"Modernism", "Elitism", and "The Working Classes"

[french frank]

I give up. I guess the idea of continuing the discussion along something related to the thread title is of less interest than rehashing the same Brexit points that have popped up here dozens of times since the referendum. Have fun!

Well, with respect, class warfare was also not, as I understood it, behind the original idea. It started out as being about something called 'modernism'.

[Beef Oven!]

I wouldn't be too bothered about using the word 'electorate', since 'to elect' is derived from the Latin 'to choose'. A referendum provides 'a choice'.

Yes, that makes sense. I think I was thinking too much in termsof 'elect' meaning to send someone into parliament, rather than electing/choosing someone/something.

You may believe that the voters were clear on both sides, but that isn't what the voters themselves felt, post-referendum:

Two different things. Post hoc, a very aggressive and persistent campaign was prosecuted on leave voters to shame and scare them into believing they'd done something stupid and wrong. I sense that their defensive reaction is what you are picking up on, as you say after the vote. My recollection was that leavers were very content before they were got at. I don't recall remainers complaining that they hadn't enough info on which to base their choice. And we can't go back in time and see what it was really like on the day and day after referendum, so there's little more to say on this point, IMV.

"There were glaring democratic deficiencies in the run-up to the vote, with previously unreleased polling showing that far too many people felt they were ill-informed about the issues; and that the ‘big beast’ personalities did not appear to engage or convince voters."

This is highly debatable.

https://www.electoral-reform.org.uk/...s-differently/

But we're becoming tedious once more …

No we're not ......

[jean]

...For example, you could conceivably argue that the one on AV was a fairly logical yes or no - more so than some others - yet some might still say there should have been a full PR option.

I don't think logic comes into that one either - the AV referendum was a choice between two systems almost equally flawed in democratic terms.

It appeared to offer a choice which wasn't much of a choice at all.

The Irish referendum was a clear Yes/No about the repeal of the eighth amendment - the details of the legislation that would follow are a matter for Parliament

[Beef Oven!]

I give up. I guess the idea of continuing the discussion along something related to the thread title is of less interest than rehashing the same Brexit points that have popped up here dozens of times since the referendum. Have fun!

What normally happens in this situation is the off-topic discussion gets hived off to a new thread.

Please don't get frustrated at those of us who still find the 2016 referendum interesting - vent it on the hosts who haven't intervened and created a new thread!

[Lat-Literal]

I wouldn't define them as 'rational' and 'irrational'. Living in a pretty multi-cultural area, I wouldn't describe my own attitude towards immigration/foreigners as 'rational' even though there are rational arguments which point to the benefits of immigrants to the country. And if there are others who have 'irrational' fears of immigrants/foreigners, it doesn't mean that everyone who sees the problems caused by such 'irrational fears' as being very real are themselves irrational, for example, for wanting to avoid causing those problems.

Most things are a balance between such 'Yes-No' alternatives, where what is important to me induces me to vote Yes and what is important to someone else else induces them to vote No. I was showing no disrespect in talking of 'entrenched opinions': many of my opinions are 'entrenched' because they are fundamental to the person I am.

Informing oneslf, talking calmly about the issues, discussing them without rancour, will make some people change their minds about some things.

That's all sounds very fair to me.

The problem is that people will disagree on whether any result should be interpreted as a reflection of the scales and variety of opinion which delivered votes to Yes and No or whether it should be interpreted according to the manner in which a question is asked, namely the majority says Yes or the majority says No and that's that.

I feel in theory a referendum might be better designed for monitoring preference rather than being about choice.

As in:

Referendum 1 to discover which colours people prefer focusses on Heliotrope and Turquoise. Which one do you prefer? Vote now.

……..Ah, 52% of those who voted said they preferred Turquoise. The nation has decided on Turquoise. Now onto Referendum 2.

This sort of area is a rational yes or no.

[Beef Oven!]

The Irish referendum was a clear Yes/No about the repeal of the eighth amendment - the details of the legislation that would follow are a matter for Parliament

It could be that the 2016 EU referendum was a straight forward in/out about EU membership and the details that followed was a matter for the government.

[ahinton]

I think you have identified a big problem with some referenda. The need to have a yes or no when about four possibilities would be more rational.

But I have tried to define for my own sake what sort of issue does naturally fall into a yes or no and I can't do it. For example, you could conceivably argue that the one on AV was a fairly logical yes or no - more so than some others - yet some might still say there should have been a full PR option.

So what makes the difference between a rational yes/no referendum and an irrational yes/no referendum? Is it simply about personal perspective? Or about what would be a consensus that a topic is complicated or not? What exactly is it? Can it be defined?

