Yes, if they help us explore what might have happened in slightly different circumstances; no, if they’re merely what the author wishes had happened.

There’s a ripe example of the latter in The Economist — where the Bagehot column takes the form of an imagined extract from the memoirs that David Cameron “might have written had he won the Brexit referendum”.

I’m not sure whether ‘Bagehot’ is describing his own wishes, or channelling what he imagines Cameron’s might be – but either way the fantastical nature of the scenario is revealing. Its premise is that if the referendum had gone the other way, we would have seen “the death of Euroscepticism”:

“The fever of Euroscepticism eventually broke and Britain entered its current age of Euro-contentment. Nigel Farage moved to America for a gig with Fox News and a slot on the speaking circuit. I’m told that he has built quite a place in southern Florida — a mock-Tudor mansion complete with red telephone boxes and a working pub serving real ale, pie and mash. With his guiding hand removed, the UK Independence Party was captured by people who were so nauseating and ill-disciplined that membership collapsed.”

Like a lot of ‘alt-history’, this ignores the lessons of actual history. Take the result of the Scottish independence referendum – a clear defeat for the ‘Yes’ side, but did the “fever” of Scottish Nationalism break? Did the SNP collapse? No, they were greatly strengthened as a result — the beneficiaries of a nationalism that is defiant, not defeated.

A similar example is the shock defeat of Hillary Clinton in 2016, which helped to energise and radicalise the Democrats. Then there’s the actual result of the Brexit referendum, which created a mass Remain movement, capable of getting hundreds of thousands of people on the streets — and re-animating the Liberal Democrats. Meanwhile, the evident willingness of the Remain Parliament to block Brexit has prompted a rebellion among Leave voters. Nigel Farage was able to bypass his dysfunctional old party, start a new one and take it to first place in the Euro elections. His comeback sealed Theresa May’s fate and propelled Boris Johnson into Downing Street.

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How the Lib Dems could seize power

By James Kirkup

Therefore the notion that a Leave defeat in 2016 would have prompted British euroscepticism to obediently curl-up-and-die is fanciful.

Bagehot (in the voice of David Cameron, remember) does try to make his scenario plausible:

“Millions of good people had voted to leave, not because they were fed up with Europe but because they were fed up with Britain. I tackled the Tory problem by forgiving the most talented Leavers, such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, while simultaneously marginalising the irreconcilables… I dealt with the problem of the left-behind by announcing the end of austerity at the 2017 party conference and encouraging Boris, as business secretary, to make revitalising the North and the Midlands his priority — or, as he put it, a matter of ‘do or die’.”

But, again, this doesn’t stand up.

For a start, an alternative history in which Remain prevailed is most plausibly one in which the likes of Johnson and Gove did not join the Leave campaign. Therefore, there are no such figures to magnanimously bring back into the fold, because they never wandered off in the first place.

Also, what makes Bagehot think that Cameron would have reached out to the North and Midlands with a latter-day Marshall Plan? The essay-crisis Prime Minister, having got away with his referendum gamble, would sink back into his habitual complacency. His Chancellor, George Osborne, though happy to devolve power to England’s cities, would have continued his strategy of targeting the local government and social security budgets for the harshest cuts. As for the “end of austerity”, any extra money to play with would have been deployed with the 2020 general election at the forefront of his calculations. For a Remain Tory government, that would have meant holding on to southern seats gained from the Lib Dems in 2015, holding off a Labour advance in London and supporting Ruth Davidson’s progress in Scotland.

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Why conservatism is failing

By Mary Harrington

Bear in mind that even when the Conservatives have every electoral reason to make a compelling offer to Leave-voting Labour heartlands (as in 2017), they can’t seem to manage it. So the idea that this would have happened in the wake of a Cameron-led Remain victory is unconvincing.

Bagehot goes on to suggest that Cameron would have gradually patiently bent the EU to his will — for instance caving in on freedom of movement. But, most likely, the compromises would have been in the other direction. EU leaders like Emmanuel Macron, Guy Verhofstadt and Ursula von der Leyen have continued to press for further expansions of the EU’s remit.

Though Cameron’s renegotiation deal prior to the referendum included an agreement to exempt the United Kingdom from the objective of “ever closer union” — those words, in the preamble to the Treaty of Rome, are of purely symbolic significance, therefore so was the exemption.

And yet with every new directive and regulation the UK would indeed find itself drawn closer into union with its neighbours — provoking bitter accusations that the renegotiation had been violated. The same would apply to every inevitable increase in the UK’s net contribution to the EU budget.

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What's David Cameron hiding?

By James Hanning

As for net immigration (from the EU), it’s reasonable to suppose that without Brexit it would be at a higher level — especially now with several Eurozone economies slowing down again. Cameron would have come under intense pressure to activate the renegotiation agreement’s ’emergency brake’ provisions — and would have faced the possibility of humiliation given the need for European Parliamentary approval. The same goes for the so-called Red Card provision — in theory a way of sending proposals back to the European Commission, but in practice requiring the support of 15 other EU member states.

