EU Ref: What was it good for?

 This piece was originally published by the online magazine New Compass

As most of the world knows, the UK had a referendum on EU membership in June. What the rest of the world probably doesn’t know is how divisive the referendum and its aftermath were. It exposed deep divisions around class and race, revealed that half the country knows nothing about the life experiences of the other half, and holds them in contempt anyway and that a sizeable section of the population would like to repeat the exercise until they get the outcome they want. And towards the end of the campaign, an MP was assassinated by a Fascist.

But despite fomenting such profound fissures in British society, the referendum result (Leave won by 52% to 48%) has resolved nothing. Prominent Leave campaigners seem disappointed they won, the Conservative government is nowhere near triggering Article 50 (which begins the two-year process of Brexit) and calls for a second referendum regularly emanate from businessmen and politicians while others hold that Parliament should simply refuse to implement the result. The referendum has, at best, instituted a shaky truce which won’t last long.

The EU referendum was, in short, a terrible way to arrive at an important decision. It failed miserably to apply three vital principles of effective decision-making. The people making the decision did not have adequate information, were denied the chance for deliberation and critical reflection and lacked the power to implement the decision they arrived at.

The referendum was presented as the epitome of democracy. What could be more democratic than asking the people what they think, after all? But other forms of democracy exist that grant sovereignty to ordinary people while avoiding the ephemeral thrill of choosing which section of the elite you like the best. Experiments, such as citizen juries, participatory budgeting, random selection and assembly democracy devolve genuine power and result in more trusted and better judgements:

Deliberation and critical reflection

The EU referendum was a thoroughly mediated experience which relegated the public to the role of passive onlooker. The jousting of the protagonists was presented daily on TV screens and through the print and online media. For most of the campaign, the mainstream media presented the referendum as largely an internal Conservative party contest and revelled in farcical spectacles such as a confrontation of ‘In’ and ‘Out’ flotillas on the River Thames.

Other forms of democracy, however, rest on enabling conversation and deliberation to happen. Participatory Budgeting, for example, involves the election of recallable delegates by assemblies to determine how all or most of a municipality’s budget is spent. According to one academic, “the key ingredient is deliberation, the quality of the exchange of ideas.” Citizen juries spend days deliberating issues such as obesity, transport, electoral systems or work and as a result their findings are trusted by the public.

Thinkers such as Erich Fromm have pointed to the way the jury system, a democratic way of arriving at life-altering decisions, arrives at generally objective and reliable decisions precisely because it involves prolonged deliberation. The participants know their decision will have an immediate and lasting effect and treat it seriously as a result. The EU referendum, by contrast, resembled a two month long edition of ‘Judge Judy’.

Representation

One Leave campaigner, the writer Dreda Say Mitchell, described the political world which she temporarily gained entry to, as “largely one big boys’ club. And it’s for a very specific type of boy, at that.”

Referenda, like its kin Parliamentary government, merely amplifies the representation of people who have already carved out a media profile. The most vocal protagonists of the EU referendum – David Cameron, Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage and Michael Gove – all male and privately educated, illustrate the unrepresentativeness of representative government. The referendum made it plain to see how the upper middle classes dominate the terms of the debate in British politics.

By contrast, there is a growing use around the world of an ancient principle of democratic government – that of random selection. Aristotle thought democracy was characterised by selection by lot, so that citizens could ‘rule and be ruled in turn’, while elections were a sure sign of oligarchy. The modern form of selection by lot involves the creation of a mini-publics by randomly selecting willing participants with the aim of achieving demographic balance and the representation of all social groups. The new Icelandic Constitution of 2010 and the electoral system in British Colombia were both partly determined by randomly selected groups of citizens.

Aside from its inclusiveness, random selection or sortition has two other important effects. It detaches political influence from personal ambition as participants are not elected and only wield influence for a finite period. And it brings together people with divergent views and backgrounds, compelling them to take into account perspectives other than their own and those of people like them. In these senses, random selection represents the antithesis of the UK’s referendum experience.

Adequate information

The EU referendum excelled in generating a thick fog of misinformation. The Leave side peddled the fiction that Brexit would result in £350 billion in extra funds for the NHS every week and made immigration the centrepiece of their campaign, masking the fact they weren’t in fact promising to reduce immigration. And, aside from aping Nazi propaganda, the Leave side’s posters deliberately conflated the migrant crisis with EU membership.

