John Bercow: defending parliament against the people

The departing speaker was no warrior for democracy.

TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR

31st October 2019

So it’s goodbye to John Bercow. The longest-serving speaker of the House of Commons since the war, the small man with the big thesaurus, has finally stepped down.

His last Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs) yesterday proved a fitting send-off. This weekly session, intended to be just 30 minutes, has during Bercow’s tenure become ever-longer – in part, at least, due to his own verbosity; his habit, as the author Ben Schott has put it, ‘of using 10 words when two would suffice’.

The session stretched to well over an hour yesterday, groaning under the weight of both sincere and tongue-in-cheek well-wishes from Commons leaders. Prime minister Boris Johnson, unsurprisingly, opted for the latter.

Though Bercow began life as a Conservative – and a pretty hard-right one at that – he has long been considered by Tories as a turncoat, increasingly in line with Labour. But more importantly, in the Brexit saga his decisions have at key points allowed this Remainer Parliament to land blows against the Leave majority.

Johnson yesterday praised Bercow’s ‘10 tumultuous years in your high chair’, before taking some sly swipes at his activism, which in many MPs’ eyes has destroyed the impartiality of his office. ‘You have been a player in your own right, peppering every part of the chamber with your thoughts and opinions’, Johnson said, pointing to Bercow’s various ‘legislative innovations’.

Perhaps Bercow’s most controversial innovation was in January, when he ignored his clerks’ advice and allowed an amendment to a government motion to be laid by Remoaner MP Dominic Grieve ultimately aimed at stymying a No Deal exit. In the words of the BBC’s parliamentary anorak Mark D’Arcy, it ‘drove a coach and horses through accepted normal practice’.

‘If such a precedent can be made to stick, it would be a huge blow against any government’s accustomed control over the business of the Commons’, D’Arcy added. And so it was to be. Bercow would later allow backbench MPs to take control of the order paper in order, among other things, to pass the Surrender Act to legislate against No Deal – closing off the path to a clean-break Brexit.

Amid the uproar in the Commons that followed the passing of the Grieve amendment, Bercow told the house, ‘I am not in the business of invoking precedent, nor am I under any obligation to do so… If we were guided only by precedent, nothing would ever change.’ Then, two months later, he had suddenly became a traditionalist, invoking a 1604 convention to stop Theresa May holding another vote on her Brexit deal.

Bercow has styled himself as a defender of the backbenches against the overreach of the executive. He expanded urgent questions and emergency debates to keep government and ministers more on their toes. All good things in themselves. All true democrats should want a parliament that keeps the executive in check.

But during the Brexit process, Bercow’s role has also been to empower parliament at the expense of the electorate, giving them all manner of unusual, unprecedented means to overturn the vote for Brexit.

He has been quite open about his pro-Remain views, and the fact that he thinks it is the right of MPs to defy the wishes of their own constituents. In 2017, after a press and public backlash against 12 anti-Brexit Tories, he effectively stood up for MPs’ right to thwart Brexit. ‘In voting as you think fit’, he reassured MPs, ‘you are never enemies of the people. You are dedicated, hard-working, committed public servants, doing what you believe to be right for this country.’

Yesterday Jeremy Corbyn lauded Bercow as a democratic champion ‘in the tradition of the great Speaker Lenthall’ – the man who stood up to King Charles I in 1642 when the king turned up in parliament, flanked by hundreds of soldiers, demanding to know the whereabouts of five MPs he accused of treason.

But where Lenthall’s stand against autocratic government sparked the Civil War and the revolutionary overthrow of the monarchy, Bercow’s multisyllabic interventions have only worked to enable the counter-revolutionary overthrow of the popular vote for Brexit.

Bercow hasn’t so much stood up for parliament’s traditions as he has bent and broke them as he sees fit to the end of crushing the biggest public mandate in our history. Whatever you want to call that, it isn’t democratic.

When parliament voted this week on a one-line bill to hold a General Election, opposition parties put down amendments seeking to fiddle the franchise to include 16- and 17-year-olds and EU citizens. (Two groups who are generally pro-Remain and anti-Tory.)

The government breathed a sigh of relief when deputy speaker Sir Lindsay Hoyle, filling in for Bercow that day, refused to select the amendments.

Hoyle was right to do it, of course. Such a profound change in how we do politics, and in what citizenship means in this country, should not be done so hastily by a bunch of MPs trying to rig an upcoming election in their favour.

But though it is perhaps unfair to suggest that Bercow might have done otherwise, that observers even thought such a change might have been possible tells us something about the Bercow era. He has, if nothing else, wrecked the presumption that the speaker is an honest broker, following the rules impartially.

Whether or not Bercow’s exploits in recent years were the product of his belief in parliamentary scrutiny, his loathing of this current government or his loathing of Brexit is very much up for debate. What is clear, though, is that his lasting legacy will be as an enthusiastic enabler of the Remainer Parliament, the most openly anti-democratic in recent memory.

As one government source told Buzzfeed’s Alex Wickham last month, just after Bercow announced his retirement, ‘Bercow thinks he’ll walk away as a hero, when most people in the country don’t know who he is and those that do think he’s a nauseating wanker. The man has been central to stopping Brexit – the nation won’t thank him.’

