It is a truth universally acknowledged that a government in possession of a majority must be in want of a new judiciary.* The old one, you see, had developed the inconvenient habit of judging things. Laws, mostly. Occasionally, people. It was all very untidy.

*Or, at least, a judiciary that judges in the correct direction. This is known in political philosophy as ‘pointing the right way’, and is considered more efficient than the old-fashioned method of pointing at the evidence.

So the machinery was set in motion. There were proposals. There were white papers the colour of bleached bone. There were committees that spawned sub-committees like amoebae, each one adding a new clause to ensure the previous clause’s clause was properly claused. The stated aim, somewhere in the small print beneath the lofty preamble about ‘streamlining’ and ‘efficiency’, was to make the system work better for the Italian people. It is an interesting feature of systems that whenever someone says they are going to make it work better for the people, the people involved in the actual working of the system immediately check their pensions and update their CVs.

And at the heart of it, as always, are the ordinary people who make the cogs turn. Not the ministers with their beautifully printed speeches, but the court clerk in Milan who has been using the same rubber stamp for twenty years and knows precisely how hard to thump it to make the ink last. The usher in Rome who can tell you which courtroom has the squeaky door and which judge prefers a glass of water at ten-thirty. The young lawyer in Naples who is still paying off her education and spends her evenings untangling the kind of minor, miserable human squabbles that never make the papers but are, in aggregate, what society actually is. They are the ones who will have to implement the new ‘streamlined’ forms, learn the new ‘efficient’ procedures, and navigate the freshly dug channel between What The Law Says and What The Ministry Now Prefers.

The referendum, then, is being presented as a grand, binary choice about the soul of the nation. But in the back office of a courthouse in Bologna, a civil servant is looking at the draft of the new ‘Case Outcome Alignment and Harmonisation Form’ and thinking two things. First, that the carbon paper required for the triplicate copy hasn’t been in the stationery cupboard since 2004. And second, that ‘Alignment’ is just a longer word for ‘row’, and ‘Harmonisation’ is what you get when everyone is forced to sing the same tune, whether they know the words or not.

The government will say it’s a vote of confidence. The opposition will say it’s a coup. The clerk in Bologna will fill out the form, in triplicate if she can find the paper, because that’s her job. And she will know, with the quiet, weary wisdom of someone who has seen governments come and go, that systems don’t get streamlined for the benefit of the water in the glass or the squeak in the door. They get streamlined for the benefit of the stream. And you’re only ever standing in it, or being carried along by it. You rarely get to say which way it flows.