Brexit

Thursday's vote to leave the European Union was certainly, to steal a quote from Jim Callaghan, a 'lesson in democracy'. I'm entirely certain now, just as I was immediately before the vote, that this wasn't a sensible thing to do. Economists are almost entirely united over the notion that Brexit will prove to have a damaging effect on the economy in the short to medium term, while the majority are also of the belief that GDP growth will continually be held back in the future if we are denied full access to the single market - which will presumably be the case if the Leave campaign prove to be genuine in their opposition to EU regulation and free movement.

In the face of this decision, many, such as Labour MP David Lammy and the Lib Dems - although in their case, pending and imminent election, have called for the Brexit vote's mandate to be ignored altogether, while others have merely called for a second referendum. I'm interested to see how the Lib Dem strategy works, clearly, if they win a majority Government next year then the widespread conversion to Remain which social media seems to be convinced has happened post-Thursday has clearly materialised, with a degree of force at that. A Lib Dem majority would probably (quite rightly) result in its own anti-Brexit mandate, although while the Lib Dems with their 8 MPs have little to lose with this decision, I do wonder if this will reinforce their image as a non-serious party, which I'm not sure is beneficial to them in the long term.

Lib Dems aside, I am not in favour of ignoring the Brexit vote, it has happened and it ought to be respected. The only circumstance in which I would support another referendum would be if a choice needs to be made as to whether we ought to remain in the single market or not, and if it became clear that opinion was heavily in favour of Single Market membership, then it might be worth considering whether Remaining in the EU ought to be considered, due to the blatant downsides of the Norwegian model for single market membership.

This is very unlikely, however, and would require a very particular set of circumstances. So in general, I think that ignoring the democratic choice to leave is a dangerous path to go down. I've seen many people call the working class voters who opted for Leave either stupid, or worse, too stupid to deserve the vote. Considering that many people like myself  are of the belief that the facts were heavily stacked in favour of Remain in this debate, such a slide towards JS Mill style elitism is understandable, and while I know it's mostly meant in jest, in a serious context I don't think it's either particularly justified or constructive moving forward. After all, we did have a system up until the early 1900s in which only well educated and wealthy men could vote in elections, yet it didn't end up in rational fact based policy and debate, it just resulted in much of the population starving to death while those at the top convinced themselves that the contemporary status quo was a result of the poor's fecklessness (although to say that this doesn't happen in today's Britain would also be a mistake).

Democracy is a good thing, and it ought not to be the target of the fallout of Thursday's decision. It might not be particularly popular, but I don't regret having supported an EU referendum for the last couple of years. There are problems with referendums, they force binary options concerning issues which often require deliberation, but there has clearly been a large proportion of the public who have been long opposed to EU membership, and I still feel that effectively denying them a say in democratic debate would be unsustainable and undesirable. For me, if there is a worthy target for scorn following Thursday's result, it shouldn't be democracy in general, it should be the woeful nature in which expert opinion prior to the vote was disseminated to the public. Of course the likes of the Sun and the Mail get away with telling absolute lies, and I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping that the press regulatory board recommended by Leveson comes into existence soon - and that it will have the powers necessary to enforce large scale front page apologies in clear instances of deception, but the broacast media were also awful in covering this debate. The economic arguments surrounding Brexit were largely summed up by the likes of the BBC as "experts disagree", ignoring not only the fact that the vast majority of economists opposed Brexit (IPSOS Mori found this to be around 90%), but also the clear and accesible economic logic which dictates why leaving the Single Market would be bad for Britain's economy. In the midst of the Tories' political games with the BBC, many are keen to jump to its defence, but its obsession with 'balance' proved to have devastating consequences in this referendum. I'm just amazed that in its reporting of HSBC threatening to move 1000 jobs to Paris if we leave the Single Market, the BBC felt it newsworthy to state that there are 'concerns' that leaving the single market 'could' result in banks losing their passporting rights within Europe. This isn't news, it's a tautological statement, and I'm quite confused why this is being reported today but wasn't widely reported on within the last 6 months. It's not like the result of a leave vote wasn't forecastable, ever since the referendum was announced it has been crystal clear that the only two options following Brexit would be to follow Norway's model which would keep free movement and Single Market access, or abandon passporting rights to some extent, either through relying on WTO trading guidelines, or through spending years and decades negotiating various bilateral treaties with the EU. This should have been clear to every voter before Thursday. The likes of the BBC shouldn't have pandered to the deliberate deception of Leave when they tried to conflate both potential outcomes in order to avoid political scrutiny, nor should they have repeated the £350m a week lie ad nauseum. Democracy is necessary to ensure stability and to protect the vulnerable from those making decisions which heavily impact their lives, but it does require an attentive and informed public to work effectively, so I suppose you could sum this situation up with Churchill's claim that "democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time".

However, while I've spent the above paragraphs detailing why I think this Brexit vote was a mistake, it would be rather hypocritical to defend democracy without addressing the numerous, and often justified questions regarding the EU's accountability. Unlike me, Tony Benn may have supported an EU exit, but I still largely agree with his assessment of the institutionalised problems within the current EU. Notably, the fact that the Commission, rather than Parliament, proposes legislation, the secrecy which surrounds decision making within the Council/Council of Ministers, and the problem of low turnout and lack of care on behalf of the public towards EU Parliament elections. While I would also add that there exists a wider cultural/media problem which means that few people are ever aware of decisions being made on an EU level, harming accountability. These are difficult issues to address, and to be honest, even though I supported Remain I wasn't particularly confident in achieving meaningful reform any time soon, the Single Market is largely what drove me to support Remain. In fact, these problems, until now anway, don't seem to have concerned The EU to the extent that they should have. If anything, the EU's contentment with passing important measures such as the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty, and the Lisbon Treaty, with only the tacit consent of national populations shows that they have all too often used a lack of accountability to push their agendas without really thinking whether this could danger the EU's sustainability in the future. I can't help but feel that if the EU engaged with national populations more when making important decisions, political events such as Brexit wouldn't be happening now. Some people may oppose this sentiment, after all, it's quite clear that the overriding contention the British public have with the EU concerns free movement. Many might feel that conceding ground to any opposition to immigration helps feed prejudicial and often false narratives about immigrants (For example, nearly twice as many people think that immigration is bad for the NHS than good, even though the facts suggest the opposite is true), while others may fear that it could have very material effects in terms of encouraging outright racism towards EU migrants (and ethnic minorities) already living here. This is a difficult debate to address, and it will be a difficult one for the left to address amidst rather rudderless calls to seek electoral compromise. But on a realist level, in relation to the EU, it strikes me as incredibly naive to have ever thought that ignoring the overwhelming democratic resistance to free movement could have lasted indefinitely. Maybe, if 30 years ago the EEC tried to reach a transnational consensus on free movement, we could have achieved the sensible compromise on immigration which wouldn't have led to the reactionary, and often outright racist debate that we are having now.