Harsh but true. Speaker Bercow didn’t so much defend parliament against the executive as parliament against the people.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Picture by: Getty

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/31/john-bercow-defending-parliament-against-the-people/

Brexit is far from the finishing line

Whatever comes of these talks, democracy will still be in peril.



TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR

11th October 2019



So, at the time of writing, we’re not in the ‘tunnel’, but by the time you read this, we might be. It was announced earlier today that negotiations on Britain’s EU exit would recommence, following a ‘positive’ meeting between Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and UK PM Boris Johnson yesterday, which cleared a ‘pathway’ to a deal. But the European Union was keen to make clear we were not quite entering said tunnel – the Brussels jargon for the secretive, buckle-down stage of talks.


If you’re finding the metaphors and fine distinctions baffling, you’re not the only one. What will come of these talks is really anyone’s guess. The Irish press has been briefed that the UK has moved significantly on the issue of customs, perhaps to something resembling the Northern Ireland-only backstop, which would keep Northern Ireland in the Customs Union. But for now No10, for whom this outrageous land-grab was supposedly a red line, remain tight-lipped.

The secrecy and the accompanying chin-stroking speculation is a reminder of how the EU does business – behind closed doors, beyond the prying eyes of the people. But it is also a reminder of how shut out the British public has been throughout the Brexit process, as much domestically as in the Brussels talks. Over the past three-and-a-half years we’ve all looked on, spectators, if that, as politicians and campaigners, most of whom want Brexit to fail, cut deals between one another.

So now it falls to Johnson, the late-in-the-day Leaver, to have one last shot at securing a meaningful Brexit by 31 October. But even if he gets what he wants, it’s worth remembering that the Northern Irish backstop has seemingly consumed No10 to the exclusion of all other issues with Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement and the accompanying Political Declaration – not least the role set out for the ECJ. The backstop is just the start of what’s wrong with that deal.

Meanwhile, our Remainer Parliament has made a No Deal Brexit effectively impossible. If no agreement is passed by 19 October, the Benn (aka Surrender) Act will kick in, forcing the PM to request an extension and giving Brussels the right to dictate how long we stay in limbo. MPs claim this was about avoiding the ‘calamity’ of No Deal, but the way they have acted recently has made it all the more clear that this was about stopping Brexit and pushing the public out of the process.

They claim there is no mandate for the No Deal Johnson was allegedly hurtling towards, and yet they blocked an election before 31 October. Now MPs are mulling over holding a second referendum – a non-choice between a version of May’s deal and Remain – before a General Election, lest the plebs elect a parliament willing to take us out. That would take months. Even if Johnson pulled off the impossible in Brussels, this is what he would be returning to.

So we have a European Union that seemingly won’t allow a meaningful Brexit for the entire United Kingdom. We have a parliament that won’t allow No Deal, and won’t allow us to vote them out. And in the middle is a government, with a negative majority, in office but not in power, but kept in place because it suits the agenda of the Remoaner opposition. Any avenue through which the public might genuinely shape events has been closed off. This is what we’re up against.

Amid the infernal swirl of jargon and speculation that is going to continue these next few days, it is important that we don’t let the seriousness of all this escape us. If Brexit is thwarted, it will leave British democracy itself in peril. We would be in a European Union we cannot leave, and lumbered with a political class more emboldened than ever to use the power we lend them to overrule our wishes. There may be light at the end of the tunnel, but for now it feels much more like an oncoming train.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/10/11/brexit-is-far-from-the-finishing-line/

The tragedy of Jeremy Corbyn

He has betrayed left Euroscepticism. And for Remainers it’s still not enough.

TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR

24th September 2019

Jeremy Corbyn was handed a lifeline last night, when the Labour Party conference backed his position on Brexit. With Labour having already backed a second Brexit referendum, yesterday was about what position it would take in that referendum. Corbyn’s approach was to put off the decision until after the coming General Election. A rival motion, ‘Composite 13’, called for an unequivocal Remain stance. By show of hands, Corbyn’s motion carried, and the other fell.

It was a win, but a controversial one. When Composite 13 was voted on, the chair, Wendy Nichols, at first said it had carried. Then Jennie Formby, Corbyn ally and Labour general secretary, sat to Nichols’ right, insisted it hadn’t. Nichols went along with it. There were calls for a formal ‘card vote’, but they were denied. Disquiet among the more Remainy delegates was drowned out by a chorus of ‘Oh, Jeremy Corbyn’. While it seems like it was, in the end, the right call, the way it was handled inflamed tensions.

Labour’s battles over Brexit are far from over, and differences of opinion are there for all to see. While Corbyn has said he will personally remain neutral in a future referendum, members of his shadow cabinet – including Keir Starmer, Emily Thornberry and John McDonnell – have made clear they will back Remain. The membership is strongly pro-Remain, albeit still loyal to Corbyn. (His team deftly presented the votes yesterday as a matter of confidence in him.)

