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(As Marvin Gaye once warbled) What’s Going On

Much as the Establishments of the UK and EU might wish otherwise the Brexit Conundrum continues to dominate political and the news agendas across Europe and – for all I know – across large parts of the globe as well. Everything happening these days seems to come with some angle or another upon the amazingly complicated negotiations to come between the UK and the EU.

In the past week, for example, to highlight a few:

  • The Times has exposed the apparently-Everest size of the task to disentangle UK law from its EU counterpart (I’m not familiar with the details but memory allows me to suggest that leaked internal Whitehall memos have claimed there are north of 160,000 individual laws to be repealed, a task that would practically need the entire UK legal profession en masse to be assigned to the task for years, which just isn’t going to happen);
  • Various EU dignitaries have queued up to attack Boris Johnson for being a clown – not least Italian economics minister Carlo Calenda who reported that when Bojo had claimed Italy would support Britain access to the single market “because you wouldn’t want to lose your prosecco exports to the UK” he had replied “Okay, and you’ll sell less fish and chips, but I’ll be selling less prosecco to one country and you’ll be selling less to 27”, adding that placing things on this level was insulting;
  • Former UK premiers Tony Blair and John Major have crawled out of the woodwork to claim that the UK can still be saved from (as Major put it) “the tyranny of the majority”;
  • Presumably in an attempt to split or de-stabalise Brit public opinion, lead UK negotiator Guy Verhofstadt of the European Parliament has announced that in principle he would support the idea of UK citizens being allowed to pay an annual fee to retain their EU citizenship even after a Brexit;
  • Nick Clegg is now claiming that a Lib-Dem victory in the forthcoming Richmond-upon-Thames bye election could be a political game-changer by preventing a ‘hard’ Brexit;
  • Irish prime minister Enda Kerry has suggested that negotiating a successful EU/UK ‘Brexit’ deal within the two-year period stipulated following a UK triggering of ‘Article 50’ is virtually impossible;
  • There’s wall-to-wall coverage of Donald Trump’s seemingly daily U-turns – on some of the whackier hard-line right-winger policies he expounded during the US presidential election campaign – now that he is having to confront reality as President-elect (shades of alleged ‘false statements’ made by Brexiters, or indeed Remoaners, during the UK’s EU Referendum campaign).

Reviewing the above, what come home to me yet again are the fundamental problems with what I glibly call Western-style democracy and here – for regular readers – I offer another apology for my ‘stuck record’ stance.

churchillToday I’m going to take you back to two statements of Winston Churchill uttered in the late 1940s after – readers aged under fifty may need reminding – having famously (from a British perspective) ‘won’ WW2, he then only went and spectacularly lost ‘the peace’ in the form of the 1945 General Election.

Firstly, in a House of Commons speech on 11th November 1947, he came up with the line “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except for all the others that have been tried from time to time”.

This is a theme to which I subscribe because of the complications that the ‘one man’, one vote’ aspect (of Western democracies) presents for the political elite.

Reduced to its essence, in the UK, for example, much is made of the supposed ‘public’ mandate that a General Election gives for all the policies contained in the public manifestos of the winning party (or parties in the case of a pre-planned coalition) – and yet, of course, the majority who voted for that winner may have placed their ‘X’ in its favour for any one of perhaps a hundred different reasons … none of which was actually the desire to see the implementation of even a fraction of the policies in that manifesto, still less all of them.

Then, irrespective of that manifesto (the one that supposedly won them the Election), the new Government will always thereafter ‘pick and mix’ its choices of the manifesto policies that it takes forward. Some just get conveniently ‘forgotten’; the failure to progress others can be put down to the complications of ‘external events’, crises over which the Government has no control, or indeed the eternal need to have ‘wriggle room’ to adjust its policies and principles on the hoof in the interests of the nation; and, inevitably, some go by the wayside because of ‘procedural practicalities’, i.e. the simple fact that in the UK Parliament the Government needs to play the ‘political numbers game’ of ensuring its survival – and indeed success –  by quelling or neutralising rebellions within its own party by negotiating and securing enough votes to get legislation through Parliament by back-room deals, the ‘pairing’ and ‘whipping’ systems and good old threats of whatever kind that come to hand.

