Breaks-it and a victory toast for the UK?
My brexfast was not very palatable; my toasted Dutch bread
topped with Danish butter and washed down with Spanish orange juice stuck in my
throat.
My own countrymen had voted against me, my child, my
grandchildren and generations beyond. At best, on a personal level, I felt
abandoned by my country of birth; at worst, on a global level, currencies were
unstable and stocks and shares were crashing, without having yet fully recovered
from the global crash of 2008. Whilst
‘Brexiteers’, (as former UK Liberal MP Lord Ashdown, likes to call them; and he
did feel for his country on that dark night) were toasting their victory; others
were ‘counting the cost’ – not just financially and not just for the EU, but
for the state of the Union that had existed between England, Scotland and Wales (Northern
Ireland is an even more complex and fragile issue beyond the remit of this
article and that county of the UK was also mostly dismayed by the result) for
almost 310 years….England voted ‘leave’… England ‘breaks-it’.
What a breakfast for me and tens of millions of others…… Then
I started to ask myself: Why did the
government call a referendum whilst the country was still reeling from the
‘shocks’ of recession and why call it on that
date this year? ‘Conspiracy theories’ notwithstanding, and not wanting to blame the current cabinet
solely, as it takes a whole government to make such a decision, not just the
Prime Minister or the Members of Parliament of the party ‘in power’, maybe it
was simply due to a lack of systems thinking?
The United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union is not
as simple as it may seem – 52% versus 48% is not the whole story; nothing ever
is. In the lands of ‘perfect economic theory‘ and ‘complete information’ maybe
so, but who lives there? I don’t live on that planet and, I suspect, neither do
you.
Of the estimated 65
million residents (of all ages) and estimated
2.6 million adult UK passport holders not resident in the UK – so a total of,
perhaps 67.2 million people - only 17.4 million voters exercised their ‘majority’
opinion for the UK to leave the EU. The total of all those who were permitted to
register to vote was about 46.5 million. In so as far as ‘the electorate’ is
concerned this works out as approximately: 37% ‘leave’, 34% ‘remain’ and 28%
’abstention’ (i.e. non-voters). I have
written ‘estimated’ in italics because that is exactly what it is; unlike some countries in the EU, the UK
government has no registration scheme for either its residents or for its
citizens who live outside the UK. The number of resident and non-resident
citizens are always a ‘guessing game’ for the UK until a census is
appropriated, which is only once every decade and only ‘counts’ those resident in
the UK on that specific date.
In the Netherlands, for example, each resident is required
to ‘register’ their address with the Local Authority where they live using the
‘tax/social number’ (BSN) they were given at birth or when they first became
resident in the Netherlands. Big Brother? In my experience, and that of my
friends, who are of many nationalities, absolutely not! It helps to streamline ‘Government
systems’ by linking each Government department together via the one number per
citizen. In the UK we were given a National Health Service number at birth and
a different National Insurance at around the age of 15 or so. Some can remember and recite their National
Insurance number verbatim, as it is needed for work and taxes, but practically
no-one know their National Health Service number. A child’s National Health
Service number used to be (and may still be) on the documents that any UK
parent has when claiming child benefit (which is available to all at the
present time). But nobody ever knows their National Health Service
number.
Getting a bit closer back to the point: the Netherlands’
Government do not need to spend huge
amounts of money every ten years to carry out a census because they already know. The Netherlands’
Government do not need to spend huge
amounts of money to ask people to fill out forms and them post back, or go
online, to tell the Government if they want to vote because they already know who of which
nationality is allowed to vote in which Dutch elections. Dutch citizens just go
to their town hall to renew their passports…. It’s so much easier for the
citizen and cheaper for the Government. The Dutch system is not perfect, but at
least there seems to be some sort of system that ‘attempts to look at the
whole’ within the ‘boundary’ of their sovereignty and does not always allow
each government department to act independently, flail around in the dark and then
blame another department, or an MP, when money is wasted or if everything goes wrong.
Any person who likes to ‘analyse systems within a boundary
constraint’ could probably see that the UK EU referendum was heading for a ‘big
fall’ even before the first vote was cast. It was a ‘wicked problem’ even before
the 23rd of June.
Less than two years beforehand, the Scottish people had
applied their referendum rights to say that they wanted to continue the union
with England, Wales and Northern Ireland. Some may be regretting that now and,
indeed, Scotland seems to be in the process of mandating a further vote on the very
same issue as soon as they can; they are also ‘in talks’ with the Republic of
Ireland, who are not only EU but also have the Euro as their currency.
Did Westminster not think to analyse potential ‘systems
dynamics’, to see either good or ill, when bringing forth the referendum? Were
politicians, and their advisors, unware of strategic options development in the
analysis of problematic situations? Or did their own greed for power make them
totally blinkered to any scenario
that was not good for them personally;
and to hell with the country they are supposed to serve?
