Sexy Regulations

It was somewhere in Central Europe (or was it Central Asia?) in the late 1990s where I first encountered the phrase “Regulatory impact”….Those were the days when the State and its activities was a thing of scorn, when state controls were being dismantled and the language of “deregulation” was at its height….”Regulatory impact analysis” at best was a tool to help that process – although it was sometimes a reluctant concession to the obstinate fact that regulations actually had positive social effects…..

At some stage, the discourse actually moved onto that of the “Regulatory State” – and my mountain shelves indeed have a (n essentially untouched) 2003 book of that title – The British Regulatory State; high modernism and hyper-innovation - by the sadly deceased Michael Moran which this 2011 paper called The Odyssey of the Regulatory State may help me understand.

So Anthony Barnett was not exactly alone when he confessed last summer that he had only recently realized the significance of regulations to the European Union which, he further argues, were by no means as badly perceived by significant sections of the British public as the Brexiteers had initially argued…..  Indeed the Brexit campaign had to tone down that part of their message…..

Grenfell Tower stands as a witness to the consequence of permissive deregulation. As the fridge caught fire in Flat 16 of the fourth floor of Grenfell Tower on the 14 June 2017, it sucked a whirlwind of inadequate, flawed, ill-enforced regulation and cuts in fire-brigade risk assessment and enforcement, into a murderous inferno. It was nothing to do with the EU but it would never have happened had the EU set the UK’s building standards and their implementation.

The result is that people want there to be regulations. In a remarkable article drawing  on a  research and polling by IPPR Marley Morris analysed how, historically, the call for deregulation was a keynote of the anti-EU campaigns and the creation of anti-EU sentiment. In 2013, freeing British business from “excessive regulation” was singled out by then Prime Minister David Cameron, as one of his main aims, when he announced the party’s commitment to renegotiate the UK’s relationship with the EU and then call a referendum. The EU could not concede. As the referendum approached the Leave side was justifiably accused of seeking to strip the public of such regulations as the Working Time Directive, which limits hours of work. Then their polling and focus groups reported that such de-regulation was very unpopular. So the Leave campaign dropped its call. Morris explains,
 “The root cause of this shift was simply that there was – and indeed still is – no public appetite for a deregulatory agenda. Our own polling with Opinium has found widespread public support for some of the most controversial EU-derived employment, environmental and financial legislation… Renewable energy targets – another bugbear of earlier Eurosceptics – are endorsed or considered too low by 74 per cent… more than 80 per cent of the public are opposed to lowering food safety standards. When confronted with this wall of public opinion, it is no surprise that leave campaigners adapted their position as the referendum date neared”.

The anti-EU campaign is one of the strangest on record. It began by demanding an end to European regulation while increasing trade with the EU. Its triumph has led it to embrace less trade with the EU while retaining its level of regulation! When it comes to 80% you can’t argue with “the people’s will”. Or as Theresa May put it in har Mansion House speech that Johnson praises but ignores, in "areas like workers’ rights or the environment, the EU should be confident that we will not engage in a race to the bottom in the standards and protections we set. There is no serious political constituency in the UK which would support this – quite the opposite".

Barnett’s article focuses on a 2007 book The Rise of the Unelected – Democracy and the new Separation of Power by Frank Vibert which I had come across but not given particular attention to…..Barnett wants to know why the significance of regulation for the EU hasn’t been properly recognised.....

Routledge have just published a densely researched Handbook on Brexit edited by Patrick Diamond, Peter Nedergaard and Ben Rosamond. It has 23 scholarly articles and aims to set out a “systematic academic overview” of the Brexit process. They encompass the special character of the British state, the English and Irish questions, the role of the city of London, the flaws of the EU and the need to rethink theories of its nature. But regulation only figures as an aspect of financial policy for the City of London.

The respected Centre for European Reform published a 50 page overview of how to Relaunch the EU in November last year. It is sober, thorough and addresses the need to make the EU more responsive. But it does not mention regulation or the need to make this accountable. The arguments that Vibert has developed remain peripheral to mainstream thinking.

Few British citizens understand the “deal” which has been struck with the EU – references in particular to the “single market” and to the “customs union” utterly confuse and I therefore think  Barnett may be both right and wrong. British people do think that parliamentary sovereignty is important; and that the expert rule embodied in EC regulations has gone too far. Barnett continues….

