GFA would still be a deal-breaker.)

From:

tobyaw

The Good Friday Agreement is hardly on the radar in British politics. It is obviously of great importance in NI and Eire, but is a non-issue for most voters in the rest of the British Isles. I suspect there would be little tolerance across the mainland UK for side issues like that to interfere with Brexit.

Focusing on the GFA as a problem at this stage in the negotiations ignores the usual pattern of EU dealmaking — there is usually a last-minute “fudge” to keep everybody happy with whatever is agreed. In GFA terms, I reckon there will probably be some sort of “constructive ambiguity” that will keep everybody happy.

But also worth noting that there are bigger and more immediate issues than Brexit for the GFA — the inability of the NI parties to form a government for a start.

From:

skington

OK, this sort of talk drives me spare. Stuff like “hardly on the radar in British politics” and “little tolerance across the mainland UK” implies that England will find a way; but why should it? Have we not learned the lessons from Suez? We no longer get to stamp our feet and get our way!

(One of the reasons I'm in favour of Scottish independence, other than “can we perhaps not be ruled by the Tories?” is that the Scottish independence movement genuinely appears to want to embrace the ethos of “let's be a normal, modern, small European country, because that seems to work well for many others”.)

The peaceful solution to the Troubles, started by John Major and finished by Tony Blair, is a triumph of democratic politics. That the EU was able to enable a warm fudge, where nobody really had to choose which country they belonged to because everybody was European, is a continuation of the ECSC/EEC's previous triumph of preventing war in mainland Western Europe. If the EUref debate was late, or nonexistent, in tackling the issues of Northern Ireland, that's a problem for the UK polity as a whole, not Northern Ireland!

Besides, Northern Ireland is merely the most obvious example of the problems that would face a Brexit UK. There are plenty of businesses who need to employ EU nationals, plenty of Brits who want to live or work in the EU, plenty of companies who have trans-national supply chains that they depend on. They merely don't have an intergovernmental treaty backing them up. That doesn't mean they don't matter.

From:

danieldwilliam

The people of Northern Ireland have a tried and tested way of getting their political issues on the radar of the mainland UK. A bombing campaign on the mainland of the UK.

I recall I didn't much enjoy it the last time.

From:

tobyaw

Isn’t the suggestion that they would resort to violence rather insulting? A lot of the discussion around the GFA seems to assume that it is the only thing keeping the barely-civilised celts from returning to terrorism. Do you think the NI community would accept a return to violence, and support extreme groups in the way that it has in the past?

There are bigger issues in NI politics. Why is it the only part of the UK where centrist parties have lost power, and where political extremism and petulant gesture politics is in the mainstream? Why do half of the NI MPs choose not to take their seats at Westminster? Why aren’t there any parties running candidates across the whole of the UK?

The GFA might have relieved immediate pressures, but it has hardly led to a stable political environment in NI.

From:

andrewducker

Um, all of those questions have well known answers if you'd like to dig into the history of the area.

And all are very well connected to the reasons why people might return to violence.

From:

tobyaw

Yes, I know there are answers to those questions. But many of the answers really don’t make much sense. And I fail to be convinced that a return to violence is an outcome to worry about.

If mainstream British politics really cared about Northern Ireland, surely it would have tried to engage politically on the ground. Why don’t the Tories, Labour, and Libdems run candidates in NI constituencies? Why don’t they allow NI voters the choice of directly engaging with the ruling and opposition parties at Westminster?

I reckon that the reasons why NI politics is so isolated mean that NI is effectively expendable at Westminster, if it gets in the way of mainstream UK politics.

From:

tobyaw

But that of course is all largely irrelevant, because the likeliest outcome is that there will be some sort of last minute fudge in the EU negotiations that resolves the GFA issues with typical ambiguity. Which is probably why Varadkar is agitating so much about it now; he knows that if there is a fudge, it will benefit the EU, UK, and NI (in that order), and that Eire’s interests will be low on the list.

From:

skington

You may as well ask why Plaid Cymru and the SNP exist as parties in Wales and Scotland, or for that matter why in the Republic of Ireland political parties still organise themselves on the basis of which side you preferred in the 1920s. Sometimes your local traditions and history trump economics.

