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Brexit confusion

Yesterday I watched the Six O’Clock News on BBC1 on which the opening story was the developing row at Prime Minister’s Question Time and elsewhere over whether Parliament should be allowed to scrutinise the Government’s strategy and/or ‘opening position’ on its Brexit negotiations  or not. At least I think that was the issue; everyone – and I mean everyone – seemed pretty confused as to the exact details on who wanted what.

This seems to be a ‘juicy’ topic, in the sense that because clearly the Government is feeling its way towards deciding its Brexit position (and currently hasn’t got one it can point to), it has become ‘open season’ for both its critics and indeed those who love hearing the sound of their own voices in the media and haven’t had much opportunity recently. And, all the signs are, this one is going to run and run. Which is why the Government appears to be a bit confused and to some degree ‘on the run’ at the moment. As it jolly well should.

We’ve got those who are calling for Parliament to have the opportunity to discuss or get involved in deciding whatever the UK’s opening position for the Brexit negotiations should be – even to have a Commons vote upon it. I think that we’ve also got some who are calling for another Referendum on the ‘opening position’. Then there are those who are also demanding either a Commons vote, or a Referendum, or even both, on the terms finally agreed with the EU by the Government under which Brexit happens.

There’s a lot of hot air being talked about democracy in the overall context. Is it a case of the Referendum – being a binary ‘Either/Or’ decision asked of the people – being the ultimate democratic instrument? Or – after a thousand years of British unwritten constitutional law and custom – is it that the ‘representatives of the people’ elected for five years to occupy the House of Commons (with or without considering those in ermine sitting in  the House of Lords) are the supreme court of public opinion?

The trouble with an unwritten constitution and/or true plebiscites is that nobody quite knows the answer – hence the current debate and potential for a long-running sore that could unsettle Mrs May and her Cabinet for years.

But let us get back to first principles for a moment.

The person who must shoulder the blame for all this is, of course, David Cameron. Spooked by the continuing UKIP popularity in the run up to the 2015 General Election, he decided to commit to holding an In-Out EU Referendum purely in the hope of spiking UKIP’s guns in terms of stealing pro-Brexit Tory votes. It may yet go down as the biggest blunder in British political history.

The thing about referenda is that they’re like the pantomime genie’s lamp – once ‘the cat is out of the bag, you cannot get it back in’ … you’ve given away to the whim of the people and that means all of them. And Parliament voted to have an EU Referendum. Which, to me, means that – in a sense – and whether those voting for it knew it at the time, de facto the UK Parliament is no longer the supreme court of UK public opinion.

Referenda are.

Never mind what loonies and warped minds are out there, you have to accept the result.

On the EU Referendum, the Leavers won because a range of different motives came together. Yes, one was concern over uncontrolled immigration. Some just wanted the UK to regain control of its own affairs – I have to admit this was an undercurrent in my thinking. I was fed up with the French, Germans … and all those other twenty-five plus smaller, basket-case countries … having the right to steamroll us into decisions and policies that the UK would ever have embraced if left to our own devices. I wasn’t concerned about the economy, I’d have voted to leave even if it meant we were worse off under a Brexit.

However, my biggest and overriding reason for voting to Leave, as mentioned in several of my Rust columns, was that it seemed the best way of the UK getting rid of the cancer of Scotland (or rather the Scots).

Another key factor was the desire to give a simple two fingers (‘a plague upon all their houses’) to our politicians and the Establishment generally, simply because the opportunity had arisen.

parliamentIt seems to me that all this current blather about the opening terms (or even closing terms) of the Brexit deal to come is merely a naked attempt by those who regard themselves as superior to ‘the people’ to bugger up the result of the EU Referendum – another glaring case of “We know better than the masses”.

And that’s what at least half the people who vote to leave in the EU Referendum were specifically voting against – the control of our lives by those who do (in the case of the EU) – or at least would like to – consider themselves unaccountable and superior to ordinary folk.

Lastly, it seems to me that Mrs May – who became Prime Minister on a platform of being an unshowy workaholic who could be trusted to knock heads together and be sensible – hasn’t been scoring many runs recently.

She took a leaf from Mrs Thatcher’s book with her quasi-humble, cod-St Francis of Assisi, “I am here to represent everyone, especially ordinary working people” arrival speech outside Number 10, but has been making policy on the hoof ever since. She immediately began defying her own vows on the subject with her announcement about bringing back grammar schools. Plus I’ve lost count of the number of times that she’s directly contradicted her Cabinet colleagues any time they put their heads above the parapet and make a public statement. To adapt Ian Hislop’s famous dicta issued after a losing Private Eye court case, if this is joined-up Government then I’m a banana.

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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