The founder of Leeds-based hospitality and events group Dine has labelled last week’s EU referendum “too marginal” and “based on a foundation of bad faith”. In a strongly-worded response, Daniel Gill said the 52-48% result for Leave was not enough to trigger constitutional change and represented unfinished business. He wants the government to consider a second vote, with a threshold to guard against such a small margin of victory. Daniel, who studied European Studies and German at Edinburgh University, said: “The outcome should be considered as simply too marginal to trigger the serious constitutional changes which are about to be set in motion.
The Motion
The United Kingdom’s referendum on 23rd June 2016, which asked eligible citizens to vote on membership of the European Union, was misconceived from the outset and is therefore invalid.
The Figures
On 24th June 2016, it was recorded that 16,141,241 (48.1%) of the eligible voting pool cast their vote to remain in the European Union. 17,410,742 (51.9%) voted to Leave the European Union. This momentous decision was therefore dependant on a margin of just 3.8%.
On 5th June 1975, the referendum which asked the British public to cast their vote on whether the UK should remain in the European Economic Community saw 17,378,581(67.2%) vote ‘Yes’ and 8,470,073 (32.8%) vote ‘No’, a margin of 34.4%. The 2014 referendum on Scottish Independence saw a result of 55.3%-44.7%, a margin of 10.6%. In 2011, the referendum on whether an ‘Alternative Vote’ method should replace the ‘first past the post’ system saw a result of 68% against and 32% in favour, a margin of 36%. The 1998 referendum which asked ‘Are you in favour of the Government’s proposals for a Greater London
Authority, made up of an elected mayor and a separately elected assembly?’ saw a result of 72% in favour and 28% against, a margin of 44%.
In general elections, the winning margin between the two parties with the most votes (as a percentage of the total votes cast) has averaged 8.73% since 1979. In other words, every general election for the last 37 years has seen an average difference between the two parties receiving the most votes of more than twice that which decided the referendum on Thursday 23rd June 2016.1
The referendum result also needs to be examined in the light of the demographics. The most striking figure is the generational difference. The chart below clearly shows that younger voters (18-34) overwhelmingly chose to remain in the European Union, whereas at 55+, this trend is reversed. The fact that the age groups which chose remain will have to bear the majority of the consequences over a longer time period, for an outcome which was decided by the older generations serves to undermine the democratic legitimacy of the result.2
The margin of the result in 2016, being virtually 1/10th of the difference between the sides in 1975, a fraction of the margin in any similar UK referendum held recently, and on average less than half the winning margin in any general election since 1979, means that the outcome should be considered as simply too marginal to trigger the serious constitutional changes which are about to be set in motion.
The Premise
Voters were simply asked whether the UK should ‘remain’ in the EU or ‘leave’; a single and broad proposition.
The European Referendum Act of 2015 failed to allow for a threshold to guard against precariously small margins or low turnout. In the event, the turnout is accepted by most to be capable of having produced a representative result. However, the margin yielded is unprecedentedly low.
The government failed to set out clearly the consequences of precisely what would happen and relate this in an individual sense if voters chose to leave the European Union. No clear legal, technical and little meaningful financial advice was offered. The information which was offered was almost impossible for normal voters to relate to their own circumstances.
It is generally agreed that both the Remain and Leave campaigns increasingly resorted instead to arguments which were reduced to headlines and were therefore of little practical benefit to voters who were trying to understand how they should cast their vote.
A vote to remain would have wrought little or no immediate consequence on the UK nationals – and indeed UK residents – it effects. A vote to leave, on the other hand, now triggers huge shifts in our constitutional, legal and financial frameworks and will have a significant impact on individuals. Therefore, the referendum should never have been measured on a straight majority measure: A far more substantial margin should have been required to trigger such an historic reversal.
The History
After two world wars, in which over 100 million men, women and children were killed, it was clear that a union which sought to take advantage of the contiguous landmass in Europe, rather than being limited by historical borders, would have the potential to help those who had lived in such a tragically turbulent period. Stability would allow the remaining populations to rebuild their lives and livelihoods; in the first instance by forging trade relations. This would inevitably lead to greater interaction between citizens of the various European countries and therefore significantly increase personal, emotional and cultural understanding and ties. The European community could thereby reduce the chances that such an all-encompassing conflict would ever occur between those countries again.
