Polishing the excreta

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Referendums don’t sit easily in the UK constitution. Unlike in some countries which have a formal written constitution, there is no formal definition of when and whether a referendum should be called, and no agreed criteria. The result is an ad hoc approach where politicians who believe that there is popular support for their position demand that the issue be put to the people in a simple yes/no vote, despite the fact that most such questions are far more complex than that. Sometimes they are proved right, sometimes they are proved wrong – opponents of devolution certainly believed that requiring a referendum was a not particularly cunning way of killing the proposals. And sometimes they promise a referendum because they think the promise will attract people to vote for them, with no real expectation that they will ever have to call one, let alone go on to lose it. David Cameron and his accidental Brexit is the most obvious case in point.

The Tories seem to be flirting with the Cameron approach again. There is no obvious legal or constitutional requirement to hold a referendum on membership of the European Convention on Human Rights. They just believe firstly that the sort of people who vote for them will be incensed about the lack of deportations to Rwanda, and secondly that an offer of a vote to abolish all connections to the ECHR will motivate their supporters to go out and vote. It is, of course, asking people to vote to abolish their own rights, but what better way to remove rights from citizens than to have those citizens themselves demanding it. It worked on freedom of movement, where many of those involved genuinely seem to have thought it was only other people’s freedom they were removing; there’s no obvious reason to believe that they can’t be fooled into voting against their own rights and freedoms a second time.

Like Brexit, it’s a sort of proxy vote, not really about the ostensible subject at all. The question they really want to ask is something along the lines of ‘do you agree that we should be as cruel and inhumane as possible in our treatment of refugees in particular, and foreigners in general?’, but even the most extreme Tories are neither brave nor honest enough to phrase it in those terms. Instead, they phrase it in terms of the sovereignty of UK courts, knowing that their target audience will understand that that’s just applying a veneer of polish to the turd of a policy, in order to try and make it look like a respectable position to hold. I’m not even convinced that Sunak and his pals actually care a jot about how many refugees come to the UK anyway; they care only about winning the votes of people who don’t like foreigners, and who believe that keeping foreigners out is more important than providing care to those who need it. I’d like to think that the good news is that, even if they do decide to include such a pledge in their manifesto, the chances of them being in a position to implement it are small. Trouble is, that’s what most people thought about Cameron and his Brexit referendum. And in the meantime, Labour are so afraid that their own potential voters share the hatred of foreigners that they can’t even point out the practical flaws, let alone the moral ones. As ever, those suffering most from the faux war between the UK’s two leading centre-right parties will be the weakest and most vulnerable.