Why Brexit matters
Published: Wed, 03/13/19
In 2015, just before the general election I went to a pro Brexit meeting. (I don’t think we were even calling it Brexit then). It was certainly a meeting which was in favour of leaving the EU. The Conservative party had just announced that a referendum on leaving the EU would be in the Tory manifesto and there was quite a lot of excitement about this development. I stood up and made the following predictions:
1. That the only reason the Tories were offering a referendum in their manifesto was to take votes away from UKIP.
2. If the Tories did win and held a referendum then that would not be the end of the matter. If the referendum result was to leave the EU then the process of leaving would be so messed up that leaving would not happen at all. Or the arrangements for actually leaving would be much worse than staying in the EU.
3. We would never know for sure if it was just cock up or conspiracy not to leave the EU whatever the result of the referendum, but it would not happen.
I think that my prediction has been proved to be pretty accurate. I still don’t know if Theresa May will just put leaving the EU permanently on hold. Or if she will hold a second referendum which asks a very different question. Or perhaps she will just hold another general election. I think the most likely outcome will be indefinitely postponing leaving the EU ‘until there is agreement in parliament on an acceptable deal’ and then just leaving the next government to sort it out. I could be right, I could be wrong, I guess we will know soon enough.
What politicians do seem to have forgotten is why we have democracy in the first place. Democratic politics is not really about delivering the will of the majority. The governing party rarely has anything like a majority of the popular vote in a general election. The present government didn’t come near to having a working majority of MPs and has needed the support of the Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) in order to lead the country. In Northern Ireland there is supposed to be a power sharing arrangement. Power sharing is supposed to mean that the majority Unionists do not oppress the minority republicans. Not that is seems to have worked very well in recent years.
The purpose of a democratic system is simply to confer legitimacy on a government. Democracy provides a way of gaining power without having to seize power by force. Democracy provides a way of retiring existing leaders without having to kill, or at least exile them. Elections simply give a few people the legitimacy to run the country until the next election. It is all a bit of a lottery who will actually end up occupying number 10 Downing Street but that does not really matter so long as they got there by playing by the rules. The rules are pretty arbitrary and not exactly fair, certainly as far as minority parties such as UKIP or the Greens are concerned. However, the country usually finds itself with a working government, and there is always the next election when things might change a bit. I am broadly in a agreement with Winston Churchill when he said something along the lines of. ‘Democracy is a terrible system of
government until you consider the alternatives.’
The terrifying thing about the whole Brexit debacle is not so much whether or not Britain leaves the EU. The worst part is the damage done to the legitimacy of the whole democratic process. In the 2015 election manifesto Labour stated that leaving the EU was not their party policy so there would be no referendum if they were elected. The Liberal Democrats have always been very pro EU. The main purpose of UKIP was to get the UK out of the EU. So all three of these parties were perfectly clear what they were offering the electorate. The Conservatives made a manifesto promise which the leadership clearly had no intention on following through on. I think that the way that David Cameron resigned and ran for the hills when the referendum went the ‘wrong’ way confirms my assertion.
Democracy can only confer legitimacy if those who benefit from it are clearly seen to be keeping to the rules, following through on promises and acting with integrity. If Brexit is not delivered then the credibility of or political system is going to be massively damaged. At the very least populist and ‘extremist’ parties will make a lot of headway at the next general election. There will be no confidence that major parties, particularly the conservatives, can be trusted to keep their promises.
You can argue that the referendum should never have been held. I would not disagree with that point of view. But just because a promise was made in bad faith does not mean that it was not made at all. We are living in interesting times and the British electorate are going to find it very difficult to know who to trust to govern this country in the future.
Regards
Graham
PS I have just started a new programme for my members entitled Philosophers, Warriors and Healers. Politics and leadership is just one topic I will cover in the course of the programme. If you are interested in joining Ice and Fire Stav and receiving this programme and other study material relating to Stav see http://iceandfire.org.uk/join.html