But for all the controversy, this is, in a way, dancing on the head of a pin. If Labour wins the next election, it will hold a second referendum. The choice would be between staying in the EU and ‘leaving’ via a tweaked version of Theresa May’s withdrawal deal – that is, between Remain and Remain By Another Name. Whoever wins that rigged referendum, Brexit would lose. This internal spat is over which flavour of betrayal to recommend to the electorate, and when might be best to announce that preference.

Corbyn is likely making an electoral calculation here. As Lancaster University’s Richard Johnson has argued, Labour’s path to election victory is through Leave-voting marginals. But at the same time, the now pro-revoke Liberal Democrats are also snapping at Corbyn’s heels, eating into his Remoaner support. He is clearly hoping that constructive ambiguity on Brexit, and a campaign fought on domestic policy, might allow him to squeak through the middle and into No10.

But I dare say there’s something personal about this, too. Corbyn is a lifelong left Brexiteer. He learned at the feet of Tony Benn. Friends say he would have voted Leave in 2016 had he not been leader. Jeremy Corbyn leading a pro-second referendum Labour Party is like Ken Clarke leading a pro-No Deal Tory Party. And Corbyn’s prevarication over his and his party’s stance in that second referendum looks increasingly like a limp, tragic holdout against the final betrayal of his principles.

He knows that holding a second referendum is wrong. In 2009, he backed a No vote in Ireland’s second referendum on the EU’s Lisbon Treaty (the first No vote was ignored). There’s a clip of him joking at a meeting that, if No campaigners win again, they should refrain from recycling their posters, because they’ll need them for the third go. Arguably, the second referendum Corbyn is backing now would be even worse than that re-run, given Leave would effectively be left off the ballot paper.

He also knows that the EU is a brutal technocratic order that battered the Greek working class; that pays North African militias to lock up would-be migrants; that is so dismissive of democratic politics that it wouldn’t even allow him to implement his rather milquetoast 2017 manifesto. Corbyn knows all of this. And yet on he goes, scuppering our one shot at leaving this thing, to the dappled applause of Blairites, hipsters and the Financial Times.

Corbyn has debased himself over Brexit. That there are those in his party demanding he go further feels almost sadistic. He has been forced to say things he doesn’t believe and support things he knows to be wrong, and it’s still not enough. But he deserves little sympathy. This alleged man of principle realised long ago that betraying left Euroscepticism was the price he had to pay for holding on to the Labour leadership. He made his judgement. And history will make its own of him.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/24/the-tragedy-of-jeremy-corbyn/

At least the Lib Dems are being honest

Remoaners need to stop feigning outrage at the Revoke pledge.

TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR

16th September 2019

In the past 24 hours, the British chattering classes seem to have woken up to the fact that the Liberal Democrats are not actually in favour of democracy. What a clever, perceptive bunch they are.

This comes in response to the news from the Lib Dem party conference that if – and this is a huge if – Jo Swinson’s party wins a majority at the next election it will revoke Article 50. That is, it would cancel Brexit by fiat.

This is never going to happen, of course. The Lib Dems currently have a mighty 18 MPs, a third of whom are defectors from other parties. In the likely event that they fail to score another 300+ seats, the Lib Dems will continue to call for a second referendum, as they have done more or less since the first one.

Still, the policy has succeeded at least in flaunting to pure-bred Remainers that this is the political home for them, and reminding the rest of us what a hilariously misnamed outfit the Liberal Democrats is. The Lib Dems and others have always said a ‘People’s Vote’ was the ‘democratic’ way to stop Brexit – but this has always been, to use their favourite swear word, bollocks.

Another vote on EU membership further down the line, a good while after we’ve actually left, would be perfectly democratic. But we haven’t left yet. Yes, democracies can change their minds. But it’s a funny kind of democracy in which public votes are only ever implemented if the elite agrees with them.

So most of us didn’t need this Revoke announcement to work out that the Lib Dems are not big fans of democracy. But apparently many in the political and media sphere are not so quick on the uptake.

Labour MP Stephen Kinnock, who is pushing for a variation on Theresa May’s ‘Brexit’ deal, slammed the Revoke policy as ‘undemocratic’. ‘How can any Lib Dem politician look their constituents in the eye’ and ‘refer to themselves as a “democrat”?’, he thunders in the Guardian, seemingly unaware that that ship sailed long ago.

Similarly, anti-extremism campaigner Brendan Cox tweets that it is ‘totally legitimate to push for a second referendum’, but revoking Article 50 ‘cannot be justified’. This was also the line of attack when Swinson was grilled on the Today programme this morning – that a second Brexit referendum is one thing, but revoke is quite another.

This is right, to a degree. Revocation would certainly be a more audacious denial of the 17.4million who voted Brexit. But a second referendum isn’t ‘legitimate’: again, we haven’t left yet, plus those pushing for it have made it clear that it would be rigged against Leave – providing a choice between Remain and a May-style Remain By Another Name.

When it comes down to it, much of this discussion about the ‘legitimate’ way to stop Brexit is really a discussion about the most easily spun way to stop Brexit. The problem with Revoke is that it leaves no one in any doubt. This is about optics, not principle.

