Now is not the time to try to lessen the anger of Farage and Trump devotees

The EU Referendum is a strong sign that the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the US have arrived in Great Britain in earnest.

The big event for me personally this week is not Theresa May finally giving up or explicit Remain parties easily beating explicit No Deal parties in the European election. It was the belated launch of my book to nearly 500 people at Kings College London in an event superbly organised by the Progressive Economic Forum. But don’t worry. This article is not going to be an account of that meeting or a summary of my book, but an attempt to give a fuller answer to a question from that meeting.

The questioner had just witnessed at first hand the passion of a Brexit party meeting, also well described by John Harris, Sky’s Lewis Goodall, Owen Jones and other journalists. She asked what can be done to diffuse that anger? Thinking about the answer I gave afterwards helped me understand more clearly the overall strategy implicit in much of what I write. This does not focus on the people who attended first UKIP and now Brexit party meetings, but instead the less committed voter who voted for Brexit, the classic marginal voter if you like. Let me give you an example of something that is discussed in the book but using a new chart, from the Berkman Klein Center.

It shows the number of sentences in the US mass market media on different issues (source) during the 2016 election period. This is not just Fox News, but also reflects an odd obsession by publications like the New York Times or Washington Post about Clinton’s emails. (Some of the current administration also use their private email to conduct official business and it is hardly mentioned.)

A recent video in Vox by Carlos Maza explains brilliantly one reason why this happens. What Fox News does time and time again is create a story out of very little and obsess about it. The non-partisan media feel obliged to cover it to disabuse the right wing image of a liberal media. You can see exactly the same thing happen in the UK where the right wing partisan press often sets the agenda for our broadcasters. You can see it after the European elections, where the broadcasters focused on seat totals for the party that hopes seats will not be taken up rather than the 40% or more who voted for explicit Remain parties compared to less than 35% who voted for explict No Deal parties.

Trying to stop the non-partisan mainstream media from doing this might influence the marginal voter (as I note in my book, more voters trusted Trump rather than Clinton before the election), but it will not influence those who attend Trump or Brexit party rallies, who consume Fox news or believe the right wing UK press. You might persuade the non-partisan broadcast media that their practices lead to bias and should stop, but doing something about the partisan media and the economic and social issues that are their lifeblood requires political change.

You will only get that political change by changing the mind of the marginal voter, because it is much more difficult to change the mind of a Trump or Brexit party supporter by rational argument, or by trying to expose who Trump and Farage really are. Trump once boasted he could shoot someone in 5th Avenue and not lose his core support, and that is not far from the truth. Showing Farage’s background and income and associations will likewise do little to influence his core following.

This is why so many who voted for Brexit are prepared to Leave with No Deal. As Kirby Swales writes in a joint NatCen and UK in a Changing Europe report:

“The EU Referendum was highly divisive, highlighting a wide range of social, geographical and other differences in Great Britain. This was less a traditional left-right battle, and more about identity and values (liberalism vs authoritarianism). It is a strong sign that the so-called ‘culture wars’ of the US have arrived in Great Britain in earnest.”

The underlying causes that are the fuel behind Trump and Farage are not exclusively non-economic, but deindustrialisation due to globalisation is a small part of the economic story. I have talked elsewhere about the growing divergence between the towns and the large cities since the 1980s. In the US you have the same thing, but it is talked about as a rural urban divide. This is the result of a new source of economic dynamism in service and IT dominated industries that is actually assisted by the diversity that those in the towns and countryside find threatening.

To bring more of that wealth out of the cities requires abandoning neoliberal platitudes, and so requires radical political change. But a large part of the fuel behind the Leave vote and Farage and also Trump is not economic, but instead reflects a clash of values and culture. It has been noted many times that many Leave voters have a deep nostalgia for an imagined past, and this is coupled with a desire to bring back hanging, corporal punishment and reverse other aspects of what we call a liberal society.

Anti-liberal views may have deep psychological roots, roots that may also be linked to being attracted to authoritarian figures, which in turn goes with irritation with a pluralist democracy. If these people are calling the shots, a pluralist democracy is fragile. Here the partisan press can be important at legitimising these authoritarian and anti-liberal views, as is appeasement by centre and left politicians, but it would be a fantasy to believe they would go away in their absence.

The extent of social change in the UK and elsewhere over the last 60 or more years is perhaps unprecedented. Here the left and liberal ‘elite’, as their enemies refer to them, have been outstandingly successful. But as James Curran argues, liberals and the left in the UK have hit strong headwinds on the question of race, with he suggests a stubborn 25% of the population expressing racist views.

I like to stress the importance of beliefs about whether immigration causes lower real wages and puts more pressure on public services (probably not and the opposite is true, respectively), but once again this is something that influences the marginal or changeable view on immigration. There will always be a core where hostility stems from racist attitudes. Again a two stage approach makes sense. You focus on changeable views by providing facts and an alternative narrative, so you can elect a left liberal government. Only then can racist views be stigmatised and income and spatial inequality reduced to help the ‘left behind’. We can also, as Maya Goodfellow pointed out at my book lauch, start telling a more accurate history that goes beyond WWII.

An interesting question is how much we should worry about those still spooked by the rapid pace of social change. We know that this is concentrated among those over 60, but is this a cohort effect of those brought up in the repressive 50s who were untouched by the 60s revolution happening in the cities, or is it some inevitable consequence of age? If it is the former, perhaps the best policy is containment until the problem goes away.

