The first victim of Brexit was the Truth. Swiftly followed by Good Judgement

It’s become a commonplace to say that the campaign which led to Britain choosing to leave the European Union was riddled with lies.

It’s a cliché, but clichés aren't necessarily untrue. Both sides spouted a lot of rubish, making it one of the least edifying campaigns I’ve ever seen. Sadly, the flow of misleading claims hasn’t stopped and, indeed, looks likely to sweep us all the way to the Brexit door.

For a time, the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, wouldn’t say what kind of Brexit she favoured. The broad options are:

• soft Brexit: Britain remains in the European Single Market. That would minimise the negative impact of departure on the economy, but it would mean continuing to contribute to the EU budget and accepting EU regulation, including freedom of movement of EU citizens into this country, without having any further say in the matter
• hard Brexit: where Britain leaves the Single Market and accepts the cost, but takes back control over its legislation and its borders

Recently, May has begun to lean towards the hard Brexit option. She told the recent Conservative Party conference, “let’s state one thing loud and clear: we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again.”

That was a rare moment of honesty in the Brexit debate. It confirmed the glaring fact that a lot of those who voted for Brexit were actually interested in only one thing: how do we get Johnny Foreigner out of our green and pleasant land?

Apart from that glimpse of truth, the continuing debate seems mostly drowned in falsehood or ignorance.

The most glaring deficiency of the vote was that it answered only one question: should we stay in the EU or leave? It’s one thing to vote to leave, but there was no way of specifying what kind of Brexit you wanted. Hard or soft? No one said because there was nowhere to say it.

To call for a second referendum once we know the actual terms proposed is, however, to be considered a traitor to the democratic will of the electorate. It can lead to accusations on Twitter of refusing to accept the verdict of the “massive majority” in favour of Brexit. That was one explicit charge made against me, as part of an indictment of my allegedly anti-democratic views. 

A 52%–48% split? A massive majority?

Even to call for a parliamentary vote on the matter leads to virulent denunciation. And that’s quite curious, because it usually comes from people who clearly view themselves as patriots. And yet denying Parliament a vote strikes me as a fundamentally anti-British stance.

Our constitution doesn’t place sovereignty in the hands of the people. Unlike the US, we don’t have a founding document that opens with the words “we, the people.” In fact, we don’t have a document at all. We have an unwritten constitution which evolves, sometimes dramatically – votes for women, for instance – but mostly in a slow, barely noticeable way.

Sovereignty in Britain doesn’t reside with the people but with the Sovereign in Parliament. That’s why an essentially silly ritual continues to matter so much.

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, a man in tights – he holds the title ‘Black Rod’ – approaches the doors to the House of Commons, which are ritually slammed in his face. That underlines the principle that the Commons is under no obligation to admit the monarch or her representative. He then hammers on the door. My wife and I visited the place just a few days ago and were shown by our able guide and local Member of Parliament, the place where the wood has been worn away by the hammering.

Black rod hammers on the doors of the Commons

The members of the House of Commons then emerge and troop along the corridor to the House of Lords. There the Queen delivers a speech – wittily entitled “the Queen’s Speech” – in which she outlines her legislative plans for the coming session.

Thus it has been for centuries.

However, though the forms endure, the substance alters. The monarch now performs an essentially ceremonial role. Her speech is written for her by Ministers, in particular by the Prime Minister. She appoints the Prime Minister, but no one can hold that office who does not command a majority in the House of Commons. Indeed, Lord Salisbury who left office in 1902, was the last Prime Minister to have led a government from the House of Lords. These days, though some ministers may sit in the Lords, the great offices are held by members of the Commons.

That means that sovereignty, while apparently unchanged, is in face exercised by the elected representatives of the people. There are still some matters of royal prerogative, but even there the sovereign’s supreme authority is actually exercised by her ministers acting in her name. In any case, their scope is being constantly reduced. For instance, after the debacle in Iraq, Parliament took to itself the authority to decide whether the nation should go to war, previously exercised by Ministers in the name of the Queen.

The evolution doesn’t stop. It feels to me that there is a big step coming, perhaps in a still relatively remote future: the replacement of the House of Lords by an elected chamber. It’s been in the air for so long that I think it will inevitably occur. 

Eventually. As is the British way.

You may like or dislike this way of doing things, but it is the British way. Power flows from the Sovereign in Parliament, but the powers of the Sovereign are now exercised by Ministers, who are themselves Parliamentarians. So political authority belongs to Parliament in creative tension with those of its members who also happen to be members of the government.

There is no provision in this arrangement for a referendum. If one is held, it takes place by Act of Parliament. Its result has no binding force on Parliament. The only obligation on MPs to follow it is the moral consideration that to ignore it would probably be career-limiting. But they and they alone have the authority to decide how they react to it.

So when Brexiters proclaim their enthusiasm for returning control to our own institutions from Brussels, what they’re calling for is the return of power to Parliament. How, in simple consistency, can they then deny Parliament a say over that process?

