A.C. Grayling | Full Address and Q&A | Oxford Union

[Music] [Applause] well thank you very much indeed Aristotle no lesser person tells us that when we're about to address an audience we should give them some reason to believe that we know what we're talking about so I just like to preface my remarks by saying that they are predicated on on two things one is I recently wrote a book called democracy and it's crisis which was prompted by the election of Donald Trump in America and by the brexit referendum here in 2016 and I'm now writing a sequel to it called the good State which is on political and constitutional reform and indeed that feeds into the topic of my talk this afternoon and the the second thing is that I have the very very interesting privilege of chairing the coordinating group of all the National remainer organizations in the UK so this shows you that I'm not entirely neutral on the question of brexit which may emerge during the course of my remarks and so having given you some reason to believe that I've given some thought to what I'm just about to tell you I'm going to launch into my account and given that we have a relatively short amount of time to have a big subject I get to do it in the following way I'd like to remind you of something that happened in 2016 in the referendum process that we had in that year and if you go back in need to the discussion in the House of Commons on the referendum bill for that referendum and the discussions as you know took place in June 2015 if you go back to the publication at the House of Commons briefing paper number oh 7 - 1 - should you wish to look it up on on the internet which was published on the 3rd of June 2015 in preparation for that debate in the house so I just mentioned to you that the House of Commons Faye helpfully produces these briefing papers for MPS in relatively short sentences simple words and so answer that MPs can understand what the bill is that they might hear about in that's a common sense very few of them actually read all the detail and if you look at that briefing paper you will see in section five of it that it points out that on constitutional grounds referendums are only and can only be advisory this is because of the sovereignty of Parliament now in the discussion section we may go to the question of the sovereignty of the UK Parliament which has been affected somewhat by membership of the EU and also by devolution of powers to strata and Wales and Northern Ireland but the the short conclusion of a discussion about sovereignty is that the Parliament of the United Kingdom retains absolute sovereignty as we see from the current situation at the moment of Parliament seeking to take back powers that it had shared or sequestered in the interests of a larger project so because Parliament is sovereign it cannot yield to any other body or process an overruling or trumping power so referendums can only be advisory so this is pointed out in section 5 of that briefing paper and section 6 adds the thought not in exactly these terms but in more circumstantial fashion that if there was any suggestion that a referendum would be regarded as binding and its outcome in any way then it would be wise to have either a supermajority requirement or a threshold requirement and and presumably the authors of the briefing paper had included that section because a political commitment had been made by the then Prime Minister David Cameron to the effect that whatever the outcome of the referendum it would be honored by by his government so in the House of Commons later in that month I think he was on 16th of June 2015 the then Minister for Europe mr. Livington said in answer to a question on the floor of the house that the referendum was only advisory and that was why there was no provision in the bill for the referendum for a threshold or a supermajority so it sort of put those there's two points up on the on the the desk top of the screen of your mind so to speak so you can remember it because they are crucial to an understanding of a claim I'm about to make which is that the referendum of 2016 and a few months later the election of Donald Trump the United States of America are symptoms of a of a failure in our democratic order and to explain that a little bit more fully in 2014 the Scottish independence referendum you may remember had a an electorate and franchised for the referendum which included people of aged 16 and up on the grounds that their future was going to be very considerably affected by the outcome of that referendum and it also included citizens of other EU countries who live work paid their taxes married to Scots people have fought his children and so on in Scotland because their futures too would be considerably affected by the outcome of that referendum now the idea that a referendum electorate ought to be one that gives a voice to all those who will be materially affected by the outcome of the referendum is a principle which seems to have a good deal in its favour the electorate enfranchised for the 2016 referendum EU referendum was a general election electorate despite the fact that they're being considerable discussion beforehand as to whether the electorate ought to be enriched to take account of the fact that there were other constituencies of people whose interests would be very greatly affected by the outcome including expats British expats who've been living abroad for 15 years or more and who had been promised repeatedly that they would be rien franchise for general elections and referendums in this country having for some reason being excluded early on and also there was the question it was debated it was discussed that 16 euros on the same grounds as had been appealed to in the case of the Scottish independence referendum should be included in the EU referendum and it was decided to exclude them because the group interested group on the right of the Conservative Party felt that you admit them would be to incorporate a natural remain element that would be distorting of the outcome so the the electorate for that referendum was a straightforward standard general election electorate what was the outcome of that referendum well the outcome was the 37 percent of those and franchised voted to leave 37 percent of the total electorate voted to leave on the day the vote was 51.9% in favor of leave but the fact that the proportion of the electorate was 37 percent is one that raises very serious and interesting questions after all it is the law in this country that a trade union can only have a strike if it is merited all its members and 40% or more of its members agree to the strike or support the idea of a strike so a threshold requirement is built-in to trade union legislation for the very good reason that we need to protect ourselves against minority arian influence that is if just a small group of activists in the phrase union militantly in favour of having a strike and bomb was held then of course it would be against the interests of many of the members whose livelihoods would be affected against the interests of the company affected by the strike and so on and so the idea of a threshold as a protection against minority area and over influence is a very important one but that wasn't despite despite the points made in the briefing paper put out by those Commons that point wasn't taken on board the 2011 Parliament Act which gives us fixed term Parliament's now says that if there is to be a general election outside the turf a period of the of the Parliament there has to be a 66% approval of dissolution and a new general election of all sitting members of the House of Commons 66% and the reason for that very high bar very high supermajority requirement is that a general election can change the future course of the country because the sitting government might be ousted a new government come in and a new set of policies instituted and therefore to protect the sitting government against and protect the country against an arbitrary change of direction very high bar is put in place so I'm going to leave that on the desktop of the screens of your mind as well the fact that trade union legislation and legislation affecting the activities of parliament have in place either thresholds or supermajority requirements on grounds that you might think apply to a referendum of such a consequential nature as the EU referendum secondly those in place now why is it that the arrangements made for the 26 2016 referendum didn't include these considerations why were they taken seriously well this alerts us to something of interest which is that every referendum that we've had in this country since 1975 has been held on a slightly different basis there is no clarity and consistency there is no fixed order for referendums and understandings of their outcome each one is as it were made up as we go along and