A letter, published just before the 2016 referendum polling day in the Guardian, from Franklin Medhurst, DFC (RAF 1939-46), perhaps best speaks to this issue;
‘In my lifetime I have seen world population increase threefold; a stable climate become wildly unstable with drought, forest fires and floods; the pollution by humanity of the planet’s earth, air and waters to a stage where all life is threatened; and violence become a permanent, continuous tragedy in a world of great uncertainty. The only stable community in this universal upheaval has been the European Union, formed from the wreckage of a continent for which I and millions of others fought six years of war. I write as a former airman, having flown well over 2,000 hours against three despotic enemy nations. That victory for the democracies has given Europe 70 years of peace and security in a widely unstable world. The Leave chancers are campaigning to abandon this steady progress, citing values false or irrelevant, while they have no plan of what to do after jumping ship. If the nation should fall for this deceit, I can only conclude the lives of my comrades – Irish, Scots, Welsh and English – were lost in vain. They will be rattling their bones, wherever in the world they fell, at the loss of the beliefs for which they fought. Britain in Europe will enhance progress to higher values in the greater world; Britain out means a return to the early 20th century chaos of warring states against each other. I am 96. I remember how far we have come. I know what we stand to lose.’
If the formation and progression of the European Community and thereafter the Union was principally created as a positive embodiment of peoples, cultures and commerce, then the withdrawal by Britain is a retrograde, inward looking and self-limiting action.
Euro sceptics have generally held true a perception of the European Union as a technocratic, over-reaching and largely superfluous entity. However, this rather misses the point; it is the union of peoples and cultures, envisaged as one of its key cornerstones at birth, which is the more noble and potent aspect of European unity, and one which British voters have now been misled into abandoning.
Our next generation has been deprived of its automatic right to enjoy access to the European continent and its ability to be seen by the wider European population as equal participants of the great cultures and countries of Europe; at this stage, rather, Britain has been reduced to a laughing stock in the eyes of most Europeans.
The Myths
Politicians of all parties have, from time to time, made a habit of denigrating the European Union over recent decades. Very often such statements have been made out of political expediency rather than genuine conviction.
This, combined with many assertions propagated by the tabloid press, among other channels, has created a body of received wisdom which has played a huge part in the referendum campaign, arguably leading voters to crystallise an emotional response, rather than an informed one.
Some of the most misleading facts propagated during the referendum campaign itself were3:
On Britain’s financial contribution, the Leave campaign claimed: “The EU now costs the UK over £350 million every week – nearly £20 billion a year”. The true figure is estimated after rebates at more like £8 billion per annum, being £150 million per week. At the same time, neither the Leave nor Remain campaigns adequately set out the existing benefits for the UK economy of being in the European Union.
The Leave campaign’s assertion that Britain would be better off economically outside the EU, aside from being almost unanimously overturned by both national and international economic authorities, ignores recent history; Britain was widely known as the ‘sick man’ of Europe throughout the 1970s, being beholden to multiple labour disputes and with a weak economy compared to other European countries. Since 1979, the UK has achieved a significant improvement in its economic position at the same time as being a member of the European Union.
There is often a tendency to claim that the European Union is responsible for a raft of cumbersome regulation, yet neither side addressed the issue of what would replace European regulation, nor did they make the somewhat obvious point of the clear advantages that harmonised standards offer, not least by reducing technical barriers to trade. Boris Johnson said: “When you consider that the costs of [EU] regulation are estimated at £600m per week, I am afraid you are driven to the conclusion [that] whatever the reasons may be for remaining in the EU, they are not economic.” This figure is simply a total of projected costs, which a think tank ‘Open Europe’ estimates at £33.4 billion per annum. However, the same research also argues that regulations produce benefits as well, which Open Europe estimates at £58.3 billion per annum.
Another damaging myth is the suggestion that Britain is somehow at odds with the majority of legislation created by the European Union and that we need to leave the Union in order to be in sole control of the laws and regulation which affect us. Aside from the somewhat obvious fact that we will be subject to the standards applied by other nations when we wish to trade, travel or reside in them, the UK has demonstrably not been at odds with the European Union legislature: Since 1999, the UK has voted against 57 legislative acts. It has supported 2,474 acts. We have therefore only felt the need to vote against 2.3% of European legislation drafted in that period.
‘We want to take back control of our own laws’ is an oft heard assertion. In 2010, when looking at the question of EU law making, the House of Commons library concluded “it is possible to justify any measure between 15% and 50% or thereabouts”. The variation is attributable to the difficulty in establishing a framework as to how variables should be treated when performing a calculation. Whether one tends toward the lower figure of 15% or toward the higher 50%, the innate assumption that an ability to create laws across all member states is a negative issue provides an interesting window on the British attitude toward Europe. Instead, it would seem more logical to accept that
Europe-wide law making is likely to offer many advantages to those citizens who wish to trade and live across the continent.