Shortly after Open Europe, which is directed by Brexit-supporting Henry Newman who once worked for Michael Gove, published Striking a Balance, a report that recommends an across-the-board agreement on these lines. Its justification: “The EU is our most important goods’ market and the most highly-regulated sectors – electrical, automobiles, and chemicals – are the areas which we trade most with the EU and are growing the fastest”. Unlike Boris Johnson, Brexiteers who study the evidence want the UK to be in the Single Market for goods. The government will apply “to stay in the European standards system for industry products and services”.

It is easy enough to ask, as we should, what, then, is the point of Brexit? Another good question is whether the EU will agree to the request. I want to ask why even passionate Brexiteers now see no way out of the EU’s regulated space, certainly in traded goods. The crux of the answer is that that there is no way out of regulation.
By regulation I don’t just mean high profile financial regulation. I mean its ongoing, background role in ensuring the quality of the air we breathe, the medicines we take, the food we consume and the safety of the flights we board. You could undertake the enormous costs of building custom checks for goods going between the UK from the EU. But what is the point, if you then have to recreate and duplicate inside the UK the entire apparatus of regulations, with their ongoing autonomy from parliamentary 'sovereignty'?

The idea that once the UK left the EU Britain could ‘do away’ with regulation from Brussels, because it is mostly unnecessary, has proven to be an utter fantasy. Britain’s wannabe Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, told the BBC, “we will finish up perhaps in an even worse place than we are now because we won’t be free to de-regulate”. But no modern democracy would wish to deregulate. It is not the road to freedom. And as the UK government is learning, public opinion will not let it deregulate. This is a fundamental lesson of Brexit.
 The lesson is related to, but goes further than, Will Davis's notable response to the referendum result in 2016. Drawing on David Graeber's "The Utopia of Rules", Davis emphasised that in an important way "capitalism is regulation" and concluded that the ideology of Brexit is illusory.
In the UK, these dire, Brexit-times have bred impatience, shallowness and lack of reflection. I want to resist these and examine an activity which may seem petty and irritating but isn’t.

Brex-lit

Ironic that it’s “The Japan Times” which gives me the first answer to my question about novels reflecting the mood in English society about Brexit – although the article focuses on novels which have appeared since the referendum (a genre now known apparently as “Brex-lit”).

The 2012 novel “Capital” by John Lanchester is a fairly obvious frontrunner for the book which anticipated Brexit and the recently-issued “Middle England” seems a good read by an established writer about the tensions the referendum created…

There are at least two reasons why we might expect novelists to offer more than social scientists in both the anticipation of a major event (such as Brexit) and in its analysis – imagination and vision -two basic “senses” which don’t seem to be given to academics….trapped as they are not just in a single intellectual discipline but, these days, in a tiny field of what is a series of strongly barricaded enclosures.

The most obvious skill-set, however, for these times is probably that of social historians such as David Kynaston - who poke about in the rubbish-bins of popular memory and develop highly readable narratives. One such historian Dominic Sandbrook has even coined a phrase for the genre - The Great British dream factory

The problem is that its coverage (starting in 1945) has (so far) ended in 1979 just when the Thatcherite agenda started to stir things up…

There is, however, one British writer whose well-tuned sensibilities are almost uniquely attuned to pick up the currents of the British mood – and that is Anthony Barnett – one of the founders of the inestimable Open Democracy website. It is only now that I have noticed the important analysis he offered last summer….starting with an open letter 

Our starting point for every argument about the need to remain in the EU should be “Brexit voters were right. The status quo is insupportable”……Brexit will not be reversed by traditional techniques alone. We need to talk with those who think anyone seeking to stay in the EU is trying to “kill democracy”, see January’s vivid Guardian survey. We could create more citizens assemblies on Brexit like the Manchester one and give them national publicity. We need to learn from the Irish referendum. As Fintan O’Toole describes, those who won decided to “talk to everybody and make assumptions about nobody” and they did not “jeer back”.

