Scribbling on the constitution: A referendum on Europe was always a bad idea

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Margaret Thatcher, quoting Clement Attlee, once described referendums "a device of dictators and demagogues".

She was right.

A referendum on Britain's membership of the European Union was always a bad idea and it has had an unlovely effect on our politics - or at least revealed a side of it that is usually well buried.

For a discussion of that effect I recommend articles by Alex Massie and the great Neil Ascherson.

Reader's voice: Come off it! You are only saying this because you are afraid your side is going to lose.

Not so.

I have been saying the same thing for many years. Most substantially, as far as I can recall, in this article for the much-missed Liberal Democrat News in 2011:

For years the main parties have engaged in something close to a conspiracy. The issue of Europe has been taken out of general elections, with the promise that it will be decided through a referendum. Those referendums never take place. The result has been an infantilisation of debate on Europe, as politicians are allowed to take up self-indulgent, extreme positions they know they will never have to defend to the electorate. 

This process has been bad for us Liberal Democrats, encouraging the idea that all we need do to prosper is not offend anybody and deliver lots and lots of leaflets. And it has been bad for democracy as a whole. Why should voters feel enthusiastic about Westminster when their representatives avoid talking about one of the most important issues facing the country?

But don't take my word for it: read a guest post by Paul Evans on Slugger O'Toole, the best blog on Northern Ireland politics.

In 2010 he gave 14 reasons why the move to introduce referendums to British politics should be resisted, The European referendum campaign has proved he was right in every case.

Here are a couple of examples:

• They drive out the deliberative element in policymaking. The referendum question is an appeal to reflexes rather than an attempt to get a thoughtful response from the public. 

• They hand enormous powers to newspaper proprietors and people with the finances to take one side of the argument. It also hands the reins of government over to unelected and well-heeled pressure groups.

I am a believer in representative government - what George Watson called The English Ideology. It is the cornerstone of our constitution.

The Conservative Party used to be united by its belief in upholding that constitution. Today, most of its members, and many of its MPs, would rather scribble on it.

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Six of the Best 602

Francis Pryor takes the long view on Britain and Europe: "Despite what some would have us believe, Brexit wouldn’t mark a return to a glorious past, so much as a dismal future, where our principal legacy would be the destruction of a truly innovative system of multi-national government."

"The British state, under Margaret Thatcher, committed one of its most violent acts against its own citizens, at the Battle of the Beanfield, when a group of travellers — men, women and children — who were driving to Stonehenge from Savernake Forest to establish what would have been the 12th annual Stonehenge Free Festival were set upon by tooled-up police from six counties, and the Ministry of Defence." Thirty-one years on, Andy Worthington asks where the spirit of dissent is in Britain today.

Matthew Jenkin on how getting children out of doors can pay dividends in academic performance and also improves their concentration and confidence.

Ely Place is a street in central London that used to be part of Cambridgeshire, explains Flickering Lamps.

Caroline's Miscellany explores abandoned passages at Euston station that are a perfect time capsule from 1962.

J.K. Rowling just can't let Harry Potter go, says Sarah Lyall.

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Jeremy Corbyn grows up 30 years overnight

"I knew him when we were 18 or 19, and his views have not changed. We are talking about the thick end of 50 years ago."

So said one of Jeremy Corbyn's old friends when interviewed by the Shropshire Star last year.

That planting a red flag on top of the Wrekin is the most endearing thing I have read about Corbyn, but his friend's comment did play into the fear that his politics do not represent an engagement with the world around him.

So it was good to hear him today accepting political reality and arguing Britain should remain in the European Union.

As Martin Kettle says:

The Labour leader finally caught up with the pro-EU shift that his party made under Neil Kinnock in the 1980s.

That pro-EU shift did arise partly out of despair at Margaret Thatcher's repeated victories, but it also recognised that the world was changing. Westminster was not the only seat of power, and battles that could not be won there might be won somewhere else.

Throughout this period, Jeremy Corbyn clung to his anti-EU beliefs. He was a supporter of the Labout left's 'alternative economic strategy' and its emphasis on import controls.

There is a danger in getting less radical as you grow older - "I used to be a bit of a firebrand when I was your age, but you can't change human nature" - but there is a greater danger in living inside your head and not engaging with contemporary problems.

Somewhere in the background of every young radical is the ghost of Billy Liar and his imaginary kingdom of Ambrosia.

So I was pleased to see Corbyn accepting reality and arguing for continued British membership of the EU.

For the result of Brexit would not be the socialist paradise of his dreams, but - as he recognised - a more right-wing government glorying in the opportunity to remove protection from British workers.

Someone should tell Jenny Jones the same thing when it comes to environmental legislation.

Martin Kettle goes on to say:

Meanwhile the feebleness belongs to David Cameron. He called this referendum. He always knew he would be campaigning to stay in Europe. But he did little to prepare the ground and has given practically no thought to the alliances that will be required to ensure a remain win. A reckless budget and an inept response to the Panama Papers means that Cameron comes to the campaign starting line like an athlete lining up for the race of his life after a night on the tiles. 

All of which adds up to the extraordinary truth that, for once, Cameron desperately needed Corbyn to rise to the occasion. Labour votes will be crucial on 23 June, and until now Corbyn has allowed the idea to get around that he is not massively bothered by the outcome of the referendum. That made Thursday a speak-for-England moment for a Labour leader who is an instinctive sectarian – yet it was one that he seized.