The upshot is that I don’t think liberals or the left, who are in opposition in the UK or US, need to worry too much about convincing those who go to Trump or Farage rallies. What we do need to worry about right now is that those same people have been given power with the help of appeasement and an unbalanced media. As we watch the sickening spectacle of Brexiters choosing our next Prime Minister what we want above all else is to take power away from these people. Changing minds, if it is possible, can come later.

Ian Dunt vs Owen Jones: a comment on a brief debate

When two of my favourite commentators on current political events, Ian Dunt (ID) and Owen Jones (OJ), cross swords, albeit briefly twitter style, the chance is that there maybe something interesting going on. I can see what I suspect annoyed OJ in ID’s piece, but I think OJ’s response was too easily sidetracked in the confusion that is history. I am going to stay on more familiar UK (and US) ground.

The general theme is ID’s piece is totally laudable. It is essentially a warning against populism of the type Jan-Werner Müller describes, and which is embodied in Viktor Orban’s Hungary. I also think he is almost right when he writes:

“Every constituent part of the Orban programme exists here: the anti-semitism, the focus on Soros, the relentless fear-mongering about immigrants, the demonisation of the EU and its institutions, the attacks on Islam, the undermining of an independent judiciary, and, most of all, the widespread conspiracy-squint - the idea, popular on left and right, on almost all matters of political consequence, that shadowy and powerful forces are undermining the people's will.”

I say “almost” because this is an undifferentiated list, and the emphasis is put on what I regard as least important. For Müller populism is a moralised form of antipluralism. The populist politician talks about the “will of the people” even when the people may be just a subset of the population, but the wishes and beliefs of the remainder are of no weight and are not acknowledged. They become instead the enemy within. To overcome that enemy within (be it Jews or Muslims or liberals) and the enemy outside (the EU trying to force Hungarians to accept immigrants), the leader needs total control, which means subjugating an independent judiciary, an independent press and other independent institutions. For Müller, populism is an attack on pluralistic democracy, attempting to replace it with some kind of autocratic or plutocratic democracy. Orban’s Hungary has so far been a very successful (in terms of longevity) example of this form of populism.

Where I started to disagree with ID’s piece is where he tries to do the classic centrist thing, which is to imply that the dangers of populism in the UK come from both left and right. In immediate historical terms this is nonsense. Immigration as an issue was revitalised by the Conservative opposition and the right wing press in the early years of the Labour government. In 2001 William Hague talked about Tony Blair wanting to turn the UK into a ‘foreign land’. The right wing papers started producing negative stories about immigrants, long after the rise in non-EU immigration in the late 1990s and long before the rise in EU immigration from 2004, and popular concern about immigration rose with this increase in press coverage. The best explanatory variables in explaining concern about immigration were readership of the Mail, Express and Sun, in that order. All three were better predictors of concern about immigration than whether people voted Conservative.

When the Conservatives became part of the coalition government in 2010, this emphasis on immigration became official policy. By now the idea that immigration was ‘a problem’ that needed to ‘be controlled’ was firmly entrenched in political discourse. Conservatives found it attractive because it could persuade socially conservative left wing voters not to vote Labour, and because it became a useful scapegoat for the effects of austerity. The right wing tabloids also found it attractive because it became a means of winning the Brexit vote. And it is Brexit where we have seen populism in full force in the UK: talk of the ‘will of the people’ as if the 48% who voted Remain did not exist, attacks on the judiciary, on the civil service, on parliament and on universities. The EU is the enemy without, and Remainers are the enemy within.

To the extent that populism has come to the UK, it has come from the political right, not the political left. Yes Labour in government eventually felt they had to play along with the immigration problem theme, and yes there are Lexiters on the left. But the motive force for attacks on immigration and Brexit comes from the right, not the left. [1]

Much the same point can be made about the US. Trump was voted into office as a Republican, and he remains unchecked in office because of the Republican party. To suggest that Republicans and Democrats bear equal responsibility for Trump is just nonsense.

In this story of how populism came to the UK, and represents an ever present threat in the UK, Labour’s problems over antisemitism do not even deserve a footnote. Antisemitism is a big part of Orban’s campaign and rhetoric, personified in his constant attacks on George Soros, but that theme has been repeated not by Corbyn but by the same right wing press that focused on immigration and gave us Brexit. Antisemtism is a problem within Labour, but the source of that problem is the Israel Palestine situation. It is not, and never will be, a part of a Labour government’s appeal to the electorate. It will not be a Labour government that tells people that have lived here for scores of years that they now have to leave the UK and say goodbye to their friends and family. It is not and never will be the Labour party that runs an Islamophobic campaign for mayor of London.

In Europe and the US, the threat today of an authoritarian, anti-pluralist government comes exclusively from the right. To lose sight of that makes dealing with that threat much more difficult.

[1] There are plenty of centrist Remainers who insist Brexit is as much Corbyn’s fault as it is the government’s. Apparently the fact that Corbyn campaigned for Remain does not count because he didn’t put enough energy and passion into that campaign. When he says he would vote Remain again he must be lying because no one ever changes their mind. Accusing Corbyn of being too ready to accept the referendum result is fine by me, but to put him in the same class as Johnson and Gove is just token centrism.

Would Remain win a second referendum?