Of course, it’s also reasonable to suppose that the UK economy would have grown faster over the past three years had Remain won. But that would have meant extra pressure on the UK to pay more into EU funds, employ more of Europe’s jobless and take in more external migrants. Even without the EU-ultras winning immediate victories on federalist measures such as a European Army or EU-wide taxation, Cameron would have had to make a never-ending series of smaller concessions — each one condemned by his enemies as a ‘betrayal’.

So, no, a Remain victory would not have ended the argument over Britain’s place in Europe. As is the case with independence for  Scotland, there’d have been calls for a second In/Out referendum by now — a ‘people’s vote’, if you will.

However, while none of this resurgent traditionalism is exactly up my street, being as I am of a decidedly more liberal persuasion, I don’t see it as the biggest threat to democracy. Having considered the issue for the better part of my life, I believe that the biggest threat to democracy is the belief among the current societal elite that what they want and what democracy is are the same thing – and that tweaking the rules of the game to get what you want is therefore right, just and somehow unto itself democratic.

This trend that sees democracy as a set of particular decisions, rather than just as a method for making decisions, has been well under way for some time and tends to divide the world between ‘informed’, ‘correct’ decisions, and ‘uninformed’ ‘incorrect’ decisions. ‘Correct’ decisions are automatically democratic; ‘incorrect’ ones are not.

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Who's most intolerant in America?

By Peter Franklin

One of the ways that is currently in vogue for ensuring ‘informed’, ‘correct’ decisions is to hold so-called citizens’ assemblies, a democratic ‘innovation’ that many leaders currently feel assured will bring them the results that they want.

You may have heard of citizen assemblies. They are all the rage in academic circles and some of that has seeped out into the political sphere. Conservative politician Rory Stewart proposed one to ‘bridge the gap between the referendum result and parliament’ on Brexit, for example, and Extinction Rebellion has demanded that a binding assembly be held on how the UK can tackle climate change and ecological justice.

For the uninitiated, citizens’ assemblies, or citizens’ juries as they are sometimes called, consist of randomly selected people who are gathered to listen to presentations from academics and interest groups, generally over the course of a few weekends, and then to make legislative recommendations or (according to some variants) legislate directly themselves. University College London held such an assembly on the topic of Brexit in 2017 and its 50 members decided that their vision for Brexit included ‘a bespoke UK/EU trade deal and a customs union that would allow the UK to conduct its own international trade policy while maintaining a frictionless UK/EU border’, but that if a deal could not be reached, they would choose to remain in the single market and customs union.

Since then, citizens’ assemblies have been a firm favourite among some Remainers, as a way to ‘break deadlock’ over Brexit and get people to make ‘considered’ decisions. They contrast this to the 2016 Brexit referendum Leave vote, which they view as the result of ill-considered or unconsidered votes and which is therefore, according to some, essentially undemocratic.

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What Rory Stewart got right

By Freddie Sayers

Touted as a participatory breakthrough that empowers the average voter, there are a lot of myths circling about citizens’ assemblies – and particularly about those that have been held in Ireland. British politicians and intellectuals apparently feel themselves entitled to just blithely repeat these myths as a justification for holding such assemblies on all manner of decisions in Britain.

The favoured narrative is that prior to 2018 the Irish were a mess of conflicting ideas on the issue of liberalising the country’s restrictive abortion laws (according to Extinction Rebellion we had, in fact, reached ‘deadlock’ on this issue). Then, mercy of mercies, the government called a citizens’ assembly in which ordinary, randomly-selected people were finally ‘informed’, revolutionising our understanding of abortion and leading to the obviously correct move to liberalise abortion law in our long and unidirectional march to enlightenment.

This transformative goodness could happen for Brexit and Climate Change, too.

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Why do the Greens make so many see red?

By Tom Chivers

Now, one of the more grievous errors with this understanding is that it confuses electoral gridlock (which is pretty much the status quo on most things) with citizen gridlock, which per definition is only possible if you have an even number of voters who are exactly divided on a topic – a circumstance that I have no example of ever occurring in real life.

The ‘division’ on abortion in Ireland was, for some time, between a sizeable majority of pro-choice voters on one hand and a minority of pro-life voters on the other. The minority, being conservative, generally give their votes to one of the two major parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail, and they are vocal about where their priorities lie. They will, for example, explicitly tell politicians that they, regretfully, cannot vote for anyone who is pro-choice. I know, because I ran in the 2016 election, and plenty of people said it to me, a few of them even being so kind as to pray for my soul.

Parliamentary seats in Ireland are often won by very few votes and each of the big parties boasted a certain contingent of potentially single-issue pro-life voters. For this reason, neither party wanted to touch the issue – no candidate wants to lose 10% of their vote share because their pro-life voters stay at home. They simply can’t afford to, despite the fact that 10% (or 30% for that matter) is clearly not a majority. This is how blocking minorities work in electoral systems on all kinds of issues. It tells you absolutely nothing about what the majority of citizens think and thus cannot be used as a proxy for inferring citizen gridlock, ignorance or confusion.

