The one thing standing between the British people and a way out of the shambles in which they find themselves is a misunderstanding of democracy. The exit from Brexit is by way of a second popular vote – anything less would pollute British politics for at least a generation with the toxic taint of betrayal.
But there is a reluctance to go back on the moment when the “people’s will” was expressed, the decisive day of June 23rd, 2016. It is, on the surface, a decent kind of hesitancy: the Brexit vote was an impressive exercise in mass democracy. Civilised politics depend crucially on the willingness of the beaten side to accept the results of a vote they have lost.
But there is an enormous difference between a general election and a referendum or plebiscite. An election result is for the immediate future – it creates a mandate for a few years, one that will later be either renewed or annulled. It is by definition reversible.
It is also limited – the essence of democracy is not just that the majority forms a government but that it is still tightly constrained by courts, constitutions and the rights of minorities. Brexit, on the other hand, is not for the immediate future. It is for good. It is an entirely different kind of democratic gesture, one that purports to bind not just a short span of national history but many generations to come.
Trial and error
The Brexiteers' motto might be taken from Bob Dylan: "Don't think twice, it's alright." But it is patently not alright and thinking twice is the essence of real democracy. Democracy is innately humble. It is a system of trial and error. Its method is experimental.
Almost nothing that was promised is proving to be possible
As voters, we try this lot and see how they get on, knowing that if we have made a mistake, it can be corrected. We can try the other lot and see how they in turn get on. Democracy rests on the wisdom of the people – but equally on the ability of the people to regret and correct their own follies.
The Brexit vote, too, was an experiment – and the early results are coming in. Even for the true believers, they are obviously not what they were supposed to be. Almost nothing that was promised is proving to be possible.
Howls of derision
Conversely, nobody at all suggested in the referendum campaign that what Britain should seek is what it has now been reduced to pleading for: a subordinate status as a satellite of the EU, half in and half out, neither a full partner nor a free-standing state. If anyone had proposed in the run-up to June 2016 what Theresa May’s White Paper has proposed this week, there would have been howls of derision from all sides.
If Brexit had been a general election, the winning “party” would now be facing certain defeat. It made wild promises and has kept almost none of them. We can be pretty sure what “the people” would do – kick out that lot and put the other lot in.
So why is this way of thinking, so deeply ingrained in British electoral democracy, anathema when it comes to the Brexit vote? How come a perfectly normal democratic impulse has suddenly become an outrageous assault on democracy?
No return
The essential problem is that the notion of the Brexit vote as a point of no return appeals, for different reasons, to people on both the left and the right. There are reasons why Jeremy Corbyn is just as adamant in his opposition to a second referendum as Theresa May or Boris Johnson are.
For both the left and the right are drawn to the notion of Year Zero, a single point in time when history starts again from scratch. Corbyn and some of those around him have their emotional roots in revolutionary communism, in the idea of the single longed-for moment at which everything changes.
Brexit – which is essentially an ultra-Thatcherite project of deregulation – has completely the wrong content for this fantasy but it has the right form. In its own bizarre way, it is a kind of English revolutionary storming of the Bastille or the Winter Palace.
Autocrats
On the right, this idea of the single historic moment from which there is no going back has an even greater – and more contemporary – appeal.
Autocrats have been drawn to the "democratic" plebiscite ever since 1802 when French voters were asked to answer Yes or No to the question "Napoléon Bonaparte sera-t-il consul à vie?" –"Should Napoleon Bonaparte be consul for life?' Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Augusto Pinochet used such votes to try to legitimise their rule.
This is bad law, bad history and bad politics
But in our time, the "illiberal democracy" pioneered by Vladimir Putin has refined the idea. Once the strong man (Putin, Viktor Orbán, Recep Tayyip Erdogan) has taken power, he embodies the will of the people and is therefore entitled to control the media and the judiciary and crush dissent.
‘Saboteurs!’
It should not be forgotten that Theresa May tried a milder version of this last year. With the Brexit press howling classic revolutionary slogans – “Enemies of the people!”, “Saboteurs!” – at judges and dissenting parliamentarians, she called an election, not because she lacked a majority but because she wanted a supermajority, one in which there would be no more than token resistance to “the people’s will” for a hard Brexit. She failed – the British people still have more sense than to fall for this authoritarian rhetoric. But the consequences of that failure have still not sunk in for the Brexiteers. They still hanker after that once-and-for-all gesture, the notion that everything was transformed on June 23rd, 2016.
But this is bad law, bad history and bad politics. It is bad law because the Brexit vote was not properly speaking a referendum at all – it was a mere plebiscite. The UK does not have a written constitution that can be changed by referendum, so in that sense the vote itself changed nothing. It is bad history because these fantasies of a single irreversible moment of truth when all is changed, changed utterly, are always disastrous, whether they come from the left or the right.
The historical irony is that nothing is less durable than “eternal” moments of transformation – what always follows such moments is a profound instability. This eternity almost never lasts more than a few decades at most. And it is bad politics because fetishising the “will of the people” as a one-time-only offer undermines the right of the people to change its mind.
No longer valid
None of this is to dismiss the Brexit vote of 2016. It is simply to say that it has to be honoured by accepting that it can be undone only by an equivalent vote – this time on a much more concrete proposition.
The undeniable fact is that the proposition put to the UK electorate in 2016 is no longer valid. There is no quick-and-easy uncoupling with no divorce settlement to be paid. There is no ability to simply ignore the Belfast Agreement of 1998. There is no end to immigration. There is no queue of former British colonies dying to return to the embrace of the mother country with fabulously advantageous trade deals. There is no £350 million a week bonanza for the National Health Service.
There is only the horribly complicated, utterly compromised and ultimately humiliating Brexit offered in this week’s White Paper. Would the British people ever have voted for that? There is only one way to find out – ask them.