Just look at some of the people feigning outrage at the Lib Dem announcement. Remoaner Corbynista Paul Mason called it an ‘insult’ to Leave voters. That’s the same Paul Mason who has spent a good chunk of the past few years insulting Leave voters, insisting that Brexit is a ‘project of the racist and xenophobic right’.

Then there’s Green MP Caroline Lucas, who says ‘you can’t pretend the result didn’t happen’ and that in backing Revoke the ‘Lib Dems are doing just that’. Not only is Lucas a prominent backer of a second referendum, she also recently admitted that she would ignore the result of a second referendum if the result was Leave again, echoing comments made by Swinson just days earlier.

These people are either buying their own bullshit or lying. I’m not sure which is worse. Either way, we can’t let them get away with this. The petulant extremes of the Lib Dems shouldn’t be used to whitewash the anti-democratic antics of everyone else on the elite-Remain side.

At least the Lib Dems are being honest. Their newfound Remoaner critics certainly are not.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Picture by: Getty.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/09/16/at-least-the-lib-dems-are-being-honest/

The cowardice of Tory Brexiteers

Johnson and Rees-Mogg are capitulating – we shouldn’t be surprised.

Tom Slater
28th March 2019




‘I could tear this place down and bulldoze it into the river.’ So said Steve Baker last night at a meeting of the European Research Group of pro-Brexit Tory MPs. It was just after PM Theresa May had told her party she would step down if her sell-out Brexit deal was passed – leading Vote Leave leader Boris Johnson and other Tory Eurosceptics finally to come on board. Baker referred to MPs, who had spent the afternoon debating their preferred plans for killing off Brexit, as ‘fools and knaves and cowards’. He spoke to a rage that many of us are feeling – though, if I’m honest, another c-word more frequently comes to mind.

Cowardice, incompetence and humiliation have each at different points defined the Tories in this Brexit process. Yesterday we got a taste of all three. ERG leader Jacob Rees-Mogg wrote in the Daily Mail that he would potentially back May’s deal, a deal he had spent the past few months decrying, rightly, as ‘vassalage’. Boris Johnson also made his hitherto hinted-at support official, less than 24 hours after telling the audience at a Telegraph event that the deal is worse than EU membership. As ‘indicative votes’ on alternative Brexit plans got underway in the Commons, things seemed to be looking up for May. The threat of Brexit getting softer was testing Brexiteers’ resolve. Though she had to pledge to resign to get there, the chances of her deal passing seemed to be increasing. But later in the evening, the DUP said it still cannot support it, sinking the deal again for now.

Meanwhile, Remainer MPs across parliament showed that they, like May, are as useless as they are anti-democratic. The indicative votes were the brainchild of Tory MP Oliver Letwin, whose amendment this week allowed MPs to seize control of Commons business to debate and vote on different Brexit options. This, Remainer MPs and commentators said, was the grown-ups finally asserting themselves. A ‘sensible compromise’ (translation: more thorough betrayal) would no doubt be in sight. But after all the ballots were counted precisely zero of the eight alternatives won a majority. That said, the results did remind us which way the wind is blowing – a second Brexit referendum took the largest number of votes, and a permanent customs union came the closest to winning a majority.

What a mess. Yesterday proved yet again that MPs are determined to thwart Brexit, but lack the courage or nous to pull it off cleanly. But this has been clear for some time. What was more striking was what utter cowards many leading Tory Brexiteers have shown themselves to be. They argue that things have changed now that No Deal has been kiboshed, that having thrown away our last bit of leverage, and our final route to a clean-break Brexit, things can only get softer. The choice now, they say, is between May’s deal and no Brexit at all. It would be a compelling argument if May’s deal wasn’t also no Brexit at all. Worse, as many of them have gone hoarse saying, it would leave us with less say over the EU rules that bind us than we currently have. Voters wanted to take back control – this deal would give more away. This is not a compromise.

May’s vow to step down and let another leader take on the trade talks also helps nothing. We would still be stuck with the Withdrawal Agreement, including the backstop, which could trap the UK in the EU Customs Union indefinitely. We would still have paid the EU £39 billion in exchange for zip. Having managed to screw us on withdrawal, the EU would set about screwing us on trade. Plus there is no guarantee that a committed Brexiteer would even become the next leader, let alone have the support in parliament to chart a more Brexity course. Candidates have to get through Tory MPs before they are put to the members. Many of the leading Brexiteers are, to put it mildly, divisive in the parliamentary party. Nothing would change.

What choice do Brexiteer MPs have, many will ask? They have the choice to stick to their guns. The bitter truth is that parliament, the opposition and the government are refusing to implement the people’s will. That the best we can possibly hope for is subjugation to the EU rather than membership of it is perverse. You can either be an accomplice to this betrayal or you can continue to oppose it. Resign the whip if necessary. Tory Brexiteers are not mounting some tactical retreat, they are surrendering, perhaps with an eye to their future careers in the party. Perhaps like fellow Eurosceptics John McDonnell and Jeremy Corbyn they have decided that holding on to power and influence in their party is more important than principle.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/28/the-cowardice-of-tory-brexiteers/

Democracy is on the line

We cannot count on MPs to save it.

TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR

13th March 2019

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TopicsBREXIT POLITICS UK

Strange as it is to say this, last night should have been – and in any other era it would have been – a good night for British democracy. A government’s central policy, fiercely opposed by the country, by both sides of a polarised electorate, which a deeply unpopular prime minister was trying to force through, was roundly defeated.

In normal times, the PM would have been forced to resign. We would likely be headed for a General Election. We would have a chance to punish a government that had failed to govern competently, with conviction and, most importantly, in line with the promises it had made to the public. The democratic checks would be kicking in; the system would be working.

But that’s not what happened, of course. Instead, the second defeat of Theresa May’s Withdrawal Agreement, this incredible failure of statecraft, democratic representation and basic competence, has only reminded us of how profoundly dysfunctional our political system has become.

May’s EU Withdrawal Agreement was beaten all right – this time by a whopping 149 votes, as opposed to the record-beating 230 chalked up against it in January. Her ‘legally binding’ assurances from the EUthat the so-called backstop would not trap us in a customs union indefinitely were deemed insufficient by her own attorney general, and she failed to win over enough MPs for even a semi-respectable defeat.

But while the rejection of May’s deal should be a positive – in response to the British people’s demand for more democracy and sovereignty, the deal would have, perversely, turned Britain into a colony of Brussels – yesterday’s vote has left voters just as disempowered, just as cut out of the process, as they were before it.

Much of the focus in recent days has been on the hardcore Tory Eurosceptics who voted down May’s deal for a second time last night. But the fact remains that just as many if not more MPs rejected May’s deal because they don’t want Brexit to happen at all. And the wind is currently in their sails.

Today the Commons will likely vote to reject Britain leaving on 29 March without a withdrawal agreement, on World Trade Organisation terms – that is, to reject our last viable path to a meaningful Brexit. May will vote to reject No Deal herself, mere months after saying No Deal was better than a bad deal.

Then, on Thursday, it is expected that MPs will vote to request an extension to the Article 50 process, delaying Brexit Day.

Voting for an extension would not stop No Deal on its own. A request for an extension is just that – a request. It would be for the EU to accept it and to set its duration. And as The Times’s Bruno Waterfield points out, the EU is pushing the argument that the best way to avoid No Deal is to revoke Article 50 entirely.

But if an extension is granted, it will be because Brussels spies a softer Brexit, or perhaps even no Brexit at all. Martin Selmayr, the power behind Jean-Claude Juncker’s throne, has suggested a year-long extension, at least, to allow for a General Election or a second referendum.

If that were to happen, Britain would be forced to take part in the European Parliament elections in May, almost three years after we voted to leave the EU.

That the EU and its Westminster cheerleaders have emerged from this period on top was not inevitable. The government has been remarkably unwilling to exploit emerging contradictions in the positions of Brussels and Rearguard Remainers in recent weeks.

The Irish border issue has continued to dominate, and yet the EU’s argument for the backstop has begun to unravel. EU negotiator Michel Barnier was not only forced to admit in January that there would be no hard border under any circumstances, he also flirted with proposed solutions his team had previously labelled ‘unicorns’.

Similarly, May’s u-turn on No Deal, throwing away her last bit of leverage, has come despite a series of deals and contingency plans being unveiled to minimise disruption in various areas. Arch-Remainers have continued to insist a ‘managed No Deal’ is a myth, even as both sides set out plans to manage No Deal.

Brexiteers were right to reject May’s Withdrawal Agreement. The idea that it is better to vote for a Brexit in Name Only than risk no Brexit at all is ridiculous. But the fact remains that British democracy is now so thoroughly broken that there is little those few principled MPs can do to stave off the coming betrayal.

While the majority of the public backed Brexit, the vast majority of MPs, and the great heft of the two main party establishments, backed Remain. Even if May was to resign or be brought down tomorrow, we would be left with the same aloof, anti-democratic political class. Nothing would have changed.

Which is why we Leavers – we democrats – need to band together, to organise. We need to thrash out strategies for the battles to come – whether they come in the form of the European elections, a second referendum or, brace yourself, another General Election.

We cannot continue to be spectators in this process. We cannot just commiserate with one another from the sidelines. We need to start working out how to defend Brexit, to defend our vote, ourselves – because the past 24 hours have made it all the more clear that no one in Westminster can do it for us.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Listen to the latest spiked podcast below:

Picture by: Getty.

https://www.spiked-online.com/2019/03/13/democracy-is-on-the-line/

THE CASUAL TYRANNY OF THE SECOND-REFERENDUM SET

London mayor Sadiq Khan shocked no one this weekend by putting his weight behind the campaign for second EU referendum. In an article for the Observer, and later an interview on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show, he made his case in the typically duplicitous way we have come to expect from those pushing for a do-over ref. He said it wasn’t about having a second referendum, but a first referendum on the deal, before adding that he thinks staying in the EU should still be on the ballot paper – thus making it a second referendum.

TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR

17 SEPTEMBER 2018

Rearguard Remainers are unabashed authoritarians.

