That’s the first I heard of it
This Brexit constitutional crisis continues to dominate the headlines. Yesterday, surrounded by the Sunday newspapers, as is my habit I sat watching the BBC1’s Andrew Marr Show and later Sunday Politics (hosted by Jo Coburn because Andrew Neil is away in the Unites States covering the General Election) it was the main topic.
Somehow Marr had managed to get Gina Miller, the business woman who fronted the recent High Court action which drew the decision that the Government could not activate Article 50 to begin the ‘Brexit negotiations’ with the EU without first having given Parliament a vote on the matter, to sit alongside Nigel Farage on the red sofa.
It made for great television.
Miller is an impressive media performer – calm and articulate but also resolutely strident in her views. She tried to maintain that her approach was neither political nor ‘Remainer’, the argument was simply all about ‘process’.
Her thrust yesterday was that the High Court decision had proved two killer points.
The first was that Parliament was where the fount of British sovereignty lay, not with the Queen (in the form of the Royal Prerogative), or the Executive (the Government), or even the will of the people as expressed in a Referendum which in any event, in strict legal terms, had always been merely ‘advisory’ and not binding.
The second was that since – as she understood it – the Brexiters’ campaign had primarily been about ‘getting control and our sovereignty back’ (presumably by repatriating all power to make UK laws etc. to the UK Parliament), it was now a bit rich of them to complain ‘Foul!’ when her action in bringing a legal action in which the Judiciary had confirmed the primary of Parliament in such matters.
The one aspect of the above that shocked me to the core, simply because nobody – literally nobody on either side of the EU Referendum argument – had ever told the UK public about the fact that legally the legislation, or other Parliamentary power (statutory instrument?) if it was not formal legislation, by which the Referendum was adopted and run specifically stated that the result would be only ‘advisory’ and not necessarily binding upon Parliament.
If that is true, then someone in the Government – and/or the civil service, the Opposition, the media or even the supposedly learned battalions of eminent lawyers that advise upon and draft UK legislation – has made a monumental cock-up. Or else possibly they were all so preoccupied with playing politics, or going on extended lunch hours, or watching the Test cricket or Premier League soccer, or spending time at their weekend cottages in the country, that they never bothered to check, or to read the paperwork, or – if they did, they were seriously negligent (actively, or by omission) in not ‘twigging’ the reality.
I say that because the only other logical conclusion is that everyone concerned (including myself) was affected by a collective delusion that the EU Referendum was – as Prime Minister Cameron had asserted at the time of announcing it was going to take place – a straightforward ‘In/Out, black and white, once and for all, no going back’ decision about whether or not the UK wished to remain in the EU.
Frankly – and I type this as someone who voted in the EU Referendum for the first and only time in my life – if I had been told in advance that the outcome would only be ‘advisory’ then I wouldn’t have bothered to vote … just as I didn’t on all the other occasions when national and local elections have taken place during the 46 years I have been eligible to exercise my fundamental democratic right.
Why not?
Because, at the bottom line, I have never in my life felt that my vote mattered and/or would make a penny’s worth of difference – and there cannot possibly be, in theory or practice, a more futile waste of time than voting in something where the result is set up to be only ‘advisory’.
Anyway, let us return to the Andrew Marr Show yesterday.
On the other end of the sofa, Nigel Farage came across as you might expect – a parody of himself, and a very good one. He is one of those public figures who transcend the normal expectations we have of politicians. He’s in the category of those like Tony Benn who, though you instinctively suspect that they are talking complete balls from start to finish, do so in such a logical, laid back, reasonable and articulate manner that you actually enjoy listening to them.
His theme was that, as he had been suspecting and warning would happen for years, the forces of the arrogant and condescending ‘Establishment’ were attempting to kybosh the UK population’s vote to leave the EU.
The people had spoken, end of message. If Mrs Miller and all those who supported her – some of them anonymously and many of them mendacious politicians, even perhaps some in the Government or House of Lords – succeeded in thwarting the EU Referendum result by filibustering, or even voting to override the verdict of ‘the people’, then there could be demonstrating and even rioting on the streets of Britain and possibly the biggest constitutional crisis since King Charles I lost his head on 30th January 1649.
Again, what was staggering about Mr Farage’s performance was that – right in the middle of it – he acknowledged the fact that legally the EU Referendum had always been ‘advisory’ only.
I cannot say this for certain, but this revelation came across to me as something that Nigel had never appreciated, or even contemplated as a possibility, until about two and a half days ago he – like all of us – read the gist of the High Court’s written decision as digested and laid out before us in the newspapers.
Like the rest of the political class, and indeed the entire regiment of UK media pundits and political reporters, he had never bothered to find out or check the legal grounding of the Referendum, no doubt presuming that someone else would have done this if, indeed or at all, it was necessary.
You’d laugh, wouldn’t you – that is, if it wasn’t such a serious and far reaching matter.
