Brexit - the Referendum

In their manifesto for the 2015 UK General Election, held on 7th May 2015, the Conservatives, led by David Cameron, promised the electorate a referendum on the UK's membership of the European Union.  Despite many predictions saying it was likely we would have another hung parliament, the Conservatives were returned to power with a majority of 12. The European Union Referendum Bill was introduced to the House of Commons by Philip Hammond (then Foreign Secretary) on 28th May 2015 and was given Royal Assent on 17th December 2015, becoming the European Union Referendum Act 2015.  This made legal provision for a pre-legislative (i.e. not legally binding) referendum to be held in the UK and Gibraltar on whether it should remain a member state of the European Union or leave it.

It is worth picking out some key points from the European Union Referendum Act 2015:

• It stated "A referendum is to be held on whether the United Kingdom should remain a member of the European Union."
• The Secretary of State had to pick a date for the referendum no later than 31st December 2017, and not 5th May 2016 or 4th May 2017.
• The question to be asked was "Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?".
• The alternative answers were "Remain a member of the European Union" or "Leave the European Union".
• There was also a Welsh version of the question and answers.
• It defined who was entitled to vote.
• It added further provisions to those defined in the Political Parties, Elections and Referendums Act 2000, and to extend the scope to Gibraltar as well as the UK.
• It set obligations on the Secretary of State as follows: (i) to publish a report, prior to 10 weeks before the referendum, showing what had been agreed by EU member states relating to the UK's request to address concerns over its membership, and the UK Government's opinion on that; (ii) to publish a report, prior to 10 weeks before the referendum, giving information about rights and obligations arising from EU law as a result of the UK's membership of the EU, and examples of countries that were not members of the EU that had other arrangements with the EU.
• It did not authorise any future actions.  Any further legislation following on from the referendum would have to go through normal Parliamentary processes.

In February 2016, Prime Minister David Cameron announced that, following the renegotiation of terms of its EU membership, the UK Government would recommend to the British people that the UK should remain a member of the EU, and that the referendum would be held on 23rd June 2016.  Rather unusually, ministers of the UK Government were then free to campaign on either side of the argument.

Also in February 2016, the Government published the White Paper "The Process for Withdrawing from the European Union". This set out the process that would follow a vote to leave the EU, and the prospects for negotiations.  Its executive summary started with the statement: "The result of the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union will be final. The Government would have a democratic duty to give effect to the electorate’s decision."  This implies there should not be a second referendum to decide membership, as has been proposed recently by the Remainers, though, to me, it does not rule out another referendum on the details of the exit; and although the referendum was not legally binding, this white paper did put a moral and democratic obligation on the Government to implement its result.

In order to discharge the obligations set upon it by the European Union Referendum Act 2015, the Government published a further three White Papers between February and April 2016:

• "The best of both worlds: the United Kingdom’s special status in a reformed European Union": This paper describes the changes made to the UK's EU membership following renegotiation carried out from May 2015 to February 2016, changes which gave the UK special status in the EU.
• "Alternatives to membership: possible models for the United Kingdom outside the European Union": This paper looks at the potential models for the UK's relationship with the EU if there were to be a vote to leave. It covered three main models of relationship, in decreasing levels of obligation to the EU: (i) the Norway model, where we would be in the European Economic Area (EEA) but not in the EU; (ii) a negotiated bilateral agreement, such as between the EU and Canada, and the EU and Switzerland; (iii) World Trade Organisation (WTO) membership, which would come into play if we had no withdrawal agreement in place.  The paper reviews each of these models as well as looking at key issues such as Northern Ireland, the UK economy, Financial Services (and Passporting), negotiation of trade deals outside the EU, and impact of withdrawal on car manufacturing.  It concludes that whatever alternative the UK follows will not come close to providing the same balance of advantage and influence that we get from the UK's special status in the EU, though this conclusion was challenged by those advocating the UK leave the EU.
• "Rights and obligations of European Union membership": This paper provides a balanced overview of the most important rights and obligations arising from the UK's membership of the EU.  It describes how the EU works, and includes explanations of many of its key features, such as the Single Market.