I think it unlikely that we will have a second referendum before we leave in 2019. [1] Brexiteers fear losing it and Labour fears fighting it. So why ask the question? It will become clear.

I think if a second referendum was just a rerun of the first, then Remain would win comfortably. It is now pretty clear there will be no £350 million a week for the NHS, and instead as the OBR suggests there will be less money if we leave the EU. The economic concerns that the Leave campaign so effectively neutralised with ‘Project Fear’ are now becoming real: we had a depreciation (as predicted), real wages are falling, and GDP per head in the first half of the year is almost stagnant. I could go on, but this is enough for many Leavers to change their minds.

Partly because of this, a second referendum would not be a rerun of the first. Leave would have a new theme, which they would plug away at relentlessly. They would argue that the very existence of a second referendum was an attack on democracy. The people had already decided, and a second referendum was an attempt by MPs to take power away from the people. The people needed to take back control from MPs as well as the EU. They would argue that you should vote to Leave again to preserve democracy.

The simple point that people should be allowed to change their mind would be met by lots of rhetoric that sounds convincing. If a second, why not a third? Referendums are meant to last a generation, and not to be held every few years. (Quotes from David Cameron saying similar things from the last campaign would be trotted out.) We know from the polls that this argument has power, as many people who voted Remain think that nevertheless we should respect ‘the will of the people’. Many think that on a constitutional issue like this, a referendum should override the views of MPs, and will feel that by voting Leave they will be upholding this principle. In this sense it would be like the Labour leadership election in 2016, which Corbyn won in part because members felt MPs were trying to take members power away.

If your reaction to this is to say ‘what nonsense’ or ‘who would be so idiotic to fall for this tactic’ then you are who I’m writing this post for. The view that Remain lost and that result should be respected is a perfectly valid point of view. Furthermore, as Owen Jones has pointed out, the polls suggest there are many besides himself who take that view. It does the Remain cause no good whatsoever to suggest that people who hold this view are in any sense stupid. (The opposite is also true - the Re-Leavers view is also not obviously right, and needs to be argued. Is parliament overriding the referendum result really a 'coup against the popular will' when people realise they were duped and so no longer support Leaving?)

In addition, Remain campaigners just saying a majority of the electorate didn’t vote for Leave because some people did not vote will not convince anyone. Simply asserting that the original Leave campaign was based on lies is also not sufficient, because all election campaigns involve politicians telling lies of some kind. We need much better arguments than this if we are going to convince Remainers who think the original referendum result should stand.

A good place to start is a post by Richard Ekins, a Professor of Law at Oxford University, who argues “Political fairness and democratic principle require one to respect the outcome of the referendum even if one is persuaded that Brexit would be a very bad idea”. His arguments are strong and they need to be addressed (as I tried to do in March). We need to argue that the chosen electorate for the first referendum was not fair, and to allow just a simple majority to decide such an important and potentially irreversible event is not democratic, even after the event. We need to argue, as I tried to do, that the lies told by the Leave campaign went well beyond what normally happens in an election. In these circumstances a referendum result is not something to respect, but something you resist with all your power.

Remain campaigners also need to be politically realistic. To say, as some do, that Labour’s commitment yesterday (to staying in the Single Market and Customs Union during the transition period) means nothing and is “not good enough” because it still involves leaving the EU in 2019 completely misunderstands political realities. Brexit is not going to fall apart of its own accord. As George Eaton argues (see also Stephen Bush), the best bet for reversing Brexit is through a Labour government. Given this, to suggest that Labour would campaign against Brexit if it wasn’t for Jeremy Corbyn is both misdirected (it ignores many MPs in Leave voting constituencies who think Labour have to support Brexit) and counterproductive (if Brexit is reversed, it will likely be by a Labour government under Jeremy Corbyn).

When Owen Jones described ‘Hard Remainers’ online as increasingly resembling a cult, I was both shocked and surprised. I am, after all, someone who argues online that the referendum vote should not ‘be respected’. By cult he meant those he encountered who were

“Intolerant, hectoring, obsessively repeating a mantra that doesn’t convince outside of their bubble, subjecting any who dissent from their hardline stance to repeated social media pile-ons, engaging in outright abuse and harassment, saying that people who voted Remain aren’t really Remain supporters and are heretics.”

Now I like to think I do none of those things, and I know some of those campaigning to Remain who do not do these things either, but I can also see that others might take a much more aggressive and purist approach. This is a strange but I think real phenomenon: the less likely something is to happen, the more some demand that only it will do. The reality is that staying in the Single Market and Customs Union outside the EU permanently is a lot more likely than simply staying in the EU, and less costly that leaving either. Because it is obviously inferior to staying in the EU it may be how rejoining the EU eventually happens. Those campaigning to Remain are in no position to be aggressive or absolutist.

[1] A referendum where Remain is an option, and assuming we leave in 2019 and the Conservatives remain in power until then.  

How Brexit will constrain a future Labour government

Those who suggest that Brexit is of second order importance to getting a Labour government need to think about what that government will be able to do and how long it will survive if we leave the Single Market and customs union. The OBR did a rough and ready estimate of the near term impact of Brexit [1], and concluded that productivity growth would fall (which means lower GDP and real wage growth) and the government deficit would deteriorate by around £15 billion by 2020. That sum is about a third of the current defence budget, or a tenth of the entire health care budget.