As ever, it’s hard to tell if those pushing for a so-called People’s Vote think we’re so stupid as to be fooled by their rhetorical contortionism or just don’t care what we think at all. I’m betting it’s the latter. Theirs is a campaign fronted by capitalists, Blairites and luvvies. If they were interested in convincing a Leave-voting builder in Stoke why he should change his mind on Brexit, they wouldn’t be sending in Caroline Lucas, Jean-Luc Picard or the bald one from Mock the Week to make the case. Their aim is not to appeal to regretful voters, but to energise a Remainer base and hope Leavers just give in. Which, given the circumstances, would be completely understandable: if the anti-democrats secure a second referendum it would send a clear signal that any vote they dislike can and will be ignored.

But just because the calls for a second referendum now ring out from every Brexit media discussion, we cannot let the casual tyranny of this campaign escape us. Indeed, as Theresa May’s Tory Party continues to turn Brexit into an exercise in national humiliation, the People’s Vote lot are becoming more and more cocky, more open in their authoritarianism and anti-democracy. Blairite lord Andrew Adonis is now not only openly admitting that the aim of the ‘People’s Vote’ campaign is simply ‘to stop Brexit’ – to squash, that is, the biggest democratic mandate in our history – he’s also piping up again about barring Brexiteers from public life. He gets more tinpot tyrant by the day.

These people drape themselves in the veil of democracy, they claim that their aim is to right the exploitation of our democratic process by the populist pro-Brexit demagogues who were willing to lie their way to a Leave victory. But the exaggerations and spin of the elite Leave campaign (which was, at worst, as bad as the exaggerations and spin of the elite Remain campaign) pale into insignificance in comparison with Rearguard Remain’s wilful distortions. They are slinging around almost comical scare stories about job losses, sperm shortages and super gonorrhea epidemics as a result of Brexit as unalloyed truth. They are bluffing and bullshitting their way to a second referendum, and they know they are.

Take the much-touted claim that there is significant and growing support for a second referendum and a backdoor Remain vote. This is, in fact, incredibly tenuous. Sir John Curtice, Britain’s top polling expert, notes that support for a second referendum across opinion polls varies significantly depending on how you phrase the question. ‘[P]olls that ask people whether the “public” should have a vote usually record a higher level of support than those that just ask whether there should be another referendum’, he writes. This is something Best for Britain, Gina Miller’s Rearguard Remain group, knows all too well. In April, a YouGov poll it commissioned was trumpeted as proof that more people than not wanted a second referendum. The poll actually asked two questions: one asked if there should be a public vote on the final deal (which was rejected 44 per cent to 39 per cent), and the other asked if there should be a final say (which was accepted 44 per cent to 36 per cent). No prizes for guessing which one made the press release.

What’s more, there has been no great shift in polling figures to suggest that Leave voters are changing their minds on Brexit, the key measure, surely, for whether or not a second referendum is justified. Indeed, while there is, in a few polls, some support among Leavers for a final say, this is largely a product, it seems, of their distrust of politicians to implement Brexit properly. ‘They are more likely to back another ballot when it is presented as a vote by the “public” than as a “referendum” and less likely to support the idea if it is made clear that the choice would be between remaining and leaving’, writes Curtice. ‘[T]he one and only question where more Leave voters expressed support than opposition was one where respondents were asked whether, in the event of there being no deal, the decision about what to do should be made by MPs or the public.’

The main reason, it seems, that some Leavers are contemplating a second vote is that the political class are refusing to take the first one seriously. This, in turn, is being cited as proof by the People’s Vote crew that Remain is what the people actually want. It is perverse, dishonest and Orwellian. And just because the calls for a second referendum have become a constant foghorn in the Brexit discussion, we can’t let the unabashed anti-democracy of elite Remainers escape us. For all the liberal-elite fearmongering about this populist moment ushering in an era of strongman politics, these people are the real authoritarians.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Picture by: Getty

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-casual-tyranny-of-the-second-referendum-set/

The Bosses’ Vote

A second Brexit referendum, brought to you by exploited Indian labour.

TOM SLATER
DEPUTY EDITOR
20 AUGUST 2018

The People’s Vote campaign, which is calling for a second Brexit referendum in the hopes of overturning that other (presumably sub-people’s) vote we had in 2016, isn’t even trying to hide its elitism any more.

Just look at its latest posterboy, co-founder of Superdry Julian Dunkerton. Over the weekend he announced he was donating £1million to the campaign. He says Superdry, the fashion brand he launched in 1985, would never have been a success were it not for the EU Single Market.

But it took people on Twitter all of 30 seconds of Googling to work out that it also might not have been a success if it weren’t for the 28p-an-hour wages his company paid Indian workers to produce Superdry clothes. A People’s Vote, part-funded by Indians’ exploited labour.

Dunkerton joins a rogues’ gallery of capitalists – including Virgin boss Richard Branson and the Pimlico Plumbers guy / bad Rod Stewart lookalike, Charlie Mullins– who have been demanding a People’s Vote. Alongside them, the likes of Airbus more subtly try to scupper Brexit by preaching fire and brimstone about a No Deal Brexit.

(Meanwhile, a poll last week suggests a plurality of voters think we should Leave without a second referendum and with or without a deal.)