It seems to me that the principal issue at stake here is the simplicity or otherwise of the issue/s being subjected to referendum.

The Scottish one four years ago sounded simple enough on the face of it; do you want Scotland to remain a UK member state? However, the pros and cons even of this were far from simple, not least in terms of the unanswered and unanswerable question of the anticipated relationship between an independent Scotland and EU (i.e. would Scotland have automatically been granted EU membership or would it have had to apply for it?). The UK/EU one is far more complex again. The questions asked in both were, however, equally simplistic.

What these examples tell me is that, if the issues of Scotland's future as a UK member state and UK's as an EU one are far too complex to be rationally ratified by simple "in/out" "yes/no" questions and answers, they should - if they're raised at all - have been subjected to debate and vote in both houses of Parliament, although it would seem that the Scottish independence issue would not have beeen possible to address in this way because the Westminster government would want to keep Scotland within UK anyway. Frankly, the UK/EU one as addressed in that referendum was an insult to the electorate's intelligence and has bequeathed the most horrendous mess of confusion, inconsistency and uncertainty from which no obvious possible escape route seems to be presenting itself.

No one would willingly have voted to be worse off as a consequence of implementation of its outcome whether it had been Remain or Leave, yet we're all facing this solely because the Tory party presented it to us out of an irrational fear of defections from it to the now near-defunct UKIP while no other party shared such a fear and accordingly did not see fit to include it in its 2015 General Election manifesto; in other words, had the Tories not been the government of the day in 2015, there is a distinct possibility that it wouldn't have promised the referendum in its manifesto because that fear would have been of less significance to it.

That said, we pay MPs and Lords and we elect the former to do a professional job for us in Parliament and this ought not to include farming out business to the electorate on a whim rather than doing the job themselves, especially on an issue as importance as this one.

[ahinton]

I give up. I guess the idea of continuing the discussion along something related to the thread title is of less interest than rehashing the same Brexit points that have popped up here dozens of times since the referendum. Have fun!

I agree that such a discussion should be an a different thread if it's to continue at all; that way, the thread as initiated could continue on the OP's topic instead.

[ahinton]

Post hoc, a very aggressive and persistent campaign was prosecuted on leave voters to shame and scare them into believing they'd done something stupid and wrong.

Be that as it may or may not in terms both of such a campaign (if there was one) and of whether or not "they'd done something stupid or wrong", the true culprits were members of the government of the day in 2015 when promising something that no other party deemed necessary, in what it believed to be its own cynical interests rather than that of UK citizens and in what turned out to be the most inappropriate format (i.e. a referendum).

I sense that their defensive reaction is what you are picking up on, as you say after the vote. My recollection was that leavers were very content before they were got at.

If indeed that was the case (and I take leave to doubt it), it was probably at least as much becuase the opinion poll outcome favoured fundamental change rather than maintenence of the status quo.

I don't recall remainers complaining that they hadn't enough info on which to base their choice.

Some certainly did (I for one) but, as I wrote earlier, almost no one had sufficient information to influence a decision whichever way (if any) they would eventually vote, whether or not or to what extent any of them "complained" about this at the time.

One other difference between the Scottish independence referendum and the UK/EU one was that there appeared to be ample evidence to justify holding the former (or at least addressing it in some way) whereas there seemed to be little or none to justify holding (or otherwise addressing) the latter.

[Lat-Literal]

It seems to me that the principal issue at stake here is the simplicity or otherwise of the issue/s being subjected to referendum. The Scottish one four years ago sounded simple enough on the face of it; do you want Scotland to remain a UK member state? However, the pros and cons even of this were far from simple, not least in terms of the unanswered and unanswerable question of the anticipated relationship between an independent Scotland and EU (i.e. would Scotland have automatically been granted EU membership or would it have had to apply for it?). The UK/EU one is far more complex again. The questions asked in both were, however, equally simplistic. What these examples tell me is that, if the issues of Scotland's future as a UK member state and UK's as an EU one are far too complex to be rationally ratified by simple "in/out" "yes/no" questions and answers, they should - if they're raised at all - have been subjected to debate and vote in both houses of Parliament, although it would seem that the Scottish independence issue would not have beeen possible to address in this way because the Westminster government would want to keep Scotland within UK anyway. Frankly, the UK/EU one as addressed in that referendum was an insult to the electorate's intelligence and has bequeathed the most horrendous mess of confusion, inconsistency and uncertainty from which no obvious possible escape route seems to be presenting itself. No one would willingly have voted to be worse off as a consequence of implementation of its outcome whether it had been Remain or Leave, yet we're all facing this solely because the Tory party presented it to us out of an irrational fear of defections from it to the now near-defunct UKIP while no other party shared such a fear and accordingly did not see fit to include it in its 2015 General Election manifesto; in other words, had the Tories not been the government of the day in 2015, there is a distinct possibility that it wouldn't have promised the referendum in its manifesto because that fear would have been of less significance to it.

