Brexit, Democracy and the Role of Opposition

Democracy: ours is a representative democracy. That means that we elect people to make decisions on our behalf to run our sovereign nation.

This allows me to make a direct analogy with a healthy organisation. The Chief Executive is appointed by the Board to make decisions about the best running of the organisation. If a Chief Executive, confronted by a difficult split amongst his executive directors, waves his hands in the air and runs back to the Board and says you must make this decision for me, the board should be very concerned about this person’s competence to remain in role. A well run Board would, of course, make a compassionate enquiry into why it is so difficult for him to do his job of making a decision. The aim would be to try to enable the CEO to regain his authority. However, if this person is still unable to make a decision, the Board should remove him and appoint somebody else.

David Cameron was running UK plc. He encountered a difficulty in his executive; namely that a number of people wanted to get out of Europe. Instead of making a decision and, if necessary, confronting these people head-on, he waved his hands in the air and went running back to the Board to ask them to make the decision for him. The Board in this case is the electorate. (Because they appoint him) The right response to this was not to go along with his wish to avoid managing his executive (by which we mean his party). The right decision would have been to sack him and appoint somebody who could actually manage their own parliamentary party. His cowardice and incompetence is going to cost this country enormously and, as always, the people who will pay the price will be the people at the bottom.

To put it another way, no politician would recommend a referendum on the question of capital punishment. That is because everybody knows that the large group called society, like all large groups, behaves irrationally and prefers an aggressive certainty to managing the anxiety of not knowing. In other words society will always vote to kill people.

Offered the opportunity to make a decision about the future of this country, society voted for suicide, i.e. to kill the country.

Let us turn for a moment to ‘membership organisations’; these are organisations that provide services for their own members, like trades unions and professional organisations. These look the same as any other reasonably functioning organisation in that there is a Board which appoints a Chief Executive, who creates a workforce to achieve the aims set by the board within the parameters also set by the board. Another name for those parameters is ‘constitution’ and the constitution is confirmed by the election to the board of trustees. The electorate are the members. Sometimes there is a question about the constitution, perhaps a group of members feel that there needs to be a change. If the Board and Chief Executive feel that this change requires the explicit consent of the membership, there might be a referendum. In a healthy system, such a referendum will take place within previously agreed parameters and a very common such condition will be that no constitutional change can take place without a significant majority. It is never enough that there is a simple majority because it is well recognised that large groups tend to behave irrationally and, therefore change requires something like a two thirds majority.

So, for two reasons, the Brexit referendum was not a democratic process; the first reason is that it was not a decision that the electorate ought to have taken, it belonged to the prime minister and you undermine representative democracy if you create ‘exceptions’ to the requirement that representatives make decisions about the country. Secondly, if it was a genuine request for constitutional change, then there should have been sensible parameters to ensure the safety of the vote. And there weren’t.

With this as a backdrop, what does this mean for the constitutional role of an opposition now?

As a forward, it is often worth stating the ‘bleeding obvious’: opposition parties generally represent the views of the electorate that did not prevail in the most recent election. This is not a shameful thing, nor is it in any way undemocratic. Indeed it is the mark of a democratic society that recognises that there is always something true and helpful in a different view. That is because it is only the infant’s world that is black and white, grown-ups recognise that the truth is complex and often confused.

Therefore, this opposition has a duty to represent the views of the 48% of people who voted in the referendum to remain in Europe.

So, to return to the question about the constitutional tasks of opposition. First of all, an opposition has to expose truths that are being hidden by government. I have already pointed out that one major lie is that the referendum was democratic. The next thing, for which the opposition has daily evidence, is the destructive complexity of disconnecting from Europe. In this they are aided by the shrill incompetency of the government representatives from the Prime Minister down to present a coherent vision of a United Kingdom outside Europe. Such a vision is essential if there is to be any kind of rational negotiation. In this regard, the first lie that the opposition should have exposed was the government’s claim that a negotiator does not reveal their aims. This is complete nonsense; it is vitally important in any negotiation that both sides have an idea of the vision that each has of the final outcome, so that they can work to find a pathway that makes a link between those two visions. What you hide from the other side is the extent of compromise that you are prepared to consider. My belief about the government’s need to hide their ‘final position’ is that they don’t have any idea of what the UK outside Europe will look like.

For example, if we just take the business of trade, there cannot be a better position for the UK vis-à-vis Europe than a market that is free from trading tariffs. That situation is only available to members of the European Community. By definition, being outside Europe means that trade with Europe will be less profitable. Secondly the means by which countries can negotiate low tariffs for trade with other countries is by representing a large trading base. By definition Europe, being made up of many countries, will have more to offer than the UK will on its own. So the question about what the UK will look like outside Europe must address the question of how it can be better to be paying more tariffs for trade.

The opposition has an opportunity to point out that those who are already wealthy and operate large companies, particularly within the financial and international legal sectors, are liable to make huge profits from involvement in discussion and negotiating trade tariffs. That is why this particular section of the establishment is pro Brexit. They will make a profit from the increased cost of trade whilst the poor and those employed in businesses trying to make trade work will pay the real cost. In other words those who, feeling disenfranchised and excluded from the site of wealth, voted Brexit, will be the ones who will suffer the financial consequences.

A final thought (simply because of the need to reduce the length of this blog) is about access or gateways. The mendacious leaders of the Brexit campaign contaminated an achievement of membership of Europe with the fear of a zombie invasion. Sadly none of the Remainers were able to expose the truth about the benefits of keeping an open door. One of those benefits, which has been finally referred to with some clarity, is that the NHS depends upon people from the European Union. I don’t mean that this is some kind of an option, I mean that without them the NHS cannot function.