... it was the philosophers who first told stories to the people…. That’s it, the people started saying, that’s just it! That’s exactly it! Let’s all die for that! The people is always so keen to die…. “Long live Diderot,” they yelled and then “Hurray for Voltaire!”… At least those guys won’t let the people die in ignorance and superstition…. First up, may everyone know how to read the newspapers! It’s healthy! By God! And quick! No more illiterates! They’re not needed! Nothing but citizen-soldiers! Who vote! Who read! Who fight! Who march! Who blow kisses!.... And that was the send-off of the first battalions of the frenzied emancipated! The first of the voting, flag-waving sods that Dumouriez led off to get shot up in Flanders.
 |
| The aftermath of Waterloo: dead and dying citizen-soldiers |
2. Democracy means deciding by majority rule. Sometimes the majority will be narrow, but if narrow majorities cannot get their way, then you do not have democracy but some other system. (After all, if 80% of the citizens favour a policy, then even authoritarian regimes are likely to implement it.)
3. There is no magic to democracy. Voters are unlikely to think hard about their choices, since each individual has such little influence on the outcome. Democracy does not guarantee sensible outcomes.
4. Since democracy is majority rule, it also means that the majority will tax the minority and transfer money to themselves. Indeed, most democracies have generous redistributive welfare states. Conservatives have always worried this will lead to the downfall of democracy in a spiral of expropriative taxation. In the 1970s, there were fears that Britain was turning into an elective dictatorship.
5. However, the peace afforded by Europe, and the shift in warfare away from mass citizen armies towards more capital-intensive technology, removed the underlying cause for democracy’s spread. Although the high point is usually seen as the 1990s after the collapse of the Socialist bloc, in fact, even in the 1970s, limits began to be set to the power of democratic majorities.
6. The courts have been one actor involved in imposing these limits. Government actions have become increasingly justiciable, and are now regularly challenged in courts. This is a deep change in the UK’s political system, in which, traditionally, parliamentary sovereignty had been central.
7. This change was always a matter of politics. No political scientist should take seriously the judiciary’s claim to stand above politics. Judges are people with interests, like the rest of us. This is obvious in the US, where some judges are even elected.
8. Another limit to the power of majorities is competition between governments. Exit to a different state lets individuals avoid burdensome taxes. In turn, the prospect of this flight acts as a deterrent on expropriative taxation. This may be one reason why the US has stayed democratic for so long – it is a highly federalised system, which in addition had an open frontier for the first half of its existence. Very highly redistributive polities, such as socialist states, have always had to ban emigration.
9. The EU came into being in order to bind France and Germany together and preserve the peace in Europe. But as it grew it fulfilled another function, of allowing people, goods and capital to flow between states. This promise was especially valuable to those in poor countries with inefficient governments, but it provided a safety valve for the rich, talented and mobile everywhere. Europe began to develop as a network of cities, competing for intellectual capital.
 |
| In the Monocle world view, skilled mobile labour chooses between competing cities... |
10. Those left behind without transferable skills, and with stronger ties in social networks at home, did not see the benefits of exit as a safety net for the rich. They felt threatened by the entry of poorer workers from the east of Europe, and by the possible collapse of the democratic welfare state. The Brexit vote was an attempt to tie the elites back to their poorer co-nationals, to limit both entry and exit.
| ... but not everybody is a fan of the highly mobile rich. |
11. Since the referendum, the UK’s political system has not negotiated successfully or unified around a political strategy. The reason for this is that 80% of MPs favour remaining within the EU. Referendums have a weakness, which is that they mandate a policy without voting in representatives to implement that policy. The reason Parliament did not successfully negotiate Brexit in the past three years is not that Brexit is impossibly difficult. It is that Parliament did not want Brexit.
12. Indeed, the whole political and social system did not want Brexit. Leave won by votes counted, but if those votes had been weighted by political power, income, or social influence, then the result would have been 80-20 remain. In the normal course of things – even in democracies, where majority rule decides the overall shape of taxation and redistribution – what happens is determined by the weight of political power, income and social influence. We are therefore in an unusual situation, where the principle of democracy challenges the normal way things work.
13. The courts are simply another organ by which the social system expresses its demands. This is no disrespect to the judges involved in the ruling on the recall of parliament. It is certainly an unprecedented intervention into politics. But the legal groundwork for this kind of intervention was laid over a long period by the increasing justiciability of political decisions – perhaps as a response to the flaws in democratic politicians’ decision-making. They are simply pushing further on down a well-trodden path.
14. We are in the middle of a struggle between democracy, and the ordinary way of deciding things in a society, which is that the rich, established and powerful get their way.
15. There is no particular reason you should favour democracy in this struggle. Voters can be stupid. The outcome of votes can be stupid too. A bare majority is hardly more likely to be right than wrong. Political campaigns rarely come up to the ideal of rational debate. You may very well prefer an enlightened bureaucracy with the occasional vote as a safety valve – like, say, the EU today, whose Parliament has about as much power as the Imperial German Parliament in 1912.
16. But you should be clear what you want. If you think majority rule is a bad idea, then say so and be honest about it. You should not pretend that you care about the will of the people, or that asking again until you get the right answer is democratic, or that the referendum result was not truly democratic because the campaign did not come up to your ideal of debate, or that Parliament is defending its proper role when it tries to settle the government’s foreign policy in advance (another unprecedented innovation). This is sanctimonious hypocrisy.
17. The day after the referendum (in which I voted remain, by the way) I spoke to a Big Issue seller. “It won’t happen,” he said. “If voting changed anything they’d ban it.” I was more sanguine. I thought that the urge to preserve democratic legitimacy would be strong among elected representatives. But his comments have resonated with me over the past three years.
18. Personally – perhaps out of nostalgia – I favour democracy. Maybe it was stupid to allow a direct vote which risked bringing the principle of majority rule into conflict with the wishes and beliefs of the most influential. But if we do so, and the whole political system promises that the vote will be meaningful, then I think we had better implement that vote. Otherwise, who are we kidding with this democracy stuff? For that reason, I am now a Brexiteer.
19. I hope that we will soon have an election involving a clear choice between pro-Brexit and anti-Brexit parties. I hope that the pro-Brexit parties will win, giving us representatives who are prepared to implement the decision we took in 2016. I also hope that the judiciary recognizes that there are wise limits to judicial power, and that judges should not get involved with micro-managing the political process.
No comments:
Post a Comment