It’s hard to work out whether the People’s Vote crew realise they have picked spokespeople who couldn’t be more unpalatable to the British masses or just don’t care. I mean, the capitalists aside, look at who else they’ve got on their side: Tony Blair, Alastair Campbell, the bald one from Mock the Week. This is terrible, terrible optics, to use a fittingly Blairite term.

But none of this should surprise us. The People’s Vote campaign has always been an Orwellian enterprise. The aim here is not to change people’s minds, but to beat Leave voters into submission. They hope the combined hysteria of MPs, bosses and luvvies will be enough to scare Leave voters or make them check out of the process entirely, safe in the knowledge that the elites don’t care what they think.

The second referendum these people want is not a People’s Vote – it is a Bosses’ Vote, a chance for the economic and political elites who run Britain to have another crack at browbeating us into doing what they want.

Lucky for those of us committed to defending Brexit, it is a strategy that will only remind Leave voters of the contempt in which the elite holds them, and why they decided to wipe the smirks off their faces last time around.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

Picture by: Getty

EVERYTHING HAS CHANGED - MUST READ

Why the Brexit revolt cannot be undone.

TOM SLATER
AUGUST 2018




Among the wave of populist uprisings on both sides of the Atlantic over the past few years, the Brexit vote was unique. Unlike the ballot-box revolts that gave us President Trump, a populist coalition government in Italy, and a hard-right party in Germany surging to become the non-official opposition, the Brexit vote was party-less – leaderless even. The 17.4million-strong vote to Leave cut across party lines. The leadership of almost the entire political class opposed it. Only two tiny parties in the UK Houses of Parliament at the time of the June 2016 referendum, the UK Independence Party (which then had one MP, and now has none) and the Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party (eight MPs then, 10 now), were formally committed to Brexit. A remarkable 75 per cent of MPs voted Remain. And though media chatter during the campaign had it that a vote to leave would empower the politicians who backed it, UKIP all but collapsed in the wake of the vote, and a Remainer took control of the Conservative Party.

Where other European and American citizens, fed up with their distant and disdainful elites, had to resort to right-wing, even hard-right, populist parties and figures in order to make their presence felt, the British public were given a clean shot, and took it. And we were only given the opportunity because former prime minister David Cameron called a referendum betting he would win it. This is Brexit’s great strength, but also its great weakness. It has made British voters’ demand for more control far harder to dismiss as unreconstructed nativism (though the domestic and international elites have made a pretty good fist of it). But, in turn, it lacks any pre-existing vehicle that could defend and implement it. Now, as Brexit is slowly being betrayed by parliament and the civil service, it falls to handfuls of backbenchers to stick up for the people’s will. And as we have seen over the past two years, this has given the establishment the time and space to try to reassert itself.

‘Nothing has changed’

‘Nothing has changed.’ So said an embattled Theresa May two weeks before the 2017 snap election, as she tried to pretend her u-turn on her flagship social-care policy, which had gone down like a cup of cold sick with voters, was no u-turn at all. It became a kind of epitaph for May’s ill-fated election bid – which she called thinking she would seize a 100-plus-seat majority, but ended up at the helm of a minority government. It summed up – along with her Maybotic slogan, ‘Strong and Stable’ – her stiffness, her inability to talk straight with voters. It was a reminder that the self-styled born-again Brexiteer was in truth the definition of the duplicitous, distant technocrat a majority of British voters had rejected at the EU referendum a year earlier. But in the ongoing battle over Brexit, Nothing Has Changed could just as easily be the refrain of an entire reeling elite, desperate to put the Brexit genie back in its bottle.

This has been most explicit, and craven, in the elites’ ongoing mental breakdown over Brexit. First up, we were told we didn’t know what we voted for. We’d been brainwashed by populist demagogues. Former PM John Major raged against the ‘tyranny of the majority’, to much Remainer applause, rather letting slip that it was apparently the tyranny of the minority that he was keen on. Then came the lawsuits, as well-heeled businesspeople and lawyers tried to slow down the Brexit process in the courts, with cases brought over whether the executive needed parliament’s say-so to invoke Article 50 (which prevailed), and whether the UK could revoke Article 50 (which didn’t). Now, rather than trying to stop Brexit, elite Remainers are trying to argue it was somehow illegitimate, either because Vote Leave overspent, Cambridge Analytica’s Facebook ads hijacked our brains or Arron Banks had lunch with the Russian ambassador.

Brexit lacks any pre-existing political vehicle – party or otherwise – that could defend and implement it

But the desire to quash, or at least contain, Brexit isn’t consigned to the Remainer ultras. The Conservative government and Labour leadership are nominally committed to Brexit: at the last election, both stood on manifestos that explicitly pledged, or at least heavily implied, that they would implement the Brexit vote and we’d be leaving the Single Market and Customs Union. But look at where we are now. Theresa May’s Chequers Deal – her opening offer in trade talks with the EU – would keep us in the Single Market for goods, binding us in to EU rules and ECJ jurisdiction in perpetuity. Labour, meanwhile, wants to magic up some new, more flexible customs union with the EU. The two main parties only differ as to what degree Brexit should be screwed over. And, in any case, Brussels rejected May’s Chequers capitulation before the ink was even dry.

