Why delivering Brexit has nothing to do with democracy

There are many people shouting about the current state of our democracy in Britain. A common theme is that in the referendum, the people decided on Brexit, and therefore either failing to deliver Brexit or seeking a second referendum would be a betrayal of that democratic process. But there are a number of problems with that notion. Primarily, it fails to understand the reality of our democracy as it exists today.

Democracy is a great source of stability and justice in our world. The benefits of any democratic system are considerable; amongst other things, the poor have a voice, dictatorships are far less likely to occur, and a broad breadth of issues are brought to the attention of those in power. Yet no democracy is perfect; there is no country in the world where all the people’s voices are heard all of the time and on all matters. No system is perfect in converting all votes into exactly proportionate public representation. And even if a democratic system was perfect it would still face the problem that democracy often involves people voting on the basis of their opinions about complex situations they don’t fully understand. Our democracy is not built on the basis of referendums on specific subjects, it is based on the principle of representation. We vote for a representative and the representative makes the decision based on their expertise. This is how we reduce that problem of opinions about things we don’t understand. Referendums are a useful an addon to that system, but one that comes with a significant risk, the risk that we are not sufficiently informed, to make a decision on the matter in hand. As Winston Churchill is reputed to have said; “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.”

All that aside however, here’s the bigger point that we always seem to miss. Our democracy, like all democracies, works on the basis of having a defined group of people of whom we can ask the question; ‘What do you collectively want?’ It starts with an already defined set of borders and social groupings. These are groupings that we did not choose. For the most part, the national borders of this world have been decided by war, by dictators, by empires, by long forgotten quirks of geography, by the availability of resources and the half-forgotten arguments of history. For better or for worse, they have been decided by committees, leaders and experts behind closed doors. Even our current local boundaries such as wards, unitary authorities and parliamentary constituencies are decided without our vote. And even if this weren’t the case, it would still be true that none of us get to decide what nation we are born into. 

Our relationship with the EU is about matters that go beyond the simplistic boundaries of nation. It encompasses complex and subtle matters of international law and commerce in the here and now, but also begs questions about our collective relationship to the future and the past. These are questions that even the most highly trained academics struggle to answer. The 2016 referendum took those matters and co-opted public emotions about what constitutes nationality into the impossibly simplistic arena of a yes or no question. A question based on arbitrary national boundaries that no longer define the nature of who we are in the way they might have done fifty years ago. And even if that were not the case, while our external UK borders have not changed in the last three years, over 5% of the UK population are different people to the ones who constituted our population in 2016 as a result of births, deaths and migration. In addition, our representatives in government have changed by a massive 18% since the referendum. In so many ways we are not who we were. The EU has given the younger generations of this country a far softer sense of boundary than we had in 1973 when we joined the EEC. In reality the referendum was partly asking us as a nation to define who we were, and we were not equipped to answer that question, because, for better or worse, that is not and never has been how nations are constituted. Neither the definition of our nation nor our relationship to other nations can be defined, much less redefined by a single binary vote. There are currently at least 67 million different versions of what it means to be British.

One of the primary reasons that Brexit has been a mess from the start, why the original referendum is now practically meaningless, is that it goes beyond the remit of what our current democracy was designed to do, but in order to move forward without significant constitutional reform, a second referendum is probably the only reasonable option. At the very least, if the referendum was ever democratically valid in 2016, it could only be more valid, not less, to ask a better educated set of questions based on what we have learned and how we have changed over the last three years.