The referendum must become a vehicle for British democracy
Richard Tice and his Reform UK party have sent another shiver of dismay running down the Tory spine (or would have, if such an anatomical item existed) and that of the rest of the political class, by pledging a referendum on Net Zero as part of their programme. Reform is demanding a Brexit-style poll on the lunatic 2050 climate target. In doing so, it is driving a further wedge into the crumbling authority of the elites, aimed at their systemic power base.
The relationship of the political class to the concept of the referendum resembles that of Dracula to a crucifix: only once in the post-War years has the popular will been asserted over Britain’s oligarchy of elites – entitled parliamentarians, civil servants, NGOs, media “influencers”, etc – and that was enabled by the Brexit referendum. That devastating experience, when the common people used their brute numbers to derail the establishment gravy train, denying Tristram and India automatic access to highly-paid sinecures in Brussels, to the embitterment of their parents, taught the ruling class (actually a clique, recruited from various classes) to fear the referendum as a political instrument.
The recent humiliating defeat of the Irish government and consequent resignation of the prime minister, following two combined referenda on issues related to the family, renewed the fear within the establishment in this country. Britain’s elites have no fear of elections: that system – ironically termed “parliamentary democracy” – is safely sewn up, or was until very recently. Two legacy parties, with near-identical agendas, go through the charade of opposing each other at a general election.
The contest is not entirely without penalties: for the Tweedledums to come into office, a significant number of Tweedledees must be made redundant. At the individual level, there are personal losses. But there is no danger of a change of direction, of any reduction in immigration, of any abandonment of the net zero superstition, of the restoration of free speech, of tax cutting or any similar regression to a growth economy, since both wings of the social democratic uni-party know the rules of decline management.
Above all, there is no likelihood of the villain people, the bigots, the deplorables, being allowed to voice their uninformed, impertinent prejudices in any way that could be translated into policy or action. Since 1965, when the two main legacy parties made the intoxicating discovery that, by combining, they could abolish capital punishment in the face of massive public opposition, consensus has governed Britain; not, of course, a popular consensus, but what Gordon Brown called a “progressive consensus”, imposed by the heirs of Roy Jenkins’ “civilised society”, has come to full fruition on our streets today.
In Britain, as in much of the Western world, the political class is at ease with elections. The public has the unfettered democratic choice to vote Conservative and get 750,000 legal migrants a year, the highest taxation since 1945, green fanatics wrecking our “unclean” energy infrastructure, bringing the prospect of blackouts and still higher taxes – or, in true democratic fashion, the electorate can vote Labour and get exactly the same things, possibly to a more aggravated degree.
The public has noted that the only time this did not happen was at the Brexit referendum, when it spoke its mind and eventually saw its wishes implemented. This happened only after a gargantuan struggle. As Mark Francois MP stated at the time: “Some MPs, some very senior civil servants and others, are basically conspiring – and I use the word deliberately – in order to try and prevent us from leaving the EU. They have never accepted the verdict of the British people in the referendum.”
That accurate description of the resistance opposed by the elites to the implementation of a democratic plebiscite – the biggest test of public opinion in our history – exposed the lies and hypocrisy of those in powerful positions who never tire of uttering the now meaningless mantra of “democracy”. Russia, China, wherever, are denounced as overriding democracy in Crimea, or Hong Kong, or anywhere, by the people who tried to do exactly the same in Britain, where free speech is now an historical memory, no longer a contemporary reality.
It is unlikely that even the most depressed Tory MP, receiving a wake-up call from ever-deteriorating opinion polls, realises the depth of the public contempt and loathing, not just for the Conservatives but for the entire political class. Labour is in the surreal position of heading for a larger landslide than in 1945, but without the least spark of enthusiasm for that party among the electorate, which intends to use it as a deus ex machina to remove the Tory party from the pages of history.
When, as expected, Labour similarly infuriates the electorate – despite a likely massive majority it will not even be accorded a honeymoon period – in five years’ time, it too will be consigned to the dustbin of history.
The public has lost all faith in parliamentary democracy, the travesty that has brought this country to its knees. It is inevitable that the disillusioned voters’ next recourse will be to explore methods of direct democracy, of which the referendum, though by no means the sole mechanism, is the iconic exemplar. Hence Reform’s initiative to bring the referendum system into play, as a curb on an oligarchic parliament, beginning with net zero, the paradigm of everything that is wrong with politics today.
