Source: https://eutopialaw.com/category/brexit/page/2/
Timestamp: 2019-04-23 00:20:21+00:00

Document:
A journey is a good time to gather thoughts and reflect. Having nothing to do but sit and watch the fields go by offers an opportunity for quiet reflection and deliberation. Such stillness should not be expected by the judges of the Supreme Court as they journey through the British constitution in the coming weeks – the headlines of the weekend papers make clear that their deliberations on the Miller case will not be set within a context of calm.
This is to be regretted, for the questions facing the Supreme Court are of a magnitude that cannot be overstated. They are of long term importance not only for the relationship between the UK and the EU but also internally, for democracy the UK. As important as the decision reached by the Court – whether the government must consult Parliament before art 50 is triggered – is the procedure by which that decision is reached, namely whether the Supreme Court uses Art 267 TFEU to refer a question of interpretation to the CJEU in Luxembourg.
Article 267 TFEU sets out the procedure whereby national judges can send questions to the CJEU for interpretation of the Treaty and adopted secondary law, and the validity of the latter. The questions sent can concern technical matters such as the classification of pyjamas or constitutional issues dealing with EU citizenship or the validity of the European Stability Mechanism.
(1) The Court of Justice shall have jurisdiction to give preliminary rulings concerning: (a) the interpretation of this Treaty b) the validity and interpretation of acts of the Institutions (2) Where such a question is raised before a court or tribunal of a Member State, that court or tribunal may, if it considers that a decision on the question is necessary to enable it to give judgment, request the Court of Justice to give a ruling thereon. (3) Where any such question is raised in a case pending before a court or tribunal of a Member State against whose decisions there is no judicial remedy under national law that court or tribunal shall bring the matter before the Court of Justice.
There is no time limit associated with the procedure: the question(s) can be sent as soon as need becomes apparent to national court/ tribunal. However, this is not an appellate procedure: questions must relate to a pending dispute and be sent before a decision has been made. There is no limit to the number of questions that may be in a reference, or the number of references that a court can make prior to its decision, as long as these are new questions or might produce a different answer. The CJ may also add to the questions sent.
There is no definition in the Treaty of a ‘court or tribunal’. The guidance laid out in El Yassini stressed a number of factors, such as whether the ‘body is established by law, whether it is permanent, whether its jurisdiction is compulsory, whether its procedure is inter partes, whether it applies rules of law and whether it is independent.’ However, even if a body satisfies all of these characteristics, it will not be seen as a court or tribunal unless it is required to determine a legal dispute or exercise a judicial function and falls within the remit of a member state.
Given its status as the Supreme Court, a question on Article 50 sent under Article 267 is unlikely to be rejected. However, given the political consequences of the question, it may not be warmly welcomed by the CJEU. Yet this would be the legally correct course of action under EU law – this is the very first time that Article 50 has been considered in any national court in the EU, and there are important questions surrounding its interpretation, in particular whether it is revocable. This issue is especially important as in Miller, the irrevocability of Article 50 played a central role in the case before the High Court: there it was held that an irrevocable Article 50 makes the need for Parliamentary involvement in its triggering crucial. However, if Article 50 is revocable, this may lead to a different conclusion. The question on revocability is thus a question of the interpretation of EU law that should be put to the CJEU under Article 267. As it is a provision of EU law, only the CJEU may interpret it.
Article 267 sets out a clear division of labour: the national court determines the questions that its needs answered, the CJEU answer those questions on EU law; the national court applies this interpretation to the facts before it. The CJEU may determine admissibility but the process is driven by the national courts – it is left to the discretion of the individual judge to decide whether or when a reference should be sent, what should be asked and how the interpretation should be applied. The opportunity for the CJEU to tackle important questions such as the revocability of Article 50 can be compromised in the absence of referrals.
The Treaty states that courts of last instance must refer yet some such courts refuse to comply. A judge may ignore a request to refer, agree or refuse as in Mid Sussex Advice Bureau where Elias LJ believed that a referral asking whether a volunteer was a ‘worker’ who could access rights in the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 when read with the Framework Directive would fail. Alternatively a judge may decide not to refer because they can interpret the issue adequately themselves or to avoid delay.
