Agreeing to disagree is an important step towards Brexit

Long before playground fun meant sexting, vaping, or getting a nitrous high, children would play a game called ‘off-ground tick’. The rules were supposedly simple. The person deemed the ‘it’ could try to ‘tick’ another player so long as that person was standing on the ground. It was fun stuff, only ruined by the more difficult kids who would deploy the old ontological trick of redefining what is or is not ‘ground’. It led to noisy geological debates about the point at which a kerbstone became bedrock. Some of the brainier sorts would invoke the spirit of Niels Bohr and claim they were floating on the weak electromagnetic force. The whole thing would quickly descend into a farce, which is perhaps why I was reminded of it when following the Brexit debate last week.

Proponents of the UK leaving the EU claim they won a ‘clear mandate’. Their opponents claim there was nothing clear about the mandate at all. ‘Yes there was!’ shout the former, whilst the latter petulantly stamp their heels and cry ‘No there wasn’t!’

There you have in précis the tone of British politics of the past couple of months.

Like children deciding what constitutes ‘ground’, we should perhaps have agreed on what would constitute a ‘clear mandate’ before we began to play this dumb game. As it is, there will never be any clarity, just lots of shoe leather being impotently stamped.

The referendum vote was close; so close, in fact, that in the hours before the result became clear, Nigel Farage admitted that he thought his side has lost the battle but also promised that they would still win the war. And whilst it was widely accepted that ‘Remain’ vote would not put an end to Euroskepticism, it has somehow become accepted wisdom that a ‘Leave’ vote means an end to the Remain cause.

‘Time to silence the EU exit whingers’ ran the headline on The Daily Express. ‘The Bremoaners and their plot to subvert the will of the British people’ was the comment piece in The Daily Mail. Meanwhile, Conservative Counciller, Christian Holliday started a petition to amend the Treason Felony Act  to include new offences: ‘To imagine, devise, promote, work, or encourage others, to support UK becoming a member of the European Union’.

Set aside, for a moment, the issue of Brexit and where you stand on our leaving the European Union. Realise, instead, that we now face a bigger issue about how, exactly, we expect our politics to be conducted in the future.

It might be helpful to remind some that the referendum was about our leaving the EU. It was not about abandoning a parliamentary system that has, on the whole, worked quite well for us for centuries. There was nothing written into the referendum that demanded that people from either side of the debate should shut up and meekly comply once the referendum was decided. Politics doesn’t work that way or, at least, it doesn’t work that way in a democracy.

Too much of the argument is now taken up with arguments about the very legitimacy of argument. Debate is being stifled because to debate apparently means not respecting the ‘will of the British people’.

Yet it’s also worth remembering that the people’s ‘will’ is something quite different to the actual referendum result. The ‘will’ of the referendum on the day was 51.9% to 48.1%, which unless we have a rigorous definition of ‘clear’ can equally be described as ‘marginal’. Whatever we think is the ‘will of people’, it was neither unanimous nor absolute. The ‘will’ at the moment is probably quite different to the will as it was on 23rd June. Indeed, the ‘will of the British people’ is probably quite different to the ‘will of the British voters’, with the latter being a subset of the former.

These things are dynamic, liable to change, and, deep down, represent our quite human fallibility. It is duplicitous to suggest that people don’t change their minds and that, in part, is why we have a parliamentary system that sits in real time, formulating and redrafting laws as the circumstances change.

The onus, then, is still on the Brexiteers to make a convincing argument for leaving the EU as it is also on the pro-Europeans to make the argument for remaining. There should be nothing wrong with asking if the price of Brexit is too high, as there is nothing wrong with highlighting the pain associated with continued EU membership. That this debate is being framed otherwise shows it to be nothing more than a childish argument by which the notional winner cries ‘Ha! You said “Yes” and you can’t change your mind!’

Irrespective of whether the government have the right to proceed or, indeed, whether they do proceed, there is a far more fundamental issue at stake and that is the right of citizens and their representatives to argue, protest, and campaign for both sides of the argument. Just because we are negotiating with Europe doesn’t mean that we should stop negotiating among ourselves. Whilst it would we be foolish not to leave our options open, it would also be fatalistic to commit ourselves to any outcome that emerges slowly and without untold repercussions.

Our parliamentary system works to serve us and to protect us in real time, adapting to changes of circumstance and changes of opinion. We should allow it to do what it was designed to do.