If a lottery is a tax on people who are rubbish at maths, this referendum is a tax on people who are rubbish at politics.
Any referendum is based on an idealistic, and hence unrealistic, assessment of the wisdom of vox populi. Yet only the vox of an intelligent and well-informed populo ought to decide vital matters.
A brief conversation with a randomly selected group, say in a pub, will show that the British public doesn’t meet this lofty standard. Most of what one hears is a crude rehash of stock EU lies counterbalanced by a visceral dislike of foreigners.
Exaggerated belief in collective wisdom is based on Enlightenment ideology, not any available evidence. That’s why unlimited, never mind direct, democracy was alien to Britain’s constitutional tradition.
This was encapsulated by Burke: MPs should represent people’s interests, not their wishes. The resulting balance, with the elected power of the Commons offset by the hereditary power of the crown, with the Lords making sure the balance wouldn’t unduly tip either way, was the best political arrangement mankind has ever known.
That has been replaced with the dictatorship of the Commons sustained by an infinitely expanding franchise of increasingly dumbed-down voters. Hence those fit to govern are never elevated to government any longer – unlimited democracy has predictably become unlimited spivocracy.
Plebiscite takes this process one step further, moving from witless to crazy. Taking this particular referendum, the country’s future may well be decided by people who think that, should Britain regain her constitutional sovereignty, we wouldn’t be allowed to travel but stay destitute, isolated and marginalised on our little island.
No one seems to realise that holding an EU referendum is tantamount to staking Britain’s future on a roll of loaded dice.
First, the vote to stay will be irreversible, but the vote to leave won’t be. If the past is a reliable indicator of the future, then the EU will treat such a result with the same disdain it showed for other referendums going against it.
Either dissenting countries were treated like inept schoolchildren and told to try again until they got it right, or else the same measure was resubmitted under a different name. (That’s how, with changes invisible to the naked eye, the European Constitution came back as the Lisbon Treaty.)
Just think about it: Darren votes to stay in the EU because he thinks that otherwise he’ll never be able to go to Ibiza again – and 2,000 years of our constitutional tradition go down the drain.
Or, if Darren’s old enough to remember that Ibiza was open for British orgies even before the Maastricht Treaty, his Out vote will probably be nullified by EU spivs in cahoots with our own.
These are rotten odds – especially since Darren will be deluged with torrents of pro-EU propaganda led by our ‘Tory’ government and supported by every fraudulent means at the EU’s disposal.
One such will be granting a few token concessions at the last moment, enabling Dave and George to claim that Britain’s relationship with the EU has changed so much that we have all to gain and nothing to lose by staying.
Anyone who believes that our public will be able to tell token concessions from real ones lives in a fantasy world. Does anyone seriously expect the people who’ve made Coronation Street our crowning cultural achievement to wade through the fine print of 1,000-page documents written in barely comprehensible Euro-English?
Since both the ruling party and Her Majesty’s Opposition (which hates both Her Majesty and the sovereignty she embodies) are committed to staying in the EU, a privately financed campaign to leave will stand zero chance – even if it presents a united front.
However, since it doesn’t, the chance slips below zero into negative values. Ukip, which after all, forced Cameron to pledge the referendum in the first place, should lead the campaign. And so it does – its own.
A much larger mainstream effort is being fronted by Lord Lawson, him of the family where daughters are named after their fathers. That’s like Sepp Blatter leading a campaign to end FIFA corruption.
For it was Mr Lawson, as he then was, who as Chancellor was in 1987 directly responsible for the policy of shadowing the deutschmark, which resulted in the 1992 disaster of Black Wednesday.
This might have been an honest mistake, and he now sees the situation differently. However, it’s obvious that Lawson has no principled objections to jeopardising Britain’s sovereignty, economic and therefore political, for the sake of what he sees as expedience.
Expedience, however, is fickle. What’s expedient today may look insane tomorrow, and vice versa.
Suppose that by the time of the referendum Osborne’s phoney prosperity has run out of steam, as it almost certainly will. How committed will Lord Lawson remain to the Out campaign? He’ll probably revert to what he saw as a pragmatic pro-EU position back in 1987.
Barring a military coup, British sovereignty can only be regained by parliamentary consensus. Gaining it ought to draw the energy and funding that at present go into campaigning in this doomed referendum.
The odds of succeeding in our lifetime are slim – but trying is still better than letting people sink our constitution with the torpedo of a rigged plebiscite.