As to “why don't the Tories, Labour and LibDems also stand candidates?” the reason is pretty obvious: that running more candidates than you need to in FPTP is madness. Labour and the SDLP are sister parties in Europe; likewise the LibDems and the Alliance; the Tories' links with the DUP and UUP are less formal, but anyone voting DUP or UUP in a Westminster election know they're going to favour a Conservative government.

From:

tobyaw

That wasn’t intending to suggest that regional or national parties shouldn’t exist; rather, that the main Westminster parties shouldn’t ignore NI. After all, the main Westminster parties run election campaigns across the whole of the Great Britain, including in plenty of safe seats that they don’t stand a chance of winning. When the Tories had a single MP in Scotland they still ran a ground operation across the whole country.

Political engagement is about more than just winning a seat and returning an MP. It is about the grunt work of local activists meeting, debating, finding common cause, delivering leaflets, manning stalls, and feeling part of a larger movement. It is about community outreach, and it is about trying to touch people across class, political, and geographic divisions.

With the traditional parties in free-fall (SDLP, Alliance, and UUP), the political landscape in NI has been in a state of flux for years, and with the loss of those traditional ties to the British parties, there is less engagement now than at any other time in recent memory.

(And I don’t buy that the DUP link with the Tories in any kind of long-term meeting of minds. It is all about short-term political expediency — there are plenty of Tories who have very little time for the DUP.)

From:

andrewducker

I don't really care if something was a big part of the leave campaign. The referendum wasn't "Fulfil the manifesto of the leave campaign" - it was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?". And, as I pointed out in the original post, you had Nigel Farage saying things like "Wouldn’t it be terrible if we were really like Norway and Switzerland" - both of which have Freedom of Movement. And you have a majority of people who voted Brexit saying they would accept Freedom of Movement for access to The Single Market: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/jul/17/majority-of-brexiters-would-swap-free-movement-for-eu-market-access

And I was explicitly not promising certainty. What I said was:
Now, I fully concede that the government might not be able to then achieve what the public asked for. They might _want_ to join the EEA, but be told to sod off by Norway. But then they'd have to try and get as close as possible to that, rather than saying "We got a split vote and a country which is pulling in two different directions, so we're going for the most extreme Brexit possible".

From:

skington

The problem is what you're really advocating for is a referendum campaign like the Indyref, where there was a long conversation and by election day most people understood the trade-offs. But 40-odd years of toxic “Up Yours Delors”-style tabloid headlines - and nobody in the centre or on the left brave enough to put forward a proper pro-EU argument - means that the country isn't ready for a sensible discussion on the issue.

On a good day I hope that Keir Starmer is carefully preparing the ground for a Labour government to announce that it's looked at the books, talked to the civil service, and decided that Brexit is basically undoable. Failing that, my fallback position would be to hope that, as some people are suggesting, Theresa May is inching towards a “Brexit In Name Only” softest-of-all-Brexits - because Northern Ireland and the economy wouldn't survive an actual Brexit - thus keeping it safe for Scotland to hold Indyref2 in the knowledge that there wouldn't be customs posts on the English border, the economy wouldn't end up in the toilet etc.

From:

danieldwilliam

I agreee about the sort of length and national conversation you'd have to have and I agree that would be difficult but I'm all for confronting the electorate with the consequences of their decisions. That includes the consequence that even thinking about what they want is going to be really difficult and might expose some of their wishful thinking and blind spots.

From:

danieldwilliam

I think there are probably several groups of people who would take the opportunity to revisit the Brexit decision if they got the chance. Keir Starmer and most of the Parliamentary Labour Party are one group. The Lib Dems. Most if not all of the SNP in Westminster. Some Tories.

If the chance arose then they might succeed in proposing a second referendum or delaying the leave date for a whole EU budget cycle or similar.