One of two core questions of political theory is, and has always been, the question of how best to make collectively-binding decisions, by whom they are to be made, and according to what kind of rules and procedures. (The other one, only briefly to be touched on in the present paper, is the question of how and by whom the policy decisions, once made, are to be implemented.) I take it that the quality of these modes of decision-making is not just something to be determined at the founding or “constitutional” moment of a political community by some pouvoir constituant. The question of whether our rules and procedures are still “good enough”, or whether they may need amendments and alterations, is rather an ongoing challenge in the background of any political process, certainly one that qualifies as “democratic”. Yet, how should we decide on how to decide? The difficulty of any conceivable answer to this question derives from its tricky recursive logic. This is because the answer, in order to be recognised as valid and binding, must itself be decided upon – but how and by whom? If we were able to deduce the “right” mode of decision-making from a robust theory of a divine order, as in an ideal-typical theocratic regime, the problem would go away. Conversely, if we had a “scientific” theory about whose decision-making competencies and methods would yield optimal policy results and unquestionably “rational” problem solutions (as was the claim of “scientific” state socialism), the problem of deciding how to decide would also evaporate and the “one best way” of running a country and its economy would reveal itself beyond any doubt. Given the obsolescence of either of these simplistic solutions, we need to face the fact that neither constitutional methods of arriving at decisions nor the resulting decisions themselves, i.e., policies, are capable of having any truth value which provides them with certainty and unquestionable validity. At best, political procedures can be consistent (or not) with widely shared normative premises of fairness and their policy outcomes can be regrettable – or not.
Instead of exploring answers that have been given by political theorists in the past here, I wish to illustrate the problem by drawing upon a case from contemporary history. This case is the Brexit referendum held in the UK on 23 June 2016 on whether the UK should leave the European Union or remain its Member State. Was it a wise decision to let the question of future UK-EU relations be settled by referendum?
Here is a summary of the events. A British anti-EU political party, the United Kingdom Independence Party (Ukip) had won a relative majority of 27.5 per cent of the vote in the 2014 general elections to the European Parliament and came out as the strongest party, with most of its electoral base won over from that of the Conservative Party. Anticipation of this threatening trend had already prompted the incumbent Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron to commit himself, in January 2013, to holding a referendum on the Brexit issue by the year 2017 in the event that he was re-elected in the national elections of May 2015. This promise was intended to serve the dual purpose of increasing British bargaining power in ongoing negotiations with its EU partners (who were seen as averse to further Ukip gains and the prospect of Brexit, and hence were ready to grant concessions to the British government) and to immunize the Conservative electoral base against further defections of the voters, as eurosceptic Conservative voters were now offered the option to vote “leave” without switching their vote to Ukip.
When making their decision on referendum day, citizens were largely left with their own individual means of will formation and without any clear guidance from the political parties as to which of the two alternatives to opt for. The two major parties were either openly divided (Conservatives) or deeply ambivalent (Labour) about the right answer, and the only party that was clear and committed on the issue (Ukip) had no chance of achieving the parliamentary representation necessary, according to British electoral law, to follow its option through. Similarly divided were the media, with some of the tabloid press engaging in a competitive denunciation of the EU, often without much regard for the truthfulness of their anti-EU claims. Moreover, both camps were united in their reliance on fear as a negative motivation – be it the fear of losing control over the fates of “our” country to “Brussels” (or of having to compete with foreign migrant labour for jobs) on the part of leavers, or be it the fear of adverse economic consequences of a “Brexit” on the part of the remain camp where strong appeals to the advantages, attractions and promises of staying were rarely advanced, implying that there were hardly any. Being left in a state of disorientation and anxieties, and being informed by the media and polling organisations that the contest would be a tight one, voters had no choice but to voice their gut feelings and resentments, rather than their informed judgement on the merits of the two alternatives (and, least of all, the numerous compromise solutions that the binary Yes/No frame of any referendum induced them to entirely ignore).
How and why the decision to let the relative majority of those participating in the referendum decide on a most complex and highly consequential national issue can be justified as the “right” procedural decision – rather than as the (eventually failed) opportunistic calculus of a leading politician to maintain his power? In other words: What is this outcome’s source of validity and normative bindingness? Given its vast and highly uncertain short-term as well as long-term repercussions of the largely unanticipated outcome, some four million voters signed a petition on the days after the referendum, which called for the holding of a second referendum, thus indicating a widespread sense of regret, as well as alarm, over the outcome. Yet such repetition would supposedly have required another Referendum Act as its legal premise. Moreover, it would have opened the somewhat horrifying perspective of an endless chain of further referenda on the outcomes of referenda: If the first is seen as ill-considered and in need of self-correction, why should the second fare better?
