Referendums are the best way to decide heavyweight issues such as British membership of the EU and reform of the Japanese constitution.
Magazine version published in Nikkei Asian Review 12/5/2016
Should we stay or should we go – that is the question being asked in the fascinating and increasingly febrile debate about “Brexit”, as Britain’s potential departure from the European Union is known.
Goldman Sachs, David Cameron and Chinese President Xi Jinping are against it. The former head of the HSBC banking group, several members of Cameron’s cabinet and Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump are for it. The Confederation of British Industry says it would be bad for business. The former head of the British Chamber of Commerce says it would be beneficial.
If it happens, Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing would cut investment in the UK, but Toyota and Hitachi would not. David Petraeus, ex-head of the CIA, claims it would damage Western security while former head of MI6 Sir Richard Dearlove believes it would strengthen British security.
Celebrities want their say too. Sherlock Holmes, in the shape of Benedict Cumberbatch, and Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame want to stay. Roger Daltry of The Who and six times Oscar nominee Michael Caine say go.
The views off the biggest celebrity of all, Queen Elizabeth, are unclear but there are grounds for thinking she is a closet Eurosceptic.
Decision day is June 23rd when a referendum will settle this issue one way or another. So far the polls have been all over the place, with many people still undecided. The bookmakers’ odds, which are usually more reliable, favour “remain” by a decent margin but there is everything to play for over the coming weeks.
Referendums are very different affairs from elections. You are not voting for a person or a party, but an idea. Furthermore your vote is not subject to the vagaries of an electoral system in which a few “battleground” constituencies decide the outcome. All votes have equal worth: winning 37% of them will not bring victory, as it did for David Cameron‘s Conservative Party in 2015.
Professional politicians are no longer bound by party loyalty and strange new coalitions are formed. This has happened in Britain with the “Stronger in Europe” and “Vote Leave” campaign groups, both of which contain figures associated with Cameron’s ruling Conservative Party and also members of the opposing Labour and Liberal Democratic Parties. .
The behaviour of the general public changes equally dramatically. When great issues are at stake, even people who are normally disengaged from the political process join the fray. In the 2014 referendum over Scottish independence the turnout ratio reached 85%, a full 30% higher than in the recent election for the Scottish parliament. Almost everybody had a view and almost everybody voiced it.
TWO CHEERS FOR DIRECT DEMOCRACY
Referendums are an exercise in “direct democracy”, in which the public decides issues itself rather than through the processes of “representative democracy”, where ordinary people elect politicians to take their decisions for them. Amongst countries that have been continuously democratic since the 1940s, only Germany, India, Israel, Japan and the United States have not used them at the national level. The US does use them extensively at the local level.
The world’s leading exponent of referendums is Switzerland, which holds them regularly to decide matters great and small, from the financing of the rail network to the legality of abortion. The Swiss have held 17 separate referendums this century, most of which have decided multiple questions. This predilection for “direct democracy” has been written into the Swiss constitution since 1865. It may or may not be coincidental that Switzerland has subsequently experienced no revolutions, wars or periods of political instability.
Britain is unusual in not having a written constitution. Instead the British constitution is said to have evolved organically – in other words, we make it up as we go along. The first ever referendum in Britain, also about EU membership, took place in 1975. Since then there have been eleven major referendums on constitutional issues and over thirty local ones on questions such as pub licensing hours and the direct election of mayors.
All this is part of the New British Constitution, according Vernon Bogdanor, the doyen of British constitutional scholars, in his book of the same name. One of its key features is that on certain fundamental issues, the people acting through referendum take on the function of a third chamber of the legislature, in addition to the upper and lower houses.
The rationale for this injection of direct democracy into what was once a purely representative system is social change. Ordinary people are better-informed than before and much less deferential towards their supposed betters. As in many countries politicians have become a separate class with little experience of other walks of life.
More generally a large and widening gap has opened up between the elites and the rest of society in terms of wealth, power and values. Referendums are a way of re-democratizing important issues that have been removed from mainstream political discourse. In so doing they bring the elites down to earth and spike the guns of populist politicians and movements.
JAPANESE SECURITY UNDER PRESIDENT TRUMP
Regardless of the result of the Brexit referendum, the intense national debate followed by a likely high turnout of voters should prove to be a healthy extension of British democracy. There are obvious implications for Japan, where Prime Minister Abe is seeking to reform Japan’s pacifist constitution. The process of constitutional change requires a two thirds majority in both Japan’s Upper and Lower House and a majority vote in a referendum.
Last summer over 200 constitutional scholars declared that Abe’s new security laws – which give Japanese forces some modest ability to help defend allies – were unconstitutional. Furthermore many of the scholars believe that the maintenance of any military capability is unconstitutional. It seems clear that Japan’s current constitution is not fit for twenty first century purpose. Growing Chinese assertiveness and the possibility of the isolationist Donald Trump winning the US presidency should add urgency to the case for reform.
A national debate and referendum on constitutional change would be a golden opportunity to extend and enrich Japanese democracy. The current constitution was imposed by the American occupiers after the end of Second World War. The previous one was manufactured by a group of oligarchs who grabbed power in the coup d’etat known as the Meiji Restoration of 1868. If Abe offers the Japanese people a voice in determining the forms of their own governance, it would be for the first time since Japan’s mythical first emperor arrived on the scene in 660 B.C.