This is a little strong: I doubt that Corbyn will appeal to the sort of Labour voters who are or have been tempted to vote Ukip,

But he is right that Cameron has been feeble. And not just Cameron.

I wrote in Liberal Democrat News (remember that?) five years ago:

For years the main parties have engaged in something close to a conspiracy. The issue of Europe has been taken out of general elections, with the promise that it will be decided through a referendum. Those referendums never take place. The result has been an infantilisation of debate on Europe, as politicians are allowed to take up self-indulgent, extreme positions they know they will never have to defend to the electorate.

Well, that referendum could not be put off for ever and it is fast approaching.

The political class will survive it unscathed: it is the rest of us who will suffer.

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Lord Bonkers' Diary: An alternative chameleon

Our latest visit to Bonkers Hall ends with an outing to Oakham Zoo.

An alternative chameleon

A sombre day: the moving television brings news of the deaths of both Pierre Boulez and Christy O’Connor Jnr. I am confident that they will go down in the annals of the game as one of the great Ryder Cup pairings.

To cheer myself up, I take a party of particularly Well-Behaved Orphans to Oakham Zoo. The consensus on the charabanc is that we want to see the chameleons.

As is the way with such creatures, they rather blend into the background. I am struck, however, by one that spends its time ranting about how much it hates “Thatcher”. I ask the keeper why it does this. “Oh,” comes the reply, “it’s an alternative chameleon”.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West 1906-10.

Earlier this week in Lord Bonkers' Diary

A shadow cabinet maker

Giving Isis one up the snoot

Andrew Neil's press gang

Corbyn sends for Christopher Robin Milne

Cooking hedgehogs for Nick Clegg

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How Thatcherites and Blairites buggered up Britain between them

I have a soft spot for The Age of Insecurity, a 1998 book by Larry Elliott and Dan Atkinson.

In part this is because, having bought a copy and sat down to read it, I found that I was quoted in it.

Since you ask, that quote runs:

In a letter to the Guardian on 15 September 1997, Jonathan Calder wrote: "Labour is effectively recasting unemployment as a form of individual delinquency."

So I can claim to have identified early on a trend that has continued right up to Iain Duncan Smith and his Work Capability Assessments.

The other reason I like the books is that it central analysis still seems spot on.

Elliott and Atkinson argue that the supposed rise of freedom in the two decades before they wrote was only for freedom of a particular sort.

Money had certainly been set free by measures such as the abolition of exchange controls, but people actually enjoyed less freedom. That freedom had been eroded both by the Thatcherite war on unions and job security and by New Labour's enthusiasm for policing private life.

As they wrote:

The citizen now fears not only the P45 and the UB40, but the knock on the door from the child welfare inspector.

Again, that analysis seems prophetic today in a world where money travels the globe in microseconds and refugees die in the attempt to cross national borders.

I thought of The Age of Insecurity today when I read a post on the always excellent Stumbling and Mumbling blog: Workplace Coercion.

In it Chris Dillow ("Rutland's leading economic thinker"), who writes the blog, quotes the Guardian report of working conditions at Sports Direct:

All warehouse workers are kept onsite at the end of each shift in order to undergo a compulsory search by Sports Direct security staff, with the experience of the Guardian reporters suggesting this typically adds another hour and 15 minutes to the working week – which is unpaid.

He then asks why right-wing lovers of freedom are never heard criticising such arrangements.

Is it that they believe the labour markets function as the economic textbooks say they should? Is it that they fear any intervention in those markets will make things worse?

Or is it - and my money's on this one - that they care only about freedom for bosses, and not freedom for all.

The way that New Labour has contribute to the insecurity of the average Briton was also discussed in a Guardian article today by Tom Clark.

Clark argues that successful prime ministers - and he gives Attlee and Thatcher as examples - first argue against the conventional wisdom, then establish a new consensus and finally frame laws and institutions that cement it for years after they have stood down.

He goes on:

Now think of the apologetic nervousness with which New Labour did great things. Within a few years of passing the Human Rights Act, Jack Straw found it expedient to begin rubbishing it – so today Conservatives can now sound respectable in proposing to rip it up. 

Gordon Brown goaded the Tories into voting for the abolition of child poverty, but because nobody outside of Westminster was engaged in that argument, the Tories can today move the goalposts by redefining a poverty measure just before the poverty rate surges. 

New Labour’s tax credits dressed redistribution up as a tax cut. At the same time, the party indulged suspicions about welfare cheats with endless headlines about dedicated hotlines to dob in neighbours for swinging the lead, or lie detectors in jobcentres.

He concludes:

as Labour in parliament looks on in bewilderment at a voluntary party that appears to have lost all appetite for office, it should give some thought to the doctrine of power at any price, and the transient nature of its legacy.

That is unfair to Labour activists, most of who very much want power even if they have opted for a wrongheaded strategy of winning it.

But Clark is right that New Labour ducked arguments and tried to do good while sounding as though it was being nasty to people.

I think New Labour saw this as a way of keeping the middle classes happy, but its effect has been to bolster just those strands in working-class and lower middle-class thinking that make people unwilling to vote Labour.

But then me and Larry and Dan could have told you that almost 20 years ago.

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