More than three years on from the 2016 referendum, Britain is still no closer to determining its future relationship with the European Union. This has led increasing numbers of people to advocate—or come out as supporters of—cancelling Brexit entirely either by directly revoking the Article 50 notification or staging a second referendum with the aim of producing a remain majority. Despite all the ongoing drama, scrapping Brexit remains a terrible idea that must be resisted.
First, a clarification. I am not saying the 2016 referendum was a good idea. It was not. Referendums are a poor tool for resolving political disputes. Reducing complex problems to simple binary choices makes compromise difficult, and the ferocity of referendum campaigns splits families, communities, and entire nations. The damage caused by the 2014 Scottish independence vote and Britain’s own 2016 vote attests to that. More specifically to the British constitution though, the 2016 referendum was deeply problematic. Legally, Parliament is sovereign and is the ultimate source of authority. Any referendum result can be overturned. The referendum created a mechanism by which Parliament was pledged to enact a decision with which it does not agree, and technically did does have to enact, but politically cannot ignore. This is at the core of the present crisis. Parliament as a whole does not think Brexit is sensible yet feels understandably queasy about calling off Brexit entirely. The result is deadlock.
I am also not saying Brexit itself is a good idea. As a Commonwealth citizen, I am far from enamoured with the EU for effectively creating barriers between Britain and countries like my own. I also find its penchant for meddlesome regulations—not all of which are Daily Mail concoctions—somewhat irritating. To pick a recent example, I genuinely fail to understand why decisions about whether or not to retain daylight saving time should be taken at a European and not at a national level. More seriously, the fiscal masochism imposed on Greece during the Eurozone crisis had an unjustifiably devastating impact on ordinary citizens. However, I am also wary of the practical difficulties of leaving, and the fact that there are so many unknowns in such a complicated process. Solving the Northern Ireland border issue is the perhaps the greatest Brexit problem, but far from the only one. As someone who has spent far too long in higher education, I am especially concerned about the impact of Brexit on universities, dependent as they are on European research grants, students, and academic staff.
Despite these caveats, we live in a world in which the 2016 referendum, with all its flaws, happened. The referendum was held on the clear understanding that the result would be implemented. All sides agreed that the result would be binding, and the legislation enabling the referendum passed with a large majority. While the final result of 52 per cent to 48 per cent in favour of Leave was not a landslide, it was nevertheless decisive.
But the Leavers Lied!
Those who push for overturning that result make numerous claims, none of which stand up to scrutiny. Many argue that the referendum result was invalid due to some combination of lies, cheating, foreign interference, or even the lack of any majority for Brexit to begin with. It is impossible to deny that campaigners told lies. The ‘Brexit dividend’ and resulting extra £350 million for the NHS do not exist. Turkish membership of the EU may happen in my hypothetical grandchildren’s lifetimes, but not anytime soon. Britain’s capacity to negotiate independent trade deals with other countries is also far weaker than Brexiteers realise, and the idea of Britain as a low-tax ‘Singapore-on-Thames’ is a non-starter.
There are three problems with invalidating the referendum result on the grounds of the Leave campaign’s dishonesty. First, while the Leave side told lies, so did Remain. No one, not even Remainers, seriously believed George Osborne’s crass threat to impose a post-referendum horror budget in the event of a Leave vote. That such a threat was inept and backfired made it no less of a lie. The economy too has held up more strongly than Cameron et al made out at the time. Secondly, Leave’s lies were frequently called out by Remainers at the time, and it is far from clear that such lies were decisive for most Leave voters. Thirdly, even if we accept that one side lied more regularly than the other, this is a not sufficient reason to overturn the referendum result. While it is depressing to admit, I highly doubt that a single election campaign since the advent of mass democracy has not involved lies. At best, every party misrepresents, distorts and caricatures its opponents while exaggerating what it can deliver. In this respect, the 2016 campaign was no different to any normal campaign. Further, as it is mechanistically impossible to stop politicians and their supporters from behaving in this way, there is no reason to assume that any hypothetical second Brexit referendum campaign would be any cleaner than the first. To use campaign lies as a justification to overturn the Brexit referendum would in effect also say that every election result since the 1880s is also invalid. Such rhetoric matters because it sets a very dangerous precedent for losing sides simply to refuse to accept electoral defeat. Given that any functioning democracy relies on the losing side accepting defeat, this is an issue.
But Brexit was never the will of the people!
