{"id":2446,"date":"2019-02-28T14:24:36","date_gmt":"2019-02-28T14:24:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2446"},"modified":"2019-02-28T14:26:56","modified_gmt":"2019-02-28T14:26:56","slug":"a-second-brexit-referendum-the-generation-game","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/?p=2446","title":{"rendered":"A Second Brexit Referendum: The Generation Game"},"content":{"rendered":"<span class=\"cb-itemprop\" itemprop=\"reviewBody\">\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">The 2016 Brexit referendum, we were often told during the campaign, was a \u2018once in a generation\u2019 opportunity for the British people to decide on future membership of the EU.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Of course the phrase \u2018once in a\ngeneration\u2019 has no clear meaning in general and certainly it has no clear\npolitical meaning.&nbsp; Yet, it makes\nsense.&nbsp; It suggests that a decision made\nat the referendum should not be quickly or easily reversible.&nbsp; This was a \u2018big\u2019 decision, the effects of\nwhich we would live with for some time, for better or for worse.&nbsp; What could possibly justify that claim and\nwhat might it imply about the democratic justification of holding a second\nreferendum?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In an earlier blog I suggested that\nthe idea of popular sovereignty made no sense.&nbsp;\nThe people cannot lay down the rules by which they are given the final\nsay in a political decision.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">However, this does not imply that\nthe idea of \u2018a people\u2019 makes no sense.&nbsp;\nWhen we talk about \u2018a people\u2019, we are not simply referring to the set of\nindividuals who live in a country at a particular point of time.&nbsp; Phrases like \u2018the British people\u2019 mean something\ndifferent from \u2018the people who live in the UK today\u2019.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">When we talk about the British\npeople, we have in mind a continuous entity that goes beyond the citizens\nliving in a country at any one time.&nbsp; A\nhistory of the British people would not be a history of all the people alive\ntoday.&nbsp; It would be a history of the\npeople who constitute the UK.&nbsp; We imagine\na people stretching back a long way and also stretching forward into the future.&nbsp; A people has a past and a future that goes\nbeyond the past and future of anyone who has ever been a member of that people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But a people also has a past and a\nfuture in a different sense.&nbsp; For within\nevery people, there are the particular people \u2013 the individuals \u2013 who make up\nthat people at any one time.&nbsp; As one\ngeneration dies, so another comes to maturity.&nbsp;\nBut this takes us back to the question what it means politically to talk\nof a once in a generation decision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">For the sake of argument, let us assume\nthat it means that a decision once taken should not be reversed within the\nnumber of years that it would take someone to come to maturity.&nbsp; A person born in 2016 would come to the age\nof voting in to 2034.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">If the referendum was a once in a generation opportunity in this sense, that would imply that a second referendum would have to wait until at least the middle of the 2030s.&nbsp; But why should there be this delay?&nbsp; To be sure, it takes until 2034 for someone born in 2016 to reach the age of voting, but there are many people who were under the age of voting in 2016 who have now reached voting age.&nbsp; The turnover of people in \u2018a people\u2019 is a continuous process.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Because generational change is\ncontinuous, it makes no sense to say that there should be a delay in holding\nanother referendum until a new generation comes to political maturity.&nbsp; Rather, a once in a generation decision is a\nbig decision because it concerns membership of an international\norganization.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">EU membership involves a commitment\nto its rules and institutions.&nbsp; No\ninternational organization, and especially no organization with the dense\ndegree of regulatory authority possessed by the EU, can function if its members\nadopt the attitude of \u2018here today and gone tomorrow\u2019, particularly if you add \u2018maybe\nback another day\u2019.&nbsp; The referendum\ndecision is a once in a generation decision because few generations are called\nupon to make a decision with such momentous consequences. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yet, the same reasons for saying\nthat the referendum decision should not be quickly or easily reversible are the\nsame reasons for making it a hard decision to take in the first place.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">One way of doing this is to require in a referendum that a change be supported not just by a simple majority of those voting, but also by a certain threshold of those eligible to vote.&nbsp; For example, in the Scottish referendum on devolution in 1979, devolution required both a simple majority of those voting but also the support of at least 40 per cent of those eligible to vote.&nbsp; However, many people do not like fancy franchises of this sort for the good reason that any such threshold seems arbitrary.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Yet, there is another way of forcing\nmore careful decision making, by analogy with two-chamber legislatures.&nbsp; Where a second chamber does not merely mirror\nthe first, a two-chamber legislative processes will force a pause on making a\nmajor change of policy, whilst still allowing each chamber to operate on a\nsimple majority.&nbsp; <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">By analogy, a second confirmatory\nreferendum, pitching the current withdrawal agreement against the option of remaining,\nwould be like having a two-chamber legislative system.&nbsp; Continuous generational replacement would\nmean that the second round would be decided by a set of people distinct from\nthe first round, but it would not prevent those who voted in the first round\nand were still capable of voting in the second round from reconfirming their\nchoice. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I suggest that it is against this\nbackground that we see the proposal by the MPs Phil Wilson and Peter Kyle to\nsupport the Prime Minister\u2019s withdrawal agreement conditional on that agreement\nbeing put to the country in a second referendum.&nbsp; A once in a generation decision is a decision\nthat would benefit from the two-round scrutiny that accompanies normal\nlegislation.<\/p>\n<\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2016 Brexit referendum, we were often told during the campaign, was a \u2018once in a generation\u2019 opportunity for the British people to decide on future membership of the EU.\u00a0 Of course the phrase \u2018once in a generation\u2019 has no clear meaning in general and certainly it has no clear political meaning.&nbsp; Yet, it makes [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":122,"featured_media":2448,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1390,1395,1396],"tags":[],"coauthors":[1584],"class_list":["post-2446","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-brexit","category-comment","category-uk"],"amp_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/02\/A-Second-Brexit-Referendum-The-Generation-Game-markus-spiske-193031-unsplash-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/122"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2446"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2446\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2448"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2446"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2446"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2446"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/politicalquarterlyblog.preliveweb.site\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcoauthors&post=2446"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}