that is a very serious and worrying point firstly of course in a representative democracy such as we have here where the adjective representative does a very great deal of work referendums are not native there are in fact rather contradictory to representative democracies as you know the whole point of a representative democracy is that the that those enfranchised in the society with a vote will send to the legislature people who have a job of work to do on behalf of those who send them that the job of working question is to get information to listen to advice and an argument to discuss to form a judgment and to act in the best interests of the country and of constituents overall the idea of representation is the idea that with the complexities of public policy matters in a government of a country and sometimes serious decisions that affect many hundreds of thousands or millions of people the process of deciding debating and deciding must be one which is conducted in a very responsible manner if you have a very small society to go back to Russo's idea of the ideal democracy which is a group of men and standing underneath the tree in a swiss canton somewhere coming to a decision about how the village is going to be run then as he Russo himself points out that is the ideal but as he Russo himself also points out it doesn't scale and so if you have a large and populous and numerous country the representative system as a great deal to recommend it for the reasons that I've just outlined so referendums are not native to representative democracies and the question of the constitutional effect of referendums outcome and it's the relationship of that effect to the duties of the responsibilities of the legislature and the executive in the Constitution becomes a very tricky one but the fact that that referendums can be held is a an indication of one kind of problem that needs to be discussed because there are two there are problems about the people and the personnel and the practices of a political and constitutional order and there are questions about the institutions of a constitutional order and I want to argue that in our Westminster model democracies there are problems with both those things the fact that we hold referendums at all is a simple failure in the political constitutional order the fact that the referendums have been held on different basis one after the other instead of there being the clarity and consistency I mentioned is another symptom and also the fact that the institutions themselves no longer seem to protect the people of the country or the overall policy for a framework meant to be operative in the interests of the country is a an indication or a symptom of a problem with the institutions also as an example of that let me remind you that in the United States of America presidents are elected by an electoral college the Electoral College is based on non proportionally on a state's basis not on a overall population basis in November of 2016 Hillary Clinton received more than three million votes more than Donald Trump did in the popular vote but he received the right votes in the right places for the electoral college vote and therefore was elected president I just remind you and the more significant point that the electoral college was instituted by the founders of the United States to ensure that ignorant childish narcissistic self-centered boorish sex Harrises wouldn't get into the White House celibacy it's working very well so the the that fact itself would be a reason for thinking that they're functioning at the institutions leave something to be desired and that we need to dig into it and my argument is that when we do dig into it we find that there are even greater problems so let me take a step back now and say why I used the expression Westminster model well as you know we in these blessed islands have for a long time until fairly recently anyway regarded with the great deal of self-satisfaction our parliamentary system which you've exported to well over 50 countries around the world as a result of our imperial activities in the last couple of centuries and one of those Westminster model countries is actually the United States of America you may be surprised to know that but that was very quickly remind you but the founding fathers of the United States looked to to map England obviously had the experience of being under English British rule for all its history until their revolution and in particular to the writings of John Locke and of Montesquieu Montesquieu was the greater admirer himself of what he thought was the constitutional settlement of 1688 in this country and it was he who gave the idea to the Americans that there should be four balancing organs of of the Constitution so there should be a legislature there should be a an executive and the legislature should have two arms so that there can be some balancing and second thoughts available there so a House of Representatives of the Senate and there should be a judiciary which is itself independent and which has a an input into whether the behavior of the state is in conformity with its own constitution so the idea of our House of Representatives a senator presidency and a Supreme Court and independent judiciary was the model and it was based on the model of King Lords Commons and judiciary in England so these were meant to be separate in both Locke and Montesquieu insisted on the tremendous importance of the separation of powers between these four branches so the executive the crown in England and the presidency in America was to be independent of the legislature in United States of America that independence persists no member of the other legislature either the House of Representatives or the Senate can be a minister can be in the government the President appoints his cabinet and his his ministry from outside and then the judiciary is meant to be independent of both legislature and executive but in this country and all the fault really of George the first not speaking English the separation of powers between executive and legislature collapsed and the executive is drawn from the majority in the legislature in in the English Parliament and in all those Parliament's modelled on it other than the American one and the result is that the legislature is the creature of the executive and not an independent body that holds the executive to account and monitors its activity and restrains its activity and that is a very very serious fault with the system that collapse in the separation of powers in the United States of America the collapse and the separation of powers operates between the political process overall and the judiciary I have only to mentioned the word cabinet and you will see that the appointments of the Supreme Court are highly political you may not know this but in the last two years of the last Obama presidency 2nd Obama presidency the Senate Judiciary Committee which is controlled by the Republican Party blocked appointments that Obama was attempting to make to the appeal to appeal court seats in the different appeal districts of the United States and since the Trump election the Senate Judiciary Committee under the influence of Mitch McConnell has been filling those appeal court judges seats with young Republican judges who will be there for a very long time and therefore would have a great influence on the the character of the social fabric of the United States as indeed will the fact that the Supreme Court now has a and an asymmetry in the left-right balance on it the fact that these are in effect political appointments and that therefore the separation of powers has failed in that direction is in itself very significant so in both cases both in the the UK style version of the of the model which by the way is replicated in Canada Australia and India as I said over 50 countries mainly of the of the provisional Empire of the Commonwealth and in America we see that the fundamental conception of the kind of Constitution which eventually evolved into a representative Constitution has image embedded in its foundations some difficulties which need to be addressed in our own case in in the UK if the if the institutions that is to say the Parliament an executive if the separation of powers that existed there that Rome enter exist there did indeed exist then question of how public policy is executed would be very different and it raises the question whether or not it would even have been conceivable that there should be a referendum on EU membership given the fact that the question about EU membership is one which is so complex and which requires such detailed thought about the consequences of one direction of travel as against another that it really does need very careful and well-informed discussion you will remember that the campaign in favor of leaving the EU that the nature of