The Remain side, meanwhile, predicted economic Armageddon and warned a ‘punishment budget’ comprising spending cuts and tax rises would inexorably follow Brexit. Allegedly neutral economic experts from the Bank of England, OECD and IMF were cited to underline the recklessness of voting Leave and its calamitous effect on GDP. But these experts were anything but neutral. The OECD had advised Britain to ‘press on with austerity’ on the eve of the 2015 General Election, while the Bank of England ensured making rich people richer and inflating share prices were the crucial elements of the way the state responded to economic collapse in 2008.

Both sides in the campaign also indulged in the daily fantasy that the UK was still a manufacturing nation and that the result would either ruin or invigorate the country’s trade. Politicians made endless visits, garbed in high vis vests and hard hats, to whatever manufacturing firms they could locate. In truth, the UK has undergone rampant deindustrialisation over the last 30 years and the country’s biggest export is financial services.

Other forms of democratic decision-making, however, are predicated upon understanding, not concealing, the issues at hand. A Citizen’s Jury established in Mali in January 2006 heard evidence for and against the introduction of the GM technology before concluding that GM crops should not be grown in the country. In the US state of Oregon a randomly selected panel of citizens convenes to scrutinise ‘ballot initiatives’, referendum proposals which are then put to the state’s voters at election time. They take evidence from advocates and policy experts before compiling a ‘Citizens’ Statement’ about the proposals, essentially a piece of distilled information which can be used by voters to make their choice.

Both these democratic techniques embody the proper attitude towards experts. Experts are never neutral and should not be treated as such. There is disagreement within every field of expertise and practitioners, whatever their claim to superior knowledge, need to be interrogated by citizens and their viewpoints translated into understandable language. Every branch of specialised authority, especially finance and economics, relies on establishing an air of mystery about its workings and judgements. The task of a genuine democracy is to dispel this.

Taking back control

A natural and justified objection to the examples of alternative democracy presented here is that they are mere adjuncts to the existing system and have no real power. They can advise but little else. So I think we need to establish ways that ‘alt democracy’ can transform society, not just make it appear more consensual. Appropriating the language of the Leave campaign in Britain, here are two ways we can ‘take back control’.

The first is through the public control of information. Beyond the racism and xenophobia, the UK’s referendum result indicated there was something very wrong with status quo despite the official narrative of growing GDP and record levels of employment. But this was an intuitive sense of anxiety and directed at the wrong target.

We need to shine an unflinching light on our economic system and dominant institutions. The writer, Dan Hind, advocates a system of ‘public commissioning’ with the expressed intention of taking the power of forming opinion and social depiction out of the hands of the mainstream media and giving it to the public. Through an annual budget of £80m, thousands of journalists and researchers would be employed to undertake long-term research. The public would vote for the subjects it wanted to see investigated and each round of voting would be preceded by open meetings. “National institutions, the EU and institutions like the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the Bank of International Settlements would all become available to sustained scrutiny,” says Hind. This approach was piloted in Croatia in 2013.

The second way is through the public establishing an influence over private investment and government stimulus. Illustrating how little has changed over the last eight years, the Bank of England responded to the Brexit vote by spending £170 billion on shoring up the wealth of rich people. It revived its Quantitative Easing (QE) programme, bought the debt of companies it liked, and re-embarked on a £100m programme to encourage banks to lend out their money. QE, which buys debt securities from pension funds, insurance companies and ‘high net worth’ individuals, has succeeded in pushing up the prices of assets such as shares and property. But for those without assets it is meaningless.

A real way to ‘to take back control’ or in fact to establish it in the first place, would be for the public to decide how economic stimulus is spent. Through country-wide assemblies the public could determine how many new council homes are built, develop transport projects, found co-operatives or establish medical research laboratories.

If this democratic method of assigning state stimulus money was established, we could become more ambitious. The American mathematician and author of After Capitalism, David Schweickart, has proposed ‘social control of investment’:  a tax on the capital assets of all enterprises to be dispersed throughout the country on a per person basis, enabling assemblies to decide how a proportion of investment is spent. Apart from establishing a breach in the divine right of central and private banks and corporations to decide where and how investment takes place, such a new democratic initiative would impede the inexorable growth of mega-cities, such as London. Mega-cities are ecological nightmares, sucking in people and capital, while starving other regions of investment. If GDP is calculated per capita, London and the South East are the only regions of the UK to have recovered at all from the crash of 2008. This is one form of inequality, highlighted by the referendum, which needs urgent rectification.