It is simply wrong to imply that this can be ignored, because Labour is anti-austerity. That large deterioration in the deficit due to Brexit is mainly the result of low productivity and less immigration, not the consequence of an economic downturn. It cannot be undone by the government spending more on infrastructure: public investment is not some magic instrument that can get you any GDP you want.

No economic theory that I know of suggests you can safely ignore the public finances outside of a recession. In a world where monetary policy regulates demand (absent the lower bound) then a build up in government debt risks crowding out private capital, discouraging labour supply (because higher debt has to be serviced through higher taxes) and redistributing income between generations. This is why Labour’s fiscal credibility rule aims to balance current public spending outside of a recession. Every £billion lost to Brexit is a £billion that cannot be spent on public services, or has to be raised in taxes.

The same logic meant that Labour’s election manifesto in 2017 had a large increase in current public spending entirely financed by higher taxes. Their programme is anti-austerity because their fiscal credibility rule would do the opposite of what Osborne did in 2010 if interest rates were at their lower bound. It also sensibly allows public investment to rise when borrowing costs are so low.  But once interest rates begin to rise, the Labour government would have a current deficit it needed to finance, and its difficulty in doing this would be made much worse by Brexit. [2]

In all this it is vital to not be distracted by some of those who see Brexit as an opportunity for Corbyn-bashing. Those that do so seem to forget two key points. First, the attitude of a large number of Labour MPs in Leave voting areas is just as much of a problem as the views of the leadership. Second, there is a purely political argument for Labour being just a bit less supportive of Brexit than the government right now. My own view is similar to this discussion by Mike Galsworthy.

However I feel I have to end by responding to a second post from Owen Jones. Let me do so by imagining the following scenario. Suppose the Conservative leadership changed, and the new leader said this on being elected: “we tried as hard as we could to respect the result of the referendum, but we found there was no way of doing so without causing the economy great harm. As a result, I have regrettably decided to revoke Article 50, and remain in the EU.” What should Labour’s response to that be? The logic of Owen’s position is that Labour should oppose this, and side with the Hard Brexit faction of the Tories and defeat the new Tory leader.

A highly unlikely scenario I agree, but it helps establish this point. Owen, unlike many Corbyn supporters, is not arguing that Labour should remain pro-Brexit while in opposition as simply a strategic move to gain votes. He is saying that Labour has to support leaving the EU because of the referendum demands it. Indeed he says anyone arguing otherwise because the referendum was advisory is “beyond delusional”: It seems I have become a beyond delusional ‘Hard Remainer’.

Does democracy mean being bound by a referendum that was called only to appease the hard right, decided by lies using a rigged electorate, and apparently made mandatory as a result of the words of a now departed Prime Minister? Is it a democracy when we are unable to change course because new facts clearly deviate from promises made, resulting in a decision that imposes costs on the young largely as the result of votes by the old? These are difficult questions, but not delusional questions.

I doubt it will happen, but would ignoring the referendum destabilise democracy? Let me turn the question around. If the final Brexit deal involves staying in the Single Market and therefore accepting free movement, will that destabilise democracy? The number of people who voted Brexit but wanted to stay in the Single Market may be more than 2% of the population, but it is bound to be small. There will therefore be plenty of people who will say that accepting free movement ignores the referendum, and plenty of aggrieved voters to back them up. Is that going to produce a reaction which is very different from the reaction to actually ignoring the referendum?

The hard truth is that any deal which avoids serious economic costs for the UK is going to make most of the 52% pissed off. And they will remain pissed off until either we reduce immigration, with the economic costs that will bring (less schools, less hospitals, higher taxes), or senior politicians start being honest about the benefits of immigration.

[1] Stupidly, the OBR were not asked to estimate the impact of Brexit before the referendum, and their mandate prevented them from doing so themselves.

[2] And please no MMT inspired comments about how taxes are not needed to finance spending. The MMT world is very different from our current world: fiscal policy rather than monetary policy regulates demand. In that case you never worry about the deficit, but spending is constrained by inflation.  

Why Owen Jones is wrong about Brexit

Owen has written a very clear account of why he supports the referendum result, even though he campaigned against it. He is, to use one terminology, a ‘re-leaver’, and as he points out there are many like him. He is quite right that those advocating overturning the referendum result have devoted insufficient attention to this group. However I think in key respects his argument is wrong.

I think it is helpful, as I have done before, to set this debate in the context of future decisions that may realistically face MPs. I can see four:

1. Having left in 2019, we are likely to remain in the Single Market and customs union while we negotiate some kind of trade agreement to allow us to leave one or both. The first decision, which could face an incoming Labour government, is should those negotiations continue or be abandoned.
   

Owen does not explicitly address the Single Market, which is surprising. In my view leaving the EU but staying in the Single Market (the ‘Norway option’) is what Labour should choose to do if it gains power. That is fully consistent with respecting the referendum result. Those who say that the referendum was about immigration and therefore we have to end freedom of movement commit a simple logical error. A majority (those who voted Leave because of immigration) of a majority (52%) is not necessarily a majority. There is no mandate of any kind for leaving the Single Market.

2. During the vote on whether to leave in 2019, there is a vote to hold a second referendum where the choice is to accept the deal or remain in the EU.