the campaign itself raises a number of questions about legalities and claims that well fulfil a bill and so on but leaving those aside if you were to ask what was the program that was offered to people other than merely leaving the EU and then we see there wasn't one no plans no program no road map no assessments of impacts no costings nothing whatever just a yes/no in/out kind of question and the other problem with that and the reason why a representative system is and should be so much more effective than using or appealing to referendums is the following this is something else which is just has it we're taking the skin off of the problems with our our system and that is the advent of social media as a platform for doing what has already been done of in the way of propaganda and argument and information in this information and that's always been part of the political process but it has weaponized it a you and they very properly a much better than I but I tell you the following anecdote that a friend of mine came over last year from New York and he said to me you know he said them I put into my Google Calendar an appointment I was going to have it as clinic in Manhattan and for the next three days I was bombarded with advertisements from my local crematorium and hephaestus is very comical until you think about it a little bit that Google or its algorithms at least know what the clinic deals with and they know what the specialist of the clinic deals with and they know whether or he's been there before and they're now our old years and they put it all together and decided he should talk into his local crematorium which is a bit chilling when you think about it and it's an indication of something that we also all know but perhaps don't reflect on enough which is that um these systems that we make such a very good use of Facebook and Twitter and what's happened and so on and collect data about us individually and collective and analyze them they know more about us than we know about ourselves that's almost a dead certainty if I said to you what were you doing it you know about four o'clock on Wednesday afternoon five years ago in February you would be pretty output to remember but I can pretty damn sure the Google or Yahoo or somebody will know so this this a you know a glommer a ssin of information about individuals which when you think about the tremendous power and utility of big data work big data analytics a fantastic tool for epidemiology and for scientific research and so it's a marvelous tool but it's also used by and organizations for other and further purposes the the data is sold on by Facebook and these these other service providers and you will get perhaps a company as it might be Cambridge that living at never dream of an Oxford analytical doing this Cambridge and earlier will have a look at this data and it will be able to to and start identifying groups of people so we'll see you you'd like guns you want more of them so does that lady there and says gentleman at the back so it could make it a group of you it can test messaging to you and a good micro target messaging but I promise you you can have as many guns as you'd like now I know you don't like taxation notice the lady behind you and another gentleman at the back so I can micro target messaging to you about taxation and so on and so on immigration all sorts of other things and in this way I can aggregate micro targeted groups of people into a single block the matter talkative groups may not know of one another at all or care about one another will be interested in one another but I've got them I've abrogated them into support for me and the importance of this is as follows in almost every election or referendum you've got your Clinton Trump in out you know up and down blocks people have usually made up their minds having a vote and they may for that reason tune out of the campaigns obviously campaigns just boring they've already decided but in between them there is a group of people who have made up their minds or who could be persuaded differently or who could be influenced and if you can get just enough of them to shift in one direction or the other you can win and this is because elections and referendums are typically won on extremely small margins and so if you can identify the right people and if you can test at home and make the target messaging to them in a way that social media now makes far more effective than has ever been the case before with newspaper advertisements and billboards and television party political broadcasts and so on if you can do it now with this powerful new weapon you can have a major effect and indeed that we've seen from what we know about what happened in the 2016 referendum that this was extremely successfully done by the leave campaign who were able to focus most of their resource almost all their resources in fact on a relatively small number of people about 7 million people hoping to get several hundred thousand people to shift and they did this in the last ten days of the campaign they were successful you will know if you have Seth illogical interests that the turnout on a polling day in the general election or a referendum will drop by a perfectly predictable percentage if it rains on that day for some reason there's a very very clearly identifiable group of people who do not like to get their feet wet on polling day in London on the fatal day of the 23rd of June 2016 the drained all day and in fact it rained more and more and more as the day went by the drop in the churn address exactly predictable and the drop in the turnout in London alone was larger than the margin by which leave 1 so if you if you are very clever about how you're going to use these tools to influence the system which is which is vulnerable to influence because of the way it's constructed because of the way the electorate has been defined and so on you know that you can manipulate a result and this raises questions about the robustness of our democratic processes and therefore that is yet another reason to be looking at those processes and asking ourselves questions about them more conscious the fact that that we don't have a huge amount of time but I do really want one to mention that in addition to the institutional questions and I've only just skimmed the surface they're talking about that the system of representation and about the the separation of powers issue in the Westminster model and so on there a number of other institutional questions that we need to address and the very great importance of them is this if you go back to the beginning of book 2 of Divis history of Rome you will see him say there that the great importance of the expulsion of the Tarquins the Kings from Rome was that what was put in place of rule by men was ruled by law now that is a very very profound a point because to construct practical institutions and a legal framework which constrains and limits what individual human beings new when they're when they populate those institutions is a very important safeguard against bad government if you if the purposes of government are and this is a another point that we could we could explore and discuss but if the purposes of government are and to provide just laws in a stable framework of life for people in a society and to act in the interests of everybody all the minorities that make up a society as a society there was a confederation of different interests and generations and so on if those are the purposes of government you want to ensure that you constrain the individuals who pull the levers of government by having a proper constitutional and institutional framework to do it and so if there are things wrong with the structure of the Constitution then they need to be addressed and that is a point that we can explore further but I just want to say something about the the people and practices that's the sort of people who who go into politics and why they do there are many there are many points that one can raise here for example careerism Impala jeez if you happen to land a safe seat in parliament you can you've got a job for life and you don't have to do a damn thing except turn up at your constituency surgery you know every Friday for certain number of weeks in the year or you can get you can get into into Parliament and be very ambitious to become a minister or perhaps even the Prime Minister and in order to do that what do you have to do well think of this there are 650 MPs in the British House of Commons there's one Prime Minister and a couple of dozen cabinet ministers so to get anywhere near the top of the greasy pole you've got to be reasonably firmly attached to the buttocks of the person just above you on the resi pole in order to achieve that altitude that means compromising any principles that you might have had of the outset it means obeying the