But instead of these democratic alternatives, the UK has indulged in the illusory freedom of plebiscite democracy, which assiduously stokes dissatisfaction while failing to deliver anything more than the chimera of empowerment. Real democracy looks very different.

On not being governed by 'the best'

A single person will not serve as the sole representative of the Partido da Terra, the libertarian municipalist political party elected to Lousame municipality in North-West Spain in May. Instead, under a system of rotation, every four months a different person will occupy the position; 11 in total over the four year term.

In Iceland, the grassroots group Alda (‘The Association for Sustainability and Democracy’) advocates that a third of Icelandic Parliament be reserved for randomly selected citizens. Part of Alda’s board is also randomly selected. “Random selection is simply a very incorruptible process, unlike elections which are usually won with money,” argues board member Hjalti Hrafn Hafthorsson.

Faced with the twin realities of economic and ecological failure, many opposition movements press for the widening use of elections to bring undemocratic institutions into line with the popular will. Under the banner of ‘economic democracy’ there is an insistence that company boards and pension fund managers, for example, should be elected, not appointed. More conventionally, there is a fervent desire – witness Jeremy Corbyn, Bernie Sanders, Syriza etc - for elected austerity-imposing governments to be replaced by elected anti-austerity governments.

But alongside this fixation on more elections – choosing people to occupy empowering positions for which the only available recourse is that they lose subsequent elections - there exists a growing recognition that they cannot overcome the burgeoning set of problems we face. Both in terms of what kind of person puts themselves forward as a candidate for election and the forces exerted on that person once in a position of power, many are concluding that elections are not the answer. Random selection (or sortition to give it another name) – the selection of people who don’t visibly desire power to govern for short and non-renewable periods – can be however.

Not only are elections not the answer to the unmistakable issues of mammoth inequality and elite power, but they are also not democratic. For a long time elections have been regarded as synonymous with democracy, but random selection has a far better claim to be the democratic way.

Ancient Athens and sortition

Aristotle famously said that choosing officials by lot was democratic but selecting them by election was a sign of oligarchy. A cursory look around the world reveals its oligarchical character – the widespread use of elections, coupled with the barely hidden assumption that elections cannot actually threaten the interests of the 1 per cent and 0.1 per cent. Ancient Athens was the originator of the practice of government by sortition – apart from expert posts such as architects or admirals, all public officials, magistrates and so on, were chosen randomly, using an allotment machine for that purpose, the kleroterion.

But sortition didn’t die out with the end of democracy in Athens. According to the anthropologist David Graeber, for much of European history elections were assumed to be an aristocratic way of selecting public officials. “’Aristocracy’”, he writes, “after all literally means, ‘rule by the best,’ and elections were seen as meaning that the only role of ordinary citizens was to decide which, among the ‘best’ citizens, was to be considered best of all.” The democratic way to select officials, he asserts, was taken to be by random lottery (and this was actually the case in early modern times in the Italian cities of Lucca and Vincenza).

Ambition and other disorders

And now, in a world convinced that elections are the only democratic way to choose who governs us, we are growing increasingly tired of being ‘ruled by the best’. Epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, co-author of The Spirit Level has astutely identified one of the faults of our political system as selecting “people with ambition as their primary quality”. The English psychologist, Oliver James, claims that, while 13 per cent of the general population have a personality disorder, so do a majority of high achievers in spheres such as politics, business and the arts.” And invariably the high achievers will be the ones pushing themselves forward as candidates and being elected to positions of power.

The evidence that psychopathy amongst corporate chief executives and senior managers is four times higher than amongst the rest of the population has by now become something of a trope in popular culture. But psychopathy is just an extreme example of personality disorder. Personality disorder more commonly takes the form of narcissism (marked by the desire for dominance, insensitivity to others and a preoccupation with personal success) or the borderline (capriciousness and impulsivity). I believe any close-up observation of the exercise of power by successful people will reveal these behaviours to be very common.

As James emphasises, the traits that accompany personality disorder are an advantage in the quest of reach positions of power. “Being a chameleon, with the self-monitoring, game playing distance that often accompanies dissociation, has been shown to enhance career success in organisations,” he says. “Ruthlessness is easier if you lack empathy for the emotions of others, as borderline people often do, and being ruthless is usually necessary if you are to reach the very top.”

According to James, personality disordered behaviour thrives in organisations “where an individual is very concerned to gain power, resources or status.” Institutions that hold out the lure of gaining “power, resources or status” are clearly not limited to profit maximising capitalist corporations. Public sector organisations, elected governments or pan-governmental bodies like the EU are just as susceptible to this kind of misrule. There is now a well-trodden career path in politics – intern, researcher, special adviser, MP, minister – while a common alternative is to demonstrate your talent in the corporate sector before switching to politics. It is more accurate to say that personality disordered behaviour thrives in oligarchic institutions.

Mimicking the elite

Our collective sense of impotence is compounded by the fact that, while ruling elites are generally more disordered than the populations they rule over, the mass of people are catching up. The American researcher Jean Twenge, has identified a 30 per cent increase in narcissism, among college students, since the late 1970s. She says that in the 1950s only 12 per cent of teenagers agreed with the statement, ‘I am an important person’ but, by the late 1980s, this had risen to 80 per cent. The English academic Peter Fleming, says students now approach their education like “fecund bank managers who only see rational and singular futures.”

Culturally, ‘being the best’, the aristocratic mode of rule, has become firmly entrenched, as evident in public life, marked by perennial elections, as it is in its traditional bastion of the autocratic private, corporate sector. For the rest of the population, the only feasible choice is to try and mimic the successful, prodded by the neoliberal insistence that everyone think of themselves as an individual enterprise. Witness the rise in self-employment and the accompanying conviction that success or failure is a personal responsibility. But, as much we seem besotted with the lives of the rich and famous and want to emulate them, there is a germinating awareness that there is something wrong with ‘the best’ and the kind of rule they embody. Paradoxically, we need rule by people who don’t want to rule over us. Immediately we allow the desire for power to be let off the leash, multiple problems ensue. “If righteous people don’t want to govern,” says French economics lecturer, Étienne Chouard, “and if we give power, as in representative government, to those who want it, the worst will govern.”

Conventional political thought, even if it recognises the problem, cannot provide an answer. Oliver James, who politically is a left-wing social democrat, candidly admits he can’t ultimately see a way out. “To run a large business or government department requires extremely hard work, and it may even be that the disordered are the best equipped to make what to others would be a sacrifice of their personal lives.” The social psychologist Stanley Milgram, whose 1960s experiments showed the power of obedience, could only suggest “constant vigilance” as a remedy.

However, sortition does offer a solution, if not an instantaneous one. The choosing of people to hold positions of power, not as part of a well-thought out career ladder, but randomly and for short and non-renewable periods, can neutralise the pernicious effects of electing individuals to niches of power. And as has been demonstrated, it can more accurately reflect the make-up of society, increasing the presence of women and marginalised groups. Random selection can therefore loosen the stranglehold of the upper middle classes on political power.  A reliance on elections, by contrast, will merely reproduce the same political inequalities.

A realist vision

But less noticed is the fact that random selection can turn traditional notions of Left and Right on their head. The linguist Steven Pinker differentiates between a left-wing utopian vision of human nature and a right-wing tragic vision, associated with, among others, Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. The tragic vision assumes that people are inherently selfish and flawed and that any changes will likely have unintended consequences worse than the problems they are intended to fix. The utopian vision assumes people are altruistic, and, in principle, perfectible. In short, conservatives are realists, leftists are idealists.

But random selection rests on a realist view of human nature and the conviction that institutions have a decisive effect on how people behave. You don’t count on virtuous behaviour; you assume people are not inherently good, you assume dishonesty. That’s why mandates, under random selection, are short and non-renewable. Representative government, however, when it is not simply disingenuous, is founded on a naïve idealism: that democracy will somehow emerge unscathed, while the elected inhabitants of power pursue their own self-interest and, in between elections, accede to the demands of the economy’s dominant financial and corporate institutions. It is time to see through the election myth and recognise how the world works