It’s the day of the second Lisbon Treaty referendum in Ireland, and polls suggest that the Irish people are going to vote yes on the second attempt, as they did with the Nice treaty a few years ago.
Love it or loathe it...
Eurosceptic commentators on both sides of the Irish Sea have argued that, whatever the result, the second referendum is illegitimate because the Irish have already answered the question, and said no. “So much for democracy“, they sneer, “if you have to vote over and over until you get the ‘right’ answer”.
This argument is self-evident if you believe in plebiscitary democracy, and full of holes if you don’t, because its flaws are also flaws in the idea of government by referendum. I wrote about the broader issue of rationalism v. popular will in June last year.
The starting point of the ‘no means no’ camp is that the People have spoken, and to ask them again is cynical and elitist impertinence. I think that’s wrong – in fact, I think you can’t run that argument without some pretty undemocratic assumptions.
Let’s accept that the Irish government want a yes, as they did in the first referendum, because they negotiated the treaty. We can assume they think it’s the best deal available for Ireland, and so the referendum isn’t a neutral yes/no vote – it’s asking “are you OK with what we’ve negotiated?”. Today’s referendum question is “Is what we’ve negotiated OK now, with these concessions?” – not quite the same as the first.
Let’s also leave aside the issue of inaccuracies in campaign materials. The ‘no’ campaign put out a lot of material that was plainly and obviously wrong, and that seemed to affect some voting intentions. Not great, but not a fatal flaw in the process – if we expected voters to have accurate information on issues before they voted, we’d have single-digit turnouts at every election. The ‘yes’ campaign should have been better at rebutting the smears, that was always going to be part of their job.
The real reason that the second referendum infuriates the ‘no’ camp because they feel that they won the first time and the Government (and wider European elites) are ruling out their victory and trying again. However, to take that position they have to – arrogantly, undemocratically – claim the right to interpret the public’s vote for them. I don’t think either side can claim the right to do that, and this is the critical flaw which turns most referendums into hurdles for elites to overcome rather than vital parts of the democratic process.
The fundamental problem is that no-one can parse the intention behind ‘no’ and ‘yes’ votes – a point made at the time of the first referendum by Charlie Beckett. Voters who voted ‘no’ might well have been thinking about gaining concessions and then voting ‘yes’ in another referendum – after all, that was exactly what had happened with Nice only seven years before. Some of them were certainly saying ‘no more European integration ever’ – but who can tell how many? The only information we have on voter intention comes from small-sample opinion polls after the vote, and if we are going to rely on those to make policy, let’s give Ben Page the keys to Downing Street right now, and save ourselves the trouble of debate.
The Irish will probably say ‘yes’ today when they said ‘no’ last year. It’s a nation’s privilege to change its mind, and no impartial democrat would think votes cast today are worth less than votes cast last year. The ‘no’ campaign think that they are, because the result that they agree with was true democracy and the result that they fear today is false consciousness, or bribery, or illegitimate. They know what the people meant, they say. They meant ‘don’t ask us again, even if the situation changes’. So much for democracy.
Those “concessions” are not legally binding. We are voting on the same text as June 2008. These concessions are false promises just like the promises the parties make to get into government!
The first referendum we had when we entered the EU was the wrong answer! We must have another one! So says the EU sceptic.