We know why we vote for a parliament more regularly than every 50 years, or every generation; MPs leave, retire or die, and issues would come and go. New political parties could rise up and fade away within that period.
A referendum is more of a one shot vote, best made on issues where opinions are largely life long. Or at least long held. Most people are unlikely to change their minds on the rightness or wrongness of capital punishment for example. If they do, it will only be once — and probably due to experience.
I don’t think there is any need to further criticise the Brexit referendum as most people accept (whatever you think of the result) that it was only held for party political reasons, and the way to implement it was never determined.
What is less discussed is what a good Brexit could have looked like. While I am happy to stay in the EU as it is, clearly many are not. So before long we will need to address what maybe should have happened.
One of the strangest problems with Brexit are the large number of its supporters who don’t really like foreigners all that much, and would rather stick with their own. The EU is already a club of white European Christians, and you might think Brexiteers would be more comfortable staying with them than talking to brown people about banana angles. A good Brexit cannot indulge xenophobia.
The first and most obvious requirement for a good Brexit would be to not to call it Brexit and focus on positive unions beyond the immediate EU. We should have formed a new alignment with Scandinavian and Baltic nations who already think like us. Instead of starting with splendid isolation, this would have given us a larger useful political bloc. Hence we should have had Brexpand.
This way we could have legitimately challenged the EU while also creating a constructive safety valve of nations who want a looser alliance. I don’t think free movement of Danes and Swedes would have given UKIP much traction, but it would at least give us a limited free movement Brexpansion zone.
The next thing would be to encourage a new European army. Or rather, a European rapid reaction force. Britain already outspends other EU nations on defence, so we could have steered this. Instead we made up nonsense about clashing with NATO. Brexpand will invite nations who contribute enough to join the combined Brexpansion forces.
One of the daftest parts of Brexit was a belief that we don’t make our own laws when we obviously do. Instead of complaining about the existence of an EU court which emphasises that very British concept of the Rule of Law, we should increase involvement. After all, most people think Britain is good at law, so we should be running it not running away. Naturally a Brexpand Court would sit between the UK and EU to deal with the few disputes that might occur.
And finally, time. A healthy Brexpand agreement would be implemented over about 15 years. Why would you want to hurry such a change? Once there is agreement within society there would be no need to maintain a stray result then guard it forever in the silly way Brexiteers have needed to do.
The above is slightly unlikely, but the point is that we didn’t have to approach Brexit as some for of prison break. Our only genuine issue with the EU is with the democratic deficit within the European Council, and our quasi legitimate issue with immigration. Both could have been addressed in a far batter manner.
