Margaret Thatcher once called referendums ‘a device of dictators and demagogues.’ She was quoting Clement Attlee as his mid-century generation had seen or remembered how Hitler and Napoleon III used plebiscites to get popular endorsement for their decisions. None of those calling for a referendum today are dictators – on the contrary, they see themselves as upholding the core of democracy’s duty to let the people decide.
But some are demagogues in the technical sense of appealing to people’s emotions and prejudices rather than the reasoned give-and-take of parliamentary debate and decisions. Referendums have hovered in the background of my political life. The first was a giant petition for one to restore hanging after its abolition in the 1960s. Then Tony Benn, no mean demagogue he, appealed for a referendum to overturn parliament’s decision to join the EEC. He persuaded the Labour party but at the price of splitting it and turning the 1974-79 government into mutually loathing factions, a split that carried on into the 1980s. Labour’s support for EEC withdrawal in the 1983 election made it unelectable for a decade.
Thatcher and John Major wisely refused referendums but Labour promised one on entry into the euro. It was that pledge and the pound’s strength after 1997 that made entry impossible. The confident Swedish social democratic government held a referendum on the question in 2003. The party was split, the government defeated and the path to a rightwing victory opened. With every paper including the Guardian emoting against the euro Tony Blair could not risk such a referendum. It was that, combined with the pound’s export-killing strength rather than the red herring of five economic tests, that prevented UK entry.
Instead, New Labour offered easy-win referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution and a mayor of London. There was overwhelming consensus and a clear parliamentary majority on these issues. And those referendums were held within months of a change of government. When Labour tried to push decentralised regional government with a referendum on setting up a regional government for the north-east in 2004 it was defeated. This confirms François Mitterrand’s observation that voters answer the wrong question in referendums and the general law that any referendum held later than a few months after a change of power often becomes a vote on the popularity of the government as the Lib Dems discovered with their doomed AV referendum.
Now the talk is of a referendum on the European Union. Peter Mandelson has floated the idea as have many Eurosceptic Tory MPs. It is clear that if one party endorses a referendum so will the other, thus rubbing out any political advantage. The Lib Dems call for referendums on everything so it is now a matter for David Cameron and Ed Miliband to decide.
But simply promising a referendum as an early shot in the 2015 campaign poses more question than answers. What will be the question? In-out? Renegotiation, but on what? The UK is in neither the euro nor Schengen and business would not take kindly to renegotiating the single market. The question of the question will become the object of debate if a referendum is conceded. Then the question will be what line the parties take. Hiding behind ‘Let the people decide’ won’t do. Every party representative will be pressed in every interview to declare the line. If they wriggle, they will look weak.
Meanwhile, as the prime minister or his would-be successor meet foreign leaders, the only question will be on whether Britain will stay a full member of the EU. Britain’s influence and status will be on hold until the referendum is held.
In the end business and the British people are not likely to vote themselves into offshore isolationism. But, as in 1975 a vote to stay in Europe solves nothing if political leaders rather in the fashion of President Sarkozy think that demagogic denunciations of bits of the EU they don’t like is a vote-winner. Labour in the 1980s and the Conservatives after 1997 rejected the 1975 referendum decision.
But a referendum looms. MPs have now surrendered so much of parliamentary sovereignty to Whitehall, quangos, the media, and rules that limit debate to soundbite exchanges that opting for an EU referendum leaves us in our comfort zone where someone else takes the key decisions on the nation’s future.
—————————————————————————————
Denis MacShane is MP for Rotherham and a former Europe minister
—————————————————————————————
While the public’s inability to understand issues can’t be a deciding factor – otherwise, why have votes at all?! – one on the EU poses real problems. “In or out” seems reasonably easy to answer, even if the knowledge to inform such a decision seems often sadly lacking. But any referendum on, say, a renegotiated treaty would be far more fraught with problems – the main one being how to out the question.
Even those presumed to have knowledge use it to suit their own ends. On Newsnight this week, Paddy Ashdown claimed that we have EU to thank for the abolition of the death penalty and civil partnmerships. While new members cannot have the death penalty as a precondition of joining, it was abolished in the UK (but not Northern Ireland) in the late 60s before we ever joined what was then the Common Market. Civil partnerships is also an irrelevance – some EU countries do not have them.
If one fears about how much of the press, UKIP and chunks of the Tory party will act in any referendum campaign, what hope is there with the Paddy Ashdowns on the “pro” side?
For many people – me included – subsequent history has made the 1975 referendum deeply flawed. We were asked whether we wished to stay in what was essentially a trading area. Then there was no question of a possible United States of Europe, a common currency, the writ of EU law etc etc. However, one views the EU, no one was asked about continued membership of what has later emerged.