Thoughts.com Blogs - Is "no" the same as "don't know"?

View Blog

Is "no" the same as "don't know"?

We've all done it. We're busy getting on with our lives, we're focused on the fact we're almost out of butter, getting the kids to school, the car windscreen wiper that needs fixing. So when someone suggests a way to make things go more smoothly, we're busy getting on with it and don't really know or care enough about the alternative new way, so we just say no thanks, we're not interested.

We may even see the suggestion as an intrusion. Now, while I could be talking about evangelical christianity being street-preached, going green or just about anything else, I'm actually thinking about politics.
It's certainly increasingly the light in which I'm seeing government announcements at the moment.

Even when the messages are good and sensible, the tone is coming out wong and everything feels like a lecture:
- eating five portions of fruit and veg a day (yes, we KNOW it's seven in Australia but we can't be trusted to even eat five, even though we know it's good for us);
- on the way units of alcohol mount up (your standard middle-class professional having two glasses of merlot in an evening is now technically a binge drinker because wine glasses are bigger than they used to be);
- on obesity and exercise (yet hasn't mandated the traffic light food labelling system and allowing local government to charge a fortune to use public swimming pools and allows dodgy contracts for use of private gyms);
on recycling and waste (I recycled everything possible in Belgium but the facilities here aren't as good, yet this is the country where we try too many different types of recycle bag, limiting the size of household bins, putting spyware into the lids to track the waste, fining people for overfilling etc. rather than just making it as simple as possible to avoid confusion...);
and the list goes on.
I was in the cinema the other day, and the very clear road safety advert came on, the one with a little girl who dies knocked down at 40 miles an hour but time goes back and she is instead hit at 30 miles an hour and lives with the slogan that at 40 there's an 80% chance she'll die while at 30 there's an 80% chance she'll live. The boys in front of me nudged each other and one said: "so we'll go at 35, split the difference, the odds seem pretty good". I'm sure he didn't mean it, he certainly wasn't giving a considered view, but it gives a clue about the way that people respond to hectoring.

My point is, people react against experts. We know we should drink less, eat a healthy diet, exercise more, drive slowly... but it's our decision and we don't like to feel pushed into it. It's a thousand little rebellions. It's sticking it to "the man". Yeah.

So what are we to make of the Irish referendum on the Lisbon Treaty? Almost every influential group is encourgaing the voters to vote "yes". Both government and opposition, farmers, trade unions, business groups, you name it, they want a "yes". But the smart money is currently on a "no" outcome.
Why?

Firstly, who's behind the "no" campaign and why vote "no"? Sinn Fein, which is a minority party in Ireland, is one of the major "no" backers and reckons the treaty is bad for Ireland. Their website (no2lisbon.ie) lists 10 reasons to vote no.
Some of their concerns are the same as those voiced here in the UK.
The measure that would effectively allow minor changes to competence if Council agreed, rather than go through a whole Treaty negotiation process is there, portrayed as putting at risk the referendums that are a requirement in Ireland after any Treaty change.
105 new powers including moving 60 to QMV are listed as a bad thing (are none of those areas ones in which Ireland wants to achieve something that has been blocked by one Member State?) The reduction in relative voting power in Council and the end of the automatic right to a Commissioner would certainly play heavily in any UK "no" campaign.
Other concerns are more specifically Irish - I can't see the generally right-wing "no" campaign in the UK focusing on workers' rights and public services, as the general portrayal in the UK is that small business are being deprived of their right to choose Dickensian working conditions - but these concerns chime more with the reasons behind the "no" votes on the Constitutional Treaty in France and the Netherlands in 2005.
The most common concern of the "no" camp in Ireland has traditionally been erosion of their position of neutrality internationally. It cannot have been helpful to the "yes" camp that the European army stories resurfaced this last week.
But the blog on the site really intrigues me. The key points from the last post were that voters face higher mortgage repayments as the ECB controls the interest rates (the argument made is who can we lobby to change this - well, the UK has an independent central bank so lobbying our government doesn't do much good either...) and that workers are suffering because of high fuel prices and again cannot lobby the EU about it.
I just don't get it. Neither of these things are to do with the Lisbon Treaty itself - to change either would require a complete renegotiation of the Irish position in the European Union i.e. withdrawal from the single currency and renegotiation of state aid rules in order for government to subsidise fuel. Is that what the "no" campaign is actually about?