party line it means obeying the width not jeopardizing your career remember if you rebel against the the whips in the House of Commons you are in danger of losing your job you might be you might lose the whip and therefore they're not going to support you at the next election and they might it might spoil your chances of a ministerial career and so individual MPs are very leery about annoying the whips in any case of course the whips find out everything they can about you and then threaten you with exposure in the Daily Mail if you don't behave and so on it's a very normal practice I don't know whether you know this but the Palace of Westminster lies outside the common law of England so practices that are outlawed in any workplace other than the Palace of Westminster are permissible in the Palace of Westminster and they're used so the net effect of career ISM and party discipline and again those of you who historians hear of our fair land will know that as the franchise increased during the course of the 19th century party organization increased the importance of party discipline became paramount and now the the whipping system the party discipline system and the idea of a career in politics has the following net effect that members of parliament tend to represent the interests of their party line as often and sometimes perhaps more often than the interests of their country of their constituency and that is a direct effect of the way the politics is organized if people were only allowed to stand for Parliament once for one turn that would instantly put an end to career ISM you might say well then what about people of great gifts who could become great statesmen or great States women and who would you know give the kind of leadership that we've only very rarely seen well I agreed that that is a point but it reminds me of a story told by a hand Fey those of you who read ancient Chinese may remember the story in ham fades of the of the farmer who was plowing in his field in the middle of which has stood a tree and as he was ploughing he saw a hare racing across the field and it smashed him to the tree and broke its neck and died and so he cooked it in deserts and it was so delicious that he put his plow to one side and sat by the tree and waited for the next well the point of the story that Hannah Fey tells is that to wait for the great statesman to come along in the hope that doesn't matter about the Constitution or the political process but some great leader will eventually emerge is that's that's bad bad strategy now what you have to do is make sure the institutions will deliver good government they're not hope that another hair will come racing along so this idea that we should do something about the party whipping system I mean here's another simple example you will know from your bemused observance of what's been happening in Parliament over recent weeks that our system our parliamentary system is very archaic and very laborious and the forms of practices in parliament are such that you ever constitutes the executive of the day as an absolute stranglehold on processing it's incredibly difficult for for Parliament even a majority in parliament to get in the way of a determined executive if it wants to get its way just think of this one simple solution electronic voting you press a button if you're going to say yes or no then you go to bat and see buddy yes button and a no button and you press whichever one you you happen to be in favor of at the moment and supposing the voting is anonymous of the whips can't pick up on you for rebelling in other words MPs will be voting their judgment much more than they would be voting their career interests that could transform the face of of politics I mean there are all sorts of there's in fact a whole pixelation of things that one could think of that would modernize and bring up to date and make more flexible and responsive the the system so that the people who populate the system will behave better or with that we will get better out of them at the moment and we don't we have an archaic system which traps people into doing things and we know that the majority of members of parliament are remains and yet we've seen too nearly three years now of mayhem as a result of the fact that they want to keep party cohesion because that's you know much important than anything else I want to look after their careers they the unthinkable idea of a new alliance across party even a temporary one to try to rescue the country from the difficulty even that seems almost impossible to achieve and so thinking about the people side and the way that they conduct themselves is also an important point of reform so I will end on this point now and I know that I'm gabbling often I'm sorry we have an uncodified Constitution in this country some people miss describe it as an unwritten Constitution it's not exactly correct because some parts of our constitutional order are in fact written down in the form of statutes and so on but we also have a set of precedents and practices and traditions which have been very well described as the set of understandings that nobody understands and that of course has been precisely of great utility two successive executives who can pretty well do what they like and make things up as they go wrong as we see from the referendums that we've held in this country since the 1970s I mean some of them have had thresholds and some not and some have included 16 euros or some large and so on so but the very fact that there is inconsistency and that they're very patchy in their nature and application should be a big red flag about how we are conducting ourselves here so the question of codifying the Constitution is a very very complex one more than ten years ago during the time that Gordon Brown was prime minister he invited a group of people of whom I was one should go to Downing Street to discuss the possibility of a written constitution that was the phraseology used and at that meeting at the very first thing that happened in that meeting was that the question was was put to these special advisers who were there mr. Brown's advisers and the question was this do you want to try to write down our Constitution and try to set out exactly what all the aspects of it are that would be very complex matter it would throw up the need for a lot of primary legislation to regularize our activities as a state but it would be politically unconscious nobody's going to mind if we did the scholarly Joe of just trying to make things down we would find ourselves faced with the following difficulty but the House of Commons is elected by a plurality system first-past-the-post system which as you know is disastrous it's what elects the House of Representatives in United States of America if you need persuading by the way here's the example constituency of 100 voters 10 people stand 8 get 8 vote it get 10 votes each one gets 9 one gets 11 the person who gets 11 votes goes to Parliament 89 people out of 100 are unrepresented completely a vote for a losing candidate in the first-past-the-post system is a nugatory but worth nothing this happens here and in the US had in Canada and India and a number of other places and it's deeply unrepresentative in the case of the United States is made worse by the fact that the states there define the congressional districts that's the constituencies and they are so gerrymandered in most of the states of the United States of America that some fantastic percentage I've read over 90% of seats in the House of Representatives never change hands from one party to another as a result of this so that system is very very unreasonable so in this country we have a plurality for the 1/2 of a system for the House of Commons and we have almost every single other kind of proportional voting system for almost everything else if we do for European elections for devolved assembly elections for mayors even in the House of Commons itself they use proportional representation systems of voting to vote for chairs of select committees and so on so it's not as though they haven't heard of it before although they're not used to it they do it but they stick to the original first-past-the-post system for this very good reason that it guarantees a two-party system and excludes third parties and people say that even though it is very unrepresentative it gives artificial majorities to one party or the other and therefore you get and I quote strong government which we have been witnessing in recent times strong government and that coalition governments which are produced by proportional representation systems are undesirable every almost every single successful state and economy in the world and is has government's elected by proportional representation and they have coalition governments there are one or two states Italy and Israel stand out which