Herein lies one of Brexit’s many paradoxes. While it was a revolt against the entire political class – a sign, if ever we needed it, that the neat left-vs-right, Labour-vs-Tory, working-class-vs-middle-class, divide no longer gave expression to the new fault lines in 21st-century British society – these two parties, these relics of the old order, remain intact, if increasingly in disarray. In the 2017 election, Labour and the Tories achieved their highest combined vote share since 1970. The smaller parties were squeezed out. Many hailed it as the return of two-party politics after more than a decade of talk about Britain entering a more continental multi-party system. For the commentariat, there was an almost audible sigh of relief. After all the weirdness of Brexit, things were back to normal. Nothing has changed.

But under the surface, seismic shifts have taken place. 2017 was the first election in modern British political history in which social class was not a predictor of how people voted. This was because the Tories had huge gains in working-class, Leave-voting areas, while Labour hoovered up support in middle-class Remain-backing metropolitan centres. This was the election in which the Tories, the old party of the establishment, took Mansfield, and Labour, the party of the people, took Chelsea. Far from reverting to two-party type, British voters are realigning British politics from within the existing structure along (largely) Brexity lines. According to the post-election Ashcroft Polls, 68 per cent of those who voted Conservative were Leavers, and 64 per cent of those who voted Labour were Remainers.

And yet the new coalitions forming under the two main parties are incredibly unstable. Theresa May is pushing for a Soft Brexit that can only, in all likelihood, get softer as she negotiates with an intransigent EU. Yet YouGov polls show that 66 per cent of Leavers reject her plans as not fulfilling Brexit. Remain voters, many of them now with Labour, are more mixed in their approaches to Brexit, given most of them, good democrats that they are, still think Brexit should be implemented in some form: hence why 18 per cent think May’s plan is too soft, while 23 per cent think it is too hard. The Labour leadership is still under intense internal pressure, from its membership, parliamentary party and the trade unions, to back a second referendum, but Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong Eurosceptic turned Remainer at the referendum, has so far refused to oblige. And so May, a Remainer, committed to a Soft Brexit, is leading the party of Brexit, while Jeremy Corbyn, the secret Leaver, leads the de facto party of Remain, well aware that its anti-democratic drift will further alienate the working classes it claims to represent.

What we’re left with, then, is a political class that is so mired in infighting and internal contradictions that it is seemingly incapable of either wilfully thwarting or fulfilling Brexit, of pleasing or betraying its various voters and factions. This leaves what happens next almost anyone’s guess. Even if May’s Chequers plan somehow makes it back from Brussels intact, there’s no majority for it in the House of Commons. There’s no majority for any Brexit plan in the House of Commons. The threat of No Deal is being talked up by all sides, but only a slim minority in parliament think it is a viable option. The campaigners for a second referendum have their tails up, but few think the legislation for one could be put together in time. Some want an extension of Article 50, but there’s no banking on the EU granting it, and we’d only really be talking about a few extra weeks. All this chaos gives committed anti-democrats plenty of room for manoeuvre. But then many in the political class remain uneasy about reversing the referendum result, even if they are sympathetic to that. And on it goes.

British populism

Ever since the referendum, even some of the leading supporters of Leave have tried to play down its populist content. The liberal Tories of the Vote Leave campaign, the likes of Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, maintain that Nigel Farage, UKIP leader and figurehead of the populist wing of the Brexit campaign, harmed the Leave cause more than he helped it. As one centre-right commentator put it recently, ‘in Britain… populist parties have no seats in parliament and a negligible vote share. Brexit killed off populism, by responding to legitimate public concerns’. But while the Brexit vote cannot be reduced to right-wing Faragism – his party, after all, collapsed in the wake of the vote and 70 per cent of Labour constituencies voted Leave – this position is complacent, and blind to the broader shifts. The Brexit vote wasn’t a democratic corrective that a humbled political elite duly responded to. It has rattled the parties to their core, sparked new alignments and heightened longstanding contradictions.

Though Britain’s populist revolt remains, for the moment, contained by a knackered party system, it is thrashing beneath the surface

Britain has for a long time seemed immune to the populist fervour that has periodically struck elsewhere. Beyond the more obvious hindrance of a first-past-the-post voting system that works to lock out new contenders, there are various theories as to why this is, each more reductive and/or patronising than the last. Some say we’ve never sustained a populist party because the rabble-rousing tabloid press has always provided a safety valve for populist rage, at least its right-wing variety. Others say it simply isn’t in the British character. British people’s dislike of the elite, reads a 2013 report, is one of ‘world-weary sceptical quietism, not rebellion’. ‘We complain about the elites but do not convert that into action.’ How naive that seems now.

Though Britain’s populist revolt remains, for the moment, contained by a knackered party system, it is still thrashing beneath the surface. Whether or not Brexit is thwarted, things cannot hold. The old politics is dying, and yet the new politics is yet to be born. Nothing has changed, and yet everything has. Our job now is to shape it.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/everything-has-changed/