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What's so illiberal about debating abortion?

By Ruth Dudley Edwards

Having lived here for over a dozen years, I would say that the number of people who were in favour of liberalising abortion was certainly over 50% and actually closer to around 2/3 for some time – a supermajority, in other words. When I ran a digital democracy exercise asking people to tell me their stance on abortion two years before it was put to the vote, 68% said that a referendum should be held in order to loosen the laws, while some polls put the numbers in favour of liberalisation as high as 80%.

The citizens’ assembly that debated the pros and cons of removing the 8^th amendment (the Constitutional provision that made liberalisation impossible) was not called by people who were devoted to liberalising abortion laws and felt the need to ‘educate’ the populace over to their point of view. Many of the more outspoken pro-choice politicians wanted a referendum to be called at the earliest convenient point because public opinion was already in their favour. If you peruse the parliamentary records you will see that sentiment clearly reflected in the debate on the citizens’ assembly regarding abortion. The citizens’ assembly delayed the referendum by a few years and helped the major parties mitigate the damage with their pro-life voters by allowing them to distance themselves from the entire process.

Thus, the principle in operation in Ireland on abortion was a completely different one than is the case regarding Brexit in the UK. In Ireland, a blocking minority was using the electoral process to punch above its weight, ensure that its votes de facto counted more than those of others and keep abortion off the agenda. Whereas the pivotal issue in regards to Brexit is that there was a majority vote in a referendum that neither parliament nor the losing side accepts.

The Irish assembly and subsequent referendum de facto circumvented the pro-life minority by implementing direct democracy on this issue. Remainers want to use an assembly in Britain to try to circumvent a majority by taking a direct democratic decision and somehow befuddling it via assembly.

This is a very different kind of ‘deadlock’ and I would like to stress that it is not a good idea to start using things like citizens’ assemblies to try to circumvent clearly expressed majority will, because in doing so you are setting a precedent for circumventing democracy whenever you don’t like it. And anyone can play that game.

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Bring on the People's Peers

By Richard Askwith

The other myth about Ireland is that the citizens’ assembly had a major impact on the outcome and quality of the abortion referendum that followed it and that had the Brexit referendum (or other issues) benefited from something similar, the post-Brexit debate would not be so embittered.

According to former Prime Minister Gordon Brown writing in The Guardian:

‘The handling of the Irish abortion referendum is evidence of the power and potential of citizens’ assemblies. It could have been a bitter and toxic debate dominated by extremists on both sides. But in part because a representative group – half initially pro-abortion, half against – talked the issues through, exploring differences, asking questions of experts and interacting with each other on their fears and hopes, they managed to defuse the controversies. And they found common ground between devout faith and resolute feminism in an outcome that astonished the world and that everyone accepted.’

Now, part of what Brown said is point-blank invention – Assembly members were not selected according to their views on abortion. That’s just something he made up.

However, leaving that aside, while I realize this may be hard for British people to accept, because your media has conditioned you to believe that we’re all running around with ArmaLites 24/7, Ireland’s pretty chill. Having lived through it, I’m not sure there was anything unusually polite or reasonable about the abortion referendum. As a small country, we are rife with both extreme nepotism and the kind of stifling small-town behaviour-policing that liberals claim to hate so much. For better or worse, it has a suppressing effect on histrionics.

There have been 13 referenda since I moved here and while most of them were not preceded by a citizens’ assembly, they have all been similarly low-key. An effect of the kind Brown proposes is hard to discern.

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What the populists get right

By Matthew Goodwin

Beyond that, a further reason as to why the citizens’ assembly had little (possibly zero) effect on the tone of the debate was that many Irish people weren’t aware that the assembly existed. I canvassed regularly for a yes vote in the referendum and during that time I explicitly addressed the issue of the citizens’ assembly with the hundreds of people I spoke to. Although the vast majority of those people had already made up their minds on how they would vote (unsurprising since abortion has been a live topic of debate for, as one woman put it to me, ‘forty years’), very, very few even dimly recognized the term ‘citizens’ assembly’ even when I prompted them.

And I wasn’t exactly shocked at that – only 100 people out of our 3.3 million voters took part (99 if you exclude the chair). That is one in every 30,000 voters or 0.003% of the voting population. There are approximately 50 million voters in Britain, so a 100-member strong citizens’ assembly would be 0.0002% of the voting population. The numbers involved in citizens’ assemblies are thus extremely low when you think about the total number of voters in the country. 100 people may sound like a lot, but a single tube on the London Victoria line carries 864 passengers. It takes a lot more than a citizens’ assembly to really involve people in political decisions.