have PR systems that produce very unstable government because very small groups in the legislature can influence the government but you know it's not beyond the which of human beings to devise a PR system that deals with that problem and indeed you know have sa a posse we see plenty of examples of such cases Germany for example has a system which produces a stable government and a successful economy so so we can see that there are great advantages to be had in codifying at least part of the Constitution that part of it which deals with how our government order is arranged and any Constitution and one of the reasons why in this country there's been such reluctance to have a codified Constitution any Constitution has the of the primary purpose of defining and thereby limiting the powers of the executive and of the legislature of government and that as we see from the misuse to which our Westminster model constitutions have been put in in recent years and their vulnerabilities as a kind of manipulation we talked about with the weaponizing of the usual political propaganda and and so on we need greater protections against it and codification would provide that now I've skated extremely fast over a lot of different topics and I'm sure you and others will want to pick me up on some of them but thank you very much [Applause] thank you so much for the speech professor so if I made to keep it brief I want to focus on one concept that you've raised in that and that's their concept of legitimacy so on the brakes of a friend of in particular so the brakes of referendum had the highest number of votes casts since 1992 generation which elected John Mayer and the Conservative government and more people voted to leave you leave the European Union their ever voted for any government or deed any previous referendum but taking your statement that the seventeen point four million votes for leave weren't enough reaction to be legitimate because of how it was based on a restrictive franchised akin to a general election electorate is the logical quarry that assertion that no UK government itself could ever be legitimate well innocent it's a rather an interesting question in a way because UK governments have historically been elected on minorities of the electorate certainly and even in some cases of the popular vote of them the actual vote cast on the day and this is a feature of our system which raises very serious question marks it raises a question which lies alongside the point about numbers and that is whether we think a democracy is a system in which the processes involved give the consent of the people to government which is a phrase used by Jefferson in his writing of the American Constitution or whether the people are actually licensing and entitling another group of people to go and do a job of work on their behalf and these are two very very different concepts and it's the first concept which has been relied upon in our very undemocratic system where a government based which has a substantial majority of the seats in the House of Commons on about 40 percent of the of the vote and perhaps a smaller percentage of the total electorate nevertheless can regard itself as having the consent of the people because people don't rise in rebellion against them but if you wanted to argue that a democracy should be such that the the actual will the choices the preferences of the people the voices of the people have been heard and are reflected in the legislature and in the executive then our system has always been from that point of view at a great highly questionable then the consequence of that immolation to the price of aid is that again you said that the justification was the people voted to leave but it was only 37% that did so and that's a betrayal of the people to follow for 37% but wouldn't it be an even bigger betrayal of the people to ignore the 37% and follow the decision of the 34% they voted no I don't think so because that the point is not about the that the relative percentage of the two groups of people who went out to vote that the point is whether or not regarding a vote of a little over a third of the total electorate is sufficient to trigger a major constitutional change now the interesting point is this I pointed out right at the outset that all referendums are advisory constitutionally speaking politically speaking they may be denominated as mandating and indeed David Cameron said we're going to forget to follow the outcome of the referendum so what was the outcome of the referendum was it that it wasn't at fifty one point nine percent of the people had chosen to leave the EU because the 37 percent of the electorate represent twenty six percent of the people so if you are a responsible government and you're thinking yourself right in a constitutionally this is an advisory referendum we've had the advice of twenty six percent of the total population to do X shall we do it shall we on the basis of the plans programs roadmaps costings impact studies and so on that weren't done before the referendum shall we leave the EU that is the question so then taking that in the context of your assertion that Parliament is sovereign and no other body in the state is suffering and that you accuse the government of acting in an illegitimate political way by following the advisory referendum in the 2017 snap general election the conservative manifesto explicitly pledged to negotiate breaks it and then leave the lady manifesto explicitly said that it would accept the results of their friend and leave with certain conditions and protections being met the SMP manifesto said that it would proceed with the bracele negotiations and then have a Scottish independence referendum the Liberal Democrats even themselves so that they would have a final referendum after negotiations and the DUP of course supported breaks in its entire form so why is it that would it be illegitimate for the Parliament which is the only sovereign body to keep its manifesto commitments across the five parties and still leave the European Union well the counter-argument to that would be to say that each of the parties might reflect on the fact that none of them achieved the majority and that that looks as though there was no there was no uniform preference in the country for any of the reforms not not not that any of them had been explicator dat that point for what what breaks it might actually mean I mean what's very interesting is that the two main parties of the Conservatives and the Labour Party had and both of them lost the election and it was only because the the the the the sitting government was able to persuade a minor party to give it a comfort in supply arrangement that it is still in government now but also by the way raises very serious questions because if a government goes to the country and loses his majority even on our rather ramshackle electoral system at the moment what legitimacy does it have what kind of claim the only legitimacy it can claim is the one that it gets from getting a partner by in effect entering into coalition the fact that we've had in effect coalition governments for most of the last nine years in this country is by itself a symptom of the fact that the the people of the country the people who were enfranchised and who vote are no longer satisfied with giving the consent to a minority government in the country business or the case that if the majority of people voted for a party which actively supported leaving European Union how could it possibly be more legitimate to remain following that generalization well it's because you wouldn't wish I think to argue that a policy which was mooted by a government by a political party in the election let us say 10 years or 50 years or 100 years ago should be because it received some support in the electorate should still apply now then that argument would make us say that when the 1975 referendum was held on European membership which had a 67 percent majority in favor of doing so and that was greater than the 40 percent the threshold not that it had put in place a threshold but that should still be binding now you know the point is that in a democracy we are always up for and invited to and encouraged indeed to contest under our view and to try to change things so I mentioned at the outset this business about all the remain organizations in the in the UK which have done consistently done polling and focus groups and the findings of that are very much aligned with the the public ones like you govern and the others which have shown that the majority in favour of EU membership which only very very temporarily switched to a majority for leave just in the days before the 2016 referendum and presumably something to do with the success of the campaign and then switch back to a remain majority that that remain majority is grown and grown so if one