These White Papers provide a lot of valuable information about the EU, the UK's membership of the EU, and potential alternative relationships with the EU should we choose to leave.  They are quite easy to read and understand, though being Government documents had a bias towards the Government's recommended approach of remaining in the EU.  They were all published at least 10 weeks prior to the referendum as specified by the obligations from the European Union Referendum Act 2015.  I assume this was to allow voters enough time to digest the information to help with their decision making process.  Unfortunately, I am not aware that the voters even knew of their existence - I don't remember being made aware of them at the time.  As I said in my Brexit introduction blog entry, these white papers would have contributed enormously towards helping people come to a much better-informed decision, so it is a real shame that they weren't better publicised.  They are still worth reading, even today.

Let us now briefly look at the campaigning that was carried out by the various interested groups prior to the referendum, including how Brexit was presented in the media. This is where we find much use of misinformation and lies, with each side making false claims, and then false claims about the other side's false claims - see the FullFact.org analysis "False claims, forecasts, and the EU Referendum".

The two main Leave groups were Vote Leave (supported by the Conservative Party Eurosceptics including Boris Johnson) and Leave.EU (supported by most of UKIP including Nigel Farage), though there were many others.  Vote Leave was designated by the Electoral Commission as the official campaign in favour of leaving the EU.  They argued that being a member of the EU undermined national sovereignty, and that leaving would allow us to better control our borders, control immigration, save £350m per week (that could be spent on the Health Service), make our own laws, free the UK from needless and costly bureaucracy and regulations, and make trade deals with the whole world.  Their message was a positive one, highlighting good things about leaving the EU before the bad things about remaining.  (This was not so much the case with the Leave.EU campaign, especially Nigel Farage's "Breaking Point" poster which was reported to the police for inciting racial hatred, as well as being a misrepresentation of the facts - the queue of people shown in the poster were not queuing to come to the UK.)  The Vote Leave campaign did include the following statement:  "There is a free trade zone stretching all the way from Iceland to the Russian border.  We will still be part of it after we Vote Leave."  This is significant because it strongly suggests that we would be exiting with a Withdrawal Agreement, i.e. NOT a no-deal exit.  Any statement by the Remain supporters pointing out potential issues after leaving the EU were described by the Leave supporters as "Project Fear" - in a similar way to Donald Trump describing anything published against him as "Fake News".  Most proponents of leaving said that any negative effects of leaving the EU would be minimal and short-lived.

The main Remain group was Britain Stronger in Europe, and was designated by the Electoral Commission as the official campaign in favour of remaining in the EU.  They argued that any loss of sovereignty was more than made up for by the benefits of membership, and that leaving would risk UK businesses and prosperity, result in job losses and delays in investment, reduce the UK's influence over world affairs, jeopardise national security, and result in trade barriers between the UK and the EU.  They also predicted that there would be an immediate recession if the country voted to leave, necessitating a "punishment budget" (which was subsequently disproven).  Their message was actually more of a negative one, highlighting the bad things about leaving the EU, rather than the good things about remaining.  This was probably a consequence of the success the Government had with doom-mongering at the preceding 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2015 General Election.  Unhelpfully, this has conditioned Leave voters to be less disposed to believe any of the warnings about the reality of the UK's situation during the withdrawal process.

It was difficult to know who to believe, as they were giving wildly contradictory messages and "facts".  I have found some seemingly more independent articles that do throw light on some of the issues raised:

• For the sovereignty and law-making issues, see the Chatham House (Royal Institute of International Affairs) report "Britain, the EU and the Sovereignty Myth".  This suggests that successive British governments have chosen to pool aspects of the country’s sovereign power in the EU in order to achieve national objectives that they could not have achieved on their own.  In their view the loss of sovereign power is more than made up for by the benefits of being in the EU, and that loss is actually very minor - the British government still determines the vast majority of policy over issues of greatest concern to British voters, and still controls over 98 percent of its public expenditure.
• For the financial issue, see the FullFact.org analysis "£350 million EU claim "a clear misuse of official statistics"".  Most people now know that the £350m per week saved for the NHS was at best a misrepresentation of the facts, and there is not £350m to be saved even if we ignore the losses incurred by leaving the EU. Yet we still had voters asking 2 weeks after the referendum why hadn't the £350m per week started making its way through to the NHS yet.
• For the trade deal issue, see the Institute for Government report "Trade after Brexit"  which focuses on options for UK-EU trade after Brexit, and Baker McKenzie's report "The realities of trade after Brexit", which focuses on trade specifically after a no-deal Brexit.  It is now generally accepted that it could take many years to negotiate new trade deals to replace those that we will lose when we leave the EU, and that we can't really start to negotiate them until after we have left.

