Boris Coup: Day 19

Nineteen days into the Boris coup. It struck me that this was the time for a tribute to that seminal experience that made BoJo the man he is today. Him and one of his successor, David Cameron.

Boris ‘The Law's for You’ Johnson and 
David ‘It's not my fault’ Cameron

I speak, of course, of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford. This, for anyone not familiar with that fine institution, is a club for the wealthiest students of the university. They engage in activities as charming as they are entertaining, such as trashing the rooms of new members, booking whole restaurants where they get uproariously drunk over an expensive meal and then wreck everything, or throwing potted plants through the windows of an Indian restaurant on their way home.

Ah, boys will be boys, won’t they? Of course, if their parents didn’t rally round and settle all the damages, if indeed they were from deprived backgrounds, respectable Tory voters would be up in arms. 

“To jail with them, and throw away the key,” they’d say.

But when it’s the sons of the wealthy causing criminal damage, Tories don’t want them chucked in jail, they want them to lead their Party. And, indeed, become Prime Minister. Which both Cameron and Johnson have done.

You have to have some sympathy with the poor lads. Well, poor rich lads. With that kind of background, how could they possibly be anything other than what they are? Taught from the earliest age that they are entitled to anything they want, and then having it proved to them by being given it, how can they possibly think themselves subject to the same standards as the rest of us?

David Cameron has been giving interviews to try to boost the sales of his newly published memoirs, which by all accounts they badly need. He’s happy to denounce Boris and his sidekick Michael Gove for the lying campaign they ran for the referendum, and the way they’re trashing the UK Constitution and undermining its democracy today.

But what is beyond him is to admit that he was in any way responsible for this mess. And yet there was no need to call the referendum. Once called, an intelligent cross-party campaign could have been run to prevent a vote for Brexit. He, instead, called it to try to mollify his far right (and look how that’s worked out for him) and then ran a dismal campaign, which was defeated.

According to him, none of that is his fault. How could it be? He lives in a world in which you can trash a restaurant and not be held to account for it. Taking responsibility for things that go wrong just isn’t something he’s been trained to do.

BoJo’s gone still further. He knows that the law simply doesn’t apply to him.

He started his coup by flouting convention and suspending Parliament for an inordinately long time, so that he wouldn’t be subject to any kind of scrutiny or opposition as he prepared for a hard Brexit. We’re now into that period of suspension when he’s working in the shadows where we can’t see him.

Anyone who’s been a parent will remember calling to kids they couldn’t see, “whatever you’re up to, stop it”.

That would be the thing to say to BoJo right now. Except that he’d ignore us. We’re in the extraordinary position of having to ask whether the Prime Minister will obey the law. This may seem odd, since he’s promising us a new law and order initiative in the near future. It seems that’s law and order for us, but not for him.

Look at where we stand these days. Just before it was suspended, Parliament passed legislation obliging the Prime Minister to extend the Brexit process if he didn’t have a deal in place by 19 October, and couldn’t get Parliamentary support for a hard Brexit.

He’s repeatedly said he won’t ask for an extension.

So is he going to break the law?

No one knows. All that we know is that, as another unfortunate whose life was blighted by the Bullingdon Club, all his training tells him that he’s above all that kind of thing. Breaking the law? He makes it, he doesn’t have to follow it. He knows what’s best, and if that means acting illegally, so be it. That makes him a champion of the people, not a common criminal.

After all, at Oxford no one held him to account for failing to respect the law. Why should he now?

So sad. Poor Cameron and Johnson. Ruined by their upbringing. Although, it won’t be them that pays the price, it’ll be us.

Just as in the Bullingdon Club, someone else always pays.

Brexit: the High Court speaks for the British Constitution

Today, the British High Court decided that the government could not, on its own authority alone, launch the procedure that would take Britain out of the EU.

Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Lord Chief Justice
presided over the historic hearing

That’s the exercise known as “triggering article 50”, referring to the relevant article of the European Union’s Lisbon Treaty. It states:

Any member state may decide to withdraw from the union in accordance with its own constitutional requirements.

