Referendums

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 13th June 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, we have had 13 referendums so far; three were national and 10 regional. This means that referendums have become an accepted practice and anyone who wants one from now on cannot be denied it on the grounds that it is inconsistent with parliamentary democracy. It is an established constitutional fact. In addition, there are several good reasons why a referendum has a place in a democracy. In a liberal democracy, the political class tends to be self-contained and it is quite important that people should be able to speak directly, unmediated by any institution. In that sense, a referendum serves as a safety valve in a liberal democracy. It also vitalises parliamentary democracy because from time to time, when the people speak and assert their sovereignty, parliamentary institutions are made accountable.

My good friend the noble Lord, Lord Norton, said that the difficulty with a referendum is who the people are accountable to. In a parliamentary democracy, parliamentarians are accountable to the people, but who are the people accountable to? Ultimately, there is an absolute premise for that authority. If I said that they were accountable to themselves, because they have to pay the price for the decisions they make, that answer should be sufficient. As Aristotle said, the wearer knows where the shoe pinches, so there is no responsibility beyond the people’s experience.

Given that, in short, a referendum is a part of our political life, the question is: what can we do to regulate it, so that we know when to implement it and on what issues, how great a majority should be required on that issue and what the preconditions are for a sensible referendum? All our referendums so far, bar one, have been noncontroversial. The EU referendum of 2016 became controversial, partly because its outcome is inconsistent with what the liberals and parliamentarians expected. That kind of clash between Parliament and the people had not happened on any of the earlier referendums.

Now that it has become controversial, it is very important that we should think in terms of a constitutional convention. That convention cannot be drafted by Parliament because it would be seen as a party—Parliament deciding its own future. The convention has to be done by Parliament in collaboration with the people. That is the kind of convention that the Scots had. Here, it is important to bear a simple point in mind. With a referendum, you create a kind of political system in which the country is ruled by Parliament in collaboration with the people. Just as we have the collaboration of Parliament and the sovereign, governing the country together, the situation would be that Parliament and the people govern the country. The people would express their views through a referendum, and Parliament through other ways. A referendum can therefore never be entirely advisory, nor can it be totally binding. There are ways in which its position can be defined, but I should have thought that one way in which we can look at the outcome of a referendum is where it is neither binding nor entirely advisory.

Conduct of Debate in Public Life

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 9th May 2019 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, it is a pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady Bottomley. It is also a great pleasure to take part in a debate initiated so ably by my noble friend Lord Harris of Haringey.

I think we all agree that there is a spirit of intolerance and aggression in our public life. Death threats have been made against public figures. Their property has been vandalised. Obnoxious language has been used to refer to what they are doing. Their past lives have been dug up and all sorts of silly things are talked about. They have been mocked, hounded and put in a situation where, inevitably, they make mistakes and once they do they become the subject of further acts of mocking. The result is a vicious cycle, which we have witnessed in the case of Brexit. Mistake after mistake has been made, not only by individuals, but by individuals in the context of the criticism and mocking that has gone on around them.

Why is this happening and what can we do about it? That is what this debate is about. I will concentrate on why, rather than what we can do about it. Obviously social media has played an important part but cannot by itself explain what has happened. Social media simply reflects a certain cultural consciousness, a certain way of thinking. It is the deeper way of thinking that we need to understand. This is what I want briefly to talk about: the way the deeper undercurrents of our public life are manifested on social media and, more importantly, through the offensive language in which our public discourse is conducted. We must remember that language is the cultural capital of a community. It is the repository of its ideas and aspirations. If that language gets corrupted, people’s thinking gets corrupted. It is very important to be a custodian and to recognise the integrity and importance of the language of public discourse.

Why has there been this decline and corruption of the language of public discourse? There are two kinds of politics at work here, which I will talk briefly about. One is the politics of identity and the other is the politics of marginality. I will start with the politics of identity. If somebody were to ask, “What is our biggest problem?” in the aftermath of the financial crisis, in any western society the response would immediately be inequality. A large number of people have found their income frozen and are unable to see any rise. People are suffering as a result of great inequality. These are the issues crying out for attention. Obviously, if you start raising those issues you upset vested interests who would rather not have attention concentrated on them. The result therefore is to bring up a substitute issue and to concentrate attention on that, which is the issue of identity.

National identity or nationalism is the battleground, the site on which our differences are played out. National identity is ultimately about who we are, where we belong and what our place in this world is. Ultimately, with those questions Europe becomes extremely important—the Europe that we joined reluctantly and that we have been a part of all these years, yet from which we want to withdraw. People have a strong feeling that the very soul and identity of their country, of who they are, is at stake.

It is in that context that the debate taking place in our country has to be seen. On the one hand, there are people who are the custodians of the national soul, the national identity, and on the other there are those who disagree. They are dismissed as traitors or as people who do not care for the well-being of the country. In other words, it is a process of demonisation. The other is always a demon: “I am right. I bring light, the other person brings darkness. I bring life, he brings death”. I think my noble friend Lord Harris called this kind of demonisation “polarisation”. I would go even further, because it is not just a polar opposite; it is the demonisation of the other. Once you demonise the other, the only way you can live with him is to eliminate him. It is either you or him. You cannot both inhabit a common earth. This is the politics of identity.

