Blowing smoke?
Political sleight of hand
Dateline: 19:40, Monday, April 26th, 2004 - an Indian Restaurant.
"So which way are you going to vote in the referendum?", I'm asked. News headlines over the last few months have hovered in the realms of the continuing political arguments over the government's - and in particular Tony Blair, the UK presid... sorry Prime Minister's - choices vis-a-vis the invasion of Iraq 12 months earlier. All of a sudden the media are in a frenzy over the announcement by the very same Mr. Blair that contrary to his prior statements against referenda in principle, the population WILL be given the opportunity to vote on the UK's acceptance of the European constitution currently being negotiated.
Now the responsibility for representation and decision making - which Blair had claimed was the exclusive province of Parliament - falls to every eligible member of the voting public. The purpose is "to stimulate debate", supposedly. Only one problem - what's the motion under debate? No-one's bothered to ask that, yet. Nor has anyone asked what changed Blair's mind. His stance in the past has always been that Parliament's role was to make informed management decisions on behalf of the population that elected it, and that any alteration to the status quo undermines its position. So what changed that outlook?
Don't get me wrong. I don't think referenda are necessarily a bad thing. It's democracy after all - government by the people. I do have reservations whether the general population are well enough informed on matters of law and politics to have the capacity to make a truly informed decision in this instance. The media will be full of skewed representations of the facts and the considerations, as the different polarised camps try to fight their corners. Anyone but a constitutional lawyer will have a hard time wading through the text of the document itself. Anyone but a political historian is going to have difficulty applying the principles to a context. I haven't a clue right now about anything but the broadest features of the subject. However, it is a big decision the outcome of which will affect the status of the UK thereafter, and impinge on the lives of every man, woman, and child forever more. The people deserve to have a say.
What concerns me is not the referendum, per se. I'm puzzled over just how much press coverage one simple announcement has received in the face of much more pressing, albeit continuing, issues elsewhere.
In summary, the media are now all in a frenzy over the question of how voters will respond to an as yet unframed question in a future referendum over the UK's acceptance or rejection of an as yet incomplete and unpublished European constitution. Well, that and the fact that Tony Blair openly changed his mind over something. Call me cynical, but I regard that as one hell of a political smoke-screen.
