That's a bit of a shallow argument. So long as one accepts the existence of nation states, one must accept that there are lines between them. The lines, then, are subject to change by political consent.
Scotland voted strongly to remain in the EU, and despite this it will be leaving. That's obviously part and parcel of being in a union, but coming so soon after an independence referendum in which one of the key arguments was "voting for independence means leaving the EU" it seems pretty obvious why there would be disquiet. It's demonstrative of how difficult it is to have a political union where there is such wildly disproportionate power wielded by one member through the weight of population.
I'm an absolute card-carrying supporter of Scottish independence. But honestly, I'd rather see genuine federalism in the UK to deal with the structural constitutional problems. However, there is no political will to make that happen, so it seems like a lost cause.
> Scotland voted strongly to remain in the EU, and despite this it will be leaving. That's obviously part and parcel of being in a union
I don't know why it has to be part and parcel of being in a union. Let me make a comparison to Australia–in Australia, constitutional amendment referendums must be passed by both a majority of voters nationally and also a majority of states. So even if 52% of Australians nationally vote in favour of a constitutional amendment, if it fails to also get a majority in at least four of the six states, the amendment fails.
If the UK applied the same rule as Australia does–the UK doesn't have a written constitution like Australia does, but Brexit no doubt is an issue of constitutional level importance–then the Brexit referendum would have failed, since even though it got a national majority, it only passed in 2 of the 4 constituent countries.
Or, similarly, look at the US–constitutional amendments aren't passed by national referenda, rather by votes of states legislatures, but still 75% of states must approve, so a bare national majority in favour of a constitutional amendment is unlikely to be enough for its ratification.
So, David Cameron could have designed the Brexit referendum to require a double majority of national voters and constitutent countries, very similar to the Australian model, and somewhat similar to the US model, but he chose not to do that–and had he done that, Brexit would have failed. Healthy political unions tend to have strong mechanisms for protecting the rights of their smaller members, but the UK has basically non-existent mechanisms for doing this, and while the Brexit referendum could have been a good opportunity to start doing that, it didn't happen. So this isn't "part and parcel of being in a union" at all.
Point taken - you are of course correct. I actually very much expected this to be part of the process, but it seems that overconfidence on the part of the Cameron government resulted in this decision not being taken. A move like this does tend to reinforce the perception that Westminster is "more important" than devolved administrations.
I meant this more in the sense that I don't think the legitimacy of the outcome can be questioned constitutionally.
Can you imagine the chaos in the U.K. had England voted to leave and Scotland and NI had prevented it, though? That would probably fracture the union faster!
> So, David Cameron could have designed the Brexit referendum to require a double majority of national voters and constitutent countries
I'm not sure he could have designed it to "require" anything, since after all it was a non-binding referendum, with which the government was free to do whatever it chose, and it's not clear that there is any basis for a binding referendum.
The decision after the fact to treat the referendum as if it were a binding, simple-majority-rule, measure, OTOH, is ceetainly questionable.
The decision after the fact to treat the referendum as if it were a binding, simple-majority-rule, measure, OTOH, is ceetainly questionable.
There were plenty of questionable things about the referendum, but I really don't think this was one of them. If you look at Hansard during the debates on the enabling legislation, one MP after another spoke in terms of giving the people the final say, or words clearly to that effect. If you look at the official booklet, sent to every household in the UK by the government at taxpayers' expense, it too contained wording that clearly implied the people would decide.
Personally I'm of the view that we need more direct democracy to fix our political systems rather than less, and I see little democratic legitimacy in arguments about Parliamentary sovereignty given the alternatives available to us today. So for me, whether or not I agree with the result, as a matter of principle I would have preferred the referendum to be absolutely legally binding anyway. But even if our most senior lawyers held that it was not, it seems quite clear that even before the vote the expectation both of Parliament and of the general public was that the referendum result should decide the matter.
The referendum legislation could have been drafted to contain a clause specifying in which situations it would have been "deemed to have passed". That clause could have contained the requirement for a double majority. Of course, being a non-binding referendum, such a clause could not have had any direct legal effect, but it would have been politically near-impossible to disregard. There is no logical contradiction between the idea of a referendum being legally non-binding and the idea of a referendum with a higher threshold for passing than "50%+1 nationally".
The constituent countries don't have equal weighting though - there would be outrage if the popular vote had carried but the vast majority of the population ,who live in England, were overridden by small minorities.
The trouble with that argument is that in a case of a straightforward binary decision, which is what was on offer, the only logical alternative to tyranny of the majority is some form of "tyranny of the minority", against which all the same criticisms would apply but stronger.
This is a reasonable argument against having a simple binary decision in the first place, but of course that opens up plenty more scope for distorting the outcome. In an ideal world you'd find a consensus favoured by most and tolerable to all, but with such a complicated and divisive issue as the EU, that was always unlikely.
You're effectively arguing for votes in Scotland or NI to count for far, far more than those in England. You're also effectively arguing for tyranny of the minority and a recipe for stasis.
> So long as one accepts the existence of nation states, one must accept that there are lines between them.
But that is the point - we can not accept the existence of these lines anymore. The XX century brought nation-state principles to their logical ends - WWII, the atom bomb and the Iron Curtain. We are supposed to have moved on to a world of international cooperation, of supranational coordination, which is the only way we can tackle systemic issues like economic inequality and climate change. The commercial world is already there, industrial globalisation is a fact of life, but the political structures are lagging. The answer cannot be a nationalist backlash, there lies balkanization and a return to the bad old days of tribal wars.
Note that this is not an attack on Scottish independence - there is an argument for "national" rule to be on a smaller scale than what we inherited from the XIX/XX century, especially in the internet age where industrial scale is relatively less important than it was. And absolutely the UK should be reorganised (the North of England has similar grievances - heck, anyone outside of London has). But the language of separatism is a dangerous djinni and it's really hard to put it back in the bottle without significant casualties.
> but coming so soon after an independence referendum in which one of the key arguments was "voting for independence means leaving the EU" it seems pretty obvious why there would be disquiet.
I wonder how many people voted to leave the union on the basis that they would it mean leaving the EU as well?
I can't find any numbers on that right now but I'm sure there's a YouGov poll that asks that question. I don't doubt that there are some, but I've yet to come across anybody with those views personally.
Scotland voted strongly to remain in the EU, and despite this it will be leaving. That's obviously part and parcel of being in a union, but coming so soon after an independence referendum in which one of the key arguments was "voting for independence means leaving the EU" it seems pretty obvious why there would be disquiet. It's demonstrative of how difficult it is to have a political union where there is such wildly disproportionate power wielded by one member through the weight of population.
I'm an absolute card-carrying supporter of Scottish independence. But honestly, I'd rather see genuine federalism in the UK to deal with the structural constitutional problems. However, there is no political will to make that happen, so it seems like a lost cause.