Let me start with a question: should it matter if a group of people decide two different things? I’m perfectly serious – if you’re heading for a night out with your friends, then half of you want to go bowling and other half want to go to the cinema, what is forcing you to do the same thing?
In just one scenario we capture the essence of social choice theory. Social choice is the antithesis of the free market – in the free market you make your own choice and carry the benefits and costs of that choice. Social choice means you express a preference, that preference informs the decision of a group, and the group fall in behind the final decision, even if that decision is at variance with your own preference. On paper, social choice seems madness – what possible merit is there in forcing a person to embrace a choice at variance with their preference?
Of course, social choice is no new madness, and we can account for several instances in which collective choice is either the only way to decide, or the best way to decide. If a town decides to build a bridge across the river running through the town, it would be insanity to build a bridge everywhere the residents wished one built – so of necessity a choice mechanism is used to determine the one place the bridge is built. Thinking back to our social outing, while it is of course true that your group of friends could go off and do two separate things, it is more likely that you will want to do one thing together, as the whole point of the evening was to do something together.
Social choice, which underpins all our modern understanding of democracy, can be summarised thus: that a group of individuals sacrifice their individual autonomy, recognising that a single response reflecting the aggregated will of that group is preferable to the alternative of separate decisions. To give a slightly flippant example – I may prefer going to Germany to watch the Grand Prix more than the holiday destination my wife and I have chosen together – but I quite cheerfully sacrifice that preference because I consider it much more important that my wife and I reach a decision together that works for both of us!
This is why the #NotInMyName hashtag is so fundamentally dangerous. It’s entirely understandable that those who voted Remain feel a sense of shock and grief. Elections are a recognition of division and sincerely held differences, and defeat is a painful pill to swallow. The contestation however that “I did not vote for this; therefore, the result is not legitimate” is a fundamental rejection of social choice theory. It should perhaps come as no shock to us; the trajectory of modern thought has been the elevation of the individual above all else, whether in morality or in economics. While some reforms have undoubtedly been for the good in freeing individuals from tyranny, the response of the young generation has two implications, neither of them good for our nation.
The first implication runs as follows: if you do not agree with me, you do not belong to me. There is a bitter irony that a campaign whose slogan was ‘Stronger Together’ now sees its acolytes pleading that they would rather be separate from those who disagree with them. Social choice means that you accept that your preference may not always win, but that forsaking a degree of autonomy is preferable for the sake of the good outcomes that come when you work together. The alternative to accepting this, as we are sadly seeing in Scotland, is to conclude that you’re going to take your decisions elsewhere. Anyone who has spent five minutes in political circles knows that such a mindset of ideological purity leads to individuals bitterly wondering why the world cannot see why their views are clearly the right ones.
The second implication is this: if you do not agree with me, then your opinion is worth less than my opinion. Social Choice is a force for good, in that it enshrines a principle that everyone’s preference should be equally weighted in the decision that is reached. To decide a decision does not represent you when it goes against your own preference, is to say that the losing side is worth more than the winning side. It rejects one-person, one-vote – it could indeed be put in the Orwellian phraseology that ‘some animals are more equal than others.’ Down that path lies neither the individual autonomy of the free market, nor the collective decision reaching of social choice. Instead lies the horrifying edifice of totalitarianism: choices made for the common good, for your own good, because the wise ones know best. We Conservatives know full well that such wisdom is folly, for it has no answer for when the wise ones are wrong or corrupt.
There are many issues to be worked through in the aftermath of the vote to leave the EU. Fundamental to the health of our nation’s governance, and I would even venture the health of our communities, is that we reject this dangerous notion that a decision reached in contrast to our preferences is ‘not in our name.’ We belong to each other, we are far better when we work together than when we flee from each other, and we all deserve to be respected as possessing equal worth. #NotInMyName stands in opposition to all of those principles – and it is entirely right that we should point that out.
