Tag Archives: Independent Commission on Referendums

Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland: Final Report

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The final report of the Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland is published today. In this post, Alan Renwick, the Working Group’s Chair, outlines what the Group has sought to achieve, explains how it has pursued these goals, and highlights some of the core findings. He points out that, while there is no certainty that a referendum will happen any time soon, policy-makers need to be aware of the decisions that might have to be made.

The Working Group on Unification Referendums on the Island of Ireland was established approaching two years ago to examine how any future referendums on Northern Ireland’s constitutional status would best be designed and conducted. Based at the Constitution Unit, the Group comprises 12 experts in politics, law, history and sociology, from universities in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Great Britain and the United States. Since coming together, we have pooled our expertise – meeting at first face-to-face and later online – and listened to as many voices as we could, including politicians, former officials, journalists, community organisers, academics, and members of the general public. We have held dozens of in-depth conversations and received numerous written submissions. Our public consultation last summer attracted 1377 responses, which we have carefully analysed. Last November, we published an interim report setting out our draft findings. Through four public seminars, direct correspondence, and monitoring of traditional and social media, we have logged over 300 responses to it. Our final report takes account of all of that feedback.

The Working Group’s starting point

A crucial feature underpinning all of this work has been our starting point. The Group has no collective view on whether it would be desirable for referendums on Northern Ireland’s constitutional future to take place, or what the outcome should be if they do happen. Speaking personally, my interest in this subject stems from my broader work on how to conduct referendums well, including the Independent Commission on Referendums, which reported in 2018, and the 2019 Doing Democracy Better report, co-authored with Michela Palese. I have no position on where Northern Ireland’s future should lie.

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Brexit and parliament: where did it all go wrong?

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meg_russell_2000x2500.jpgParliamentary arguments over Brexit may now feel far behind us, but the bitterness of those arguments has left scars on our politics. Meg Russell examines four factors which contributed to the parliamentary ‘perfect storm’ over Brexit, concluding that ‘parliament’ largely got the blame for divisions inside the Conservative Party. This was fuelled by the referendum, minority government and the inability of parliamentary rules to accommodate a minority situation. The populist anti-parliamentary rhetoric which resulted was potentially damaging, with implications for the current Covid-19 crisis, when public trust in political decision-making is essential.

Amidst the current Covid-19 crisis, last year’s Brexit clashes already feel a long time ago. But at the time, they pushed Britain’s politics and constitution to their limits. Parliament was frequently at the heart of these conflicts – with angry headlines suggesting that parliamentarians were seeking to ‘block Brexit’, and branding them ‘wreckers’ or ‘saboteurs’. Twice questions of parliament’s proper role in relation to government ended up in the Supreme Court. Boris Johnson sought a lengthy prorogation of parliament, after which the Attorney General told MPs that they had ‘no moral right to sit’. How on earth did the UK, traditionally the most parliamentary of all democracies, get into such a mess? I dissect this question in a newly-published paper, ‘Brexit and Parliament: The Anatomy of a Perfect Storm’, in the journal Parliamentary Affairs. This post summarises the article’s key arguments. The full version is freely available to read online.

I suggest that four key political and constitutional features, all unusual in the UK context, contributed to this ‘perfect storm’. It was accompanied by a rise in populist and anti-parliamentary rhetoric – of a kind which would be destabilising and dangerous in any democracy, but particularly one based on a core principle of parliamentary sovereignty – as returned to at the end of this post. The four factors were as follows:

The referendum

As charted by the Independent Commission on Referendums, referendum use has grown in UK politics, but can sit awkwardly with traditional parliamentary sovereignty. Arguments for referendums on matters concerning EU powers were made over a long period (somewhat ironically) on the basis of protecting that very sovereignty. The 2016 EU referendum – eventually conceded by David Cameron, under pressure from Conservative Eurosceptics and UKIP – was very unusual, in two important ways. First, it was what the House of Commons Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee (chaired by senior Brexit supporter Bernard Jenkin) criticised as a ‘bluff-call’ referendum: where the government’s purpose was not to seek approval for a change that it supported, but to shut down its opponents’ demands. Second, the referendum was held on a broad proposition (to leave the EU), rather than a detailed prospectus. Hence when the result came in, and was not the one the Prime Minister or most MPs (even on the Conservative benches at that time) wanted, parliament was left to decide how to put it into effect. Such circumstances generated clear tensions between parliamentary and popular sovereignty. Continue reading →