Are referendums like the one we had on Brexit a tool of fascism – or the will of the people?

Just back from a conference on “referendums and democratic politics” at New York University, on Thursday and Friday last week.

If there were one comment that summed up the proceedings it was from James Cronin, Professor of History at Boston College, who said that David Cameron had “made the mistake of not coming to this conference – if he had done he would have realised how fraught referendums are”, and how they usually create more problems than they solve.

I didn’t disagree, although in my contribution I argued that Cameron was pushed into the referendum by wider forces that he could hardly have resisted (an argument supported by Oliver Letwin, Cameron’s Cabinet colleague, yesterday). As I have written for The Independent, if he hadn’t promised the referendum Ed Miliband might well be prime minister now.

Miliband was also at the conference and made a powerful argument for MPs who had campaigned to stay in the EU not to try to oppose Brexit: “If the vote was people trying to say politicians are not listening, the worst thing you can do is to say we’re not going to listen to you.”

He quoted a woman in his constituency in Doncaster who explained why she voted to leave: “I know I’m not supposed to say this but it was to stop them coming over here and taking our benefits.” Miliband asked her if that were her only reason: “Oh no,” she said, “it was mainly because I wanted a new beginning for my grandchildren.” His point (I think) was that Brexit meant hope and aspiration to many Labour voters, and for Labour politicians to appear to set themselves against that would be disastrous.

Thus he joined the growing consensus among Labour MPs that they cannot obstruct Article 50, the start of the two-year process of leaving the EU, if the Supreme Court insists that Parliament must vote on it. Jeremy Corbyn tried to set some conditions for Labour’s support for Article 50 yesterday, but they were things that Theresa May has already promised (such as “no watering down of EU workplace rights”), and Tom Watson, Labour deputy leader, said: “We are not going to hold up Article 50 if we don’t get the deal that we expect.” Keir Starmer, the shadow Brexit secretary, repeated Watson’s message on the Today programme this morning.

Miliband said that the referendum was just the beginning of a process, and one that was “not reversible in a 10- to 15-year view”. He thought that the EU might resolve itself into three circles: the eurozone, the rest of the EU and an outer circle of “associate” countries with the right to vary the rules of free movement.

As Labour leader, he resisted pressure from Ed Balls and others to commit the party to a referendum. Indeed, unlike many Labour and Conservative Remainers now arguing to delay Article 50 or for a second referendum, he did not vote for the Referendum Bill when it came to the House of Commons after the 2015 election. But he now insists that the result of the referendum must be respected.

Many of the speakers at the conference were sceptical of referendums. The tone was set in his opening remarks by Professor Larry Wolff, Director of the Center for European and Mediterranean Studies at NYU, who quoted Clement Attlee, when Winston Churchill proposed a referendum on continuing the wartime coalition: “I could not consent to the introduction into our national life of a device so alien to all our traditions as the referendum.”

Yet there seemed to be an unspoken distinction between good referendums, on independence, joining the EU or legalising cannabis, and bad referendums, such as those on EU integration and Brexit. One of the telling contributions was from Guy Verhofstadt, former prime minister of Belgium, who said, “I am still in favour of democracy, but...”, which is an ominous way to start a sentence, and who said “the existence of referendums is a threat to reform of the EU”.

Contributors covered independence referendums in Quebec, Catalonia and Scotland, EU-related referendums, including last year’s anti-austerity vote in Greece and this year’s anti-immigration vote in Hungary, and ballot initiatives in US states – nine states have referendums on legalising cannabis on the ballot tomorrow, for example.

The discussion of Brexit was also influenced by parallels with Donald Trump’s presidential election campaign: Pippa Norris of Harvard University spoke about the rise of populism and “picket-fence nostalgia” in America and Europe.

I have always been doubtful about the line that referendums are the instrument of dictators. It is true that Hitler held some, but Switzerland and California are hardly fascist states. One might as well say that elections are the instrument of dictators because they often abuse those too.

My view is that, provided the question is fair (the conference heard how Canada passed a Clarity Act in 2000 to ensure that the question in future referendums should be clear), referendums are a legitimate and democratic way to decide fundamental constitutional issues.

I shall write up more about the conference, including the contributions of John Nicolson and Ed Vaizey, the other MPs there (pictured above), shortly