And, unlike most of those who write on Brexit, you can rely on Barnett to sniff out an important source which is being ignored by everyone else. – in this case a 2007 book The Rise of the Unelected – Democracy and the new Separation of Power by Frank Vibert – who

describes how over the last half-century unelected bodies, from economic regulators, to science and medical councils, and now digital watchdogs, backed by a new range of auditors and ‘risk managers’, have proliferated.
Democracies need regulation for a wide variety of reasons that have grown out of an increasingly complex, science-based, long-range market-place. New relationships are being created between the state and the market, while ethical questions of safety, accountability, privacy and consumer and employee rights have emerged. The internet and the explosion of digital platforms has intensified the process greatly.
…….The need for a process to approve or disapprove products or standards is of obvious importance. The decisions taken can have serious economic, human and environmental consequences… Regulation is an ongoing process. Science and industry keep discovering new techniques and technologies and creating new products. It is not practical to decide each new inclusion on a white list or a black list via a Parliamentary vote, still less a vote by 28 parliaments. The answer to the democratic impossibility of parliamentary voting is expert advice, followed by the adoption of secondary legislation. …
 It seems that the EU has in this way developed over 11,000 regulations, set over 60,000 standards and its different agencies have taken over 18,000 decisions on interpreting regulations and laws….which could take ten years to incorporate into British law, if each is accorded scrutiny. This alone shows that a process has been taking place that is beyond the reach and capacity of traditional legislatures.

Barnett’s analysis is an important and long one which warrants proper reflection – so I will pause it here and resume tomorrow…

Novel Clues?

What, I asked last week, does Brexit tell us about British – or perhaps more precisely, English - society? And the post duly looked at some titles from the social scientists, think-tankers and the better journalists to see what insights they might offer on such a question. But perhaps I’ve been looking in the wrong place – or rather format?

Perhaps it’s the novel which has the capacity and range to help us “penetrate the soul” of a country? – an issue which these posts have tried to deal with from time to time…..After all we talk of the Thatcher novel.

The French indeed would consider the point so obvious – Michel Houllebecq for 20 years has been the poster-boy of cultural pessimism. I;ve actually read a couple of them – and actually like them! He has somewhere said quite explicitly that the diagnostic skills you expect of non-fiction seems to have transferred to novelists…And if the “gritty realism” of his early novels shocked those used to the more formal tones of le nouveau roman of Duras and Queneau, it was actually thoroughly in the traditions of Emile Zola.

I may not be a great fan of novels but I do my best to keep up with the names and reputations - and have read enough to be able to make the distinction between contemporary Scottish and English novelists – whose countries, of course, voted differently in the referendum…

I’ve started to read the latest collected essays (“The Rub of Time”) of one of England’s most famous novelists Martin Amis – who has some similarities with Houllebecq – and noticed that he characterizes contemporary English fiction as….

“hopelessly inert and inbred (apart from the crucial infusion of the colonials)” – and French fiction as …“straying into philosophical and essayistic peripheries”

I’m not an Amis fan (I prefer Faulks, Ballard and even Weldon) – he is so arrogant indeed that I would not put it past him to have included the Scots in his use of the term “colonial”! It can't have escaped him that the prose of Alasdair Gray, William McIlvanney, James Robertson, James Meek, Andrew O’Hagen, Andrew Greig, AL Kennedy - let alone the SF of Iain M Banks - has a raw force only Ballard could match amongst English novelists. Interestingly, 2 of that list (Meek and O’Hagen) have also established a reputation in the wider field eg Private Island.

So the table I have developed below to explore the Brexit issue deals only with the English writers. And I do understand that it is a bit provocative to refer to a writer’s “typical” concerns…..but we all have to simplify!

English novels 1985-2019

Author	“Typical” context	Example
Fay Weldon, Margaret Drabble	Middle class women	“She Devil”; “The Millstone”
Martin Amis	brats	“London Field”
David Lodge, Malcolm Bradbury, Howard Jacobson	University academics	“Good Work”; “History Man”; “Zoo Time”
Ian McEwan	Middle class men	“Chesil Beach”
JG Ballard	Dystopian cities	“High Rise”
Sebastian Faulks, Louis de Bernieres	Foreign parts	“Birdsong”; “Birds without Wings”
Hilary Mantel	history	“Wolf hall”
Alan Hollinghurst	LGTB	“The Line of Beauty”
Zadie Smith	versatile	“NW”
Julian Barnes	More an essayist	A history of the world in 10 ½ chapters
Hanif Kureishi	Conflictual relations	“My Beautiful Launderette”
David Mitchell	Surrealistic worlds	“The Bone Clocks”
John Lanchester	Social concerns	“Capital”
Clive James	Poet and essayist	“Cultural Amnesia”

There is a very good short overview of the 1945-1990 writing scene in the UK here

I will now have to give some thought to the sort of picture (if any) which emerges about the “state of England” in the 1985-2016 period and how this might differ from, for example, the French “cultural pessimism” which has been referred to...