Moreover, having belaboured the abortion issue on primetime television, talk radio and newspapers up and down the land for years, few people decided to glue themselves to YouTube to watch videos of citizens’ assembly presentations in order to ‘inform’ themselves. Many citizens’ assembly YouTube videos have little more than 100 views, with even the most controversial ones garnering fewer than 10,000 views.

Remember, there are 4.5 million people living here and 3.3 million voters. ‘Citizens’ Assembly’, I think we can assume, is not going to be the next ‘Game of Thrones’ hit in terms of viewership.

Ireland’s yes vote is attributable to one fact alone: most Irish people wanted to liberalise abortion, and this trend has been in the works for a long time for a number of different reasons. It is not attributable to a small-scale deliberative democracy experiment that most people were barely, if at all, conscious of, but is supposed nonetheless to have had some dramatic and ennobling effect on public opinion.

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Fast forward to a post-Brexit Britain

By Carl Miller

Perhaps even more important, however, is to remember where all this is headed, because some people in Britain seem to forget that the assembly was just a low-key warm-up round for a referendum. This is the biggest and most relevant of all myths – that somehow the citizens’ assembly solved something that a referendum couldn’t and therefore there is some kind of strained relevance to Brexit and other allegedly divisive issues.

The citizens’ assembly, contrary to Brown’s assertions, didn’t reach any kind of a comfy ultimate compromise that everyone could live with at all. They came up with more than a dozen recommendations, but the ultimate and only relevant question was whether or not the 8^th amendment (which restricted abortion) should be repealed, which would allow the houses of parliament to legislate on the issue.

The referendum was ultimately, as it had to be, a straight Yes/No vote, and the pro-lifers turned up for it to the tune of over 700,000 people, nearly one-quarter of the electorate. They wanted to keep the 8^th amendment in – no one ‘compromised’ with them on that.

The idea that life is sacrosanct and should be protected under all circumstances and the idea that humans should, in any way, shape or form, be allowed to make their own choices, including on such topics as termination and euthanasia are not, at the end of the day, compatible.

Democracy isn’t about achieving ends that everyone agrees on or even finds tolerable. That’s impossible. It’s about making choices that everyone is literally forced to abide by because those choices become law, and that law is in turn enforced by police and interpreted by courts. Democracies are intentionally constructed to only require a majority of votes cast. Thus, that one is unhappy with a result is no indicator of its democratic or undemocratic nature.

And personally I believe that is a good thing, because any law depends a great deal on its real or perceived legitimacy and I’m at a loss to understand how that can be achieved without some process that allows each citizen a vote, whether that be directly (my preference) or through voting for elected representatives.

Seeking to get around either of those mechanisms via a citizens’ assembly – involving, in the grand scheme of things, next to no one – means that one is actually setting an absurdly low bar for participation.

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Can bribery fix democracy?

By Peter Kellner

When it comes to legitimacy some citizens’ assembly advocates, especially those who would like to overturn Brexit, seem to wield both this absurdly low bar and an absurdly high one at the same time. If pro-Remain advocates, for example, want to say that a margin of 1.3 million votes was too tight to be decisive – with a 72% turnout of registered voters (or 65% of the entire voting age population) – in the Brexit referendum, I do wonder how a citizens’ assembly resting on only a few people perhaps changing their votes could have any credence.

I also wonder what they’d think of some of our liberalising referenda over here in Ireland.

The 8^th amendment abortion referendum wasn’t the first of those (yet another reason as to why it did not exactly strike as a bolt from the blue).

There is no minimum turn-out required on referendum votes in Ireland. Turn-out for the most recent referendum on reducing the waiting period for divorce was below 51%, while fewer than 44% bothered to vote in the referendum to remove the offence of blasphemy from the Constitution. Ireland’s 1995 divorce referendum passed by a mere 9000 votes (that’s a vote of 50.28% in favour). I’ve learned that Remainers dislike being reminded of these events, especially in response to the allegation that the Brexit vote did not enjoy a clear enough majority. After all, we have often been unable to turn out as clear a victory for some of the outcomes here that they agree with the most.

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Time to scrap these toxic parties

By Polly Mackenzie

The reason these votes are accepted in Ireland, despite sometimes sluggish turn-out and close outcomes, is that everyone did get a chance to vote, whether they ultimately chose to vote for, against or abstain. As far as I am aware, this method has never yet delivered consensus, but it has delivered legitimacy, which is much more important.

Proponents of citizens’ assemblies will tell you that the number of participants involved don’t matter, because those who are selected are ‘representative’ of the society as a whole, but that’s some funny maths at best, not to mention quite crude identity politics. I would certainly never, for example, claim to represent any substantial chunk of immigrants, although I am, seen from a statistics point of view, indisputably an immigrant.

In service to this ‘representative’ argument, citizens’ assembly buffs even managed to forget a referendum. Back during the Irish same-sex marriage referendum in 2015, we actually held two referenda. The second one, on lowering the legal age to be President (a largely ceremonial role) didn’t pass. It didn’t pass by a landslide, despite the predecessor of the citizens’ assembly (the Constitutional Convention) having passed it. Not so representative now.