Euro sceptics often use terms such as ‘European project’ or ‘super state’ in a manner which suggest that the British voting public is somehow being slowly deprived of its independence and authority by an organisation which has a hidden ambition to overcome national governments and create a federal Europe. Examples of what anti-EU campaigners might cite as overreach might be the creation of Europol, or even the creation of the European External Action service (the Foreign policy arm of the EU). Yet when each stage of evolution in the European Union is analysed they can be seen as logical progressions which have a positive intent. European nation state co-operation on criminal intelligence and policing is perhaps the most obvious example of a logical evolution in the EU’s powers.
On immigration, the requirement for free movement of European citizens is often blamed for the significant growth in the UK’s population and cited as the reason the government is unable to control it. This is a curious conclusion, given that we are not part of the Schengen area, preferring instead to control our own borders. It is unclear what the Leave campaign expects to be able to alter so quickly in order to alleviate the ‘problem’ of growing net migration.
A ubiquitous line of casual debate during the referendum campaign referred to a desire to ‘take back control of our taxes’ from the European Union. The EU has no control over the most important taxes, such as income tax and National Insurance, as well as taxes such as stamp duty on properties and inheritance tax. All national governments within the EU have control over setting these taxes and EU has no say over how taxes collected should be spent4.
It can therefore be established that the amount of meaningful facts available to voters occupied only a tiny portion of the available information bandwidth before and during the referendum campaign. The predominance of bland, politicised and sometimes downright inaccurate propaganda pushed on the UK voting public further renders the referendum outcome invalid.
The Motivation
This essentially has its roots in the ambition of key figures for their individual political careers.
The Conservative party’s tendency to split, often very publicly and divisively, over the issue of the European Union is long-running. In the lead up to the 2015 UK general election, the biggest threat to a possible Conservative victory was perceived by the Conservative party to be the potential loss of votes to UKIP. A key tool for minimising the risk of Conservative voters defecting to UKIP was therefore to promise a referendum on Britain’s future within Europe.
On 7th May 2015, David Cameron was returned as prime minister, this time in a clear victory for the Conservatives and partly as a result of the referendum promise. During his resignation speech on 24th June 2016, he averred that he had “held nothing back” during the referendum campaign; yet here is a man who cited his favourite childhood book as ‘Our Island Story’, a children’s history of Britain published in 1905 and whose former election adviser suggests that he would have been in favour of Brexit had he not been Prime minister.5
On 1st September 2015, the precise wording of the poll was agreed following a recommendation by the electoral commission. David Cameron announced the 23rd June polling date on 20th February 2016.
The Leave campaign was launched on 9th October 2015, yet Boris Johnson, now widely seen by the public as its erstwhile figurehead, took until 21st February 2016 to announce his allegiance to this group and indeed, whether he was either for the Leave or Remain camps. It has been suggested that he was in fact more persuaded by the argument to Remain. Why then would this populist politician choose to join the Leave campaign, if not on conviction?
It seems arguable that the referendum was firstly instigated, and the respective campaigns then championed, by politicians who were more interested in their political careers than the consequences of the outcome for the UK public.
The motivation of the public when voting in the referendum has also been more often attributed to a rejection of the status quo in general, rather than a vote on the issue in hand. Examples of this were bound up in the failure of TATA steel, when Leave campaigners attached both the government and the European Union to the perceived failure of the government to do anything meaningful to rescue the company and thousands of jobs. It has also been suggested that Labour voters, disenchanted with their current party leadership, perhaps saw the referendum as a chance to reject Jeremy Corbyn’s arguments to remain.
Nigel Farage, at 4am on Friday 25th June 2016 said “This, if the predictions now are right, this will be a victory for real people, a victory for ordinary people, a victory for decent people… And we will have done it without having to fight, without a single bullet being fired, we’d have done it by damned hard work on the ground”. This diatribe helpfully reflects the problem at the heart of the referendum and why it should be considered illegitimate: A decision has been reached on rhetoric, not reasoning. A decision has been reached based on myths and an antiquated view of Britain’s place in the world.
It has already been argued that many voters were deciding and ultimately casting their vote on an emotional basis, rather than engaging with the technical reasons of either outcome which would be likely to impact them personally. Several commentary articles in the press on Sunday 26th June 2016 coin the term ‘Bregret’ and refer to conversations with individual voters who voted Leave, often apparently on a gut instinct (and perhaps defaulting to the British visceral tendency against Europe), who now state that they regret voting that way. The only clear indication of this is the fact that a petition created on ‘petition.parliament.uk’ on 25th November 2015 by a William Oliver Healey, has at the time of writing, collected a staggering 3,077,291 signatures.
The Consequences
One of the key aspects which renders the referendum exercise illegitimate is the serious and irreversible nature of the consequences which flow from its outcome. The referendum, therefore, should simply never have been posited: It sought to ask the British population one question on a complex issue which covered a huge raft of issues and of which it was highly unrealistic to expect most voters to make a fully informed assessment; only a handful of the population could ever have hoped to have sufficient knowledge of the vast range of technical, legal and financial issues and consequences which would follow a ‘Leave’ outcome.