Further Reading

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/jan/25/reading-between-the-lines-books-to-help-us-understand-brexit

Post-war English novelists
https://www.britannica.com/art/English-literature/The-20th-century

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281413847_Playing_with_Collective_Memories_Julian_Barnes's_England_England_and_New_Labour's_Rebranding_of_Britain

https://athanata.typepad.com/files/literature-for-the-21st-century.pdf
21 st century British lit
https://thegreatestbooks.org/the-greatest-fiction-since/2000
Thatcher novels
Postwar English literature 1945-1990#Profile of John Lanchester

https://www.academia.edu/9682169/Barnes_England_England-_Novel_as_an_Identity_Analysis

good on post-war novels - http://shodhganga.inflibnet.ac.in/bitstream/10603/7300/5/05_chapter%201.pdf

On Houllebecq

Michel Houllebecq and the politics of despair; Carole Sweeney (2019)

Western Civilisation in the novels of Michel Houllebecq; Timothy Gouldthorp

Exchange of letters between Houllebecq and BH Levy

https://www.lawliberty.org/2019/02/28/michel-houellebecq-serotonine-review/

https://www.artforum.com/print/201504/michel-houellebecq-s-new-novel-50729

https://www.dw.com/en/prophet-of-depressing-times-michel-houellebecq-releases-yellow-vest-novel/a-46986149

https://jakeseliger.com/tag/novel/

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.522.5833&rep=rep1&type=pdf

The geography of thinking

Most of the time we imagine we are unique individuals – very occasionally we have a sense that we are but a grain of sand in an endless desert.

An archetypal figure in these most modern of modern times is the character who flits between continents, universities, policy institutes, government and business consultancies and on whom it is difficult to pin any label except that of “technocrat”.

I have, these past 2 days, been absorbed by a book whose title The Dawn of Euroasia – on the trail of the new world order (2018) intrigued me sufficiently to persuade me to fork out 10 euros without too rigorously subjecting its content to the tests I recommend for non-fiction books. Its author Bruno Macaes was unknown to me but seems to be one of the slippery new breed of geographical, linguistic and functional commuters.

A self-styled “adventurer”, Maçães was a Professor 2006/07 at the University of Yonsei in the Republic of Korea, where he taught International Political Economy; then worked at the American Enterprise Institute in 2008. From 2008 to 2011, Maçães helped launch a new international university in Europe, the European College of Liberal Arts in Berlin.

Between 2011-2013 he was a policy adviser in the Portuguese PM office whose political connections allowed him, for a couple of years, to be Secretary of State for European Affairs which he left in late 2015. He has held positions at the Carnegie and right-wing Hudson Institutes; and is currently a hedge-fund adviser with Flint Global

I could see that the text covered aspects of China and the Central Asian countries in which I had spent almost a decade of my life - and that acknowledgements were duly made to the geopolitics writer par excellence  Robert Kaplan – although there was no reading list.

I am now on the final chapter and have to say that this is an extremely well-read 45 year old (with the breadth including a range of Russian novels he’s able to build seamlessly into the text)- even if this interview does reveal a certain slickness

Particularly resonant at this time was a section covering the 2015 immigration crisis which was resolved by a formula based on algorithms which weighed for population size, GNP (40% apiece), average number of asylum applicants per million inhabitants in 2010-2014; and the unemployment rate (10% apiece). As he was reading the account of the relevant meeting in his office, he suddenly had the realization that 

“the EU isn’t meant to take political decisions. What it tries to do is develop a system of rules to be applied more or less autonomously to a highly complex political and social reality” (p228)

I am surprised, however, that Macaes does not make more of the cultural insights which occur particularly in his “Chinese Dreams” chapter (pages 137-147). His spell in South Korea will have allowed him to become familiar with the literature on the culture of geography - whose principal exponents are de Hofstede, Trompenaars and Inglehart

Richard Lewis’s When Cultures Clash (1996) is my favourite go-to reference whenever the discussion turns to questions of cultural difference – as is Richard Nisbett’s Geography of Thought (2003) who argues that-

East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken.