were to be if one would be very forceful about this one would say look let us be sure that the decision that the electorate made on the 23rd of June 2016 is stable and stands it's a bit like the kind of situation you would want if we had legal physician assisted suicide here and you wanted to check that a person who asked for euthanasia whether they still think that that's the right course so how would you check that if you don't think we should have another referendum to check that and you don't think that if we have another general election and all the party supported it that would be legitimate no I do think we should have sorry to interrupt you but I do think we should have another referendum I'm no friend to referendum so for the reason that I pointed out that in a representative democracy really our our representatives should be doing the job of that we require of them and III let me just make one little footnote remember I come back to this but don't let me get away from the second referendum point which is that if there is one thing you know I think the European Union has many flaws and faults in their needs reform and so on but I'm a great admirer if it's ideal which is for peace and progress and for unity and cooperation and so on so I'm I'm very very much in favor of that but if I had one complaint about it it is that because of the collective activity of the European Union as a whole on matters of of economic policy and trade what one result has been that the predictable debates in member states have changed character over over time so if you would go back before 1970 before 1970 in this country there were tremendous ideological battles between might and left over the direction of the country and they have the economy ought to be won and so on and socialist arguments about the commanding heights then persuaded more people than they do now and so you have these great divisions the result of membership of the EU has been that those great ideological battles no longer take place and one consequence of that is that the proportion of people who go into politics since politics has been a less exciting and a less influential thing who were not actually first rate has risen and if you were to read a Simon Jenkins column in The Guardian today or yesterday forgive where was where he talks about the very impoverished quality of MPs well I think there's a certain justice to that and that might be a symptom of how things have changed so so that does raise a question about our representatives having the responsibility and the duty to do the work do the due diligence get you know a really good rich well informed discussion going and on that basis thinking what is really in the interests of everybody and of the country and its future that's how it should be but successive Parliament's have slacked off that responsibility by having referendums which have crude very crude instruments especially for dealing with things of this complexity but now that we're in that game and now that we're in a situation where the country's so deeply and bitterly divided and and we've seen the the wreckage of our governmental and political order over the last two and half years I mean it's an embarrassing situation that we're in in this country the only solution is to go back and say now now you know much more now you've got a lot of more information now you've heard a great deal more argument many more facts and claims and false facts and so on have come out now you've had a time to think about this what do you what do you think are you do you want to go on with this or do you want to stop and I think that now that is the only way forward do you think that referendum should have the same go person markers as the 2016 referendum or should it be with a supermajority with an enfranchised electorate do you the conditions to be settled well there is a debate to be had about whether we go just too exactly for the same people as before or whether we acknowledge the fact that there are vitally interested groups of people who are here to be really affected by the outcome and give them a voice you know one one really significant point that any democracy that wishes to be thought of as a democracy must take seriously is this a vote is a voice and and if you have about you have you an entitlement to your voice to be heard in a plurality system like ours all the losing votes are silent there have been disenfranchised but by the system and it's terribly important that the the overall preferences and there will be great diversity and there's a lot of competing interests and desires and needs in society levels of grasp of the implications of using your vote one way rather than another but there should be some kind of permutation some sum over the totality that tells us something about what the the national preference is the national sentiment is in a way the genuinely reflects it the first-past-the-post system doesn't do that so I would have long winded way of saying yes I would myself think that that people who are going to be affected by the outcome should have a say so then the final question I've got if we open up to the floor is there if you then change the goalposts before having this act frontin what do you think the consequences are for civil society and the trust and democracy for those seventeen point four million people who voted to leave who now think that the system is being changed to reverse their decision and see the vote that way that is a good point and it suggests that it might in this case be that you do one of the following two things that less complicated one is you have the same you have the same electorate the other is that you distinguish between the same electorate and the people who were denied a voice the last time round that if there was some way of differentiating these two groups of people and then you could see whether you get an overall majority from when you sum both whether their majorities in both groups but you know that could raise the difficulty that you have a majority for X in one and Y in the other and then you ought to work that out but you know that there are imaginative ways that you could deal with the problem we certainly need them now but it's just a you know what do you think the consequences would be do you think these people would become more disenfranchised from the political system doing that then have more faith in it with a second referendum look I I think that that whatever happens there is going to be a lot of annoyance and anger there's a huge amount of and among the now majority in the country which is four remain who feel that they've been stolen away from the EU by a relatively small group of people who for decades have been working very hard like woodworm to undermine the system and and you get this this you know sort of extraordinary phenomenon of a bunch of troughs as some critics call them you know the the mobs of this world who have very successfully harnessed the support of you know people who work in factories to get a result that suits them so you know all the skeptics who think this is really about you tax regulations and the like and so that they wilt there's anger on both sides that we're a very divided society now because of this and that's not going to go away it's certainly not going to go away if we just go ahead with brexit and in any case that my own feeling is them just published an article this week on this very point that it's still possible the brexit will be stopped so they're mechanisms but by which that may happen and in fact as day follows day so the likelihood that it will be increases but it is also the case that if some form of brexit happens it's almost certain to be a relatively soft form of basic No Deal kind of breaks it is is the by far the least likely outcome there's no majority for it in Parliament if there's some form of soft brexit then the following will be the case we sit right next to the world's biggest the most successful trading bloc and we're gonna have to trade with it and to trade with it we have to observe its standards and its regulations and its requirements and to do so without any voice without any vote without any influence and without any veto over some of the things that it might do seems to be an act of madness and so with the demographic change in our country and with the the fact that the paradoxically the whole brexit mess has galvanized millions of people in this country realize what the value of the EU is and they want to be part of it it hadn't been much of a subject of conversation beforehand but it's certainly become one now and it's astonishing the number of people who having learned more about the EU and now more enthusiastic for it and so my confident prediction is I hope I'm around for you two to call me out on it if I am being in five or ten years time if we were if some form