Again he does not directly address a second referendum, but some of his arguments are relevant to it.  You could argue that holding a second referendum would disrespect the first. If the Brexit decision was changed as a result, then Owen’s arguments about a large section of the population losing faith in democracy would perhaps still apply. However it seems to me the rationale for holding a second referendum is overwhelming. In the first referendum, what leaving would entail was very unclear. In particular, we did not know what the divorce bill would be, and what the economic implications would be. Information is crucial in voting decisions. We now know much more, and therefore it seems only right that people should be allowed to change their minds. We are familiar with the idea of requiring new information to reopen issues in other contexts, so why not for a referendum.

To argue that the 1975 referendum over joining was a once in a generation event is irrelevant, because by then the nature of the deal was clear. Why should the fact that Cameron or anyone else said this would be a once in a generation vote bind parliament? The bottom line has to be that if Leave cannot win two votes just a few years apart then we should not be leaving. Remember the first referendum had an electorate chosen to keep the Brexiteers happy, and likewise it had no super majority. To argue that we have to respect the first referendum to uphold faith in democracy and at the same time argue that to hold a second referendum would be undemocratic seems a bizarre, and very worrying, notion of democracy.

3. During the vote on whether to leave in 2019, there is a vote to remain in the EU without a second referendum

Here the referendum would have been overruled by parliament. Owen has two, related arguments why this would be wrong. First, both government and opposition said that they would be bound by the referendum result. Second, the people will have been overruled by parliament. On the first, I agree that any MP that said their vote would be bound by the referendum and then went against that has some explaining to do. But an explanation along the lines of ‘I had no idea how bad Brexit was going to be’ sounds reasonable to me. MPs, like people, are allowed to change their minds.

I also cannot see why pledges by the government and opposition have to bind MPs who did not so pledge. This gets back to the nature of our representative democracy. Although Owen does not think much of people, like me, who keep noting that the referendum is advisory, this does express the fact that parliament is sovereign. We live in a representative democracy. People may be upset to learn that, but it is true. Ed Miliband was right to rule out holding a referendum. Just because Cameron chose to hold one to appease his right wing should not bind the actions of MPs.

The fact that the referendum result was achieved as the result of a completely inadequate campaign matters. The Remain side (and the media) failed to adequately put across their case, because the positive case for immigration was not made. The Leave side lied their socks off. To equate the dishonesty on the Remain side with that of the Leave campaign, as Owen does, is quite wrong. Two central planks of the Leave case, that the NHS would have more money and that Turkey was about to join the EU, were complete lies. The main plank of the Remain campaign that Brexit would reduce the real income of UK citizens has been shown to be true. Information matters.

If such a vote was almost certain to fail because it lacked the backing of enough Conservative MPs, then there might be a tactical reason for not supporting it for reasons I outlined here. But this is not the case that Owen makes. Barry Gardiner has also departed radically from this script. As I said in that post I did not know if Labour's Brexit position was strategic or just confused and conflicted, and Owen's piece together with these recent developments reinforce such doubts.  

4. The government fails to negotiate a deal but wants us to leave despite this. There is a vote in parliament to revoke Article 50 and not leave the EU.

If you remain unconvinced by the above, consider this outcome. No deal would be a disaster, and bring immediate chaos. But all of Owen’s arguments for respecting the referendum would still apply! Would Owen really argue that Labour should not support such a vote for the sake of Leave voters’ faith in democracy? If it did that it would be complicit in the chaos that followed. 

Owen keeps coming back to the impact of any decision on how those who voted Brexit would feel. In this sense he is in the same spirit as John Harris’s article that I discussed here. It is an utterly defeatist argument: we must let people harm themselves because only then might they learn that they were mistaken in what they wanted. A much more progressive policy is to persuade people they are wrong.

If Labour did form the next government, as I very much hope it would, the consequences of leaving the Single Market would be on its watch. Would those who voted Leave forgive slow growth in their living standards as their own fault for wanting Brexit? Would they accept the implications of low immigration for the public finances as a price worth paying to control immigration. Of course not. Much of the media would argue that these problems were all down to the Labour government, not Brexit. A Labour government that presides over leaving the Single Market could be a one term government.

In an earlier post I talked about the logic of a triangulation strategy for Labour, but I said at the outset that I did not know if this what they were doing. As a result, there is currently a serious danger that Labour would squash any attempt from the Tory backbenches to hold a second referendum, or if they won the next election that they would leave the Single Market. Although everyone focuses on Corbyn, this is as much a problem with many Labour MPs in Leave voting areas. It is an area where we need the membership to influence Labour policy, as both Jeremy Corbyn and Owen Jones have always suggested they should.

Does democracy require implementing the referendum result?

We all know the EU referendum was not legally binding on parliament. That is not true of all UK referendums: the referendum on using AV did require parliament to enact whatever voters decided. Despite the lack of a legal requirement, there remains a powerful political argument that parliament was nevertheless duty bound to implement the referendum result. It is an argument that is often invoked by both government and opposition MPs. Now I have no doubt that in reality other motives are important, perhaps decisive, but because political arguments can be persuasive, it is important to debate this one.

The clearest argument along these lines comes from a post from Richard Ekins, who is a Professor of Law at Oxford University. He writes

“Parliament made clear that the decision about whether to leave the EU was to be settled by the referendum. There were good reasons, outlined above, why Parliament should not permit Brexit otherwise than by way of a referendum. Even if one denies all this, one should still accept that a referendum once held settles what should be done. For the decision to proceed thus is itself an important public decision that fairly governs how we jointly are to decide. That is, Parliament having decided to hold the referendum, and the public having participated fully in it, the result should be respected and not undone.