East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning.
More independent Westerners live in less constraining social worlds and have the luxury of attending to the object and their goals with respect to it. The physical ‘‘affordances’’ of the environment may also influence perception.

Most of the writing on the geography of thought hesitates at this stage and seems unwilling to explore the implications of such a startling discovery. The niceties of cultural behaviour on display at global interactions are a safer topic – forming an integral part of most Business School courses. 

But the reviews of The Geography of Thought clearly suggest that all of us need to be thinking much more about the way we all take decisions – whether as individuals, organisations or countries – in full recognition that there are, legitimately, various styles appropriate to particular contexts….…

Further Reading

This is a more eclectic list than usual not just because Macaes is well-read but also for the thoughts his text gives rise to….

Beyond Liberal Democracy – political thinking in an east Asian context; Daniel Bell (2006) is a powerful early apologia for the system of party control in China written by a Canadian political scientist who has chosen since 2000 or so to live in China

The Art of Thinking; Allen Harrison and Robert Bramson (1984) The book which introduced me to the idea that there are, legitimately, different styles of thinking

Decisive – how to make better choices in life and work; C and D Heath (2013). An example of the huge literature now available on decision-making…

Cultures and organization – software of the mind; G de Hofstede (1991) One of the first to explore the cultural aspects of organisations and societies

When Cultures Collide – Richard Lewis (1996) – the full text of the easiest book on the subject

Riding the Waves of Culture; Frans Trompenaars (1996). Another Dutchman rides the waves…

The geography of thought; Richard Nesbitt (2003) – which pushed the ideas further
The Spirit of Russia; Thomas Masyrk (1913 German; 1919 English). An amazing book written before the First World War by the guy who subsequently became President of Czechoslovakia

forward the people?

When Theresa May became PM in July 2016, she made no effort to try to heal the divisions caused by the referendum – let alone to try to create a larger conversation about the possible principles or shape for the new future facing the country.

There is no place in english politics for words like magnanimity, consensus or cooperation. British Governments take no prisoners….locked as they are into an adversarial culture. It’s one of the distinctive - but not unique – features of the British system. And even the equally adversarial French system was capable this year of opening up a bit with its "grand debat"

But, with parliament deadlocked, some voices are suggesting that any second referendum should have elements of the “citizen assembly” system – which (i) randomly selects a group of citizens who are (ii) able to invite people from respective sides of the argument to give evidence (iii) which is then explored before (iv) the production of a final report and recommendations – all under the auspices of an advisory group which manages the process.

A previous PM Gordon Brown suggested this in a speech in November - and repeated here

And the Irish gave an inspiring example of how it works in their recent referendum on abortion

Of course, this would need an extension (or revocation) of the famous “article 50” to be agreed with the EU – and by longer than 6 months…..And any remain majority would be a small one – and therefore insufficient to still the loud and insistent voices of leave...
But the argument that Brexiteers have never been able to deal with is that noone knew during the campaign what leave actually meant - hence the sheer insult embodied in the May mantra - "Brexit means Brexit". As the last post said, at least now we have the strong outlines of its implications and it's on that basis that a second referendum could usefully be fought - for all that many people will impugn the motives of an elite which never takes no for an answer......Or indeed warn us of the dangers which the EU now even more clearly poses to the democratic project

Coincidentally, I picked up earlier this week in my second-hand bookshop Decisive – how to make better choices in life and work 

Brexit - What Happens Now?

Any defeat of the central strategy of a British government would normally lead to a vote of confidence which, if lost, would mean a General Election. And the massive 149 vote defeat last night of the government’s latest Brexit wheeze was the second such defeat after its 230 vote massacre in January. These, clearly, are not normal times – with governments now having the protection of the Fixed Term Act of 2011 which allows a general election only when two thirds of MPs vote for it.
The principle of "Parliamentary sovereignty" may be a hallowed one in the UK constitutional law textbooks but has not actually been evident for more than a century......the power first of party discipline; then (since mid 20th century) of the Prime Minister; and finally of European Law...has seen to that. 
But the UK's Supreme Court ruled 2 years ago that the Executive required parliamentary agreement to start the withdrawal process from the European Union. And Theresa May's subsequent failure (in the June 2017 General Election) to achieve a parliamentary majority led to the return of parliamentary sovereignty.

