The guillotine has been erected and the tumbrils are ready to roll. Parliament is not to be allowed to vote on the terms of Brexit, the most momentous process undertaken by the UK in modern times. Decisions on the future of the country’s relationship with its neighbours are to be announced instead by prime ministerial decree. Mere MPs who contend that they, as the country’s elected representatives, should have the final say in the matter have been told by Number 10 that such a conceit is “unacceptable”.
And so it begins.
Most of those who voted Leave in the referendum on June 23 did so, it is safe to say, not because they opposed the hobbled democracy of the European Union or the supremacy of the European Court of Justice, but because they wanted an end to unfettered immigration and, in all likelihood, the repatriation of a million or more of those East European immigrants already in situ.
Theresa May is right to ordain that the free movement of labour from Continental Europe into the UK cannot continue as it has since Tony Blair unwittingly opened the floodgates in 2004. She is wrong, however, and dangerously so, to extrapolate from the referendum result that British voters want out of Europe bag and baggage in the way that, say, the voters of India in 1946 wanted an end to the Raj. Hard Brexit and Soft Brexit were not options on the ballot paper, which asked only that those taking part (72 per cent of the electorate, as it turned out) should declare their preference for In or Out of the EU.
If the result meant that Britain was mandated to leave the Single Market and clamp down hard on EU citizens living and working in the UK, then, logically, it also meant that the £350 million a week allegedly paid into the Brussels budget each year by Britain should henceforth be allocated to the NHS. Indeed, since the latter transfer was actually included as a pledge on the Leave campaign’s battle bus, there is no excuse for not implementing it as part of the 2017 Queen’s Speech.
The referendum, while binding in the absolute, is irrelevant in the particular. Voters were not asked what form Brexit should take. They were not, for that matter, asked their opinion on migration. And the Government should not act as if the opposite were the case. It is for Parliament to decide what type of separation we should negotiate and accept, not Messrs Johnson, Davis & Fox.
Sadly (tragically, one might say), the House of Commons is in no shape to undertake such a momentous task. More than half of Tory MPs on June 23 were for Remain. What has happened to them since then? They hold their seats but have surrendered their opinions – in office but not in power. Most of them have embraced Leave as if it were the new religion, presenting their conversion as evidence of their integrity and commitment to democracy when in fact it comes across as weak and despicable. Truly, they are the “deplorables” of the Conservative Party.
What, they should ask themselves, if Remain had won? The boot would then have been on the other foot, except that Leavers would have vowed to continue the war, just as they always did during the long years of the EU’s ascendancy. They would have fought on the beaches and on the landing grounds. They would have fought on the hustings and in the division lobbies. They would never have surrendered.
All may not yet be lost. Stephen Phillips, a Tory backbencher who voted Leave in the referendum, has charged the Government of proceeding in a “fundamentally undemocratic, unconstitutional” manner [that] “cuts across the rights and privileges of the legislature”. But among his fellow Conservatives (apart from Ken Clarke and the redoubtable Anna Soubry), he is almost a lone voice.
Which brings us to the Labour Party, as unstructured and depressing a body as any in mainstream politics in the last 75 years. Jeremy Corbyn, a Leaver in Remaindered clothing, couldn’t care less about Brexit. I doubt he has given it much thought since June 24. All he is interested in is the refashioning of Britain (actually England) as a workers’ collective. It is hard to find words for him. What is certain is that the evil that he does will live after him. He will be remembered as a cancer on the body politic of social democracy, devouring all that is active and positive, leaving behind only an empty husk.
But his MPs are little better. A handful, led by, of all people, Ed Miliband, have stood up for a negotiated settlement with Europe. The rest are cowed, afraid that if they speak out they will be punished by Ukip at the polls. What a shower! What a collection of deadbeats!
After the Tories and Labour, all that is left are the Lib Dems and the SNP, the former powerless and rudderless, the latter like a puff adder, hissing and striking out at the UK in the hope of hastening its necrosis. But we shouldn’t forget the Democratic Unionists – as near Ukip as makes no difference – who until the triumph of the Nats thought of themselves as dislocated Scots but these days would sell their grannies if it meant Ulster’s shrinking Protestant majority staying on top of the Stormont dung heap for another 20 years.
Time is running out. Attitudes in Brussels are hardening. Is there really no Tory capable of rallying the party’s centrist majority round a sensible negotiated settlement – one that takes us out of the EU but allows us to remain part of the greater European family? Can Labour’s parliamentary party not find the courage to defy Corbyn and act in what is overwhelmingly the national interest? Is it possible that the SNP, just for once, could put their tartan tantrums on hold and pursue the common good?
Or have they all already succumbed to the Great Terror?
