After Theresa May this week declined to hold a third “meaningful vote” on her Brexit agreement, parliament geared up to hold a series of meaningless or nonsense votes – or “indicative” votes. But if an indicative vote is not meaningful, does it really indicate anything?
The word “indicative” enters the English language (from the Latin for “show” or “point out”) as a term of grammar: the indicative mood, explains a 16th-century expert, is “when they shewe or tell a thyng to be done”. In parliament, however, an indicative vote is one where they don’t tell a thing to be done; they just indicate their mood. This sense gets started in the early 17th century: “a Precept indicative, or significative, what is fit to be done, but not obligant”. The 2016 EU referendum, too, was technically an “indicative” rather than “binding” referendum, but the result was felt to be binding nonetheless.
In law, meanwhile, “indicative evidence” is not evidence itself but evidence of where proper evidence may be found. An indicative vote in parliament, then, might have the virtue of hinting at where we should look for something meaningful. Then again, on the evidence of the last three years, it might not.