Political fairness and democratic principle require one to respect the outcome of the referendum even if one is persuaded that Brexit would be a very bad idea. One might think it wrong to hold the referendum, but it was held – and Parliament invited the people to decide this question. ... In short, the important constitutional question of whether Britain should remain in the EU was fairly settled by public vote.

The proposal to ignore or undo the vote is unjust. It bears noting that the relatively powerless in our polity – the poor – overwhelmingly supported exit. Ignoring the referendum would be particularly unfair to them.”

Note that this does not say that people like me should shut up about the harm that this action will cause. Instead it says that parliament, having invited people to decide, should respect that verdict. To do otherwise would be highly undemocratic, and would be particularly unjust to those who, for well known reasons, might justifiably claim that they are not well represented by the sovereignty of parliament. Arguing that the Leave campaign told lies, or that voters were deceived, does not seem to be a compelling argument against this, as exactly these charges can and are made after general elections

To help see why Ekins is wrong, it is useful to look at his discussion of the claim by Ken Rogoff that the “real lunacy of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union was not that British leaders dared to ask their populace to weigh the benefits of membership against the immigration pressures it presents. Rather, it was the absurdly low bar for exit, requiring only a simple majority.” But Ekins’ response strikes me as particularly weak. He essentially says parliament could do this because it has done it before. He goes on to say that there is “nothing at all perverse in Parliament choosing to make provision for a clear decision on point by way of a single referendum, inviting and encouraging public deliberation that culminates in a moment of clear and authoritative decision.”

This strikes me as completely ignoring Rogoff’s point. How can a 51.9% vote on one particular day represent a “clear and authoritative decision”. If a general election is close in terms of seats, that is reflected in the balance of parliament, and governments with small majorities and independently minded MPs face constraints on what they can do. What Rogoff is saying is that a referendum which only requires in theory a majority of only a single voter can never be clear and authoritative. Those who lost can justifiably claim that if the vote had been taken a day later or earlier the result could have been different, and we know they could be correct. The fact that UK governments have made this mistake in the past does not make it right. Remember we are talking about what is right politically, not what is right in law, so precedent is far less compelling.

Much the same point applies to the issue of a second referendum. He says: “Parliament having chosen already the decision-making procedure, it is not legitimate now to say that this should be set aside. The time for arguing for a two referenda requirement, or majority support in each part of the UK, was before this referendum was held.” He is certainly right that those who had won would think it is unfair to apparently change the rules of the game after the event, much as those who have lost think the whole process is deeply unfair and unjust. I also think that Ekins’ appeal to those who are otherwise unrepresented resonates with many Labour supporters, who feel that such a move would look just like the elite overriding the wishes of the people. (See Owen Jones, who questions Corbyn’s leadership but not his Brexit line.)

Except that is nonsense. If those who voted to Leave cannot get a simple majority in a second referendum when we have a lot more information about what leaving entails then that indicates something very wrong with the initial vote, and not some plot by the elite to cheat them. It is hardly undemocratic to hold a second referendum because the situation has become much clearer. As I have said before, when politicians argue that allowing a second vote is going against ‘the will of the people’ you know that you are in real trouble.

Is that unfair to one side? Of course not, because it is how politics works. Take the Scottish referendum, where Remain won by 55.4%. Just a few years later, and we could well see another referendum. To say that is different because something crucial has changed actually plays into the arguments for a second EU referendum. Unless voters perfectly anticipated the nature of the exit deal with the EU, that deal in itself is a huge and crucial change.

It seems to be neither politics nor fairness dictates that something poorly done in the past should dictate what politicians do in the future, when there is no legal constraint on them changing their minds. Holding further votes when the situation has changed cannot be undemocratic or unfair to anyone. [1]

I think all this is a useful perspective when we go back to the original question of whether parliament is obliged in some way to enact the result of the referendum we have had. Recall that Ekins says: “Parliament made clear that the decision about whether to leave the EU was to be settled by the referendum.” Now I have said in the past that I can understand why an individual MP, who has pledged to let the referendum decide their vote, should feel duty bound to keep their word. But I do question how exactly ‘parliament’ made such a pledge. An obvious way for a parliament to make such a pledge is to embed it into the terms of the referendum itself, as was done with the AV referendum. This was not done on this occasion.

It seems to me, therefore, well within the rights of any MP or Party to say that they do not regard a vote this close as binding on how they should vote. Indeed I would go further. Any MP or Party who thinks, based on the knowledge they have, that those voting Leave will over time regret their decision, has a duty to vote based on his or her judgement, rather than be tied by some vague notion around parliamentary commitment. 

But all this assumes that the Article 50 vote was just about implementing the referendum. It clearly was not just about that. Any sane discussion of the referendum has to recognise that voting Leave gave no guidance to politicians about how to leave. The referendum was not about the Single Market, the customs union etc. What the Prime Minister should have done was to allow parliament to debate the issue of how to leave, which is critical for the future of the UK. No doubt they would have given parliament a lead, but triggering Article 50 could have waited until that discussion had taken place. [2] Theresa May decided not to allow parliament that discussion.

As a result, the vote on Article 50 was not just about deciding to start the leaving process, but it also effectively became the last chance for MPs to express any view on how we should leave. That in effect made the vote a decision to leave the way May had decided, or might decide without recourse to parliament. The moment the Prime Minister did that, any obligation an MP might have felt regarding the referendum became null and void.