In the UK, of course, referenda are normally treated with huge suspicion by the Establishment. As the EU knows to its cost, if you ask the wrong question, or ask the right question on the wrong subject, or even if you ask the right question on the right subject but at the wrong time, you might not get the answer that you seek. History teaches, and Establishment ‘condescension’ holds, that  you consult the public’s views at your peril and therefore – in the cause of good, successful and contented government, wherever possible – this should be avoided.

David Cameron, who will go down in British history, one way or the other, as the man who destroyed UK democracy in a trice when he set up the 2106 EU (In/Out) Referendum, learned this the hard way.

If he’d won it – and thereby secured the UK’s place in the EU forever – we’d have heard little more of the EU follies, grandeurs, lack of accountability and cock-ups. Generally, as far as anyone noticing anything, life would have gone on as before because the media would have given up exposing them. After all, what’s the point when – whatever EU outrage to logic, fairness and integrity you uncover and reveal – it won’t make any difference?  You’re going to be stuck inside the EU … so why not just accept it? Okay – so it means goodbye to democracy and political accountability, but then that’s the price everyone pays for EU membership anyway.

Alternatively, now having ‘lost’ the Referendum, Mr Cameron will have to watch from the sidelines as – again, one way of another – the Establishment eventually finds a route to ‘getting back in control”, whether that be by buggering up the Brexit negotiations for years and/or simply making everything so complicated and debilitating that eventually people get bored and somehow [and don’t ask me!] the EU and the UK come to a convenient arrangement whereby the UK remains in the EU.

The second Churchill quotation I wanted to mention was that uttered in his opening broadcast of the 1945 General Election campaign on 4th June, when he warned the nation that the introduction of socialism into Britain would require “… some form of Gestapo, no doubt very humanely directed in the first instance.”

Debate continues as to the effect this ridiculous allegation had upon the result of the 1945 Election.

atleeSome hold that it was a major factor in turning the campaign Labour’s way, either signalling how out of touch with ordinary people Churchill was, or simply underlining – without denigrating at all his WW2 leadership – his lack of suitability as a peacetime Prime Minister. Others maintain it had little or no effect. Perhaps in the final analysis, and of course with the benefit of hindsight, it was just one line in one short speech that didn’t create many waves at all at the time but subsequently has seemingly come to encapsulate neatly some of the aspects in Churchill’s persona that help to ‘explain’ Clement Atlee’s extraordinary journey to Number 10 Downing Street.

The thought that came to me yesterday – which is why I mention it today – was that Churchill’s 1945 ‘Gestapo’ reference (or gaff, if you’d prefer to call it that) is currently the earliest example in history of a ‘false statement’ being made by a British politician to the British electorate that I can think of.

No doubt over the weekend the Rust will be inundated with hundreds of thousands of examples of earlier Election statements, allegation or pledges identified by our illustrious and super-intelligent readership.

(I’ll be happy to be corrected, I promise).

But it brought me back to the controversy since 23rd June about the extent to which either or both sides of the UK Referendum argument had made false claims or promises during the campaign.

Personally, I think it’s almost irrelevant.

Just as it’s doubtful whether there’s ever been anything published in history that didn’t have a typo in it somewhere, I very much doubt that there’ ever been an election campaign since time immemorial in which no politician ever made false statements, or just plain lied, in the cause of winning.

The problem with democracy, of course, is that there’s a small but highly significant gap between the process of gaining power by winning a public vote and that of governing once you have. They are two quite distinct and different things. From a politician’s point of view, elections are simply the device by which you gain power.

Furthermore, as with any important issue in human society, all that counts is winning.

Whether you ‘fight by the Queensbury Rules’ (or indeed any others) or you simply ignore the first whistle everyone else is abiding by and go straight to kick your opponent where it hurts and keep doing it until he submits, what does it matter? When the ballot boxes are opened, if you get more votes that the others, you win.

Then the hard part starts – until the next election-time comes around.

 

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About Simon Campion-Brown

A former lecturer in politics at Keele University, Simon now lives in Oxfordshire. Married with two children, in 2007 he decided to monitor the Westminster village via newspaper and television and has never looked back. More Posts