The realisation that we are governed by lunatics who think it is sensible for Britain, which contributes under one per cent of the greenhouse effect, to lead the world in divesting itself of oil and gas resources and beggar itself by trying to implement a carbon-free energy ecosystem by 2050, at a cost of trillions of pounds, innumerable lost jobs, blackouts and escalating subsidies for unreliable, unsustainable Heath-Robinson wind and solar contraptions means that the demand for a referendum will eventually command majority support among the public.
Opponents point out that, last summer, a YouGov poll showed 71 per cent of respondents were supportive of the overall net zero target and so Reform would lose any referendum. But nobody expects a referendum imminently. During years of campaigning, UKIP faced similar levels of support for remaining in the EU, but the eventual outcome was Brexit. With scepticism regarding net zero accelerating, it is unlikely that last summer’s figures would be replicated now. Allow a couple of grim winters to pass, with Labour fanatics tearing up oil and gas licences while going cap-in-hand to China, and net zero scepticism will become a bull market.
As with Brexit, expect the venomous snobbery of the elites to pour disdain on the referendum concept. Keir Starmer’s predecessor Clement Attlee denounced referenda as “alien to all our traditions” and an “instrument of Nazism”. Margaret Thatcher condemned the referendum as “a device of dictators and demagogues”. Those opinions partly reflected the complacency of an era in which politicians still broadly retained a degree of accountability to the electorate, partly a measure of Little Englander contempt for constitutional devices employed in foreign countries.
Did Margaret Thatcher regard Switzerland as ruled by dictators and demagogues? It seems unlikely. Yet the referendum device is at the heart of Swiss democracy. Swiss referenda are of two types. An optional referendum will be held if petitioned for by 50,000 voters or eight cantons within 100 days; a mandatory referendum is required to approve any amendments to the constitution or the country’s joining any multinational community or collective security organisation. Switzerland has held almost 600 referenda since 1848 and has not noticeably succumbed to dictatorship or demagoguery.
Another country which employs referenda prolifically is Hungary. It too has optional and mandatory referenda, as well as less formal consultations, and parliament must pass legislation mandated by a referendum within six months. Commentators who have wondered at Viktor Orbán’s winning three successive super majorities might ask themselves if there is any link between the popularity of the Fidesz government and the frequency with which it consults its electorate on key issues such as immigration. When did Britain ever consult its people on that question?
Referenda are employed in at least 14 European countries, many of them EU member states. With parliamentary government in Britain, at both national and devolved level, at a record low in public opinion and the legacy political parties visibly heading for desuetude, national regeneration depends on implementing new mechanisms of direct democracy. This country has, historically, been reluctant to innovate within its unwritten constitution; but the encroachment of the intruder state upon citizens’ lives at every level requires the people, whose servants MPs and Whitehall bureaucrats are intended to be, to reclaim mastery of the institutions of governance.
A first step, though many more – such as the abolition of the first-past-the-post voting system – will be required, would be increased recourse to referenda. The net zero madness will soon become an emergency. It is a measure of the La La Land we have become that this one-way ticket to Third World status is being enforced by authorities who believe there are an ever-increasing number of sexes.
A recent poll by the Legatum Institute found that 42 per cent of Reform voters would be likely to vote Conservative if the party offered a referendum on reducing net migration to below 100,000 a year. That is an impossible scenario: not only have the Tories run out of time and out of history, but a globalist such as Rishi Sunak would never defer to the views of the great unwashed on our open borders, so congenial to large corporations in search of cheap labour.
Referendum? One can already hear Sir Bufton fuming: completely impossible in this country (despite the Scottish and Brexit plebiscites), an alien concept, likely to promote mob rule (the elites’ term for democracy). Gradually, by a process of osmosis, we have slipped back under rule by an oligarchy, as in the 18th century. The public, post-lockdown, is fully awake to that reality and is in a mood to reverse it. Nothing could better serve the cause of making politicians accountable to the public will than expressing that will via a system of regular referenda. Once again, Reform has caught the popular mood and found a fresh stick with which to beat the legacy parties and the discredited elites.
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