The argument that the 17.4 million votes only represented a minority of the electorate and therefore isn’t really legitimate also fails. It may be of interest to progressive Remainers that by this logic even the great Labour landslide of 1945 was not a legitimate expression of the will of the people. While Labour won 47.8 of the popular vote and an enormous Commons majority, when you factor in turnout, only 36.09 per cent of the electorate supported it. The Attlee Government’s reforming social legislation thus ought to have been fair game for Conservative obstructionism.
This is not to say that the British electoral system is perfect and beyond improvement. It isn’t. Compulsory voting, for example, would ensure that electoral outcomes are more reflective of the electorate’s wishes. It also baffles me that, as an Australian, I can still vote in British elections. Rather, the point is that for any political system to work there need to be agreed rules that both sides pledge to play by regardless of the outcome they produce. If you agree to adhere certain rules beforehand only to trash their legitimacy after they produce a result you do not like, you invite your opponents to employ the same tactics against you. In doing so undermine the flexibility of the political system. Parliament created the rules for the referendum process, and so must respect the consequences of that process.
Indeed, the 2016 referendum was arguably conducted in the fairest way possible given the circumstances. Sensibly, the referendum followed usual general election franchise, with only very minor exceptions: the inclusion of members of the House of Lords and Commonwealth citizens resident in Gibraltar. I say sensibly, because any tweaking to the normal franchise would be construed as favouring or penalising one side or the other. Allowing EU citizens, expatriates, or 16-17 year-olds to vote, for example, would be interpreted by Leave as attempting to tilt the balance in favour of Remain. By contrast, not changing anything, allows you to fall back on the relative neutrality of precedent. Similarly, while it might have been tempting to impose a supermajority, this would have created its own problems if Leave won the popular vote, but fell short of the higher-than-usual threshold.
As for claims of foreign interference and overspending, I seriously doubt enough of that occurred to account for the 1.3 million-vote Brexit majority.
People have a right to change their minds!
Another common refrain is that voters have the right to change their minds. People were lied to and given contradictory promises, but they can see the light, and should vote again now that all the Brexit lies have been exposed. It is true that democracies regularly give people the chance to change their say via periodic general elections. Yet another problem with referendums is that they are usually interpreted—at least before one side loses—as binding for a generation or more.
There are two problems with this. First, if we stick with the general election analogy, while voters do reassess their decisions, they only do so after a government has had a chance to implement its agenda for at least a few years. This has not happened with Brexit. Triggering Article 50 but refusing to see withdrawal through is not respecting the referendum result. At the very least, if Brexit is to be reversed, it therefore only should happen after some form of it has been implemented. Demanding a rerun of the Brexit vote beforehand would be like expecting every government to resign after a dip in the opinion polls.
Secondly, there is no evidence that voters have changed their minds. While of course there has been some movement, it generally has not been from Leave to Remain. The current (small) remain majority is accounted for by non-voters in 2016 breaking more heavily for Remain than for Leave. Crucially, polling evidence shows that those who voted Leave in 2016 still tend to support Leave. If Leavers truly voted on the basis of misinformation, they would have switched, but they haven’t.
What about a ‘People’s Vote’?
Reversing Brexit is fraught with difficulty. Revoking Article 50 without a further referendum, as the Liberal Democrats now advocate, would be hugely divisive. Even if somehow they won a parliamentary majority under a ‘revoke’ platform, even most Remainers accept that politically the only way to undo one referendum is through a subsequent referendum.
That brings us to the second referendum option. Aside from the practical difficulty of there being no parliamentary majority for one, it is far from clear what the question in such a plebiscite would be. If the options were ‘May’s deal versus remain’, supporters of no-deal Brexit will would view this as a Remain stitch up. If the options were ‘no-deal versus remain’, supporters of leaving with a deal would feel similarly disillusioned. While a three-way ‘remain versus no deal versus May’s deal’ option seems more sensible than the other two, the Electoral Commission, which has considerable sway on such matters, is sceptical.
Even assuming a second referendum happens, the real problem is that it will never be seen as legitimate by the losing side. I freely admit that one of my main reasons for opposing such a vote is that I fear it will reverse the 2016 result. Unless Brexit is implemented, the Leave side, which, according to current polling still represents at least 40 per cent of the population, will feel forever cheated. They were promised Leave, and then Leave was not delivered. The narrative is easy to predict. The Establishment, having opposed Brexit in the first place, deliberately frustrated the withdrawal process, before finally killing Brexit by engineering a referendum whose result was effectively predetermined. We are already seeing such rhetoric deployed by the right-wing press and by unscrupulous populists, and it will get substantially worse if Brexit is formally cancelled. Moreover, since no Brexit ever happened under this scenario, it will be easy to assert that even valid claims about its economic consequences were simply Establishment lies. It will be Britain’s ‘stab in the back’ myth. Worse still, at a time of serious disillusionment with the political system, it sends a dangerous message that change is impossible. Don’t bother with mainstream politics, many will feel, because if the elite opposes change, it will never happen. In such a toxic climate, the far right will have a field day.
