Second referendum, yes. Will of the People, no

Most people who
bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad
way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything
about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs
– must inevitably share in the general collapse. It follows that any struggle
against the abuse of language is a sentimental archaism …

These are not
my words. George Orwell wrote them in
his famous 1946 essay ‘Politics and the English Language’. Orwell thought that language was being used
in a slovenly way because it was used to express ill-thought out ideas. And, ill-thought out ideas are a result of the
tolerance of slovenly language. There is
a vicious cycle: slovenly language produces slovenly thought and slovenly
thought uses slovenly language. When the
correct use of language ceases to matter, then thought ceases to matter.

Whatever else is
true about Brexit, it has produced a large volume of slovenly language. Here are a few examples. ‘Take back control’, ‘global Britain’, ‘deep
and special partnership’, ‘re-engaging this country with its global identity,
and all the energy that can flow from that’, or ‘the people of our country
voted to leave because they believe in Britain’, ‘delivering an innovative,
competitive and growing UK economy that benefits individuals and communities
and makes sure the value of trade is more widely shared’, and, of course, ‘Brexit
means Brexit’. All these examples have
the same qualities. Though they sound
serious, they are really meaningless.

Top of the
prize list of meaningless terms is ‘the will of the people’. Consider the following exchange between
Caroline Lucas and Theresa May during Prime
Minister’s Question Time on 21 November 2018:

Caroline Lucas:

The Prime
Minister has just repeated that voting down her deal risks there being no
Brexit at all. Does she recognise that, far from being a risk, recent polls
show that, actually, a vast majority of people would like no Brexit at all in
order to save jobs, protect the environment and ensure our standing in the
world? Will she acknowledge that the will of the people can change and that the
will of the people has changed? Does she therefore think that the way forward
is a people’s vote, or does she think democracy ended on 23 June 2016?

The Prime
Minister:

The hon. Lady’s
claim in relation to democracy is absolutely ridiculous. This Parliament gave
people the right to choose whether to remain in the European Union or to leave
the European Union. People exercised that vote, and we saw numbers of people
voting that we had not seen before. It was a great exercise in democracy in
this country, and I believe it gave this Parliament an instruction. We should
ensure that we leave the European Union, as the people voted.

I offer this
example because both Caroline Lucas and Theresa May, though they come from very
different parts of the political spectrum, are serious and intelligent
people. If they can both talk in
meaningless slogans, what hope is there for anyone else?

Take Theresa
May’s claim that in offering a referendum, Parliament created a situation in
which the people could give Parliament an instruction. Parliament did no such thing. The relevant words in the referendum
legislation were the opening ones which simply said ‘A referendum is to be held
on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union.’ The rest of the Act concerns the mechanics of
the process. There is nothing about the constitutional
status of the referendum, whether it was to be advisory or mandatory, what
‘membership’ means or what the implications of a vote either way would be. Would continued membership of the single
market be consistent with a vote to leave? Would continued membership of the customs union be consistent? And so on.

An instruction
must be something that you can act upon. If I am instructed to climb up and down the stairs three times, I know
what I have to do to follow the instruction. I may choose to ignore the instruction, of course, but ignoring a clear
instruction is not the same as having no intelligible instruction at all. Yet, the ambiguity surrounding what it means
to cease to be a member of the European Union amounts to there being no
instruction at all. It is like being
told to climb higher, without being told whether you are to go up the stairs,
up the ladder or simply up the wall.

So when Theresa
May says that the referendum gave Parliament an instruction, how does she
derive this conclusion? She is relying
on a simple syllogism that runs something as follows. The referendum gives us the will of the
people; the government is acting in accordance with the will of the people;
therefore Parliament should accept what the government has negotiated.