Also, the procedural design of the Referendum Act failed to make use of the several safety valves that are often applied in referenda in order to strengthen the bindingness of the outcome, its chance of being durably and universally recognised as valid. For one thing, a quorum, or minimum required turnout of voters, could have been stipulated, such as a 75 per cent requirement. For the other, a super majority requirement could have been applied, such as a 60 per cent threshold that must be passed by either of possible outcomes; through the adoption of this mechanism, the objection could have been pre-empted, to an extent, that the result is, by and large, spurious, accidental and unworthy of being respected as binding.
Applying these two requirements could have been justified by reference to the fact that a referendum is a one-shot decision, and a highly consequential one at that, in the event that it is translated into actual policy. It causes consequences which are certain to make themselves felt in the long term future. In contrast, the “normal” democratic procedure of holding contested elections is defined by its periodicity, meaning that governing authority is granted pro tempore and that losers of an election will have another chance in four or five years’ time, with both competing parties and members of the general public being given a learning opportunity to revise platforms and preferences during the interval. If after an election, policies are considered to have gone “wrong”, there is at least someone to blame (and punish!) on next election day, whereas the voting public can only blame itself (i.e., nobody in particular, as the vote is secret and nobody can be held accountable) in the event that the results of a referendum turn out to be seen as regrettable. Under a pure referendum regime, citizens would thus be deprived of learning opportunities and the challenge of forming and revising considered judgement. Issue-specific referenda, such as they are advocated, for instance, for issues of land use and conflicts over the territorial (re-) organisation of political communities, may be argued for in terms of their “once-and-forever” temporal structure and substantive irreversability: “an airport means an airport”, and for a long time to come. Because of the “sunk costs” invested already, there is no point in repeating a collective decision in five years’ time to find out whether we still want it. The same applies to constitutional referenda. These are, however, typically designed not to preclude the space for future socio-economic and political contestation (as is the case with the losers in all substantive referenda), but, to the contrary, to guarantee the permanent availability of such space – a guarantee that is implemented, for instance, through a bill of rights, the division of powers, and the stipulation of constitutionally-specified procedures and competencies of interpreting, amending and changing the constitution.
A third provision that was, in fact, made use of in the Brexit referendum is the procedural stipulation that the government is not strictly bound to implement the result, but can treat it as merely advisory. As sovereignty resides in Parliament, it is this representative body that must decide as to whether or not to endorse and subsequently implement the referendum decision. For the only thing that even the most sovereign body cannot do is to abdicate its own law-making powers and transfer it to another body, such as the multitude of citizens voting in a referendum. It follows that a Prime Minister cannot promise voters that he or she will follow their expressed preferences as though they constituted an act of legislation. In the absence of a parliamentary endorsement and ratification of the (presumed) popular will as expressed in a referendum, the latter remains entirely inconsequential. For example, the invocation of Article 50 TEU (the article that prescribes the first step of the procedures of actually exiting from the Union) must doubtlessly be an act of Parliament.
Let us now assume the (not entirely unlikely, but this is not my point here) case that “what happens next” in “reality” is a chain of events that frustrates the hopes and expectations that have been entertained by the majority and thus lets the initial and (practically irreversible) Brexit decision appear as, in retrospect, as misguided and regrettable. The immediate consequence of such frustration will be accusations directed at “them”, i.e., élites who have deceived “us”, the citizens, through false promises, and at the media that have misinformed us through their mendacious propaganda that has led the majority to decide the way it did. The sense of regret may lead us to the fruitless wish: If only we had made a different decision! But this frustration may also lead us to conclude that not just the decision but the very mode of making collective (and highly consequential for “all of us”) decisions has itself been ill-advised. How can a Prime Minister be allowed to adopt a risky tactic of maintaining his power position (over the country, his party, and within the EU) and make everyone else pay for the costs of what turns out to have been a frivolous miscalculation? If the chosen procedure of decision-making comes to be seen as a lesson of what not to do, such conclusion may rightly trigger the “constitutionalist” search for alternative procedures of decision-making that can possibly protect us from the regrets and complaints that we feel when facing the consequences of decisions that we have made under that procedure. The question becomes: Are there better and smarter, i.e., more reliable “ modes of making highly salient decisions – ways that are compatible, at the same time, with the basic tenets of democratic political theory, namely, equality of civil and political rights, freedom of opinion, and the division of state powers?
 I have argued elsewhere that there are altogether three kinds of regrets – or retrospectively perceived and deplored deficiencies of previous judgment – that are to be avoided: deficient future-regardingness, deficient other-regardingness and deficient fact-regardingness. Taken together, they can serve as a standard of political rationality. Cf., Claus Offe, “Crisis and Innovation of Liberal Democracy: Can Deliberation Be Institutionalised?”, in: Claus Offe and Ulrich K. Preuss, Citizens in Europe: Essays on Democracy, Constitutionalism and European Integration, (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2016), pp. 73-98.