of brexit were to happen that it wouldn't last very long well my point let's open up the questions to the floor if you put your hand away for the microphone to be given to you yeah let's go to the gentleman thank you very much for your remotes my name is Joel I'm studying the BCL at Jesus College my question is regards to the courts in the system of separation of powers particularly some arguments that have been raised that the Supreme Court should be representative of the community or the nation more particularly Justice Antonin Scalia as he then was remarked that to have a group of very light people decide on the matter or a socially contentious matter on behalf of very diverse population would be would not be right and morally correct what is your take on that idea that the courts must also be representative and then do you think that's achievable do you think the appointment of judges should then change to be based on other criterion that can make them more representative thank you yes thank you I'm so very very very interesting question and a very difficult problem actually as you know in some states of the United States of America judges at certain levels are elected and their elected of course on to the party political lines often enough for the separation of powers problem to very much raise its ugly head in that connection they are their idea that the the administration of justice should be predicated on on a system where you don't have a particular but a very very particular group of people making decisions on behalf of that great diversity that's at that point is an extremely compelling and powerful one but so is the point than what you need in a system of justice is people of intellectual quality and of expertise who who at the same time one could rely upon to really adhere to to cleave to the idea that justice must be done in a way that is maximally fair and independent of the kinds of pressures that come out of class and race and so on consciousness so it's it's very hard to pick which way to go there are certain judicial systems in the world and my own view is that even though one could criticize the the old white men Oxford Cambridge background of the senior judiciary in in this country and you know one can indeed criticize it on that grounds but there are judiciary's like our own I think which come very close to fulfilling what one would really like to see from a judiciary very reflective very bi so they're very powerful in the kind of thinking that they bring to the task that they're performing whether that's the case in the United States of America well and if you read the history of the Supreme Court you see that there have been some very remarkable individuals there into whose hands you would quite comfortably place you know decisions about your own life I think there's some a remarkable characters but also some very questionable ones as well the questionable ones May themselves of course be the product of the fact that there's too much political influence in the choosing of them that if you had even less and therefore even greater remoteness from the diversity of the society as a whole you might get you might get better judging but you're quite right it's a very difficult point there's a there's something very desirable about government reflecting diversity I've just been making the point in favor of you know preferences being reflected in the way that government is constituted through proportional representation but could it be that the judiciary is very very much more like you're your surgeon in hospital that that you pick your surgeon as you pick your judge because of their ability and their background I know you will say they only have that ability in background because they come from a certain class and that does it iterate the difficulty so that the the answer is this in other words it's a difficult problem yeah to the handle the fundraiser thank you very indeed my name is Peter Burke I'm Sheriff Oxford to Europe and I mentioned that in this audience because we I think very largely people whose idea logic in support of the organization and I hope that people will google us and join us after that brief blog can I say well done to end this super talk with a positive note you talked about the gardener's ation of opinion in this country the fact that as it happens the UK now has already the largest pro-european movement of any country in Europe so the other point was going to make you my namesake Edmund Burke keeps being trotted out for partitions of both sides and the distinction between being a representative and being a delegate mmm-hmm now it seems to me I think what you've said very much underlines it so there's a protocol isn't representative the fact that something is popular it's not good enough to justify supporting it so MPs and representatives I've got to stand over to seat decisions that they make and if they make wrong decisions then they should be liable for them personally as well as at the party and if for example in the slave states somebody as a result of a referendum or public vote decided that slavery was right that doesn't make it right and equally we can say if brexit is bad for the country is damaging the fact that a popular doesn't make it right I be interested in your views about that well I mean we have the example of popular majorities in favour of capital punishment this country for a very very long time I don't know how things stand on it now because as opposed to two percent fifty one point nine percent is almost the same group of people that's opposed to the brakes oh yeah okay so so the Senate majority in favor of it but with Parliament is extremely unlikely ever to act on it and to say that's the will of the people so we must start hanging people from lampposts on said that is a very good example of how that the Burkean principle operates with at least some things what you notice is that the Burkean principle tends to be observed when it aligns with the convenience of a political party or what Parliament sentiment and severely at a given time and that should not be the case it should be the case that in in in that distinction I drew earlier between just passively giving consent and so even indeed consenting to minority governments as we always have done in this country to a much more active attitude that we are we are sending people to do a job of Licensing them and asking them requiring of them that they do a job of work on our behalf much as we do through our taxes educate people to become surgeons and some we want them to acquire and to exercise a certain expertise and if they don't do it we recall them that is by not voting for them the next time around this is a much more active and positive view of what we expect about our representatives and in order to protect that function from being suborned by partly discipline in the whipping system and career ism and politics we need to be able to protect individual members of the legislature so that they can exercise their judgment on the basis of those facts in those discussions and I gave two very simple examples you know update modernize that the way we do things have an electronic voting system which is anonymous or get rid of the party discipline system by saying that a member of parliament is as protected as any employee is anywhere in the country from being over manipulated or blackmailed or bullied by his or her employees that kind of thing yeah sometimes just there thank you for a fascinating talk for us groaning my name is also Edmund and I study history at new college after the 29th of March braixen will be the state's quote justice romaine was on the 23rd of June 2016 it's overturning would then surely have to be considered as radical the constitutional change sauce 450 was would this require a supermajority I'm wondering if you think there is a tension between advocating that the public be permitted to reconsider all political matters should they wish such as via a second referendum and a set of constitutional reforms I think you advocate such the supermajority requirements that would in fact creates a great deal of constitutional inertia against radical political change very much not quite sure I got every element of a quite complex question but Papa partagas the acoustic was Saturday I didn't catch every word sorry and the one thing to notice is that the the having of periodic general elections is precisely the recognition of the fact that people can change their minds and their people don't like the way things are going they've made a choice they vote one way they may not like how it's going so they vote another way later on of course the will be all no familiar with the point that people tend to vote just for labels party labels the very very big problem with the way the general elections are run in a plurality system and a two-party system