The coverage by the UK Press in the run up to the referendum was very heavily biased towards Leave.  Oxford University's Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism carried out an examination of the  press coverage of the EU referendum in the UK, "UK Press Coverage of the EU Referendum" and found that 41% of the articles published were pro Leave, as against 27% pro Remain.  After factoring in the reach of the different newspapers, the pro Leave bias is further accentuated, with 48% of articles being pro Leave, and just 22% Remain.  6 out of 9 newspapers had a dominance of pro Leave articles, and pro Leave campaigners were cited in 74% of articles as against just 26% pro Remain.  One of the key conclusions of this report was that, in what was a very complex decision, the detailed issues were underplayed and when they were covered this was done in a highly partisan way, reflecting the position of each paper and often following the lead of each campaign.  The FT published an interesting academic study recently which concluded that Liverpool's high Remain vote was partly a consequence of The Sun's low readership there ever since residents started boycotting it in response to the Hillsborough coverage 30 years ago, suggesting a direct correlation between press sentiment and Eurosceptic tendencies in the long term.

Despite all the lies in the campaigns, and the bias in the press, I still expected common sense to win out, and that the people in the UK and Gibraltar would vote to Remain.  However, this was not to be the case.  With a relatively high turnout of 72% of the eligible population, 51.9% voted in favour of leaving the EU, and 48.1% voted to stay.  It was interesting to look at the breakdown by country: England 53.4% leave, Wales 52.5% leave, Scotland 62.0% remain, Northern Ireland 55.8% remain.  Gibraltar figures were included in the South-West England region, but taking them on their own did actually vote 95.9% to remain.  Greater London was the only other region to vote to remain, by 59.9% to 40.1%.  Every other region voted to leave.  The Scottish Nationalists immediately started to use these figures to justify a second Scottish Independence referendum, so that Scotland could stay in the EU whatever the remnants of the UK did, and this issue is still ongoing and will be looked at further in a later blog post.

So, on 23rd June 2016, the "will of the people" was that we should leave the EU.  This being at odds with the recommendation of David Cameron's government, he felt obliged to resign as Prime Minister, which he did on 24th June 2016.  After the ensuing Conservative Party leadership election campaign, Theresa May was appointed party leader on 11th July 2016, and Prime Minister on 13th July.  It would be her responsibility to implement the withdrawal of the UK from the EU, and we will look at this in my next blog post.

What did the Electoral Commission make of the referendum? Its public opinion research highlighted the following points:

• People were very happy with the overall running of the referendum, the process of registering to vote, and the procedures for actually voting.
• The majority of people felt they had enough information to make an informed decision on how to vote - 62% agreed versus 28% who disagreed.
• There were over 1,000 complaints from the public about the content of campaign material.
• When asked whether they thought that the conduct of the referendum campaigns was fair and balanced, 52% of people disagreed versus 34% who agreed.  The main reasons given for thinking the conduct of the campaign was not fair and balanced were that it was one-sided/unbalanced/biased/partial, and that the information was inaccurate and misleading.

Full information can be found in the following reports:

"Report: 23 June 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union"

"Report: The regulation of campaigners at the referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union held on 23 June 2016"

"Report: The costs of delivering the June 2016 referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union"

More recently, the Electoral Commission investigated Vote Leave as there were claims that it had broken electoral law during its campaign, by exceeding the spending limit.  Vote Leave has now been fined £61,000 for this breach, though this has no effect on the result of the referendum itself.  There are claims of another breach by Vote Leave, but the Electoral Commission does not think this in the public interest to pursue.

In the review "Lessons from the EU Referendum", the Electoral Reform Society was not as positive about the referendum as the Electoral Commission had been.  It compares the EU Referendum with the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum and the 2011 Alternative Vote Referendum, and criticises the EU Referendum on timing and lack of good information, plus it thinks there was a missed opportunity to extend the franchise to 16 and 17 year olds as had been done in the Scottish Independence Referendum. Given that younger people tended to vote Remain, this may have made quite a difference to the result.

Gerontios