I look like an outlier. Child of a European migrant and one myself. Career dedicated to human rights and the progressive cause. Left-leaning liberal. Graduate of élite institutions. Ex-London dwelling Scot. Yet, I voted Leave. Why?
Though no easy choice, for me, it was still a clear one. The United Kingdom has been on a wrong path for most of my lifetime, and, in these most recent decades, its social fabric has been brought almost to the breach.
Between 1979 and 2008, UK poverty doubled. One in six children in the UK live in absolute poverty, a proportion set to rise to almost one in five by 2020-21, while relative child poverty, currently running at 17 per cent, is projected by then to affect more than a quarter of children. Over 2 million UK families, more than one-third of the total, subsist on poverty incomes, despite an increased proportion of families including someone in work. Real wages fell 10 per cent between 2007 and 2015, the “longest sustained fall in average pay since the Great Depression”. By 2016, 900,000 people in the UK were employed on zero-hour contracts, a rise of 20 per cent on the previous year. Inequality, across all measures, has soared. The richest 10 per cent of UK households hold 45 per cent of all wealth, while the poorest half account for only 8.7 per cent. The income and wealth prospects of the young are diminishing. Yet, a short eight years after the start of the financial crisis, in 2016, UK firms paid employees £44 billion in bonuses alone, mostly in the financial services and insurance sectors. Those in England lacking financial support from parents now graduate from university with average debts of £44,000, higher than anywhere else in the English-speaking world, even, remarkably, the US. Home ownership has fallen in every region of the UK and in England to its lowest level since 1986, as prices inflated by international and local demand for UK real estate have become unattainable even for people on much higher than average salaries. The costs of childcare, at around £200 per week, wipe out the incomes of all but the highest-paid, while most childcare workers do not even enjoy a living wage. Deepened divisions in social and economic status are naturally accompanied by entrenched disadvantage for the less well-off in physical and mental health prospects and outcomes. The prevalence of obesity amongst the most deprived children is double that of the least deprived, while their likelihood of developing mental illness is 2-3 times as great. Scarcely surprising, in this context, social mobility has ground to a halt.
If statistics offer a snapshot, what they cannot communicate is the lived experience of degradation, marginalisation and, plainly, human abuse, meted out, generation on generation, to the majority who are not born wealthy in the UK.
Hyperbole? So it may seem to the educated metropolitan professionals who, usually, define the political, economic and media narratives framing social experience – to people, in other words, like me. But for anyone with even a mild or passing interest, testimony of this miserable toll is not hard to find.
Can it be said that Britain’s membership of the EU caused this? Of course, the answer is no, not in any direct way. And at various moments, I gladly concede, EU initiatives have patched up gaping holes in British employment and social policy, tempering extremes of Anglo-Atlantic free market ideology with more continental concerns for cohesion.
Yet, and though the matter is complex and uncertain, I believe that, at this time, and in the contingent circumstances that are ours to work with, the UK’s continuing EU membership could be an obstacle to restoring it to greater social balance. I suggest three reasons, scarcely new or original, but perhaps still worth repeating in the context of the present collection.
Firstly, an uncomfortable topic, but one that cannot be avoided: migration. In the ten years to 2011, the UK’s population increased by over 4 million, with immigrants accounting for an estimated 85 per cent of this growth. Over 600,000 people moved to the UK in 2014 and 2015 alone, with net immigration of EU citizens running close to 200,000 in each year. Of the 600,000 total, over half arrived for work, with between half and two-thirds of those already with jobs to go to.
Undoubtedly, and in line with prevailing political orthodoxy, the weight of reported expert economic opinion at least since the 1990s has assessed migrants’ net contribution in terms of taxation and the broader economy as positive. But cumulative gains may lag behind the immediate costs associated with new arrivals as users of public services, which redound on local authorities whose budgets have been cut, and cut again, since the financial crisis, while the profits such workers generate accrete to employers and the owners of capital, so that discussion of global net gains, for real living people, with their inconveniently truncated lifespans, is, at best, meaningless, and, worse, often deliberately manipulative and insincere.