There are few parallels among similar political systems to what is now happening, but one example may prove illustrative. In Australia on 11 November 1975 the Labor Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, and his government dismissed were by the Governor-General, Sir John Kerr, even though they enjoyed a clear lower house majority. Despite two election victories in 1972 and 1974, the Government’s legislative agenda had been consistently obstructed by a Liberal Opposition that, not entirely without justification, viewed it as fiscally reckless, incompetent, and a danger to the country’s prosperity, much as Remainers view Brexit today. By 1975, the Liberals convinced themselves that Government was illegitimate and, like some Remainers, set out to destroy it by any means available. To do this, and in breach of all convention, the Opposition used its upper house numbers to block the budget. Consequently, the Government risked running out of supply. The Opposition demanded an election as the price for passing the budget. The Government refused.
To break the deadlock, The Governor-General appointed the Opposition Leader as caretaker Prime Minster on condition that an election was immediately held. While technically legal, removing a government that still controlled the lower house was grossly improper. Significantly for our purposes, although the Opposition won in a landslide at the ensuing poll, the losing side felt angry and cheated. Labor had won two elections but had not been given a fair chance to govern. Its mandate was ignored, and its government ground down, as risks happening with Brexit. Bitterness lingered for years, the office of Governor-General tarnished, and the sacked Whitlam became a political martyr. The legislative impasse was broken, but at significant cost. Had the government simply been allowed to govern and face a subsequent election, the result would most likely have been accepted even if, as seemed likely, Whitlam lost. As it was, the new Government’s victory was tainted, and no opposition since seriously has attempted to block supply. No Governor-General would now contemplate doing a Sir John Kerr. Given the much greater seriousness of the present issue compared to that of 1975, the omens for the UK if Brexit is cancelled are not good.
That’s all well and good but what about the economy?
Some Remainers acknowledge all of the problems mentioned here but still justify overturning Brexit on economic grounds. I once again concede that I do not know what the economic impact of Brexit ultimately will be. No one does. Personally, I suspect Britain will be poorer outside than inside the EU. I doubt, however, that the outcome will be as catastrophic as feared as long as a deal is in place and there are sensible transition arrangements. However, even if a few percentage points of GDP growth can be salvaged by cancelling Brexit, this does not to my mind outweigh the major social, political, and institutional damage that doing so would entail. Finally, if Brexit really does prove as economically damaging as some fear, it will be seriously discredited as a result. If anything can reunite the country behind Remain in years to come, it will be the failure of Brexit.
The way out
There is, however, a way out of all this mess if only Parliament, and Remainers in particular, would seize it. For all its faults, Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement makes no deal impossible, but takes Britain out of the European Union while providing for an orderly transition period. Further, assuming an all-Ireland customs arrangement is politically impossible, it offers the only way to prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland. Crucially, the accompanying Political Declaration is flexible enough for a future British Government to adapt into anything from the Norway to Canada models. For some on both sides, the deal’s flexibility is a source of criticism. Of course, hardcore Brexiteers will be deeply unhappy about anything that falls short of a ‘clean break’ with Europe, even though such a thing is impossible. Remainers will, by definition, be unhappy about anything that falls short of full EU membership, and especially wary of anything that does not guarantee as close a relationship to the EU as possible.
As things currently stand, neither side can get everything that it wants without infuriating the other half of the country. This is not healthy. Brexit divisions are now firmly entrenched, and it is difficult to see one side substantially eating into the vote share of the other. For all its fudges and compromises, by delivering Brexit while keeping open the possibility of a closer future relationship with Brussels, May’s deal is still offers the best path forward for Brexiteers and Remainers alike. While some on the nationalist fringe will cry betrayal whatever happens, most Brexiteers will be less angry with a soft Brexit than no Brexit at all. Remainers too are far more likely to accept a negotiated exit than a crash-out on Jacob Rees-Mogg’s terms. It is much easier, after all, to accept getting some of what you wanted than to end up with nothing. Like most compromises, few will love it, but most will likely grow to accept it. And that’s about as much as anyone can hope for right now.