The Times Companion to 2017: The best writing from The Times. Ian Brunskill

— some being shown the wrong body in the morgue. But he is not vindictive, and insists on the need to heal the split in French society, to avoid marginalising Muslims and pushing them into the arms of the terrorists.

      He says in his book that he has no hatred for the jihadists. “I have never experienced this feeling,” he says. “I cannot hate the sinister cretins who took my daughter’s life and lost theirs in this business. They are victims, too.”

      Antoine Leiris, a French radio journalist, has written a book, too, after losing a loved one — Hélène Muyal-Leiris, his 35-year-old wife — at the Bataclan. As with Salines, the book is more about love than hate: Vous N’Aurez Pas Ma Haine (You Will Not Have My Hatred) is the title.

      Leiris recounts his love for his wife, and for Melvil, their 17-month-old son — and his fear, uncertainty and pain at the realisation that he will have to bring up Melvil on his own. Of the killers, he has little to say. “I don’t know who you are and I don’t want to know. You want me to be frightened; you want me to look at my fellow citizens with suspicion; you want me to sacrifice my liberty for security. I won’t.”

      Claude-Emmanuel Triomphe, who had two operations and a month in hospital after being injured in Café Bonne Bière, says much the same thing. “I feel indifference for them. I feel no hatred. I tried to have hatred; I thought it’s not normal after all they did to me. If I must express a feeling it is rather pity — pity in the sense that these guys have massacred their own lives: ‘Not only have you massacred the life of other people but you have messed up yours as well.’”

      He says he has no nightmares, no worries about going out. After months of lethargy he has rediscovered some of his old intellectual energy, too. Nothing is quite the same now, however.

      Having given up his post as head of a think tank, he wants to specialise in the estates that are home to a generation of second-generation immigrants, among whom a handful have turned to radical Islamist violence.

      “I need to understand why my country is affected by terrorism, why my country has manufactured more jihadists than any other in Europe. It’s not to say that other countries are not affected, but France is particularly so.”

      The incomprehension is widespread in France, and it is Sophie, perhaps, who sums it up best. “You ask yourself questions: what was in their heads when they did that? The youngest terrorist at the Bataclan was 23. Me at 23, I was in Lyons, in university and thinking how I was going to dress the next day and not going to a concert hall to kill people. These are questions that remain and to which we will not have an answer.”

YOU CAN’T TRUST THE PEOPLE WITH DEMOCRACY

       Roger Boyes

      OCTOBER 5 2016

      IT MUST HAVE seemed like a shoo-in for the Colombian president Juan Manuel Santos. After four years of negotiation with Farc guerrillas, a peace deal was unveiled to the accompaniment of a choir singing Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. After half a century of debilitating war, how could anyone vote against peace in the subsequent referendum? In the end, though, he set himself up. It was a bit like the US civil war general whose last words, glancing at the enemy lines, were: “They couldn’t hit an elephant from that dista …”

      It wasn’t just the Colombian referendum that went awry. There is a quiet revolt under way across the globe. In vote after vote, people have been rejecting the guidance of political establishments, baffling elites and adding to the sum of anger in the world. In the age of rage, direct democracy is a risk. Referendums are infallible only for dictators — think of Napoleon, master of the strategic plebiscite — when instructions are handed down to voters, when ballot boxes are stuffed and there’s a secret police snitch living next door.

      The fact is that in free societies a government should not abdicate its responsibility to govern by using a single-issue vote to demand guidance from ordinary punters. Clearly if you want to avert a populist avalanche you should keep capital punishment or mosque-building off the ballot paper. And by now leaders should have learnt too that referendums are not a suitable vehicle for deciding on war, peace or immigration. Viktor Orban, the Hungarian prime minister, has just asked his citizens the impossibly loaded question: “Do you agree that the European Union should have the power to impose the compulsory settlement of non-Hungarian citizens in Hungary without the consent of the National Assembly of Hungary?” Of those who voted, 98 per cent rejected the idea, as was intended. But most voters stayed at home, perhaps sensing that the vote wasn’t about migrant quotas at all (since they are more or less off the table anyway) but rather propelling Orban to a new level in his gladiatorial contest with Brussels. Many Hungarians are quite comfortable inside the EU.

      The problem with referendums is that they become a receptacle for grievances and bear little relationship to the question posed. Take Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, who earlier this year was saddled with a referendum on the ratification of an economic deal between the EU and Ukraine. The treaty had been agreed by the government, ratified by all other EU states and was 2,135 pages long. The Dutch rejected it, not because they had done their homework but because they were railing against weak government, against EU dogma and against the possibile eastward expansion of the union. Rutte was ambushed and called the No vote “disastrous”. Vladimir Putin rubbed his hands with glee and called it a truly democratic act.

      The fact is that voting in a referendum can, without knowledge and preparation, become an almost random transaction between leaders and led. The political philosopher Jason Brennan calculates that the probability of your individual vote changing policy is about as low as winning the lottery. You could of course win hundreds of millions but it is still irrational to buy a ticket. And so it is with direct democracy. Voters, he says, “have no incentive to be well informed. They might as well indulge in their worst prejudices — democracy is the rule of the people but entices people to be their worst.”

      Most democratic governments that deploy referendums do so out of weakness. In doing so they fool themselves that the wisdom of the people must inevitably support their world view. That’s how Juan Manuel Santos and David Cameron ended up in the same leaky canoe without a paddle. The Brexit referendum was a way of pacifying the Conservative Party. Cameron failed to grasp the potency of a national vote that fused mild dissatisfaction with the EU and the seeming inability of the government to get a grip on immigration or shield British jobs from a global slowdown.

      By the end of this year there will have been eight major referendums — the next crucial one is Matteo Renzi’s attempt to secure backing for his constitutional reforms in Italy. It’s too late for the Italian premier to call it off now. If he loses in December, he could also lose office. If the Five Star movement and the Northern League take power in the resulting election they are promising a referendum on Italy’s membership of the euro. Few analysts would now rule out an Italian No vote. But whatever the verdict, the uncertainty of a referendum campaign would bring chaos to Italy, where the banks are already wobbly, and speed the unravelling of the eurozone.

      The watchword has to be: listen to the people at your peril. Referendums can act as the safety valves of democracy but never as their engine. If legislators run away from their responsibility to consider and scrutinise complex questions, then power will seep away from the centre. The biggest risk posed by Donald Trump is surely that he could undermine or circumvent instititutions that keep America on an even keel. James Madison, the fourth American president, identified the problem: democracies endanger the right of minorities and must therefore devise solid institutions to protect those rights, civil liberties and free trade. Referendums, over-used and cynically steered, can end up subverting rather than enhancing democracy.

      It is too late for the Colombian president and for David Cameron, but let’s declare a five-year moratorium on referendums. And yes, that means you too, Scotland.

BURNT AND TORTURED MIGRANTS FILLED DECKS AS WE RUSHED TO HELP