Rigging the rules

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Arch-Brexiteer and current Northern Ireland Secretary, Steve Baker, has argued this week that there probably should have been a requirement for a ‘super majority’ in the Brexit referendum, despite acknowledging that his side would have lost on that basis. He said, “… the reason I say that is if we’d had to have 60%, everybody would have abided by the result. If it had been a 60-40 result, it’s inconceivable to me that we would have had all of the political difficulty which followed…”. If there had been a 60-40 majority, one way or the other, it’s just possible that he might be right – acceptance of the result might well have been more forthcoming. I’m not entirely convinced, though; people who hold a strong view about the ‘right’ way forward – people like Baker, in fact – don’t change their minds just because they have failed to convince a sufficient majority at a point in time.

The bigger problem with a requirement for a supermajority is not what happens when the vote exceeds 60-40, it’s what happens when it does not. If, say 59% had voted for Brexit and 41% against, meaning that the proposition was ‘defeated’, is there not just the tiniest possibility that the 59% would argue something along the lines of “we wuz robbed”? Once it is known, through a public vote, that 59% of the electorate support a particular proposition, stuffing the genie back into the bottle is never going to be easy. There are those who argue that some sort of super majority should be required – whether in a public vote or a vote in a parliament – for a change to the constitution. There is obviously an argument based on ‘stability’ to protect against over-frequent changes, or swings back and fore over a period, although whether that's necessarily a bad thing is open to argument. It’s not easy to apply though in a state which has no formal constitution and where whether a proposition constitutes a change to the constitution or not is itself open to argument.

Perhaps most worrying of all is that he wants to apply the rule in relation to any future border poll in Ireland. His concerns about a decision based on 50%+1 are entirely valid; reunification based on such a slim majority would leave a large part (50%-1) of the population unhappy with the new status. It would obviously be better for the idea of reunification to achieve a much greater level of consensual support. And a rejection of reunification on the same basis would have a similar effect on the other part of the population. Again, it would obviously be better for the status quo to receive resounding support. But suggesting that a vote of 59-41 in favour of reunification amounts to a vote for continued partition seems very much more problematic to me. It highlights the big problem with the requirement for a super majority for change, which is that it gives the status quo, however that was arrived at and however much it is contested, an inbuilt advantage in any vote. Whilst it’s easy enough to see why supporters of the status quo would argue that to be a good thing, it’s not clear why anyone would consider it fair. Seeking to rig the rules in favour of the status quo doesn’t seem the most sensible approach given the historical background to Irish partition.