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Let's junk our electoral system

By Tim Bale

The truth is advocates of citizens’ assemblies don’t worry about representativeness or legitimacy too much because the point is not to reflect what the wider society thinks, but what it would think if it weren’t so ignorant and misinformed. The idea is that if you think about an issue as hard as they have, you will inevitably come to the same conclusions they have. You know – the right ones.

I’ve had many conversations with pro-lifers. I had to – they’ve kept phoning me over two elections. And though I would call them many things – chief among them ‘persistent’ – they weren’t ignorant. They just had different values than I did on this point and ascribed to a different version of communal life.

I deeply disagree with that position, but I also disagree with all those traditionalists who voted against lowering the age to be President. But I accept that in a democracy I sometimes win and I sometimes lose. Although I think I am right, I may not always be. More than that, however, I’m unwilling to forego my rights to participate just to keep someone else from them, as I believe that in the long-run that is more dangerous than anything the people as a whole might actually decide to do.

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How the Establishment debased direct democracy

By Ben Cobley

It may be nice to get one’s way, but pushing ‘innovations’ like citizens’ assemblies, particularly at the expense of elections and referenda, is merely to weave the noose for your own neck. It means that you’re willing to disrespect your fellow citizens entirely to get something more important – the ‘right’ thing. That’s the exact calculation that every abusive regime the world has ever seen has made and it’s certainly holding the door wide for every other person and party out there who believes that their ideas of what is right are just so terribly important as to justify extraordinary measures.

No relationship can survive that kind of behaviour for long and a democracy is a relationship.

In a democracy, we are actually fundamentally saying to each other on a daily basis that you and your rights (and by extension, me and my rights) are more important to me than just getting my way is. That each person has entitlements no matter how woefully ignorant and awful I think they may be. That, importantly, each person has the potential to make a contribution to our society. This is a commitment that brings a lot of security with it.

That’s what we ultimately had here on the question of abortion in Ireland. You can’t outsource that. And you can’t just claim we did things differently because it’s convenient for you. There is no democracy without equal participation that includes the good, the bad, and the ugly. Not here. Not anywhere.

Dr. Fuller’s new book In Defence of Democracy is out on 6th September.

But could Corbyn, by making what might be a big mistake in the short to medium term, end up doing the country a huge favour in the long term? By sitting on the fence he just might prevent the already painful polarisation between Leave and Remain voters from creating a partisan divide between Labour and the Conservatives to rival the one between Democrats and Republicans that’s disfiguring politics across the pond.

Declaring Labour’s support for a second, ‘confirmatory’ referendum would undoubtedly be a logical move for Corbyn. It would open up the possibility not just of topping the poll at the European elections (an accolade which on current form will otherwise go to the Brexit Party, just as it went to UKIP in 2014), but of strangling Change UK in its cradle or, if that’s too murderous a metaphor for you, blowing up its planes while they’re still on the ground. It would also stop what, after the locals, is bound to be trumpeted (with some justification, it has to be said) as #libdemfightback.

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How Thatcherism produced Corbynism

By John Gray

Before anyone gets on my case, yes I know – or at least think I know – why Corbyn won’t make that move.

For a start, there’s the ‘Lexiteer’ perspective he shares with his hard-Left advisors and trade union allies. Just because most economists deride the idea that EU membership presents an obstacle to a faster growing, more ‘socialist’ Britain, it doesn’t mean Corbyn and co. are going to stop believing that it does anytime soon.

And then, of course, there’s the widespread concern among many (but by no means all) Labour MPs in ‘Leave constituencies’ that being seen to do anything that smacks of stopping Brexit will lose them the support of ‘traditional Labour voters’ or ‘the white working class’. Doubtless those MPs will be citing Labour’s disappointing local election results in some Leave voting areas in the north of England as ‘evidence’.

Again, expert opinion would differ. It’s not just a matter of refusing to lump all sorts of very different people together in outdated, subjective, and fetishised categories. Or of being wary of extrapolating too much from the outcome of council contests. It’s also about preferring solid survey research over the faux-concern for their constituents or  ‘democracy’ expressed by a bunch of politicians arguably more interested in hanging on to their precious seats in parliament than the fate of the country as a whole.

Naturally, those politicians will dismiss that research: no-one but no-one, especially a bunch of ivory-tower academic number crunchers and London-based polling companies, will ever persuade an MP that they don’t know ‘their patch’ and ‘their people’ quite as well as they think they do – something which presumably accounts for the stunned incredulity with which so many defeated incumbents greet their demise at general election after general election.

But, to me at least, that research suggests that supporting a second vote wouldn’t actually lose Labour many, if any, seats anyway. And it also suggests that, even if it did, Labour might well win seats elsewhere as a result.