is that you either have to buy the whole agenda you know the whole manifesto and you can't be selective about parts of it so that adds another layer of disconnect between the preferences of voters and what actually happens once a government is formed but that principle the principle that we can change our minds is a very important one in systems like for example the Swiss system where they have a lot of referendums with relatively low turnouts and relatively conservative results as a result of that the idea that you could um just not just a question of sort of directly influencing the course of policy but but that you could continually say where take the temperature Society and see how our people feeling has a great deal to recommend itself in in one way but if you went to the extreme if all of us voted on issues of the day electronically every morning on our television sets we see a proposition we press our yes button or our no button we would get very disorganized and chaotic government and we would get people really dropping out and turning off from there from the system when we need precisely what what you were hinting at there the idea of more engagement more interest and more activism in the society so I think that if if we had done if we had a system of representation where every time we went to the ballot box we felt we were making a real difference to the outcome I think that would deal with a great deal of lis of the sort of lassitude politically speaking if there is in the society because people say with a great deal of truth that their vote is not going to make a difference so I think what some for one final question and let's go yet and I just find you saying yeah hi I'm Cheryl I've been studying the MPP at the bluff any school of government so my question is about the second referendum so I as a global citizen I'm disappointed in the referendum result in 2016 but we cannot deny that the elitism in Westminister has given rise to populist like Boris Johnson to capitalize on so if there is a second referendum and if that overturns the first decision with that in the optics of the public they were seen as these elite are gaming the system once again to get their way and wouldn't that create the perfect environment for extreme populist to take over this country well two interesting points there well one is I think that the case for a second referendum rests in very large part on the fact that it would be a much much more informed one you know other people had an opportunity to hear a great deal more about the pluses and minuses the benefits of discipline if it's what would happen and if we leave the European Union and what analyses we've had since then about the impact on the economy and we see a report in the press today that one in three companies in the United Kingdom are making plans to move their operations to Europe if a brexit were to happen we can see the consequences now in a way that weren't visible beforehand mainly largely indeed because nobody imagined that there would be a leave outcome of that referendum and the the the interesting point about the the populism issue and the the fear that there might be a upsurge of populism has to be thought about in the following context those people who voted to remain in the EU in 2016 were largely voting for the same reason as everybody else who voted to remain on the basis of 40 years of knowledge of EU membership the people who voted to leave were a very diverse set of groups of people there were those who were worried about immigration there were those who wanted to give a kicking to the establishment of the government to the Cameron because he was campaigning for remain they wanted to be on the other side of the argument as they feel that austerity policies in this country had harmed their communities and themselves as indeed they have done and then there were people who had I don't know you know dreams of empire and former greatness of the country in the stagger and the sense that you know we were no longer free to be that kind of thing and then of course there will be people who had been influenced by a perpetual drip drip drip of anti-eu stories about bendy bananas and all the rest of it from the tabloid press and from the sort of Euroskeptic wings of both far right and far left in this country I have to remember that the far left are also and in favor of brexit for the sorts of reasons that people like Tony Avella and Peter Shaw put forward in the referendum campaign in the 1970s that some of us remember so when we worry about populism and we think about a great popular uprising you what you would need for that is some unified feeling and that that brought them all together and what to make them active and on the basis of what I've just said the the unified feeling will only be about whatever my reason was for voting leave that that has been overturned so they would have to make common cause on that even if their motivations had been very different that would be point number one point number two is I mentioned an answer to an earlier question that the 37% of the electorate represents about 26% of the population and a Peter Kellner of who used to had YouGov pointed out that on the 19th of January this year so just a couple of weeks ago even if nothing else had changed and nobody had changed their minds and no new information to come out the the the demographic change that is the two million people just over two million people who have turned 18 since 2016 and the 1.8 million people who have died since 2016 that demographic change by itself produces a majority four remain if the same referendum were held on the same constituency as in June 2016 so just demographics by itself let alone any arguments so a second referendum would have to be based on the idea that we are now now going to test the public opinion again on the basis that so much more information is available and people have heard so much more argument on both sides of the question this will be an informed referendum in a way that the first one was most emphatically not and that I think should but you see it's the other point I want to make a sergeant bang on but butts and populism the concept of populism is an interesting one in a way it makes people think that the grassroots rises up and you know like the French Revolution or something the French Revolution was revolutionary activity by Parisians who do this on a fairly regular basis that's the kind of Parisian thing you know if you look at history is every so many years they do it and they've just been doing it again so it's a precision thing so um it's not it's not the people rising up it's a group of people a group of people who are geographically and socially and economically sufficiently unified temporarily for that to happen look at the Arab Spring look at what happened in in Egypt and you see repeated there of a tragic lesson that uprisings teach which is that those who initiate them don't you inherit them that in the case of for example Egypt that the Tahrir Square activity young intellectuals young middle class educated people watching democratic reform in Egypt well look what happened they started a revolution they toppled Mubarak and then who stepped in but somebody worse and and what they aspired to and hope for didn't happen and that's very very typical of those sorts of events but populism m'appelle of the grassroots who have been marginalized and left behind who feel that they've been ill-treated by society if you're poor and unemployed and struggling and you know not very well connected with other people in other towns and cities who are feeling the same way how are you going to organize and get together populism doesn't happen from the grassroots up it happens because demagogues go to those people and say I know what your problem is it's the fault of and then you pointed something the EU or the establishment or the government or something I can solve your problem for you they never do but they say I can and then they harness that power populism is actually really the temporary success of demagoguery in a society now if you say an analysis of it as a political social phenomenon is required to stop us being alarmed about the idea that there's going to be a you know the sort of myth of the French Revolution repeating itself well thank you very much unfortunately us we've got time for but if you could please join with me in thanking professor granny for joining us today [Applause] you

Channel: OxfordUnion

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Keywords: Oxford, Union, Oxford Union, Oxford Union Society, debate, debating, The Oxford Union, Oxford University, A.C. Grayling, philosopher, philosophy, brexit, referendum

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Length: 78min 13sec (4693 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 26 2019