This is the crucial difference between 1975 and 2016, and another reason why arguments that appeal to precedent are wrong. In 1975, voters had a clear idea about what both In and Out involved. In 2016 what Leave meant was completely unclear, not least to those campaigning for it. That meant in practice that voters decided on the basis of the form of Leave they expected to happen, or perhaps were promised would happen, rather than the form of Leave the government would eventually choose.

It is for this reason that we appear to have a decidedly undemocratic result. If the referendum had set remaining against leaving for the type of hard Brexit that we are almost certain to have, it seems extremely unlikely that a majority would have voted for that. Yet those who argue that the referendum obliged MPs to vote for triggering Article 50 are in effect arguing for exactly that result. That is neither democratic, fair or indeed wise.

[1] I am sure many would argue that a referendum which came with the promise of a later referendum where you could change your mind would be too great an invitation to those who simply wanted to exercise a protest vote. I will leave that and similar arguments for others.

[2] The more people argue that such an arrangement would not have been practical, the more they illustrate how badly designed the original referendum was. Instead of debating and voting on a specific way of leaving (which could have been chosen jointly by those who wanted to leave) relative to remaining, we got a decision which was far too open ended. As a result, Leave campaigners said during the campaign that voting Leave did not imply leaving the Single Market. Once again, it seems odd to argue that parliament should not try and rectify past mistakes like this for the sake of some imagined commitment.   

The total failure of the centre left

We have already begun to hear laments that Corbyn’s second victory means the end of Labour as a broad church. This is nonsense, unless that church is one where only people from the right and centre of the party are allowed to be its priests. Alison Charlton (@alicharlo) responded to my tweet to that effect by saying “It's the soft left, like me, who shouldn't be priests. We're rubbish at it.”

That I think captured my thoughts this last weekend. As Steve Richards writes “The so-called shadow cabinet rebels must be the most strategically inept political group in the history of British politics.” And although they were never the tightly knit group of coup plotters that some Corbyn supporters imagined, their collective thinking was completely flawed. It was self-indulgent folly by the minority group that I call the anti-Corbynistas to constantly spin against Corbyn from the start: as I predicted, it was totally counterproductive. But it was equally naive of centre-left MPs who nominated Owen Smith to believe that all they needed to do was adopt the leadership’s economics policies.

Forget all you read about Smith not being experienced enough, or about how he made gaffes (journalists just love gaffes), how he could have run a better campaign and so on. This is stuff and nonsense. Just as with Sanders in the US, Corbyn’s support is the result of a financial crisis the after effects of which we are still suffering from and where the perpetrators have got away largely unscathed. The crisis came as a complete surprise to the political centre, and only those on the left had warned about growing financialisation. Yet these warnings went unheeded by the Labour party, in part because the left had become marginalised. That is why politicians like Sanders and Corbyn can talk about the financial crisis with a conviction that others cannot match, and their supporters see that. The constant UK refrain about entryism is, frankly, pathetic.

In those circumstances Owen Smith had a mountain to climb. I wrote on 1st August a list of things he needed to do to win. Crucially he failed to back reducing the number of MPs required to nominate a candidate for leader, which in practice excluded any successor to Corbyn from the left being able to run. I wrote “If Smith wants Labour members to trust him, he has to show that he also trusts them in the future.” I also suggested he should now offer John McDonnell the job of shadow chancellor to show he meant to unify the party. How naive I was, some retorted: didn’t I know McDonnell was hated by much of the PLP. Of course I knew, which was partly why it was a good idea: at least I was trying to show some imagination that seemed absent from the PLP. Team Smith even seemed unable to acknowledge McDonnell’s positive achievements, like the Economic Advisory Council (EAC) and the fiscal credibility rule. No wonder he lost.

There is no getting away from the fact that the vote of no confidence is going to be fatal to Labour’s chances at the General Election. Of course Corbyn’s performance had been extremely poor, and he ran a deeply flawed Brexit campaign. But the no confidence vote was a do or die act, and the chances of it succeeding were always minimal. That is political ineptitude: sacrificing your party’s election chances for slender odds. All MPs can do now is help minimise the scale of that defeat, and if some feel that given all that they have said about the leadership that is best done from the backbenches Corbyn supporters should respect that. They should use the spare time to think about how to revitalise the centre left, but keep these and other thoughts out of the public eye. Talk of sacrificing being part of the single market so we can end freedom of movement is not a good start. As Chris Dillow argues, they are not even worthy of the label Blairite.

What Corbyn needs to do is clearly set out by Owen Jones here. To say he has a mountain to climb is an understatement. He carries the weight of the no confidence vote. Even if the PLP now unites behind him, much of the media will act as if it does not. He risks being outflanked in the traditional heartlands by UKIP: if voters think their problems really would be reduced with less immigration (and which politicians are telling them otherwise?), they will vote for the party that talks about little else. In the new heartlands of London and other cities, anti-Brexit feeling may well find LibDem clarity on the issue attractive. (Corbyn’s margin of victory in London was small.) Corbyn's ridiculing of warnings about the economic cost of Brexit (despite the advice of his EAC) does not set him up well to capitalise on any bad economic news.

In short, if he manages to defeat the Conservatives in 2020 it will be one of the most remarkable achievements in UK political history. Even to come close would be a great success. For what it is worth I hope he does, if only because it would force the centre-left to finally recognise their failure since the financial crisis.

