The stability of liberal democracy depends upon Brexit

Most professions have fairly obvious aims. Medics aim at curing patients; pilots, at reaching destinations safely; generals, at winning wars.

What makes politics so difficult is that politicians aren’t, or at least shouldn’t be, in this sense mono-teleological. Their job is, rather, to balance off one kind of result against another.

Even within a single kind of valuable social result—say, achieving prosperity or preserving liberty—there are bound to be difficult tensions between the short-term and long-term consequences arising from a given political action; and when it comes to tensions between two or more different kinds of valuable result—say, between maximising prosperity and maximising liberty—the political going really gets tough.

Never is this truer than when a nation comes face to face with fundamental change. Unlike in the ordinary run of elections, during which politicians (and the journalists who are parasitic upon them) can at least pretend that “the issues” are self-defining, once the nature of the state and its fundamental relationships to other states are up for discussion no one involved in the debate can ignore the tensions between differing, valid concerns.

This is precisely the position in which we now find ourselves as we head towards Brexit.

If ever there was a fundamental change, this is it. And if ever there were differing, valid concerns that need to be balanced off with one another, there are now.

Who knows how to balance the value of open markets (even supposing them to be accepted as the engines of prosperity) against the value of national self-determination? Or the value of international cooperation in Europe against the value of freedom to pursue British as opposed to European interests in the world at large? It was, indeed, such vast imponderables that formed the core of the referendum debate. And we will know only many decades from now, if even then, whose arguments came nearer to the truth.

Following the referendum, some "Remainers" have taken this continuing uncertainty as a reason to prolong the argument. In various more or less covert and ingenious ways, they have attempted to keep open the question whether we should in fact leave the EU as mandated by the electorate if X or Y or Z cannot be guaranteed as part of the terms upon which we leave.

But, as a Eurosceptic remainer who came to the conclusion before the referendum that, on balance, we were better off in (with the changes negotiated by David Cameron) than out (with the uncharted terrain onto which the Article 50 process would inevitably take us), I believe that those remainers who now seek in various ways to prolong the argument are doing the country a disservice—because they are failing to give due weight to one consideration that seems to me to outweigh all others.

What is this one outsized consideration?

It is the faith of our people in liberal democracy itself.

In any complex modern democracy, the people must necessarily cede large amounts of power to governments and parliaments. Only in that way can the modern state govern its citizens with any semblance of efficiency.

But it is an inevitable consequence of such power-structures that, at least between one election and the next, they disenfranchise the electorate—and that, even at election-time, the political parties present to the electorate pre-packaged alternatives rather than an unrestricted choice. The further consequence, as we have seen vividly displayed in recent times, is that large sections of the electorate may all too easily become disillusioned with what they come to see as an "establishment stitch-up."

Against this background, if the electorate is on a particular occasion presented with a direct and unrestricted choice on a matter of the greatest possible significance in a referendum, and if—following a clear majority decision on that matter—the "establishment" then attempts to override that democratic decision on the grounds that the electorate cannot possibly have understood its full implications, then the "establishment" is telling the electorate that democracy is a farce.

It does not take the gift of prophecy to see the dangers of a polity within which the electorate is told by the "establishment" that democracy is a farce. Such a polity is setting itself up for the eventual triumph of illiberal demagogues who have no time either for the liberal values that the rule of law protects, or ultimately for democracy itself—who can plausibly appeal to the populace over the heads of an "establishment" that has palpably disdained them.

Accordingly, in the light of the referendum result, a full and genuine Brexit—whatever its economic consequences—is now a necessary condition for the continued stability of our liberal democracy. As that liberal democracy is the most precious thing we have, we should act to preserve it. And we should put the need to do so above all other political aims.