Charles Moore:
Last week, Theresa May promised to resign if her Brexit deal were passed. The unspoken corollary was that she would stay if it wasn’t. This is political lunacy, of course, since it rewards failure, but it could still be effective: a party held hostage by its leader might feel that, to get rid of her, it must give her what she wants.
She is bluffing, though. Even if Mrs May is allowed to hold yet another vote, that really will be the last time. After it, win or lose, she will have to go. So those wondering how to vote should set aside her threats, and vote on the deal’s merits – or lack of them – as if she were not there.
One of the few ministers looking impressive in the melee is Rory Stewart. Calm and articulate, he deserves higher office. But last week I heard him advance a nostrum which lies behind a lot of Remainer thinking: “If we have a 52:48 vote, we need a 52:48 result.”
This is a false doctrine in the British system. Apply it to any general election. Our first-past-the-post tradition means that if a party gets an overall majority of seats in Parliament, it governs alone. In modern times, this has meant in practice that a party with less than 50 per cent of the votes governs the country. Any British one-party government with a 52:48 margin of victory would be enjoying the biggest mandate ever given since before the Second World War. The Brexit referendum winners got nearly 3.5million more votes than any political party ever.
With a referendum that asks a binary question, the win-or-lose aspect is even more starkly the case than in an election. Indeed, the whole point of asking the people is to get a yes or no answer. Did the people of Northern Ireland want the Good Friday Agreement? They said yes. Did those of Scotland want Scottish independence? They said no. What on earth would “a 52:48 result” mean?
The same is true, with knobs on, of the Brexit vote. The 52:48 difference is not enormous, but it goes well beyond the margin of error – a difference of more than a million votes. We chose to Leave, so we must. Yes, it is certainly part of the job of wise political leadership to reassure the losing side as much as it can. Our political leadership has never done this: instead it has fanned irrational fears of no deal. It has hidden behind the Stewart doctrine of 52:48, trying to turn the people’s decision into permanent indecision.
Facebook says that, from today, it will take down all material in favour of “white nationalism” on its platform. Many will applaud this in the wake of the New Zealand massacres, but in fact it is both impossible and oppressive.
What, please, is “white nationalism”? I doubt if Facebook would apply the phrase to Irish or Scottish nationalism, for example. Yet why not? Both nationalisms are overwhelmingly white. Both, in their extreme forms, derive their energy from hating another race – the English. In those forms, they are obnoxious and sometimes (think of the IRA) murderous. Yet we can all see that it would be crazy to expel them. Many anti-semites regard Israel as an example of white nationalism – Jews being a subset of whites – and accuse it of being a racist state as a result. Will Facebook drive out the Zionists, then?
Then there is black nationalism. There are many black nationalist movements, some of them extreme, trading on hatred of whites. Then there is Arab nationalism. Will Mark Zuckerberg block these too? In our justified anger at Facebook’s cynical commercial devices, we are in real danger of swallowing its suggestion of setting up an authority to dictate what can and cannot be said all over the world, leaving it free to go on making billions out of targeted advertising. In 1914, Nancy went to war, along with 26 men from her village, Ewelme in Oxfordshire. She was a 16-hand bay mare, and she went with her owner, Tom Orpwood, who served, as Winston Churchill had earlier done, in the Queen’s Own Oxfordshire Hussars.
In the course of the war, eight million horses on the British side are estimated to have died. Nancy, however, survived. Tom was a farmer, and knew how to care for her. One day, by nice chance, he collected his consignment of hay at the front and saw it was marked as coming from the family farm.
In 1918, Tom and Nancy returned together alive and well. From Culham, eight miles away, Tom rode her home. As he reached the village, he dismounted at the pub for a celebratory drink. When he emerged, he found Nancy had disappeared. She was discovered back in her stable in Lower Farm. Despite four years abroad, she had remembered the way.
At 11.30am on Friday April 12, Nancy will be commemorated by a plaque unveiled by the High Sheriff, Lady Jay, accompanied by some Orpwoods, a bugler, the Last Post and prayers. The ceremony will take place in the Pound, where Ewelme’s stray animals used to be held. I doubt if the mare ever found herself there. She knew where home was.
The point of a referendum is to get a yes or no answer. Did the Scottish want independence? They said no