Sinn Fein are not alone. There's someone called Declan Ganley (they call him "the man who has read the treaty") who, with the anti-Treaty group Libertas , is campaigning "no" too - they argue that to vote "no" is not to be anti-European, that it is giving the government the scope to fight harder for a better deal for Ireland. The campaign he's backing covers workers' rights, a European army, Irish neutrality, discharges from Sellafield nuclear plant, abortion and euthanasia. While Ganley is a millionaire, he is not bakrolling the "no" campaign alone. It is not clear who is.

Secondly, why is the "yes"campaign finding it so hard?
Well the "yes" message is quite a difficult one to deliver - while "no" campaigners can pick on the different points as above, "yes" campaigners have to sell the whole Treaty, as it is, whether they think each bit is ideal or not. Unlike voting for a government, voting for the Treaty doesn't lead to real benefit that will be delivered direct to the individual and, with no flag, anthem or other symbols, little that can be sold as an intellectual ideal. EU expansion means that Ireland's role as a beneficiary of EU funding has declined.
But I think there's an element of sticking it to "the man". The political class in Ireland is firmly behind the Treaty, but is increasingly being found to have corruption issues and this is reflecting badly on things supported by the establishment. Deference is out, self-determination is in.
For Ireland's voters, there also doesn't really seem to be a downside to saying no. The current system has worked fine (if you are a small longstanding Member State in particular) and one person's desire for smoother, faster decision-making processes is another's allowing pauses for reflection and greater accountability. The "yes" campaign also relies on people believing that the changes the Treaty makes are essential. That means understanding what it's all about and what it's all for - and even if you do that, you may not agree that the changes are essential.

But is "no" really no? I have an idea that in a lot of cases "no" is actually "don't know" (and probably "don't care").
The Treaty itself is over 400 pages and is not written in clear language - it is after all an amending treaty not a constitution, and is not really intended to be a mass-read document. There's a specific language that is used as well - words that mean specific things in Brussels (transparency, subsidiarity, comitology etc.) which are a useful shorthand there but are totally inpenetrable to anyone outside. Unless that's patronising to say.
It is therefore possible to give the content a positive or negative spin, depending on your aim - and it will be hard for anyone to prove conclusively that their take is right. Usually what can and can't be done as a result of a Treaty only becomes clear by testing it once it's in place - by what governments and MEPs will agree to and what the courts will decide if there's a challenge. So you're effectively saying vote yes to see if you should have voted yes.
You can't force the public to read the Treaty and even if you could you can't expect everyone to really understand the full implications of every word.
You can, however, ask them to give their view on it.
That's democracy.

The question some people are asking themselves is whether a "no" vote of just over half of the votes cast by those eligible to vote in a country of four million people should effectively stop the rest of the nearly 500 million people in the other 26 Member States going ahead. There's no clear answer to this.
A majority of four million people is not a majority of near 500 million people. So should Ireland effectively hold the other Member States in limbo while they re-open an already concluded and carefully balanced compromise between 27 countries in order to get a more Irish outcome? Should they only be able to negotiate opt-outs rather than re-open agreed texts?
Should all countries have to have referenda even if they've no political tradition of doing so? People who believe fervently that a popular vote will always equal a "no" vote tend to argue that this should be the case.
I'd say only if the people think there should be.
And there's a natural inclination to say that unless there's an active reason for change, things should stay the same. Human nature is innately conservative, with a small c.
People need to be persuaded that things will change for the worse around them if they do nothing and just accept things happening - and that where the "no" campaign has been succeeding. There's something seductive about the idea that you are defending your status quo by saying "no" to something that's not really very clear, and there will be no reprecussions. Makes it easier to say "no" when it's just don't know.

But we'll need to look at the result, the turnout and the reasons for a result in Ireland to make a judgement on why people vote as they will. The islands voted today, the mainland votes tomorrow.
Oh, and if there had been a referendum in the UK, I would've voted "yes". But I'm pretty clear I'd've had to search hard in the media and the public sphere for the information to allow me to make that decision - just lucky that I've read (most of) the Treaty.

Posted by rose22 on 2008-06-10 19:27:05 | Rating: