Among the reasons that I heard for people
wanting to vote for Brexit were, 'Well, it’s
nice to have a change,' and, 'Well, I preferred
the old blue passport to the European purple
passport.'
These are the kinds of reasons people were
giving for voting for Brexit.
The day after the referendum, the most Goggled
question in Britain was: What is the European
Union?
During the Brexit campaign one of the leading
politicians favoring Brexit, Michael Gove,
said to the British people, “You are the
experts.
Don’t trust experts, you are the expert
now.”
So ordinary people who have absolutely no
knowledge of economics or politics or history
decided on a 50 percent majority to vote to
Britain out of the European market, out of
the European community, which was a very,
very complicated, detailed, ramified structure
that has been built up over decades.
And so in one stroke the British people, who
had no knowledge, no expertise, were given
the opportunity by a reckless David Cameron
to vote us out and they did, by a very narrow
margin.
This cult of everybody being an expert, all
opinions being equally valid is, I think,
dangerous and most unfortunate.
Of course I have been accused of being an
elitist because of this.
And yes, when you’re about to have an operation
you want an elite surgeon to cut you open,
you want an elite anesthetist to put you under.
When you’re about to fly you want an elite
pilot to fly you.
When you’re about to leave a federation
of states, which has been built up over decades,
you want an elite economist or politician
or historian to advise you on it.
You don’t want to take the view of just
any old man in the street or woman in the
street.
I pronounce myself profoundly ill-equipped
to vote on the referendum about Brexit.
I was ill-equipped and so was the vast majority
of the British people ill-equipped.
In that sense I think that elitist should
stop being a dirty word and we should start
to respect elites in whatever field we’re
talking about.
We want elite musicians to play in our orchestras,
et cetera.
I think it’s bad enough to ask non-experts
like me to vote in direct referendums, but
when we are also being fed false information,
or it’s deliberately false information.
The Trump administration is actually lying
every day and more or less proud of it.
In Britain the Brexit campaign had a bus—you
may have read about this—they had a bus
which had a great big slogan on the side,
which said that every day or every week I
think it was, some gigantic sum was being
paid to the European Union, which if we left
Europe would be available for the national
health.
Now that was an admitted lie, that’s quite
simply false, and many people were probably
swayed by that consideration to vote to leave
the European Union.
So no, I do think we need to stick to democracy
as it is, but I think it’s a representative
democracy that we have.
In Britain we have a parliamentary democracy,
normally we don’t vote on actual issues
we vote members of Parliament.
Members of Parliament then go to the House
of Commons and then they vote on our behalf.
And we have cabinet government where the cabinet
gets advice from civil servants who are expert.
So no I’m not advocating that people with
PhDs should get two votes or anything like
that; I don’t want to be elitist to quite
that extent.
So let’s go for representative democracy
but not referendum democracy.
I think it’s worth adding that the precedent
for not everybody having the same weighted
vote is already well-established in the United
States.
When you think about voting for the United
States Senate, where every state gets two
senators.
What that means is that a citizen of Wyoming
has, I think, the equivalent of 60 votes compared
to a citizen of California because if you
look at the actual relative population sizes
of Wyoming and California.
So in a way that pass has already been sold,
that we already see gross inequality.
I mean sixtyfold inequalities, and the Senate,
of course, is very important because the Senate
does not only take hugely important decisions
but also ratifies presidential nominees for
the Supreme Court and that could be the most
important single thing that a president ever
does, is appoint members to the Supreme Court
because they go on and on for decades, in
some cases, after the president is gone.