Entryism and Corbyn supporters

Owen Jones writes “Corbyn’s opponents .. are, by turns, bewildered, infuriated, aghast, miserable about the rise of Corbynism. But they should take ownership of it, because it is their creation.” I have argued the same in the past, but I would go further. If this crisis within Labour does prove as destructive as I fear it will be, it will be a result of the behaviour of many of Corbyn’s opponents. It is their actions and words which make compromise between the membership and the PLP so elusive.

As I argued in my post on the future of the Labour party (the gist is in the title: Mutually Assured Destruction) those who tried to undermine Corbyn’s leadership from the start in a very public way (I called them the anti-Corbynistas) became in the eyes of most Corbyn supporters their opposition. As a result, they see the vote of no confidence as just an extension of this anti-Corbynista activity, and therefore believe they must defend their original choice at all costs.

While this characterisation of all of the PLP is wide of the mark, the way the anti-Corbynistas characterise Corbyn supporters is far more bizarre. Their model is Trotsky style entryism. This was very real in the UK in the 1970s and 1980s, and my one and only experience of standing for election when I was a student involved defeating them. They were always small in number. [1] Their modus operandi was taking over other organisations through a mixture of subterfuge, strategy and persistence, targeting in particular groups where more traditional support had become moribund.

What has actually happened over the last few year to the Labour party in the UK is very different. Labour’s increased membership is similar to the support for Sanders in the US and the rise of the ‘new left’ in other European countries. Of course those who were previously in far left fringe groups will be getting involved, but in this case they are a tiny minority in an organisation that has become rejuvenated as a result of Corbyn (as his opponent in the forthcoming elections, Owen Smith, has acknowledged). If you really want to know who these new Labour party members are, read this post from the Very Public Sociologist, or this article by Ellie Mae O'Hagan or this from Helen Lewis. These accounts chime with my own experience. Militant entryists they are not. Of course this wave of new support contains a fringe of entryists as well as a fringe of intolerant twitter trolls, but to characterise the whole by this fringe is to wilfully misunderstand it.

As Ellie Mae O'Hagan describes, Corbyn supporters are also a group with few representatives in the media (and I’m talking Guardian not Mail), which allows too many in the Westminster-centric media to dismiss them as Socialist Worker fodder. Of course for those journalists in the right wing press who are not sympathetic to Labour, entryism is an attractive story to tell. For those on the right of the party who know this membership will never support their side, the myth of entryism provides a convenient excuse to pursue measures to exclude them. But if you are neither of those and want to influence this new membership, the last thing you do is go on about entryism. Which is the trap Tom Watson fell into earlier this week. [2]

Just as the anti-Corbynistas are happy to falsely characterise Labour party members who support Corbyn as either entryists or being under their sway, so they also claim that Corbyn and McDonnell never intended to try and work with the PLP. Instead it was always an entryist plot. I am called naive when I have suggested otherwise in the past. What I have actually said is that cooperation with the PLP was the only path that offered the new leadership any chance of success, which is what my MAD post is all about. But of course the anti-Corbynista claim about the leaderships real motives is unprovable: the leadership trying to work with the PLP (as it did) can be put down to pretence, and when the leadership failed it could be put down to deliberate intention rather than lack of ability.

The group whose motives are really suspect are the anti-Corbynistas. With Corbyn’s election in 2015 they saw their ability to influence the party slipping away, and have subsequently done everything they can to ensure it disappeared out of sight. They have publicly undermined the leadership, giving Corbyn supporters a clear excuse to ignore the polls. They have attempted to exclude Corbyn from this new election, allowing Corbyn’s supporters to say that by voting for Corbyn they are standing up for democracy. They have called Corbyn supporters entryists when most are clearly not. If they really wanted to win hearts and minds they have been utterly useless, and as a byproduct have probably destroyed hopes of any kind of compromise. (I have lost count of the number of times I have been told by Corbyn supporters that Owen Smith is bound to come under the sway of the anti-Corbynistas.) It is not clear to me yet whether this behaviour is just incompetence, or whether it is they who really have an undeclared objective, which is to split the left.

[1] Colin Talbot argues that because these organisations had high churn, there are a lot of ‘ex-Trots’ out there. “It is this mass of vaguely ‘socialist’ middle-aged ex-Trots – and there are an awful lot more of them than they or anyone else probably realized until recently – that might explain a lot of the ‘Corbyn’ phenomena. Disillusioned with Blair (mainly over one single issue – Iraq), despondent of Labour ever winning again anyway, they have turned to Corbyn as the political equivalent of going out and buying a Harley.”

But maybe these ‘ex-Trots’ are ‘ex’ because they went off the concept of entryism - like the author himself. Being disillusioned by Iraq and despondent at Labour losing in 2015 are virtues. The implication that by supporting Corbyn they somehow have not grown out of their youthful behaviour is nothing more than an opinion.

[2] He said “There are Trots that have come back to the party, and they certainly don’t have the best interests of the Labour party at heart. They see the Labour party as a vehicle for revolutionary socialism, and they’re not remotely interested in winning elections, and that’s a problem. But I don’t think the vast majority of people that have joined the Labour party and have been mobilised by the people that are in Momentum are all Trots and Bolsheviks.” My italics, suggesting his analysis is similar to mine. But then he went on about “old hands twisting young arms”, which is really not a good way to persuade those with young arms!