So Parliament will vote today to get rid of one of the three options which are open to it – to crash out of the EU in 16 days without a deal. It will then be asked to vote on Thursday on the option of requesting the EU for an extension.

The EU will only agree to that if there seems good reason for it – one strong reason being the possibility of a second referendum being held.

The People’s Vote has long argued for a second referendum – facing initial anger that this seemed to deny the legitimacy of the original vote but it has now dawned on many people that the inability of the parliamentarians to develop a clear consensus means that there is no other option than returning to the citizen. 

As Chris Grey points out in his forensic Brexit blog, Brits now have a much clearer sense of what they would be voting for – or rather “against”. It was in July 2018 the government published its Chequers’ Strategy – resulting from an away-day held by the Cabinet at the Prime Minister’s country residence. And it is this strategy to which the government refers when it talks about “the deal”.

Most European leaders were (and remain) aghast at David Cameron’s recklessness in allowing the British public a vote in the 2016 Referendum on membership of the European Union. And few of them expected the British government to honour the result. But we all know how eccentric the Brits are!

The 2016 referendum turnout may have seemed healthy at 74% - compared to the 64% of the first referendum in 1975 (and to a 59% turnout in the 2001 General Election and low 60% in 2005 ) - but not compared to the 82% of the 1950 and 1951 General elections and to the high 70% which prevailed until the 90s.

Nor was the experience without its critics – for example for its exclusion from the vote of 16 year-olds; EU citizens; and expats who had been out of the country for more than 15 years;

The 1975 Referendum had broken new constitutional ground – it had never been used before….and was, in most people’s minds, associated with dodgy regimes…..Vernon Bogdanor is Emeritus Professor of Government and author, amongst much else, of The New British Constitution. The grounds he gives for the support of such constitutional referenda do, therefore, deserve our attention. He gave two arguments – namely

- all parties supported membership in the 1970s - but public opinion was divided. A significant section of society had therefore no voice…

- the issue was so fundamental that the legitimacy of government was being threatened

But he then proceeds to show that’s not actually why or how the first ever British referendum came about……

In the 1970 Election, the Labour Party was defeated. Heath was returned to office. At the end of 1970, Tony Benn raised the possibility of the Labour Party committing itself to a referendum on joining Europe at Labour’s National Executive, but he could not find a seconder for the motion.

From 1971 onwards, the very complicated European Communities Bill made its way through Parliament, and in March 1972, a Conservative backbencher who was opposed to Europe, called Neil Martin, proposed an amendment calling for a referendum, and this meant the Shadow Cabinet had to decide what to do about it, and they decided to oppose this motion.  

But the very day after this happened, President Pompidou in France said he was going to have a referendum in France on whether the French people approved of British entry into Europe…and he was doing this for internal party political reasons, to weaken his opponents on the left, who were split on the issue. …. But there were going to be four new members of the European Community: Britain, Denmark, Ireland and Norway. In the end, Norway did not join.

The other three countries were all having referendums. France was having a referendum on whether Britain should enter, but Britain was not. One cynic wrote to the newspapers that when Heath has spoken of full-hearted consent of Parliament and people, he meant full-hearted consent of the French Parliament and people… 

After this, Labour’s National Executive voted narrowly in favour of the Benn proposal. Then, a couple of days later, pure coincidence, the Heath Government announced there was going to be a plebiscite, in Northern Ireland, on the border, on whether people wished to remain in the United Kingdom or join the Irish Republic. At this point, the Labour Shadow Cabinet agreed to the referendum.

So, the referendum came about through a series of really unforeseen contingencies and vicissitudes, completely unplanned, this very fundamental change in the British system.

Some readers may wonder why a referendum was held a mere 2 years after the UK entry into the EU. The answer is quite simply that the 1974 Labour Party manifestos had made very its reservations about several aspects of the agreement which it pledged to revisit and revise. The General Election of February did not give it a working majority and another had to be held (in June) to give it that – after which very detailed negotiations with Europe took place to allow it to campaign successfully in the 1975 referendum  

Although the odds on a second referendum have just shortened, I haven;t actually seen any real discussion about the mechanics - ie the options and question which would be on the ballot paper; or the organisation and timing of the campaign. I hope to explore these questions in my next post