Sorry to mention it, but …
Well, yesterday’s House of Commons “Super Saturday” – the first since the Falklands War crisis of 1982 – was a bit of a damp squib, wasn’t it?
With the current Brexit 31st October departure date looming ever closer everybody involved, including the media, had assumed in advance that some definitive decisions were going to be made yesterday, thereby reducing other options and perhaps (even if only by default) at last creating some sort of path to somewhere.
[I used the phrase ‘including the media’ above because every senior editor involved in news and current affairs, not least the BBC radio stations and 24/7 News television channels, seemed to have cleared the decks and mounted wall-to-wall dedicated coverage.
During the course of the day – the morning of which I thankfully missed being detained watching sporting events in Japan – the extravaganza turned into the biggest orgy of vacuous navel-gazing by our political elite, its correspondents and hangers-on since the death of Princess Diana.
This reached its nadir with a special edition of Newsnight on BBC2 at 7.00pm hosted by Emily Maitlis which must have seemed like a good idea at the time but in fact played out like the morning hangover breakfast scene (after “a hell of a night before” which hadn’t actually taken place) that it really was.]
In keeping with editorial policy I shall not regurgitate here a list of the participants, issues, developments in Parliament – overt or behind the scenes – and on the streets of London and elsewhere: regular Rusters interested enough can and will get their fill of expert analysis and conjecture from their Sunday papers later this morning.
It seems to me that we have reached a seminal crisis point for UK democracy where, the ‘connection’ and trust between the electorate and its political elite having to all intents and purposes broken down, there is no obvious way to restore it.
Let’s be blunt, politicians have always lied and schemed in order to persuade the people to vote them into power – nothing unusual in that.
But in the modern era the technological and other means available to do this have become so subtle and underhand (I mention ‘fake news’ without the slightest enthusiasm) that they’ve become nakedly transparent even to the most unsophisticated Man on the Clapham Omnibus.
One of the resulting ironies is that all this has proved with bells on the time-honoured adage that the electorate ends up with the politicians it deserves.
Without taking sides in any of this, in Number 10 we’ve got one of the most widely-distrusted and clownish politicians ever to become Prime Minister; a biased Speaker of the House of Commons; former ministers such as Blair, Cameron, Heseltine, Major and Mandelson operating behind the scenes; Remainer politicians going off to Brussels (or wherever the EU politburo is operating from this week) to lobby against the Government; and all sorts of skulduggery being played with Parliamentary procedures and protocols by both sides of the Brexit argument.
So much so that in stages the much-fabled and admired ‘unwritten’ British constitution is being undermined if not trashed almost week by week.
And so now we’ve been reduced to the spectacle of an ongoing “You did!” … “No, you did!” pantomime script as to who started all the subterfuge shenanigans.
The obvious place to identify as the origin of it all is the 2016 EU Referendum itself.
Whether it was the Government’s £7 million spend on the infamous “Project Fear” Remainer pamphlet sent to all households or the equally suspect Leave slogan on the side of a battle bus “We could spend the £350 million per week we send to the EU on the NHS” [as I type I’m not sure I’ve got the phrase exactly accurate, but that was the gist of it] doesn’t actually matter.
The point is – it seems to me – because the issues at stake were so momentous and far-reaching for the nation, a very short time after the avowed ‘once in a lifetime’ Referendum campaign began all restraining moral, legal or other norms and notions of integrity as to how electoral campaigns should be fought were soon ‘parked’ in the desperation of both sides, each convinced their cause was indisputably best for the country, to win the day.
Not much has changed since.
I’m not making a personal political point here for either Leave or Remain, but I do think it’s a bit rich for those involved on the Remain side [and I’d include in this group all those in the House of Commons pretending they accept the 2016 Referendum result and maintain that they are only seeking to gain the best-possible Brexit deal, but for whom in reality there is no such beast and de facto what they really want is to stay in the EU] to have been be mouthing off, ever since he took office, that the Prime Minister cannot be trusted and is using underhand tactics to achieve his Brexit goal, whatever it is (and I for one certainly don’t know).
Why? Well, simply because ever since the UK Parliament voted to trigger Article 50 those on the Remain (or anti-Leave) side of the debate have been using every Commons procedural device they can think of – and, with the connivance of the Speaker, ignoring conventions and/or inventing new ones – to put the skids under the Brexit process that Parliament previously voted for.
What is that old Bible reference – oh yes, Jesus Christ’s words from the Gospel of St John, Chapter 8, Verse 7:
“Let he who is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone …”
I commented above that it was unclear as to who first played fast and loose with the rules and conventions over the 2016 EU Referendum – both sides claim it was the other, of course, but perhaps at the end of the day it doesn’t even matter.
Politics has always been a dirty business. The difference in 2019 is that whereas throughout history in elections and votes the key players maintained a “rouge’s charter” whereby neither displayed their dirty deeds to the public, these days – accidentally or even possibly by design – they drop that convention and now simply “hide them in plain sight”, as the saying goes.
