There’s no denying that High Court lawyers have thrown Brexit into confusion.* Shakespeare must have anticipated this situation when he made Henry VI’s Butcher Dick utter the above words.
Part of the reason confusion reigns is that so many people, including me, clearly prioritise their beliefs. For pious people, God is clearly above any prioritisation, but a pecking order exists for more quotidian creeds. The higher one will always take precedence.
For example, the kind of people who currently insist that Parliament must have its say in not so much Brexit but even the invocation of Article 50 also believe that our sovereignty has to be moved from Queen and Parliament to the EU.
Chaps, don’t you sense self-refutation in your arguments? If you fervently believe in British sovereignty vested in Her Majesty’s Parliament, how can you welcome a situation where most of our laws come from a foreign body unaccountable to king, country or, for that matter, God?
It’s that prioritisation kicking in. Remainers love the EU for whatever reasons, the principal one, I suspect, being the kinship bureaucratic elites everywhere feel for one another, trumping whatever loyalty they may have towards their own people.
Some of them, by no means all, may also quite like our parliamentary tradition, but their affection for the EU occupies a higher rung in the ladder of their pieties. Hence their strategy is to derail Brexit by whatever means. If that involves screaming their previously understated love for Parliament off the rooftops, then so be it.
M’lords on the High and Supreme Court, most of whom are Europhiles, play along. They seem to ignore the issue of the royal prerogative, which actually vests HMG with executive powers. Among those is the power to abrogate treaties, which has been put into effect for as long as I’ve been following British politics.
The very same people who never raised an infinitesimal objection whenever the government exercised this prerogative over the last several decades (not wishing to date myself, I won’t tell you how many), now scream bloody murder about the government wishing to invoke Article 50, thereby acting on its royal prerogative and fulfilling an unequivocal popular mandate.
Actually, I shouldn’t be tossing stones out of the glass house in which I live. For I too am guilty of the same twisting and turning, if in the opposite direction.
For I detest the EU with the same passion that its champions love it. In fact, I detest it even more than some UKIPers do, who seem to be deaf at times to the clearly fascist noises emanating from that vile contrivance. My years in Russia have made my hearing extremely acute in perceiving such sounds, which may be ultrasounds to others.
This detestation of the EU is even stronger than my opposition to direct democracy by plebiscite. I think it’s ridiculous that constitutional issues, anchored as they are in centuries of history, a careful accumulation of precedents and reams of political philosophy, should be decided by a show of hands – which extremities mostly belong to people who don’t have much of a clue about constitutional history, legal precedents and political philosophy.
Edmund Burke, one of our greatest constitutional thinkers, would be appalled by this. He believed that, once elected, MPs should govern according to people’s interests, not their wishes. It was understood that the wise and virtuous people trusted with representing their constituencies knew better than the constituents themselves how their interests could best be served.
If Burke were told that people would decide in a plebiscite the issue of Britain’s sovereignty, he’d immediately retire to his Beaconsfield estate and live a hermetic life thereafter. He might suspect, rightly as it happens, that our parliamentarians solve the conflict between the people’s wishes and interests by representing neither.
Not only am I opposed to direct democracy, I have severe misgivings even about democracy of universal suffrage tout court. When unchecked by the power of other estates, one-man-one-vote democracy first becomes what Tocqueville called ‘tyranny of the majority’, and then the tyranny of a small elite governing in the majority’s name.
Sooner or later, such an elite begins to serve itself, rather than the demos in whose name it supposedly governs. That explains why so much of our governing elite (‘the establishment’ in the popular parlance) are attracted to the EU – answering to a supranational body makes them largely unaccountable to their own people, thereby increasing their domestic power and, consequently, enhancing opportunities for personal advancement.
In case anybody is interested, I’ve actually written a book about this, Democracy As a Neocon Trick. But, having written it, I still agitated for a Brexit referendum, realising it gave Britain the only chance to regain her independence, getting her constitutional essence back on track.
Obviously I’m the anti-EU teapot calling the federalist kettle black. I too seem to prioritise my pieties; I too am prepared to overlook certain inconsistencies, not to say mutual exclusiveness.
And, figuratively speaking, as I hope you understand, I do think Butcher Dick was on to something. How else can we prevent lawyers throwing spanners in the Brexit works?
* My previous post reflected this confusion. I mistakenly attributed remarks made by Lord Kerr of Kinlochard to Lord Kerr of Tonaghmore. My only excuse is that I’m not the only culprit: The Times ran the former’s statements under the latter’s photograph. Also, having visited my ex-neighbour Brian Kerr in his Westminster apartment a few years ago, I assumed, wrongly as it happens, that this was grace and favour. In fact, by contrast to some of our other public servants, Lord Kerr commendably pays for his own accommodation. If my mistake caused any offence, I’m sincerely sorry, especially since I like Brian Kerr very much.