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How Corbynomics is winning over Britain

By Matthew Goodwin

We also need to factor in the opportunity costs that Labour may have to pay for continuing to sit on the fence. True, a fair few of its members and supporters, whatever their t-shirts say, ultimately love Corbyn more than they hate Brexit. But not backing a second referendum – or whatever euphemism you prefer to call it – is, over time, still going to alienate an awful lot of them.

Maybe not so badly that they’ll immediately take to Twitter with their party cards and a sharp pair of scissors. But enough to see them slowly drift away or at least out of the ‘high-intensity’ activities (canvassing, leafletting, etc.) that are still so vital in first-past-the-post contests – something that Labour learned to its advantage, and the Tories to their cost, in 2017.

The eight-month run-up to that election saw Theresa May dismiss any notion that the 2016 Referendum had produced a close result which, along with the difficulties the UK was always going to face negotiating with a more powerful interlocutor, implied the best course to pursue was some sort of Norway-style arrangement. Instead, she went for a hard Brexit designed to appeal to Leave voters – many (though not all) of them socially conservative, less well-heeled and less well-educated – and in particular to the four million voters (13% of the electorate) who two years previously had voted for UKIP.

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Britain's first Brexit was the hardest

By Tom Holland

Sadly for Mrs May (and, as it turned out, fatally for her hopes of honouring her promise to extract the UK from the EU by 29 March 2019), she was only partially successful. Although she increased the Tories’ vote share (from 36.9% to 42.4%), the narrow majority they won under David Cameron in 2015 evaporated, leaving them as a minority government reliant on a dodgy support arrangement with the Brexit-supporting DUP.

True, the Conservatives did win over (and in many cases win back) many former UKIP voters, but only rarely in sufficient numbers in the places where they stood a chance of winning seats from Labour.

Meanwhile, Labour, despite its leader’s ambivalence during the referendum campaign, and despite its pledge to honour the result of the referendum, picked up votes from those sections of the electorate most likely to have voted Remain, namely the younger, the better educated and the more socially liberal. But because many of them were located in more urban areas where Labour would have won anyway, and because Tory support also rose, the party’s big improvement in vote share (from 30.4% to 40%) resulted in a much smaller, 30-seat improvement in seat share.

At that point, the stage was surely set for Britain’s two main parties to make Brexit and, crucially, the values associated with Remain and Leave voting, the main divide between them. And in many ways it still is – but for Jeremy Corbyn.

Few can doubt that the Conservatives’ response to what has happened since – most worryingly the rise of Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party  – will be to become, in nature if not in name, what Nick Timothy (once seen as some sort of Rasputin to May’s Tsarina), has taken to calling the National Party. Losing seats at the locals in some Remain-voting areas in the South might give them pause for thought, but it’s unlikely, particularly when Brexiteers can (and will) point to picking up the odd council in the West Midlands – an area that traditionally helps decide the result of general elections.

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Where would the Left be without Brexit?

By James Bloodworth

Now, if politics were physics it would presumably obey Newton’s third law of motion: for every action, there would be an equal and opposite reaction. The Conservatives’ seemingly inexorable drift towards what many of its more moderate MPs see as populism, jingoism, and intolerance would be matched by a Labour Party catering only for those for who shudder to think of such things.

Anyone who wonders what that might do to our politics only has to look across the Atlantic, ideally with a copy of Lilliana Mason’s provocative but persuasive book, Uncivil Agreement, in their hands. The polarisation we are witnessing in the USA is driven not just by the fact that Americans are divided by race, religion, and whether they see themselves as conservative or liberal, but by the fact that these identities, via social sorting, increasingly map on to the partisan divide between Republicans and Democrats.

Nobody, surely, wants to see that kind of poisonous politics play out here. All of which raises the intriguing possibility – even for those who want to see Corbyn commit his party to a referendum and to remaining in the EU – that, by resolutely refusing to do either, he might be doing precisely the right thing, albeit for the wrong reasons.

“The mighty collective power of the UK’s £20bn advertising industry – which has been united in its support for Remain – has failed to find the compelling messaging we so desperately needed. Shame on us.”

For Christine Beale, global editor-in-chief for the industry magazine Campaign, and  her fellow PR and advertising gurus, Brexit presented a mighty wake-up call. Their job is to ‘sell’ us buying choices and opinions, and on the 24^th June 2016 their collective power had been found wanting. The sector was left licking its wounds.

The Referendum was direct democracy, unmediated by party politics and our first-past-the-post electoral system. Votes in safe seats counted equally to those in swing seats. The fixation of party managers on the latter, which simplifies their messaging efforts no end in general elections, was only of marginal importance here.

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The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

For those in the business of influencing, the message was clear – they had to do a lot better. They had to get serious, and far more political, and that meant turning their attention to democracy itself.

Once their initial outrage and despair had cleared, it was clear that campaigners for Remain were going to continue the fight, and that they would not be short of funding to do so. Over time they have consolidated around two fully-staffed operations: People’s Vote (headed by the City PR man Roland Rudd, with Peter Mandelson as a director) and Best for Britain, Gina Miller’s outfit that George Soros has funded.