The effects of such significant shifts in workforce on wages, working conditions and access to public services such as housing, hospitals and schools can be parsed, but again, global figures lack relevance to those population segments that are dislocated or undercut. Albeit they may earn more in Britain than they would at home, foreign-born workers and their children in the UK experience poverty at rates almost double those of UK-born workers, even years after arrival. Unskilled EU migrant workers are more vulnerable to exploitation, and are indeed gravely exploited in practice, at both the core and the margins of the UK economy today. If comparable indigent workers, in some cases, have the social wherewithal better to avoid the very worst abuses, this remains a situation in which, surely, no virtue is to be found.
Will Brexit, in itself, cure the ills of Britain’s labour market, and its social inequities? No. Does it entail any hard guarantee of reduced inwards migration to the UK? Again, no. But continued migration to the UK on anything resembling the trajectory of recent years, though still today maintained by many as economically desirable, is plainly not socially sustainable for a country that has so singularly failed to redress the deprivation and discrimination experienced by its existing population. If no silver bullet solution, then, the possibility of greater scope to control inward flow of people to the UK appears fairly assessed as a minimum condition to address the country’s chronic and still deepening social problems.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky portrays Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov as “one of those senseless persons who are very well capable of looking after their worldly affairs” and yet adding that “[a]s a general rule, people, even the wicked, are much more naïve and simple-hearted than we suppose. And we ourselves are, too”, thus postulating a universality in Fyodor’s character.
It has been held (a self-evident truth) that Britain is no longer an empire; and that, therefore, it has been delusional to vote by referendum to leave the EU, since the British are now discovering that they will be withdrawing from the EU constellation without having sufficient “imperial-like” resources to stand in the world on their own. But this is only a partial analysis. There is more at stake. There may no longer be vast territories held under colonial rule as was once the case, and, yet, “imperialism” is an enduring state of mind. One cannot under-estimate this state of mind, so diffused these days across much of Europe, and its potential to make things intelligible. To summarise a common understanding on the matter, this mentalité is about taking advantage and being confrontational, as opposed to an ethic of sharing, engagement and acknowledgement of the value of the “European other”. Ultimately, “Brexit” may be explained as signifying the attempt by parts of the population and of the élites to re-engineer these attitudes.
I entered the EUI in 2005 as one of a dozen or so researchers from the UK. A running joke at the time was to do a quick round of the Mensa, or refectory, staring at tables of French sitting with French, German with German, Greek with Greek, etc., and remark what a success European academic integration had been! The broader truth, though, was that this was real integration – not just of chemicals and Cassis de Dijon, but of friends of all nationalities – sharing ideas, sharing drinks (and, of course, rather often sharing beds, too). It was an integration of peoples.
It is little surprise that those of us in the UK who returned to our home countries or filtered off elsewhere in Europe and the world were normally committed europhiles, even if we often pretended otherwise to ourselves. We had experienced what Neil Fligstein dubbed the “Euroclash” in person: we were the privileged, mobile few for whom the EU had provided four years of quiet reflection and good food in paradise. We also faced the shock of following UK politics from afar, or experiencing it in reality once home. For us, the EU was part and parcel of who we were. For our fellow Britons, it was a foreign entity. This identity clash explains part of what I can imagine is a common feeling among many contributors to this publication: the UK’s very rejection of integration makes it a somewhat foreign entity for me now too.
The integration of people had simply not occurred. Britons ventured abroad but often simply to buy flats in UK bubbles in the Costa del Sol, or to be a part of a different trans-national project – the vestiges of the old Commonwealth that offered the promise of freedom and prosperity not in Berlin but in Brisbane. Meanwhile, those who came to British shores were rather too easily cast as outsiders (people who were here as part of a market, to cash-in, rather than to contribute to society). This was not free movement but “economic migration”; it was not a reciprocal exercise but the entry of outsiders on the take (for “our jobs”, “our benefits”, and “our homes”). The reaction recalls the debate over gay rights a decade ago – one’s affinity to the cause was often not determined by political, but by personal affiliation: Do you know someone who is gay and are you able to step into their shoes? (hence, the priority of coming out to the LGBTQ movement). Too few people had a stake in the EU project, and too few were able to identify with those who did. Too few could make it onto that Tuscan hill with us.
Surely, the question that Brexit poses to all of us committed to, or simply interested in, the EU is how to build that stake. How does the EU become something that can be defended not just at the level of trade statistics, but as a personal and political project? One has the feeling that, without this connection, without a sense of commitment to Europeanism, however thin, the EU has no hope of facing down the next catastrophe. The dis-integration of the Union is not, in this sense, a question of self-interest and preferences – if it were, the people of the UK (already enjoying a cherry-picked version of integration) would have been easily bought over – but a question of whether people perceive Europe as being a part of the “self” that defines their interests.

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