In refusing to rule out further votes on her Brexit Deal - should it be defeated in the Commons - Prime Minister Theresa May has doubled down on a stubborn stance. Adamant that she has a Brexit mandate, May won't countenance a challenge to it.
Whether she likes it or not, that puts the Prime Minister in the same camp has the hardcore Brexiters, who argue that the first referendum was the final say - however flatly untrue that stance may be when it comes to UK constitutional conventions.
In a time when interest and participation in democracy has been slipping, when democracy has been increasingly under assault from fake news and far right populism, it is unhelpful when the Prime Minister coopts their arguments.
Populism and democracy
Populism is a word that gets thrown around in the media, being used to refer to popular movements of left as well as right. But it's not accurate to equate the two.
On the left, popular movements are increasingly horizontal, cooperative and reflective of a belief not in a single struggle, but in the commonality between different struggles to shake off inequalities that affect people based on their identities - ethnicity, sexuality, gender - and stand together in solidarity.
On the right, popular movements are emotional, exclusionary and 'competitive' - highlighting difference between groups of people and pitting them against each other, even against good sense. These are the so-called 'populist' movements. It is a populist idea that one vote is enough to settle something in a democracy.
Like he idea that the referendum ended the conversation, that the will of the people was crystalised in one popular vote - which is clearly undermined by the fact that any political party could stand at a future election on a manifesto to stop Brexit, and upon winning a majority have the right to implement it.
The populist sentiment is a trap that Theresa May fell into the moment she tried to claim the referendum mandate for her own government. It was aggravated by the fact that she hasn't been able to covert the referendum result into a Parliamentary majority - functionally necessary to delivering any change.
With the referendum vote in her pocket, Theresa May triggered a snap election and stood on a party manifesto that promised to deliver Brexit. But she failed to win a majority. And in that failure was exposed the problem with the referendum in the first place: there wasn't, and still isn't, a party of Brexit with a Parliamentry mandate to deliver it.
Lincoln and the Union
In a democracy, the ideal is that even those who lose out most in the result of a poll will be able to appreciate the importance of respecting the will of the majority - it's a key aspect of democracy. Populists have been quick to label their Remainer opponents as undemocratic sore losers.
However, with the Brexit referendum, the populist Brexiter side has exploited their temporary majority and failed to respect the fact that majoritarianism is two sided: yes, the will of the majority needs to be respected. But democracy also means that the will of the majority can change. There is no final say.
The trouble with that fact is that it doesn't quite have the emotional reasonance of 'one vote and done' - it doesn't feel as good. It doesn't feel as cathartic. Yet it's at the core of why a minority should respect the will of the majority. Some day, you may change their minds. You may be the majority.
In an old biography of Abraham Lincoln, there is a discussion of his view of the importance of the political union and disavowal of secession. He had questioned the right to secession, asking, "Must a government, of necessity, be too strong for the liberties of its own people, or too weak to maintain itself?"
Following Lincoln's stance against secession as undermining a democratic political union, his biographer asks:
"...if by democratic government is meant the rule of the majority, may there not be occasions when the majority is tyrannical or where the division of opinion between majority and minority is so acute, that the minority is entitled to leave?"
Lincoln had argued that adhering to majority rule, properly held in restraint by constitutional checks and balances, was not only a good, but a safeguard against the severed consequences of undermining majority rule - chaos, disorder, the threat of war.
As Lincoln said, "that ballots are the rightful and peaceful successors of bullets." To Lincoln, elections and majority rule held out always the possibility that the majority might be persuaded and would change it's mind at a subsequent election.
That while a minority must adapt and integrate to the majority conditions - and could, perhaps should, be helped along to do so - it would still be able to seek to peacefully win over the majority. Laid plain, that democracy, that majority rule, was never to be seen as final.
May and the Union
Theresa May has her own Unionism. For her part, it has driven her to pursue a particularly single-minded path. One that does not really account for, especially, the divergent path upon which Scotland is travelling compared to the rest of the UK.
Theresa May has caught herself in a difficult position, of jealously holding one union while dissolving another - in opposing one secession while enacting another, a confusing circumstance of competing sovereignties.
Arguing against dissolving the British Union, while also arguing for the permanence of the referendum vote, May finds herself caught in an inconsistent position - that the Union cannot be dissolved, but it also will not allow for the changing of minds.