A large part of their efforts has been focused on media management straight from the conventional PR-Mandelson playbook: lining up a succession of important and well-known folk to make targeted interventions in the public arena, co-ordinated by messaging and timed to have maximum impact on politics.

Day after wearisome day we have seen and heard the results of this as figures from our economic, cultural and political elites have been wheeled out to recycle the approved lines of the day: some variation on ‘Brexit is a disaster and must be overturned for our own good’.

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Time to scrap these toxic parties

By Polly Mackenzie

These efforts have appeared overwhelming at times, dominating our public sphere. But the campaigners have also realised that this sort of pressure is only part of what they need; that they are vulnerable to charges of elitism. They have seen that direct democracy is different; that 17.4 million votes needs more than a renewed Establishment push to overcome.

Hence the campaigners sought to reach out and build a ‘movement’; to defeat one instance of direct democracy with other versions – hoping that this will culminate in a second referendum on their terms; a People’s Vote. The drive to convert Leave voters goes on, but with limited success. It has been in mobilising Remain voters to participate – by posting on their social media, by marching, signing petitions and making donations – that they have been much more successful.

Just recently we have seen the astonishing success of these efforts. At the time of writing the Revoke Article 50 petition has secured nearly 6 million signatures. At the same time campaigners have managed to get mainstream media to report their claims that their march in London on Saturday attracted a million people (the likely real number is less than 400,000; still impressive but nowhere near the iconic figure claimed).

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On Brexit, Auntie just can't help herself

By Robin Aitken

We know that Remain voters tend to be much more educated, younger, more networked and also wealthier than Leave voters on average. Check out the Revoke petition sorted by constituency and you will find a list of the wealthiest urban areas in the country, overwhelmingly in London. They are places full of people connected into networks of political, economic and cultural power; and also fully equipped with new technology to access the latest messaging and talking points.

In other words, the average Remainer participating in these activities is the sort of person that advertising and consumer public relations target anyway as a matter of course. They have proved relatively easy to reach and to mobilise.

Brexit voters are rather more elusive. This has been both a strength and a weakness for the pro-Brexit side. It is a strength because they have been mostly impervious to the daily bombardment of media messaging, both before the Referendum and since. But it is a weakness because this lack of connectedness reflects a general lack of access and organisation, a lack of political power beyond that basic ability to go out and vote.

We can see this in the contrast between the several well-attended anti-Brexit marches and the dearth of similar efforts – or rather successful efforts – to defend Brexit. Saturday’s gathering in London may have been much smaller than the campaigners and their media supporters said, but 400,000 is still a big number – and the widespread positive media coverage testifies to its success.

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Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsan

Compare this to Leave Means Leave’s effort, led by Nigel Farage, albeit without his presence for most of it. The idea of marching from Sunderland to London to protest is a powerful one, evoking the Jarrow March of the 1930s. However Farage is a divisive figure, the numbers have been small and the effort has gained little media coverage.

This relates to a wider issue. While the London media can hardly move for pro-Remain voices from various groups, pro-Leave ones are much thinner on the ground. Pro-Brexit activities struggle for funds, and are hampered by the greater dispersion of Leave voters. Compare Remain and Leave campaigning now and you see on the one hand a professional, well-funded and proactive operation and on the other a motley crew of small organisations and individuals who are constantly in reactive mode, bickering with each other and responding to what the other side are doing rather than setting the agenda themselves.

The Brexit vote was perhaps the only way in which those people who voted for Brexit could bypass established political and economic power and get themselves heard on their own terms.

At least for a brief window, a powerless, disorganised rabble shook things up and defeated the powers-that-be – by voting.

However, those powers have regrouped, adjusted and redeployed since this rebellion. They have mobilised their most ardent supporters, gathering them together to form a group that has developed a strong identity; a class consciousness even. They have learned the techniques of direct democracy and deployed them to re-assert their own power.

These and other counter-moves have left the largest exercise in direct democracy this country has seen in tatters, torn apart from every side: from within the Government itself, by most of our media and major institutions, but also online and in the streets.

This is what political power does. It wins.

“But no firing squad. No torture or retribution. No bloodshed. A very British coup, wouldn’t you say?”

So ran an exchange between firebrand socialist prime minister Harry Perkins and his nemesis, the scheming head of MI5, Sir Percy Browne, in the gripping climax to the TV adaptation of Chris Mullin’s novel A Very British Coup. Man-of-the-people Perkins was ‘a bad dream’ to Sir Percy and his establishment friends. So they conspired to bring him down by falsely implicating him in a financial scandal.

Is it over-egging things to suggest there are parallels between the former Left-wing MP Mullin’s novel and attempts today to sabotage the result of the EU referendum? Perhaps. But the clash between the wishes of the people in voting for radical change and the determination of the ruling class to prevent it is very much of the same theme.