The alternative is simply to leave it up to the government itself, free of parliamentary scrutiny – the kind of arrangement, now abandoned, that led to the Iraq invasion. Not terribly British, is it, to go back on the process of extending the power of elected representatives and return it to an Executive answerable to no one? I suspect a lot of Brexiters would reject the very idea as the kind of misguided thinking generally associated with that pitiable figure, Johnny Foreigner.

Trouble is, if truth was the first casualty of Brexit, good judgement was close behind.

The Tory Tax Credit cuts: observations and warnings and even a few ironies

It’s painful when the party you’d like to see in government is, in fact, in Opposition. But it’s even worse when it fails to oppose.

Not that opposition is useful for its own sake. We need to oppose government when it’s doing something unconscionable. Something like, say, the British Tory government’s decision to cut tax credits drastically.

These are not in fact related to tax. They’re simply payments to help those working poor who aren’t earning enough, and are more generous still to those who have children. One advantage of the system is that it makes sense to get into a job, even a low-paying one, rather than remaining in assisted unemployment.

Tax credits are generally credited with reducing child poverty in England from 35% of the child population to 19% over the fourteen years from 1998/99 to 2012/13 (twelve of them under Labour).

The Tories have decided that they simply cost too much. In their single-minded drive to cut the deficit on government spending, they have decided to reduce them massively. They never calculated the impact of their policies on the poorest, but the estimates there have been suggest a loss of between £1000 a year and £1300 a year, on average. For some, that could mean a loss of 10% of their income.

That’s for the poorest working families – and the stress is on working: these are the people for which David Cameron and George Osborne claim to speak, even to the extent of calling themselves the “new workers’ party.” We can’t afford to support these strivers, Osborne and Cameron seem to claim, so they must suffer. This at a time when there seems no end in sight to the growth of top salaries: between 2013 and 2014, the incomes (I refuse to call them “earnings”) of directors of Britain’s biggest companies climbed 21%.

It’s the inequity of this arrangement that is particularly shocking. The Tory view is that the economy has to be fixed. That’s not contentious. However, they feel that to fix it, the burden must be disproportionately borne by those least able to shoulder it. Meanwhile, at the top end of the scale, there is no sense of obligation to share in any of the pain but, on the contrary, an unfettered drive to take more and more – even though many of the organisations involved were responsible for the economic problems in the first place, through a crash caused by the irresponsibility of bankers.

Surely, if there were a time for an Opposition to oppose, this had to be it. And yet Harriet Harman, interim Labour leader until the September election of Jeremy Corbyn, let it be known in July that, with a heavy heart, she would back the Conservative plans. Sadly, expressions of sympathy, however well-meant, don’t actually feed children or prevent evictions.

So it was with some delight that I watched the Labour and Liberal Democrat peers, with a smattering of others, win a crucial vote in the House of Lords last night forcing the government back to the drawing board, to come up with plans to soften the impact of the tax credit changes. 

Ironically, it’s the House of Lords, home of a privileged elite
that had to take a stance against regressive policies

That leads to a number of observations, some not a little ironic, and a few warnings.

The first observations is that it’s good to see the Lib Dems doing some opposing. For the five years up to May this year, when the Tories won the election on their own, the two parties were in a Coalition government. Lib Dem Ministers tried to soften some Tory measures, but they naturally didn’t oppose them. They seem to have learned their lesson, after being slaughtered in the May election.

Secondly, following Harriet Harman’s weird stance in July, it’s good to see Labour too learning to oppose again.

Third observation: it’s a little sad that we had to rely on the House of Lords, an unelected chamber, to force the government to reflect a moment. The Tories have been swift to point out that the convention is that the Lords do not block financial measures adopted by the Commons. There is now talk from within the government about reforming the Lords, which is deliciously ironic: it’s the Tories who have most impeded Lords reforms down the years.

Fourth observation: such reform is badly needed, but not to shelter a Tory government from opposition. It’s nonsensical to have to rely on an unelected chamber of parliament to scrutinise and question government policy. We should move towards elections to a revising chamber in Parliament, and then increase its powers to challenge government, rather than reducing them. Will the Tories move in that direction? It’s probably best not to hold your breath. 

In passing, I ought to point out that supporters of the move in the Lords argue that they were within their rights. Frankly, the technicalities hardly seem to matter. The fundamental point is that the measure needed opposing, and they did.

Now for the warnings. 

The government will have to reconsider its approach. That doesn’t mean it’ll drop it. George Osborne has already announced he’ll press forward with the cuts anyway, even if he softens the blow a little.

Secondly, it has left George Osborne with a bloody nose and made the government look inept. That, however, won’t have a lasting impact on its grip on power. We’re still four and a half years from an election. In 2012, Osborne put forward such an incompetent budget that it came to be known as an “omnishambles”. Three years on, his party won a majority on its own.

Thirdly, Labour has to show that it’s learned the lesson and will keep on opposing. It shouldn’t sit back and wait for the Tories to slip up, as happened under the previous leadership, of Ed Miliband and Ed Balls. The blows need to keep landing, or the Tories will turn things round in their favour again (see the second point above).

Still, for all that, I can’t deny that it’s an unqualified joy to see an Opposition learning to oppose again. 

We’ve missed you for the last five years, Oppositionists. Good to see you’ve found your tongue again. This time – don’t forget you have one.