After innumerable false deadlines and anticlimaxes, we are finally close to the tipping point. Sometime within the next month it seems likely the historic compact between governors and governed that has rendered the British constitution a template for parliamentary democracy will be shattered. That fracturing of our imperfect but workable system of governance by consent will truly be a watershed in history – and a deeply ominous one.
How have we arrived at this crisis point? The EU referendum represented the culmination of generations of expanding suffrage and wider public engagement in political decision making. It was the largest exercise in consultative democracy ever carried out in the United Kingdom. It dwarfed the 1975 EEC referendum which, with 40 million people registered to vote, produced a turnout of 64.62 per cent. The 2016 EU referendum, based on a register of 46.5 million voters, attracted a turnout of 72.21 per cent.
In this way, a vexed question that had increasingly been destabilizing political life was settled fully and fairly, by a direct appeal to the electorate. This was the People’s Vote, a culminating exercise in direct democracy on a single issue, where everyone had a say.
