Lessons from Brexit as referendum drums hit stunning crescendo

The chaos that has come to define Brexit exhibits, most starkly, some of the ills of direct democracy. Conceptually, democracy is rule by the people, who typically delegate their sovereign power to various organs, including elected representatives.

Sometimes however, the people will opt to exercise their self-governing power directly. It was in such direct exercise of sovereign power that the UK opted to exit a marriage it had been in for more than forty years. The decision to take such a momentous issue to the people through a referendum, which in a country where Parliament is sovereign was not necessary, was birthed through politics. David Cameron, then UK Prime Minister, was trying to manage the chaos in the Conservative Party where the Eurosceptics were running to the more rightwing United Kingdom Independence Party and Cameron believed that the promise of a referendum would woo them back to his party. Though he denies it, I am convinced that in retrospect PM Cameron rues the day he made the promise and carried it out.

Not only did it cost him the Prime Ministership, it is clear that for the foreseeable future, it will leave the UK in sustained turmoil and may weaken it irredeemably. The danger of leaving such a momentous decision in the hands of the population arises from several factors.

In the first instance, most voters do not vote rationally. It is UK’s wartime Prime Minister Winston Churchill who once said that the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter. In complex issues which have several permutations of possible consequences, the average voter is ill equipped to weigh all possible consequences of their acts and make the most reasonable of decisions. Indeed, it is said that referenda never respond to the question on the ballot but to other deeply felt issues which have only a peripheral relationship with the referendum question. Related to this is the enormous amount of misinformation that is cleverly packaged to push untrue narratives that especially play to voters’ fears, prejudices and angers. Nowhere was this more evident than in the Brexit vote where people’s fear of being overrun by immigrants, though unsupported by data, was more important in determining people’s choices than the more complex question of how the UK would navigate its trade relationships with an unfriendly Europe.

What makes matters like Brexit most complicated is that while referendum questions are framed in a simple Yes or No question, there are numerous layers of the issue that are not as simple. Brexit for example had numerous underlying questions some of which are deeply troublesome now. What to do with the Irish border? On the one hand the Republic of Ireland remains a full member of the EU while North Ireland has exited with the rest of the UK. Yet the sustenance of Irish peace, which troubled the UK for so many years, depends to a large extent on an open border between the two Irelands. How to navigate between retaining trade relations with the European Union while not harming relations with important partners like Trump’s USA who are hesitant to enter into relations with the UK if it is not fully in charge of its trade policies? What then ought we to learn from the messy European divorce? While I am great believer in the people’s sovereignty, I am no believer in the Swiss model where everything is put to a referendum.

I am convinced that other than in elections, few issues should be left at the foot of the electorate. Complex issues with multiple alternative options must be left to those that the people have themselves elected to give leadership. Let us raise the bar of leadership and if leaders make wrong decisions, they can be punished at the ballot. To leave a country in the muddled throes the UK finds itself in is failure of leadership. This ought to be an important lesson for Kenya as the crescendo of referendum drums rises, with convoluted questions being proposed. Spare us the complexity. Keep democracy simple.