Sounds straightforward. Britain voted for Brexit on 23 June and, despite the regrets of Remain supporters like me, all we have to do now is trigger the article 50 process and go. But, as always, the devil’s in the detail.

The first awkward bit of detail is a problem I’ve mentioned before: just how far out do we go? Do we leave the Single Market? Do we leave the Customs Union? All options have their merits and their disadvantages. They need to be weighed and judged. And the great question is – by whom?

‘By whom’ takes us straight to the second tortuous detail, which is the one that was addressed by the Court today. It’s all about those words “in accordance with its own constitutional requirements”. Just what are those requirements in a nation without a written constitution?

Many of us feel that much of British history has been about the conflict between an executive power originally represented by the monarch and a body that has increasingly come to represent the people, Parliament. All the progress there has been towards freedom, and there’s a lot further to go, has gone hand in hand with increasing the authority of the Legislative power over the Executive.

Now the peculiar characteristics of British power is that this long process has moved executive authority from the Monarch to Ministers who are themselves Members of Parliament. So that ancient tension has now been internalised within Parliament, opposing a powerful minority, the members of the Government, to the majority, all other MPs.

Those of us who would like to see British liberties protected and, ideally, extended are on the side of the Parliamentarians. Unfortunately, a great many people see far more efficiency in action being taken by the Executive untrammelled by such oversight. They particularly favour that approach if they see the government about to take action they like – so, for instance, a lot of Brexiters want Parliament to back off and let the Prime Minister, Theresa May, trigger the exit process herself, on her own authority, without referring the matter to Parliament at all.

In its judgement, the High Court’s view is that this isn’t the right way to go. Brexit is a key decision for the nation. The government should not be able to take it alone. It should, at the very least, obtain Parliament’s assent to it.

The irony is that if the government asks for that approval, it will almost certainly get it. A few MPs will stand up for the Remain cause and vote against triggering Article 50. Far more will see doing so as a defiance of the will of the people expressed in a referendum, which they consider wrong, or at least career-limiting.

David Lammy is a Labour MP who says he would vote against triggering Article 50. But, he claims, the real issue isn’t whether individual MPs vote for or against, it’s that they should have a vote at all. As he says, “it’s about whether you believe in a sovereign parliament.”

David Lammy:
anti-Brexit parliamentarian strong on principle

I do believe in parliamentary sovereignty, so I’m in favour of their getting that vote. That’s a curiously topical matter. Just yesterday, Lord Chilcot, who wrote the damning report on British involvement in the Iraq War, was questioned by MPs. His view was that the problem was caused by the dominating personality of Tony Blair, who drove his government into the war and refused all parliamentary scrutiny. It seems particularly appropriate that the next day a court has ruled that, on an equally crucial issue, parliament must have its say.

The government will appeal the decision, so that might still not happen. My hope is that the Supreme Court upholds the High Court, and Parliament gets to take the decision – even if it goes against me and in favour of Brexit.

So much for the matter of principle. .

At a more pragmatic level, and in the longer run, having Parliament take the decision does suggest that there’s a glimmer of hope for those of us who’d like to remain in the EU. MPs consulted about Brexit may also be consulted about the final Brexit terms. It will be quite a time before negotiations reveal what those terms will be, but when they’re known, Parliament should vote again.

That takes us back to the first point of awkward detail I mentioned earlier. What kind of Brexit is going to be on offer? Many people tell me that Brexit means Brexit and that means getting out of every single European institution. Well, I think if we get that far, the prospect may start to look so utterly appalling that more MPs might feel they can, in conscience, vote against it. So, in order to avoid a disastrous Brexit, they might refuse a Brexit at all.

That’s why, for both principle and pragmatism, I think the High Court’s judgement is the best piece of EU news we’ve had since that sad night of 23 June.

An excellent reason to salute it.

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.