The battle is no longer for Brexit but for democracy

The game has changed and the change is permanent. Amid all the Brexit chaos, which has now reached levels of fantasy to which only the pen of Lewis Carroll could have done justice, one significant new fact has emerged. A clean Brexit, probably on WTO terms, is now the likeliest outcome – something which was not credibly the case even a month ago.

Until very recently, it looked as if the political class would be permitted to play its usual game of cross-party stitch-up, a ploy familiar to legacy parties. According to this scenario, Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn would cobble together a deal on the Customs Union (which in any case is already contained within May’s withdrawal treaty).

Parliament would then nod through this non-Brexit, the EU would approve it and this fait accompli would scupper a genuine Brexit, with Leavers unable to do anything about it. What the Remainer political class did not realise was that the ground was shifting beneath its feet, the whole political environment was being transformed over the course of the past month and any prospect of averting full-blooded Brexit had become difficult with the rise of the Brexit Party.

Many politicians, however, remain complacently unaware of how the world has changed. On 5 May, after the local authority elections, Boris Johnson’s Telegraph column was headlined: “Far from facing Blair-era oblivion, a huge electoral triumph is in the Tories’ grasp.” Er… up to a point, Lord Copper. That brand of Bunker optimism (“Glorious news – Manstein’s tanks are half-way to Antwerp!”) is evidently the kind of delusion with which the Tories feel the need to anaesthetize themselves in their last days.

As for Remainers, their situation is beyond parody. Received opinion (the worst possible guide to contemporary realities) held that the emergence of Anna and the Soubrettes marked an historic development in “centrist” politics. These were experienced political practitioners, keenly aware of the advantages of EU membership (though unable to communicate them), representative of educated and “expert” opinion, who would give Farage and his rabble short shrift.

As the vehicle for this “exciting” revolution to maintain the status quo they invented a party with a composite name longer than a Welsh railway station. Their campaigning performance has come a poor second to the Anti-Dog Fouling League. Yet the phenomenon that is the What’s Its Name party is also instructive. It reveals the buffoonish reality of those who pose as authoritative on the benches at Westminster, once they emerge from the protection of the legacy parties’ organisations. So far from running the country or Brexit, these incompetents could not run a bath.

Then came “Events, dear boy.” If there was one occurrence the legacy parties needed like a hole in the head at the height of this crisis of credibility it was the return of the parliamentary expenses issue, particularly the revelation via a FoI request that 377 of our illustrious tribunes have had their Parliamentary credit cards suspended since the 2015 general election for failing to observe the rules. As Theresa May would say, “Nothing has changed.”

The Conservative Party has got itself into the strangulated position of being unable to divest itself of a leader – and therefore the country of a prime minister – opposed by 82 per cent of its members and exhibits a spectacle of impotence that disqualifies it from government, now and forever.

That lunatic landscape is the context in which the sea change referred to earlier has occurred. It is the background to the new situation in which, though the legacy parties fail to recognize it, a genuine Brexit is now virtually assured. The only way of thwarting it would be via the kind of stitch-up May and Corbyn have been tentatively negotiating. There are sound reasons for believing that will not happen.

However, as a worst-case scenario, imagine it did. What then? It is questionable whether the EU would approve it; but, again for the sake of argument, suppose it did. Remainers would have triumphed and the United Kingdom would be locked into permanent dependency upon a multinational organisation of which it would not even be a member.

But by the time any such betrayal could be effected, the European elections would have taken place. What is your bet for that ballot-box Gotterdammerung? A Tory landslide? Labour as winners? Chuka and the Thingummies by a mile? Or might it be the Brexit Party that cleans up, in a very literal sense?

If anyone was suspending judgement on the Farage phenomenon, Peterborough was the tipping point. The Brexit Party’s rally at Peterborough was large. Public meetings are back in British politics. The days when horny-handed sons of toil bicycled thirty miles to hear Lloyd George speak no longer seem a quaint anecdotage. The Brexit Party, however, is equally at home on social media.

Its candidates are the kind of people the legacy parties have sidelined for decades in favour of metropolitan A-Listers, trade union hacks, Spads and every variety of identikit liberal android. They are acceptable to a very wide public: you would be unlikely to mistake Annunziata Rees-Mogg for Tommy Robinson.
Already Farage is making it clear the European elections, though important, are a dry run for the general election. If Brexit has been betrayed by then, even the first-past-the-post system will not protect the legacy parties from the vengeance of the electorate.

Consider this fundamental question: was it ever credible that the British public would watch its biggest ever democratic decision being annulled by the political class, tug its forelock deferentially and go gentle into that good night? Only in the entitled imaginings of the metropolitan elite, is the answer. The issue is no longer Brexit but Democracy. That is a confrontation the elites cannot win. Clean, authentic Brexit will happen because otherwise Britain will have ceased to be a democracy. Many voters have grasped that incontrovertible fact, including Remain voters who value democracy more than membership of the European Union.

Farage is openly proclaiming support for a WTO Brexit. What he has not yet spelled out is how that would be achieved if a Tory/Labour stitch-up had been perpetrated. The answer is obvious: a Pro-Brexit government must resile from the toxic treaty, whose disadvantages would by then be evident.

“Britain does not resile from treaties…” bluster the elites. “That is not the kind of country we are…” (But we are apparently the kind of country that blocks the democratic will of 17.4 million voters.) The reality was revealed in the House of Lords on 27 November 2018 in the answer from the FCO to a written question from Lord Pearson of Rannoch: “The UK has unilaterally withdrawn from 52 treaties since 1 January 1988. All of these have been multilateral treaties.”

There would be no need to invoke Article 62 of the Vienna Convention. Any sovereign state has the right to resile from a burdensome treaty: that is the nature of sovereignty. A future Brexit government would have the full capability to torpedo the legacy parties’ stitch-up and honour the democratic will of the British electorate.