That said, we pay MPs and Lords and we elect the former to do a professional job for us in Parliament and this ought not to include farming out business to the electorate on a whim rather than doing the job themselves, especially on an issue as importance as this one.

It should not be forgotten how Harold Wilson held the UK's first referendum to resolve party differences or that what most of the general public knew about politics then could be written in the space of a seaside postcard.

I'm also not for narrowing any discussion on referenda to one recent example. I am more of the thinking that when UKIP was up and running at the local levels, one of its more attractive policies for voters was the one which suggested there would be a lot of local referenda. One could also see the Lib Dems in the future travelling a similar route.

I like the sound of it. However, do I like it really? Would we? The entire theoretical area of referenda needs a lot more work doing on it and preferably work that isn't over-burdened by or intended to re-run any experience hitherto.

[ahinton]

It could be that the 2016 EU referendum was a straight forward in/out about EU membership and the details that followed was a matter for the government.

It certainly comes across that way and, in so doing, exposes the sheer absurdity of it; one could reasonably interpret it as the government of the day saying to the electorate "we'll give you two choices and suff all information upon which to make them and then we'll make the best of whichever one a majority of you select", a stance even more dangerous than it might otherwise have been given that said government had already convinced itself that the outcome would be Remain and, accordingly, it had no Plan B for the actual outcome. In any case, what form of "matter for government" have those "details that followed" taken since the result was announced? - preciosuly little debate of how the electorate voted and lots of hapless attempts at "negotiation" that look set to get us all nowhere. What use is that?

[french frank]

I feel in theory a referendum might be better designed for monitoring preference rather than being about choice.

Which constitutionally is pretty much what it is. As I said, what impressed me about the Irish referendum was that the government listened to the 'advisory' views of the pre-referendum panel of voters who had weighed up and discussed the issues on what was - as jean pointed - out, a relatively straightforward YES-NO. Where there were areas of potential doubt, it published its proposals based on the views that had emerged from the discussion.

The AV referendum was an unsatisfactory choice imposed by those who were opposed to change. An interesting piece of research showed that as the campaign continued, people became progressively more persuaded to believe the misinformation than to believe the truth.

[ahinton]

It should not be forgotten how Harold Wilson held the UK's first referendum to resolve party differences or that what most of the general public knew about politics then could be written in the space of a seaside postcard.

I'm also not for narrowing any discussion on referenda to one recent example. I am more of the thinking that when UKIP was up and running at the local levels, one of its more attractive policies for voters was the one which suggested there would be a lot of local referenda. One could also see the Lib Dems in the future travelling a similar route.

I like the sound of it. However, do I like it really? Would we? The entire theoretical area of referenda needs a lot more work doing on it and preferably work that isn't over-burdened by or intended to re-run any experience hitherto.

Broadly speaking, I agree with you. What continues to stick in the craw here, however, is the lack of obvious evidence that a majority of the electorate even wanted the UK/EU issue to be addressed at all (never mind by referendum). As to any increasing recourse to the referendum instrument in place of debate and voting in Parliament, the danger inherent in it is a possible emasculation of Parliament and Parliamentary responsibility; another is the risk that the much-vaunted "will of the people" supposedly enshrined in the principle of referenda is forced to be seen as something inflexible and set in stone indefinitely, whereas governments cannot last for more than five years before the electorate decides whether is "will" is such as to desire change.

[ahinton]

Which constitutionally is pretty much what it is. As I said, what impressed me about the Irish referendum was that the government listened to the 'advisory' views of the pre-referendum panel of voters who had weighed up and discussed the issues on what was - as jean pointed - out, a relatively straightforward YES-NO. Where there were areas of potential doubt, it published its proposals based on the views that had emerged from the discussion.

True on both counts. The UK/EU referendum was "advisory" as distinct from legally binding, even though the Tories who launched it have seemed determined to regard it as the latter ever since the result was declared. The Irish one, even though a "yes/no" one, was at least addressed, as you and jean recognise, in a far more constructive way before the actual vote.

[Richard Barrett]

Well, with respect, class warfare was also not, as I understood it, behind the original idea.

(My reference to class warfare was actually tongue in cheek by the way, obviously enough I thought. )