The other important issue I want to talk about is the politics of marginality. Our public life is dominated, so the analysis goes, by a metropolitan elite, which is basically liberal, cosmopolitan, has no national sentiments of any kind and is elitist and technocratic. This elite has been governing our country for the past 50-odd years and has got us into this mess. Therefore, this elite has to be fought by the “real people”.

The “real people” is quite an important expression. They are the people whose voice cannot be represented by the elite. They are the people who speak in their own language and whose aspirations are not articulated by the elite. Therefore, a kind of war is postulated at the very heart of our society between the “People” and the “Elite”. The war between the elite and the people can be fought at many different levels in different countries in different ways, but in western democracies it is fought in one way: this war obviously has to be fought to the end, but we, the people, as a majority, should rule in a democracy, and the elite should have no commanding say at all. The argument is that in this war between the people and the elite, the people are the legitimate winners because they are the supreme majority in a democracy. Therefore, once you begin to speak in the name of the people, you say that the people feel alienated and unrepresented and hence that the whole representative framework which brings the elite to power should be dismantled.

Therefore, I suggest that these two kinds of politics—the politics of identity, which brings self-righteousness, and the politics of marginality, which brings anger and passion—are at work in contemporary British culture. Unless we identify how they manifest themselves and learn to cope with them or get rid of them, we will continue to have this problem, again and again.

Referendums: Parliamentary Democracy

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 19th July 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, for securing this debate. We have had three national referendums so far and quite a few regional ones, but none of them has led to the kind of controversy that has arisen from the last referendum. There are two factors to that: first, it dealt with one of the most important events in our history, which is unscrambling the arrangements that we have had in place for the last 42 years; and, secondly, the result was totally unexpected—at least, unexpected by those who called it. Therefore, there is a danger that our debate on the place of referendums in a democracy could be clouded by our views on that referendum. In order to avoid that, I want to decontextualise the debate and talk almost entirely about the place of referendums in a democracy, irrespective of what happened with the referendum on the EU.

Our political system is parliamentary democracy, not parliamentary sovereignty, but I think that the two are often confused. First, it is a parliamentary democracy in the sense that the power lies with the people, and it is articulated not directly by the people but through the representative institution—namely, Parliament. Therefore, it is a democracy first and it is parliamentary second. It is a parliamentary democracy because it is democracy as articulated through the instrumentality of Parliament. Therefore, as a parliamentary democracy, people remain sovereign. Popular sovereignty, as in any independent state, is a basic principle of a political system, and that is true of our system as well.

Secondly, to talk of parliamentary sovereignty implies that the monarch has no role, but you cannot call a Parliament unless the monarch calls it, and the monarch is not a part of Parliament.

Thirdly, Parliament is subject to certain conventions and procedures. Unless those procedures are met, it is not properly constituted and its deliberations and decisions do not count as laws. Therefore, Parliament is not sovereign, and it is misleading to say that it is. Given that we have a representative democracy, the question is: what is the role of a referendum?

Here, I take a slightly different view from that of the noble Lord, Lord Higgins, because I am a keen supporter of referendums, provided that they meet certain conditions and are conducted in a certain way. Nearly 95% of parliamentary or representative democracies in the world practise referendums, and the fact that Hitler used them does not necessarily make them a weapon of dictatorship. For example, in a parliamentary democracy people might feel that Parliament does not represent them or that the political class, made up of different political parties, is already thinking in a certain way and acting on assumptions that people do not share, as I think happened in this case. What do people do in that situation? How do we elicit their views?

In that context, I think that people have a right to speak if they feel that the Parliament does not fully represent them. If they have a right to protest or demonstrate, they also have a right to express their views, and the only way they can do so is through a referendum. If people feel that they want to disown the political class, or if, on an issue of fundamental national importance, they feel that Parliament does not represent their views, how do people speak? They speak through protests and so on, or else through referendums. A referendum, with all its limitations, is a valuable constitutional device. It gives voice to people’s feelings and gives them a chance to express their views. It forces them to think, because a clear-cut issue is presented to them. It centres on a specific issue and is not won or lost by which political party is in power, as general elections are. More importantly, everyone feels engaged by it, and people feel committed to the decision that is taken because they have all thought about it individually and participated in it.

That referendums have a place in a parliamentary democracy is beyond doubt—as I said, we have already had three referendums so far. The important thing is to be clear about what the place of a referendum is: to constitutionalise it. It cannot just be an ad hoc convention by which a referendum takes place. It must be regularised and constitutionalised to give it a definite place in our constitutional system. This would mean laying down the conditions under which a referendum can be held and the manner in which it should be conducted so that information is provided to the people. It would indicate where a referendum is politically binding and where it is not, and where it should have a threshold or a supermajority provision. Once referendums are constitutionalised in this way, they would become an important part of our constitutional system and could be easily reconciled with any kind of parliamentary democracy that we happen to have.