The first thing I
take issue with, as a ‘systems thinker’,
is the structure and rules of the ‘referendum voting process’ which I feel was
flawed. Surely, a ‘safeguard’ should have been put into place that any decision
considered (or enacted) by government had to be from a majority vote? After all, this is what usually happens in the UK
House of Commons when MPs are considering and enacting legislature on their
country’s behalf. Given the question ‘Should
the UK leave the European Union’ 37% ‘Ayes’, 34% ‘Nays’ and 28%
’Abstentions’ would probably have never have got further than the Commons and,
if so, would have fallen flat on its face in The Lords, with little debate,
because the Commons had been unable to agree. The Queen would not even have
known, let alone ‘rubber-stamped it’. Her Majesty, rightly so, tends not to
opine on issues of even much less gravity than the EU referendum…. despite what
some popular UK tabloids may say.
Without such a safeguard as a ‘majority vote’ written into
the referendum rules, just one person
could have swung the vote between ‘leave’ and ‘remain’. On watching the results come in live on TV, I
noticed that many of the declaring officers said that some ballot papers had
been discounted from the vote because both
the ‘leave’ and ‘remain’ boxes had been crossed. This may have only counted for
a few thousand ballots, but does that not in some way signal the confusion of
those who actually turned out to vote? Were the 28% ‘abstainers’ even more
confused by what is, after all, an incredibly
complex, multi-disciplinary issue that not even one highly-trained expert could
analyse solo? Was the actual question or
statement upon which to vote flawed? Psychologists seem to know that if people
are asked ‘Do you prefer hot milk?’ most
will say ‘yes’; the same people if
asked ‘Do you prefer cold milk?’ most
will say ‘yes’; But asked ‘Do you prefer hot or cold milk?’ the
responses are likely to be ‘hot’ and ‘cold’ in relatively equal measure with
a fair dose of ‘I don’t know’ mixed
in. ‘I don’t know’ was not an option
on the ballot paper. The only way to say ‘I
don’t know’ was simply by not
voting; thus leaving the on-the-fence citizens completely out of the picture
and creating a calamitous two-horse race with a calamitous outcome that would
have dissatisfied and disillusioned a great deal of the UK population no matter
what the outcome had been.
Although this referendum was only, so-to-speak, ‘an opinion
poll’ of the eligible electorate and is not legally binding on the UK
government, the government should have taken greater responsibility for any
outcome and, ergo, the care of its citizens; no matter in which country they
reside or what their vote may have been.
Rats are now deserting the proverbial sinking ships of whatever party
they belong to; The buck is being passed faster than a hand-grenade with its
pin removed; no MP wants it to go off in their
face; no MP of any party wants to even hold the poisoned chalice that is the
result of ‘the 2016 UK referendum’ let alone sip from it. Ultimately,
Westminster and Whitehall will admonish the proletariat; they believed the rhetoric; they
cast the votes.
Social learning is ‘a
many splendored thing’; it slowly taught the public about animal welfare, pollution,
carbon emissions, organic farming and ‘Fair Trade’. But this time social
learning was a big, two-pronged failure:
First, the tabloids, prominent speakers, MPs et al
had their influence on ‘the eligible electorate’ . It was as subtle as using a
sledge hammer to crack a walnut and pretty much everybody could see it. But did the UK Government, and its
advisors, think systemically about more understated
forms of social learning that could have influenced an individual’s vote?
2016 was the year of not only Wimbledon and Le Tour de
France, but also of Euro 2016 football, 2016 Olympics and Queen Elizabeth’s
90th birthday. 2016 could be seen as the most influential year, in many decades,
to ‘national pride’ in the UK. So why not hold the referendum in spring 2017?
Maybe government preferred to hold a vote shortly before the summer recess so
that MPs could thence pretend to have ‘private discussions’ with other parties,
whilst in reality making a hasty retreat to their holiday homes in the EU or in
British overseas territory tax havens; no thought to the police force who
cannot sip fizz and bask in the sun, even if they could afford to, because all merry
hell seems to be about to break loose on the streets of Blighty.
Second, the repetitive use of a ‘phrase’ or ‘mantra’ can
sway any person’s opinion. Systems
Thinkers try to ensure that they are aware of their own innate biases before
embarking on a project; every breathing entity on our earth has them in one way
or another. It is, frankly, the way any individual species manages to survive. But
bias is not always innate and is often learnt. The UK media picked up the
latest portmanteau buzz-word called ‘Brexit’. Even good old ‘Auntie Beeb’
bandied it about with merry abandon both verbally and in written captions. For
a supposedly neutral public service
provider this could have been seen as reckless….. considering that it obviously
contained the word ‘EXIT’.
The ‘wicked problem’ of a referendum now seems to have turned
into the reality of ‘an almighty mess’.
Could this have been, at least in part, avoided if systemic thinking had been
brought into play before ‘referendum
day’? I shall not be toasting the result myself, because for either outcome the
whole scheme lacked thought and planning from outset to, what might be a very final,
bitter, conclusion. Maybe I’ll have either hot or cold milk tomorrow for
breakfast, instead of toast…..
I’ll leave the final comment to Streetband, who probably
never gave a fig about Systems Thinking, don’t care what ‘colour’ or
‘nationality’ their bread is, and may have thought that referenda were stupid……