But can ‘a
people’ have ‘a will’? What could it
possibly mean for a large and diverse set of people, the citizens of a country
at a particular time and in a particular place, to share one will? One obvious reply is that a group of people,
no matter how large and diverse, can have one will provided that they all agree
with one another. But no one pretends
that this is true of Brexit. The
campaign was raucous, the result divided and the aftermath rancorous. Different people had different views before
the referendum, including different views on whether a referendum should be
held. They voted in accordance with
those different views. And many continue to think that the result was a
mistake. There is no singular will of
the people emerging from a plurality of people. There
is no singular will of the people emerging from a plurality of people.You can defend
referendum voting as a way of taking important decisions for a variety of reasons. You can say that it engages as many citizens
as possible in making a choice that will be fundamental to their lives. You can say that the only way of reconciling
people to a controversial choice is to enable them to vote in a
referendum. You can say that a
referendum treats everyone according to a principle of political equality,
which is a foundation principle in a democracy. Sometimes these claims will be true and sometimes they will be false. What you can never say, however, is that a
referendum uncovers the will of the people. The will of the people is not a real thing out there in the world like
the chemical composition of hydrochloric acid or the number of legs on a
spider.

Nigel Farage and Green Party MP Caroline Lucas at the Channel 4 Brexit debate Live at the Custard factory, Birmingham, November 5, 2018. Aaron Chown/Press Association. All rights reserved.A referendum is
a vote conducted according to certain rules. Change the rules and the result may well be different. Have a super-majority rule instead of a
simple majority rule, and you will come to a different view about the will of
the people and whether people want change. Require a certain minimum turn-out and you can turn a majority of those
voting into a minority of those eligible to vote. Make the referendum question a three-way,
rather than a two-way, choice and you are likely to end up with no majority at
all. There is no simple will of the
people because different ways of counting the same opinions will give you
different results, and there is no obviously one right way of conducting the
count.

Caroline Lucas
was right to say that democracy does not end on a particular date. But it does not make sense to say that this
is because the will of the people has changed. There seems to have been a shift of public attitudes towards Brexit,
with a shift of opinion back towards remain. This means that the opinion of a set of individuals has changed. Maybe there have been lots of cross-cutting
shifts of opinion, with some people turning towards leave and some people
coming to favour remain. Individual
people, perhaps through conversations with their friends and relatives, have
changed their minds. There is no one
super-individual – the people – that has changed its mind. There is no one super-individual – the people – that has
changed its mind.

One reason it
is important to recognise that behind the imaginary one there is a genuine many
is that it alerts you to the need to reconcile those who lost the vote to the
result. One of the reasons why Brexit has been so acrimonious is that the
referendum result was taken as a reason to suppress dissent.

Even to raise
the question of whether the decision was the right one was taken as a symptom
of elitism, the committing of a thought-crime against the supposed will of the
people. But there was no will of the
people. There was a vote in which one side carried the day by a narrow
majority. Given the lack of definition about what that vote meant in
constitutional terms, it would have made sense for the government to reach out across party and
partisan lines to explore realistically what the alternatives then were.

Instead the
myth of the will of the people was used in an attempt to justify executive
action unconstrained by parliament. Only when the courts struck that attempt
down was some semblance of constitutional process produced.

A second referendum

There is a good
case for holding a second referendum, but if one is held, it will not reveal
something we can call the will of the people.

It will yield a
result according to the options put and the voting rules used. If the choice is put as a three-way choice –
remain, leave on agreed terms or no-deal – there is unlikely to be a majority
for any one of them. In those
circumstances, a new counting rule will have to be used. Some favour the alternative vote, with the
least favoured alternative being dropped before going on to determine a
majority among the remaining two alternatives. Others (I
am in this camp) think that you should use a rule that finds an alternative
– if there is one – that beats each of the others in a series of pair-wise
contests. But the fact that the counting rules in such situations need to be
discussed and decided underlines the point that there is no will of the people
independently of the rules used to combine different opinions. There is no will of the people independently of the rules
used to combine different opinions.

Unlike Orwell,
I do not think that the use of slovenly language is a sign of a decadent
civilization. But it is a sign of a
civilization in which there is too much muddle-headedness. And muddle-headedness
is a brake on sensible democratic conversation. How intoxicating it seems to be on the side of the sweep of history and
the will of the people. How
intoxicating, but how much the enemy of the hard, practical decisions that the
members of any democratic society need to make.