The Financial consequences have already seen large companies, mainly in financial services, gearing up to move significant portions of their operations to European cities which will continue to enjoy unhindered access to the common market. BNP Paribas, Goldman Sachs & HSBC have all been referenced as some of these companies.
On Friday 24th June 2016, the British Pound fell briefly to its lowest level since 1985 and the FTS250 had lost 7% of its value as at 3pm that day.
As at 26th June 2016, credit ratings agency ‘Moody’s’ has downgraded the UK’s credit rating outlook from ‘stable’ to ‘negative’.
A slow, painful and costly extraction; an undoing of decades of work is now to follow. Exacerbating this situation is the thought that, whereas the vast array of negotiations will be conducted often by expert and talented members of the civil service, there will undoubtedly be many occasions when the unstitching process will be run to some degree by private concerns, consultancies and law firms. There will doubtless be many millions of pounds spent on such activity, all of it wasted on engineering a huge backward step in Britain’s constitutional history.
Far from ‘saving’ the £8 billion per annum net contribution to the European
Union, we will have to pay to remain a member for the European Economic Area, all at a time when the economy will be under severe pressure anyway. Most forecasters agree that wages will dip as a result of the decision to leave, our GDP will decline and therefore our tax revenues will shrink.
The security consequences are mixed, as even though we clearly benefit from intelligence sharing and co-operative policing iniatives within the EU, it is hard to envisage that these will diminish in practice following the UK’s exit.
The outcome has a profound personal consequence to the many UK citizens now deprived of their automatic right to move, live and work anywhere within the European Union. This alone is a consequence which should never have been allowed to flow from such a vote, undermining many hard fought freedoms.
The Union with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales will now come under further pressure, creating yet more uncertainty for individuals and businesses alike.
The perception of Britain and therefore its own people, businesses and institutions has been damaged by the exit in many quarters. International states and bodies alike have reacted with a mix of shock and puzzlement to the result of the referendum. Therefore our status in International Affairs and standing in organisations such as the UN, G7 and our trading and political kudos with other states has been irreversibly diminished.
The Next Step
The referendum was sealed by an Act of Parliament and is a fundamental part of the democratic process of which we are all so proud. However, there is a duty on the leadership of this country, namely the Conservative government, to offer the Nation a second, clarifying question. This should be set with a threshold to avoid a similarly narrow margin crystallising any decision.
Michael Heseltine suggested on 26th June 2016 that an all-party group of pro-EU MPs is formed immediately to examine the options and to start the “fight back”.
Even prime-brexiteer, Nigel Farage has previously commented that the margin which in fact materialised would leave many feeling that there was unfinished business.
Current commentary is assuming that a move to avert the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union is inconceivable. It is not; rather it would be a perfectly sound piece of leadership on the part of the Government and UK Parliament.
The Conclusion
Had the outcome been that Britain would remain in the European Union, we would have preserved the option to continue to reform its excesses and work on reducing its democratic deficit – all whilst still enjoying the many benefits it offered. The leave result has instead deprived us of any such scope.
Those who argue that they would rather be under the sole jurisdiction of the UK’s administrative, legal and financial frameworks seem to abstain from the obvious; the European interaction with our own institutions was never held up to be perfect. Do they honestly believe that the ‘new circus in town’ will be better? Rather, the interminable political in-fighting which has been sparked will strangle focus away from the vital task ahead. If we imagine ourselves five years from now, do we honestly expect to see a stronger, more prosperous nation? This issue is perhaps best encapsulated by the fact that the man responsible for setting the referendum in train, David Cameron, has resigned from his post as prime minister, serving to further destabilise our country and economy in the meantime.
It is clear to see that there were serious issues with the way that the referendum was structured, that it was based on a foundation of bad faith and that the voting public were given insufficient and often times misleading information on which to base their decision. Eurosceptic myths, propagated over a number of years, made it impossible for the information that was offered to be filtered in an unbiased way by most. By instigating an entirely unnecessary and ill- structured referendum in order to solve a party political issue, the Conservative government has caused lasting and substantial damage to UK individuals and businesses. The correct remedy for this is either for it to agree to pay compensation once losses have been measured and established OR to agree to a second referendum.
This all compounds the most serious issue of all – the empirical one: for a decision of this magnitude to be triggered without any threshold and by such a narrow margin makes the whole process extremely precarious and seriously undermines the result. To use Nigel Farage’s own words in an interview on 16th May 2016, “In a 52-48 referendum this would be unfinished business by a long way.6”