I think their difficulty is two-fold. They did lose the referendum so they have an uphill struggle to create and demonstrate some sort of democratic mandate. Secondly, they can't be seen to be creating the chance (see above). I think there would need to be some pretty obvious and immediate downside / crisis for people to reconsider their vote and most of the situations I can think of only happen after we've actually left. Or we're looking at massive constitutional crisis - such as the DUP pulling support for May's government, there being a messy interegnum in the Tory Party leadership, a Remainer winning the election but not being able to command a majority in the House or the Lords voting down some key legislation.

From:

skington

The other hope is that Jo Maugham goes to the EUCJ and wins his case, and those of us with nice Burgundy passports can keep our EU citizenship rights, even if future children are stuck being merely British.

From:

tobyaw

Doesn’t Maugham have a track record of crowd-funding futile legal actions? I wouldn’t hold out much hope for him succeeding this time. (He also went all fruit-loop over BBC bias a few weeks ago, which isn’t a good sign. It’ll be conspiracy theories next.)

From:

skington

Links, please? It's always useful to get information from outside your social media bubble.

I should mention that I totally have a dog in this race: I voted Yes and Remain, partly because I'm lucky enough to have my parents' house in France that we go to in the summer, and that I'd quite like to be able to retire to if that's still an option. (“Let's get out of the UK before the English take us out of Europe” was the main reason for my vote in the Indyref.) This isn't entirely transactional: before coming back to the UK for University I got my Baccalauréat in France, and I have a French driver's licence; I feel European.

From:

tobyaw

A potted history of Maugham’s Brexit-related legal cases: https://order-order.com/2018/03/15/jolyons-failed-vanity-cases-cost-crowdfunders-350000/ — the analysis may be somewhat puerile, but the facts are sound.

And some evidence of his emerging conspiracy-theory nuttiness: https://www.rt.com/uk/421796-qc-bbc-code-corbyn-messages/

(BTW, I voted for Yes and Leave — I’m reasonably convinced that an independent Scotland would be in our best interests, but if I had to weigh between the two, independence from Europe is more important than independence from the UK. But that is quite a different discussion.)

From:

skington

Hmmm. Guido Fawkes misses out the one crowd-funded case of his that actually succeeded, although it's small beer compared to the other ones.

The BBC comment is bizarre, I'll give you that. Although I'm not sure how useful it is to link to Russia Today, rather than something a bit more impartial.

From:

tobyaw

Yup, sorry about the RT link. Not my usual reading matter! But it was that or one of the other fringe “news” sites that covered the BBC story.

From:

errolwi

I'm not clear why 'do you want change' is a separate question, when you are ranking the change options? Especially when the status quo isn't at one end of the theoretical options (which FPTP was in the NZ electoral system situation). I can see many people wanting say just-like-Norway, but much preferring membership-with-exceptions over WTO.

From:

andrewducker

Because if at least 50% of people aren't going "Yes, we need change" then there's no point even going into what they want to change to.

So I wouldn't start the second referendum until referendum one had come back asking for it.

And in this case we've had the first one.

From:

agoodwinsmith

I have been trying to articulate my ideas about The Dirtbag Left since summer. Your post today helped me get started, and it is here:
https://agoodwinsmith.dreamwidth.org/192023.html
I wanted to let you know because I have included a link to this post in mine.

From:

danieldwilliam

I have always been a fan of the New Zealand approach to referendums. I personally would be inclined to add in some of the deliberative democracy processes using citizen juries that British Columbia have used in their electoral system referendums.

From:

michaelftaylor

My solution if Brexit goes ahead is simply to leave the UK. I can't bear the idea of a country rife with the racism, misogyny and homophobia that will characterise the UK after Brexit. Having to spend my old age fighting battles that I thought had been won long ago is not something I am willing to contemplate.
I'm lucky. I have an almost certain option of a German passport, so I'll find somewhere to live there. Really a huge irony for the son of a German Jewish refugee.

From:

davidcook

Maybe I'm seeing this through my own particular filter bubble, (and obviously I'm 10 years removed from living in the UK now), but I don't think the media and political landscape in the UK would make your proposed type of referendum work at all.
The Leave campaign seems to have got away with lying and fudging the first time around, attempting to campaign on more complicated questions would seem to be playing into the hands of those who spread fear and disinformation.