Democracy and the will of the people are highly overrated
Are you, like me, weary of the refrain, repeated with increasing frequency since the referendum by those most closely identified with the preservation of the British class system, that the Government and Parliament must respect “the will of the people”?
We are being asked to accept that – to take two entirely random examples – Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson stand shoulder to shoulder with the voters of Sunderland, Wigan and Stoke against the metropolitan élites of Mayfair, Notting Hill and Islington.
Rees-Mogg is no more a man of the people than the editor of Burke’s Peerage. It took a crowbar to prise the Moggster’s fellow Old Etonian, Johnson, who earns £245,000 a year for writing one column a week for the Daily Telegraph, from the grace and favour mansion in Carlton House Terrace he had occupied as foreign secretary.
Neither of these boys would watch the X-Factor or shop at Next. But they are, we are assured, at one with “the people” in wishing to extract Britain from the European Union and into a new era in which the citizenry is sovereign and all will be equal members of the governing class.
If you believe that, you believe in fairies.
Democracy is overrated. Anyone with any sense knows that, and the rise (and rise again) of Ukip only proves it. It is only tolerated because, as Churchill famously observed, it is the worst form of government apart from all the others. Voters are like the guests in Fawlty Towers – it would be so much easier to run the place if they didn’t exist. The results of elections rarely reflect majority opinion for more than a few weeks or months. People are capricious. They change their minds. They are also, for the most part hopelessly uninformed about the realities of governance, most obviously the complexities and constraints of economic management.
They vote for the party or the individual that promises to give them more of what they want than any of the other candidates on offer. They know that if they succeed they will be denying those with a different outlook, or a different set of priorities, the chance to fulfil their dream. But that doesn’t matter to them. For the will of the people, it turns out, is not an expression of national solidarity, but a numbers game, in which the winner takes all and the devil takes the hindmost.
As evidence, consider the referendum. Even in its own terms, it proved nothing. Does anyone truly believe that the voters of Sunderland, Wigan and Stoke voted Leave because they were fed up with the unaccountable nature of the European Commission or the rulings of the European Court of Justice? Most of them couldn’t have named either the British commissioner or the Commission President (since presented to us as a villain). Hardly any of them would have been aware, prior to the referendum campaign, that there was such a body as the ECJ, or what it did, or that it was different from the European Court of Human Rights, of which most of them would also have been ignorant.
It wasn’t the European Parliament from which they felt alienated. They didn’t give a stuff about what went on in Strasbourg. It was the parliament at Westminster, and the Tory Government, that they felt had let them down. It was eight years of austerity and the overweening arrogance of David Cameron and George Osborne to which they were opposed – that and the presence among them of some two million East European migrants who had the effrontery to work hard and speak a language other than English when all they, as Brits, wanted to do was save up for a dirty weekend in Prague.
Democracy? For the 51.9 per cent, this was an exercise in spite and resentment. It had nothing to do with the workings of the EU and everything to do with the English working class getting their own back on the Establishment.
What, though, of the 48.1 per cent who voted Remain? What did they hope to achieve? I suspect that most Remainers were well aware of the deficiencies of the European Union and were keen to see it reformed. They will have shared some of the unease felt by the 51.9 per cent about migrants. They may even have wished to give Cameron and Osborne a kick up the backside. But in the end they felt that to walk out on the EU after 46 years would be an act of madness – an act, moreover, without any obvious upside. The UK was the fifth largest economy in the world, and one of the fast-growing in Europe. Unemployment was approaching record lows and both our financial services and rejuvenated manufacturing sectors were thriving. What on earth was the problem? What were we thinking of?
The problem was democracy. And the problem with democracy, on top of its usual inefficiencies, was that it had been kidnapped by Ukip and the “Eurosceptic” Right. In theory, there is still a chance that we would put things right. We could hold a second referendum and give the people the opportunity to undo the mistake they made in 2016. But it won’t happen, and even if it did there is the real possibility that voters would double-down on their error.
In the meantime, what other joys does democracy present to us? What prospect is there that “the people,” post-Brexit, will usher in a new Golden Age? Will they opt for the omnishambles that is the present-day Tory Party, or will they plump instead for Jeremy Corbyn and his allies on the Rasputin Left? I like to think that the political board will somehow be wiped clean once Brexit becomes a reality and that a period of relative sanity will succeed the current madness. Unfortunately, the one thing that won’t change is the voters, millions of whom will continue to have difficulty distinguishing their arse from their elbow. The people, alas, are always with us.