That position undermines the point of democratic majority rule. As Lincoln argued, the preservation of the Union is in large part achieved by acknowledging that there is no end point to a debate - that there is no definitive, inalienable vote.
Theresa May has pulled out all stops to protect her position, the mandate she claims and the policies she pursues, especially Brexit. The result has been that she has turned to the arguments populist right for justification of her actions - the Brexit was a final vote, there can be no change of position.
Legitimising the positions of the populist right is a very dangerous game to play, but as Conservative leader Theresa May inherited a legacy of taking advantage of the over loud and amplified grumbling and scapegoating of the far right.
The Conservatives have spent a long time courting the rise of the far right, feeding off the populist energy to attack Labour and the Liberals. But it's a source of energy that comes with a high cost, giving light and air to emotive scapegoating.
From the beginning, the Conservative plan for a referendum - spawned of a need to satisfy the right-wing energy it was exploiting - didn't really factor in the possibility that the Leave campaign would win the public vote.
Conservative leader David Cameron resigned, having backed Remain as the Prime Minister in a deeply pro-Remain Parliament. With no Parliamentary majority for Brexit, the country was thrown into political turmoil - which May has tried to navigate.
Her failing was to try and do so without a proper constitutional mandate, gained in the form of a Parliamentary majority from an election with an explicit Brexit manifesto commitmnt. She waited too long to pursue that, trusting instead to exluding Parliament in favour of using executive power to forge ahead.
Democracy never ends
When the question is settled, the post-Brexit Union will be defined by this period in time. Disrespect for democratic process, political division, ignoring or exploiting well-established constitutional conventions - all of these things will feed into the new shape of the British Union, whether it remains European for the long haul or ultimately pulls away.
Theresa May has allowed the far-right populist view of democracy - as a competition not a compromise, pitting ideas against each other for mastery - to infect the mainstream and take route in the public consciousness. These represent lasting damages inflicted in pursuit of short term political goals. May will have to reflect on that.
The reality is that the referendum vote could never have been binding, but the view it expressed needed to be respected. That has never really happened. Theresa May and the Conservatives didn't go to the electorate for a Brexit mandate until a long time after the fact. By then, moods had begun to shift.
Brexit was always undermined by the absense of a mandate to deliver it - a party, or parties, explicitly elected on a manifesto commitment to deliver it, awarded the power by the electorate to do so in the form of a Parliamentary majority.
Now, with the deal an unsupportable mess, public opinion is polling as even less inclined. And Parliament remains ill-disposed towards Brexit. Saying that there is no justification for further votes undemocratically protects the power of a majority that may now have become the minority.
Is a second referendum, the People's Vote, the answer?
The first referendum resolved little, as it didn't produce the political conditions within the constitutional framework to deliver on the 'Brexit mandate'. Can another referendum do anything more than simply affirm one of the positions?
Another referendum will still need the explicit mandate from an election to deliver on the public will, if it is to have the legitimate power to implement the decision. In the end, the only way out of this mess is to return to democracy.
Populism sees an end to democracy in the satisfaction of it's own will - the realisation of it's own supremacy. But democracy, to be a valid basis for political union, has no end point. There is no definitive say. Only limited mandates that expire.
The Brexit mandate is close to expiration - largely thanks to the failures of the Conservative party, who brought forward the first referendum and failed to empower it. What comes next must be instructed and empowered by the people.
References
'Brexit: May not ruling out second MPs' vote on deal'; on the BBC; 30 November 2018.
Jessica Elgot's 'Theresa May rules out Norway-style Brexit compromise with Labour: En route to the G20, PM rejects plan B and accuses Labour of wanting to leave country with no deal'; in The Guardian; 30 November 2018.
Juliet Samuel's 'Theresa May's manifesto plan for Brexit amounts to a single principle: trust me'; in The Telegraph; 18 Mat 2017.
Brendan Chilton's 'It’s time to accept that the Labour manifesto you voted for promised hard Brexit: Labour must drop the positioning and accept the UK is leaving the EU'; in the New Statesman; 18 January 2018.
K.C. Wheare's 'Abraham Lincoln and the United States'; Hodder & Stoughton/English Universities Press; 1948.
No comments:
Post a Comment