Negotiating styles

In Britain, where I live, we’ve been having a bit of a political crisis over the last week and a half. We went and voted to leave the European Union, and now we have to decide how exactly that’s going to work. One of the things we have to decide is what’s going to happen to all the citizens of other EU countries who live in Britain at the moment. As Britain is an EU country too, they’re currently allowed to live here. Once we leave, they won’t automatically be allowed.

Now, we could just let them stay, if we wanted to, but we haven’t committed to that yet. Apparently when we’re negotiating our new relationship with the EU, deporting them will be on the table. And you might think that’s just good sense - the other EU members will want to look out for their citizens’ interests, and that means negotiating an arrangement on which they won’t have their lives turned upside down by being deported. Committing ourselves now would reduce our negotiating power.

But don’t we want them to stay? They contribute to life here, and deportation is awful, so kicking them out would be lose-lose. These people are our friends and neighbours, and deporting people is neither friendly nor neighbourly. But the possibility that we don’t want them to stay shouldn’t be ruled out. The person making this decision is quite likely to be Theresa May, and gratuitously deporting people is one of her hobbies. And then there are all the people in Britain who just don’t like immigrants. Without those people we never would have voted to leave the EU in the first place. So maybe that’s what’s going on.

But perhaps we really do want them to stay, but we’re pretending to be willing to do mass deportations as part of a negotiating strategy. If the other EU members don’t call our bluff, we might get some concessions out of them. It’s like threatening to walk away from the table. You don’t want to walk away from the table, but if the other side thinks you might do it anyway then you have more bargaining power.

This isn’t like walking away from the table, though. What happens if you don’t come to a deal? You do what you can to get what you wanted by yourself. And since we don’t need EU members’ co-operation to let their citizens stay here, in the absence of a deal we would just let them stay, if that’s what we wanted. Threatening to deport them, even though we don’t want to, is therefore not like threatening to walk away from the table. So what is it like?

It’s like threatening to kill hostages. People don’t tend to particularly want to kill their hostages, but they threaten to do it because they think people won’t dare call their bluff. This negotiating tactic can work, of course, both in real hostage situations and in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma of international diplomacy. But however effective it is, it’s not the negotiating tactic of civilized businesspeople. It’s the negotiating tactic of Bond villains, and I don’t want people negotiating on my behalf to use it.

Czechs and balances

Suppose a country was both democratic enough to have some human rights legislation and undemocratic enough not to allow women the vote. Suppose an unelected judge ruled that the latter was in breach of women’s human rights. Then suppose the elected executive of the country said that the judge should mind his own business because he wasn’t elected. That would sound a bit rich, wouldn’t it?

One of the advantages of having elected executives accountable to an unelected judiciary is that when it comes to trampling on the interests of minorities and the disenfranchised there are lines that won’t be crossed, even if crossing them would appeal to the majority of people with votes. An example would be the death penalty. For a long time the death penalty was supported by a majority of people in my country, but by a minority of the MPs they elected. Perhaps it still is. The MPs resisted the temptation to bring it back, even though this might well have been a vote-winner. I’m glad they did, but I understand that since the Human Rights Act came in they no longer have the option, and I’m glad they don’t. A lot of what goes on here in the name of fighting Terror sails pretty close to the wind too, and it’s comforting to know that no matter how hysterical the public or how soon the election, there are some people in Strasbourg we can appeal to if things start going a bit Kafka.

I am, of course, thinking about the current debate over giving prisoners the vote. It’s been suggested that the decision shouldn’t be made by EU judges, because they’re unelected. As well as being a bit rich, I think this is exactly the sort of decision which should be made by unelected people. This isn’t because I want prisoners to have the vote, although I do. (Then again, I’d lower the voting age to thirteen if it was left up to me.) It’s because when it comes to the tyranny of the majority over the disenfranchised, elected officials can’t be trusted. Prisoners are among the most vulnerable people in society, and as such they’re exactly the kind of people human rights legislation and an independent judiciary are there to protect.