What's in a referendum question? Quite a lot... | thearticle

The eagle-eyed Daniel Finkelstein spotted a fascinating aspect of our Brexit conundrum deep in the weeds of the latest ComRes poll. In it, voters were asked to respond to the same question

asked in two different ways – and came up with very different answers. Q1. “I would prefer to leave the EU without a deal than have Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister” Agree 44 per cent

Disagree 33 per cent Q2. “I would prefer to have Jeremy Corbyn as prime minister than leave the EU without a deal” Agree 27 per cent Disagree 51 per cent In other words, where you put Jeremy

Corbyn in the question significantly changes the answer. This is part of the wider problem of polling on the EU, and politics generally. Mrs May famously thought the 20 per cent leads she

enjoyed in polls over Corbyn in March 2017, combined with the majority for Leave the summer before, meant she would easily win a general election. She was wrong. A personal confession here.

I wrote a book in 2014 called Brexit: How Britain Will Leave Europe. It was based on decades of door knocking and talking to voters, SME business owners, trade unions and just what to me was

political common sense as applied to the UK outside the M25. I have never trusted polls on Europe, whether they favour my pro-EU position or the anti-EU camp. In 2016, David Cameron talked

to Jean Chretien, the wily Canadian prime minister who defeated the second Quebec independence referendum in 1995, to ask for his advice on how to win his Brexit plebiscite. Chretien told

him to put in minimum thresholds of getting majorities in all component entities of the United Kingdom, or insist on a 60 per cent – or even two-thirds majority, given the scale of the

constitutional upheaval associated with leaving. Cameron assured Chretien he was going to win, so did not need to put in the thresholds which were put in place for the 1978 referendums on

Scottish devolution, and which are common in countries where referendums are regularly held. The complacency of the Cameron government and the utterly useless Remain campaign in the run-up

to 23 June 2016 is well known, but there is also the question of the question. Previous UK referendums and those held abroad asked voters to say Yes or No. In the 2014 Scottish referendum

the ballot paper asked voters if they agreed that Scotland should “become an independent country?” Yes or No. In 1975 is was a simple Yes/No answer to the question “Should the UK should stay

in European Community (the Common Market)?”. But by 2016, the decision on the question was in the hands of the Electoral Commission, another quango which was trying to justify its

existence. So they invented the Leave/Remain divide. But nowhere on the ballot paper was any definition of what Leave meant. And we are plagued by this question to this day. After decades of

wrangling over Britain’s relationship with Europe and full-scale media coverage in 2016 it would be wrong to think a different question would have produced a different result. More

interesting is that of the 52 million voting age citizens in the UK in June 2016 only 17.4 million – around a third – voted to Leave. The rules of democracy are clear. A majority of one is

enough. But the 35.6 million voting age citizens who did not vote for Brexit have had hardly any voice since 2016, beyond the Lib Dems with their ever changing leaders. If Boris Johnson runs

out of parliamentary road and is unable to call a general election, the only alternative left may mean asking the people again. If that happens, choosing the question will be a very

difficult job indeed.