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The pointlessness of a 'People's Vote'

By Matthew Goodwin

The irresistible force of the popular vote has run up against the seemingly immovable object of the massed ranks of the establishment. And, like in Mullin’s thriller, the latter has plotted and connived, sometimes brazenly, often stealthily, to subvert the democratic will.

Amid the tumult and the shouting, it’s worth taking a step back to reflect on the course of events. In 2015, five in six MPs voted to hold a referendum on membership of the EU. Then, a year later, in the biggest democratic exercise ever witnessed in our nation’s history, more than 33 million people went to the polls and a majority voted for secession. They didn’t vote to leave only with a divorce agreement that the EU was willing to approve. No, the question on the ballot paper was simple: remain or leave.

MPs subsequently voted overwhelmingly to trigger Article 50 to enshrine in law the UK’s departure from the EU on 29 March 2019. No caveats, no conditions – we were heading out, deal or no deal.

But, as time has elapsed, the early consensus among the establishment that the will of the people was sacred and must be respected has crumbled. And in its place we have seen a growing resistance, a feature of which has been the deployment of the most crude and paternalistic arguments in an effort to justify the attempt to debase our democracy.

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Our political class is afraid to govern

By Paul Embery

As if that were not bad enough, the post-referendum debate among Westminster politicians and the commentariat has missed the mark spectacularly by focusing almost exclusively on the dry, technical issues of Brexit: the Single Market and Customs Union, the Irish border backstop, and so on.

These things are important of course, but no-one in power has yet bothered to initiate a serious discussion about what drove so many of their fellow citizens to vote Leave in the first place – defining issues such as community, identity, democracy and belonging.

People voted Leave in such large numbers because they felt the political class in this country had stopped listening to them. And in the almost three years since, that political class has done everything in its power to prove them right. Little wonder that minds haven’t been changed and the polls are broadly mirroring what they were doing in the run-up to the referendum.

So here we stand: a government desperately trying to flog a deal that falls short of a genuine Brexit and threatening a delay to the whole project if it isn’t accepted; an opposition apparently bent on committing electoral suicide by demanding we vote again; and a wider establishment – including civil servants and business chiefs – doing its damnedest to ensure the thing doesn’t happen at all.

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By James Bloodworth

Oh, and into the fray has now come a sour band of recalcitrants in the form of the so-called Independent Group, determined, apparently, to ‘change politics’ while actually fighting tooth and nail to preserve the status quo.

These people aren’t the future. Far from being motivated by a craving for political change, they are in fact contemptuous of those who have disrupted the prevailing order. It will come as a nasty shock when they eventually discover, as they surely will, that their desire to return to the narrow and elitist liberal centrist orthodoxy that created such disaffection and discontent in our society in the first place, is shared by few beyond their own bubble.

For Labour, which has responded by changing its position on a ‘People’s Vote’, this could prove a seminal moment. Not only does its call for a fresh referendum constitute a clear breach of its previous commitments to honour the 2016 result, it also defies all political logic.

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The trouble with TIGgers

By Graeme Archer

Its slow haemorrhaging of support across its once-loyal working-class heartlands over recent years, as well as the reality that those heartlands voted decisively for Brexit and would be repelled still more by any suggestion of a re-run of the vote, ought to have been enough to persuade it not to alienate its core vote any further. But apparently not. The party of workers is now preparing to traverse the country telling workers they got it wrong. It should come as no surprise that the first survey of the public’s reaction to Labour’s latest position shows working-class voters opposed to the party’s new position.

In choosing to pitch to its largely middle-class, urban, pro-EU membership rather than its traditional base, Labour has blundered badly. Its message to seventeen million people is: ‘Your Leave vote is no longer safe with us.’ The party may well pay a heavy price for prioritising Hampstead over Hartlepool. It wouldn’t be undeserved.

Labour folk supporting the idea of a second referendum should be careful what they wish for. What do they envisage would happen if Labour came to power under Corbyn? There is every likelihood that the formidable apparatus of the establishment, big business and the media included, will be turned against an incoming Corbyn government, just as it was against the fictional Harry Perkins administration.

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Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsan

Capital flight, a run on sterling, disinvestment, threatened relocation of business – all of these things may confront them. In some quarters this would no doubt lead to demands for another general election on the grounds that ‘People didn’t know what they were voting for,’ that ‘The facts have changed,’ and ‘Nobody voted to be poorer’. What then? Consistency would dictate that Labour concede to these demands. Democracy would dictate it resist them.

We often forget that democracy was extended fully to the working-class in Britain fewer than a hundred years ago. Some among today’s elite would appear to regret it ever happened. But they subvert the popular will at their peril.

It may seem that, while the political class postures and preens, the pliable and subservient masses are still going about their daily business in their normal, quiet way, disinclined to question the judgement of their ‘betters’. But it would be unwise to mistake this silence for acquiescence. For as the gilet jaunes have shown across the Channel, if you chip away enough at people’s faith in the democratic process and their ability to hold their political leaders to account, then from behind that silence a mighty roar will eventually emerge.