Talk of a referendum in the UK is deeply misplaced and risks making a mockery of parliamentarym democracy, writes Dennis Kennedy
Any issue involving Europe has the power to deprive the citizens of the United Kingdom of their normal mastery of rational thought. The latest manifestation of this phenomenon is the referendum mania that has overtaken the political and journalistic classes.
On all sides we hear frequent references to the "40 or so" referendums that have been held in the UK in recent decades. We are assured, even by those resisting a referendum on the European Convention, that they do so only because the proposals are not important enough to merit one, implying that if they were, they would, of course, be put to "the people". One might easily gain the impression that the British have learned from the Swiss, that the referendum is now part of the way the UK governs itself, and that the old idea of the sovereignty of Parliament just won't do anymore.
Not so; the reality is that the referendum is almost entirely foreign to the system of government of the United Kingdom. Of those 40 or so referendums in recent decades, only one has actually been a UK-wide referendum on a national issue, and that was more than a quarter of a century ago - the 1975 vote on the re-negotiated terms of EEC membership. All the others have been either regional - on devolution for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland - or local, to do with deciding whether selected towns or cities do, or do not want an elected mayor.
The degree of misunderstanding over all this is evident when even someone so normally well-informed as the editor of the Daily Telegraph seems confused. He recently claimed that the proponents of the European ideal were fearful of referendums because they had only ever won one, in 1975. The fact is they only ever won one because that was the only one ever held. That is a 100 per cent success record.
It was the only one ever held because the United Kingdom is a parliamentary democracy and national policy is decided in and by parliament at Westminster. The decisions on devolution were constitutionally important, and affected the whole nation, but significantly the referendums were held only in the regions to which some power was being devolved. The bulk of the nation, the 75 per cent of the population who do not live in these regions were not consulted, and left it to their elected representatives to decide.
The 1975 vote was an aberration. Harold Wilson called it to get himself off the hook of a cabinet hopelessly divided over Europe. For many years his successors did not regard it as a precedent. Neither the Single European Act nor the Treaty of Maastricht - much more significant in terms of national sovereignty - was put to referendum. John Major promised one on the single currency for much the same reason as Harold Wilson had thought of a referendum in 1975 - as a means of postponing or fudging a decision on an issue critically dividing his party. Tony Blair presumably saw similar virtues in the idea.
It suits some to pretend that referendums are a superior form of democracy, that they involve "the people" directly in government and give clear mandates to those in power. However, the people have far less interest in referendums that the politicians or the commentators. Average turnout at the 30-plus mayoral referendums has been under 30 per cent. In Scotland and Wales in 1997 on the historic issue of devolution, the polls were 60 and 50 per cent respectively. Here in the Republic, much lauded by British commentators for its use of referendums, the Nice Treaty was first rejected by a No vote of 18.7 per cent of those entitled to have a say, and months later approved by a Yes vote of barely 30 per cent of those on the register.
This convenient change of mind by "the people", and a similar earlier one in Denmark on the euro, show how meaningless a referendum vote can be. In none of these cases did a majority of the electorate exist either for or against the proposition. So much for the voice of the people. A referendum is plainly no way to decide a complex national policy issue which invariably arises as the culmination of earlier decisions and is part of a broad range of inter-related policies. By definition it has to demand a simple yes or no to an easily understood question, yet neither the euro nor the European convention is a self-contained proposition. To ask the public at large to pass judgment on such complex matters on the basis of, in many cases, no knowledge of the issues at all, or, at best, a crash course of a couple of weeks via the media, is not democracy.
The irony in the UK today is that the demand for referendums arises on the issues of the single currency and the European convention, both of which involve the question of parliamentary sovereignty. When John Major insisted on his opt out of the single currency at Maastricht, he did so explicitly to reserve to Parliament the power to decide when the UK would join; he was, he claimed, defending the sovereignty of Parliament. Much of the opposition to the European convention is similarly based on concern for the preservation of that same keystone of the British constitution, the sovereignty of the Westminster Parliament.
It will, in the end, be Parliament which decides both such issues after any referendum that might be held. But could Westminster say yes if the people had said no, or vice versa? As the Danish and Irish experiences have already shown, the referendum is essentially incompatible with representative parliamentary democracy, and can make a mockery of parliamentary sovereignty.