Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of. Mick Hume
insisted that sixteen-year-olds should have been given the vote in the referendum; no doubt because he thinks teenagers are better informed, educated and wiser than their elders, and not simply on the assumption that they might have been more likely to vote Remain.
Similar ‘democratic’ arguments for overthrowing the referendum result were advanced by all the other voices arguing against the Brexit vote, many of whom appeared to believe that the granting of democratic rights means you keep people voting until they arrive at the right result.
The Brexit-bashers all seemed keen to draw parallels between the Leave campaign and the Trump crusade in the States. Yet it was their refusal to accept the referendum outcome that more closely chimed with the pre-election attitude of Donald ‘I’ll respect the result – if I win’ Trump.
There were the handful of backers who funded a legal bid to get judges to rule that, regardless of the ‘advisory’ referendum result, the government could not trigger Brexit without the backing of MPs and lords in parliament. In true Newspeak-style, this stunt was called ‘The People’s Challenge’. Thus the real people’s challenge to the technocratic political elite, as seen in the referendum result, was threatened by a self-interested ‘People’s Challenge’ and dressed up in the finery of the Royal Courts of Justice. In November 2016, three high court judges ruled in the legal claimants’ favour, and declared that the government must have the approval of parliament before it could trigger Article 50 and begin the Brexit process. In effect the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales took it upon themselves to shelve the democratic decision of the electorate. The people might have spoken, but three law lords had told them to shush and let their betters talk among themselves. This was a microcosm of the trend for unelected bodies to assume authority over the demos.
Then there was the apparently four-million-strong online petition calling on parliament to hold another referendum that would require a larger margin of victory (a petition initially launched before the referendum by a Leaver who feared a narrow Remain win, which suggests that faith in popular democracy is not necessarily stronger on the other side). When this demand was debated in parliament, as petitions which garner more than 100,000 signatures must be, Tim Farron MP, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, said (seemingly with a straight face), ‘We demand that the British people should have their say on the final deal in a referendum!’56 Never mind that the people had just had their say in a referendum; that could not be final, since too many people had misspoken and said ‘Leave!’ Not for the first time it might occur to some that the Lib Dems have a strange idea of the meaning of liberal democracy.
In similar vein was the letter signed by around a thousand top lawyers, demanding that parliament must decide (i.e., vote for Remain). As the Queen’s Counsel who organised this initiative, Philip Kolvin QC, explained, ‘In times of crisis people often turn to lawyers to ask them how we should behave in society.’57 Of course we do. The notion that the opinions of 1,000 lawyers on ‘how we should behave in society’ could outweigh those of 17.4 million voters mostly without law degrees summed up the some-are-more-equal-than-others essence of the backlash against Brexit. Even though this top legal advice was unusually offered free of charge, the price to pay for a free society accepting such guidance would be far too high.
In parliament, meanwhile, a cross-party alliance – including Labour MPs such as leadership contender Owen Smith and Tory lords such as Baroness Patience Wheatcroft – was busily conjuring up constitutional and ‘democratic’ arguments as to why they should act to ignore, overthrow or otherwise seek to reverse the referendum result.
Leading Labour MP David Lammy wrote that ‘we cannot usher in rule by plebiscite which unleashes the “wisdom” of resentment and prejudice reminiscent of 1930s Europe’.58 Note the inverted commas around the word wisdom when applied to the masses. For the likes of Lammy, it appeared, overturning the EU referendum result was now on a par with defending democracy against fascism.
This was a sure sign of what democracy has come to mean: a hollowed-out, narrowly defined system of rule which denies a meaningful say to the demos – the people – from whom the idea takes its name, and concentrates control in the hands of an elite that looks more like the privileged oligarchy of ancient Athens. Where the Greeks practised direct democracy, we have long been told that representative democracy is better suited to modern times. Now it seems we are left with an increasingly unrepresentative form of democracy – and when people revolt against the orders of the elite, the response is to try to make our democracy less representative yet.
Those arguing in the language of constitutional law to delay or reverse Brexit boasted impressive legal and academic credentials. Yet in the language of real democracy, their arguments against accepting the referendum result were bogus. They constituted a legalistic mask to disguise the authoritarian intent.
The referendum was in no way merely an ‘advisory’ measure, to be ignored or accepted at parliament’s pleasure. It was legislated for by parliament in a 2015 Act, passed with overwhelming support, which made no mention of a referendum being advisory, and conveyed the clear understanding that the government would give effect to the result. If there was any doubt about that, during the referendum campaign the Conservative government which commanded a majority of MPs sent out a propaganda pamphlet to every household, clearly stating the government’s belief (backed by the official opposition parties) that Britain should remain in the UK. This document concluded: ‘This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.’59 Nothing advisory or open to interpretation there.
The issue of parliamentary sovereignty became the major smokescreen for attacking democracy. The apparently lofty and learned argument is that the UK parliament is sovereign, so that the government could not act to implement Brexit without gaining the approval of MPs and Lords. Under Britain’s largely unwritten constitution, however, ultimate sovereignty still rests with the sovereign of this constitutional monarchy, exercised through the device of the Crown-in-parliament. The Royal Prerogative gives the government the power to do all manner of things in the name of the Crown, from waging war to signing treaties, without parliamentary approval.
The royal power that the Royal Prerogative grants to a government should be a big problem for anybody seriously concerned about democracy in Britain. It is the main reason why some of us have always favoured abolishing the monarchy. Curiously, however, it had never seemed much of a problem before the Brexit vote to those arguing against accepting the referendum result. Leading Remainers such as ex-New Labour prime minister Tony Blair and his allies certainly never had a problem with using the Royal Prerogative to launch destructive foreign wars while in office. Yet now they suddenly object to its use to pursue Brexit.
Most strikingly, few of the new champions of parliamentary sovereignty appeared in the slightest bit bothered about having that sovereignty overridden via the EU, by both European bureaucrats and British governments, through the previous forty years. It seems that they only became excited about the need to defend parliamentary sovereignty against the people.
These pseudo-democratic arguments were just a device to discredit the referendum which had been a genuine exercise in mass democracy. By August 2016, Labour front-bench MP Barry Gardiner could even accuse the new Tory prime minister Theresa May of acting ‘with the arrogance of a Tudor monarch’ by insisting that she could implement a form of Brexit without a further vote of MPs.60 Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Mrs May was a Remain campaigner who did not want Brexit; Mr Gardiner may have studied some different history from me, but I do not recall the well-known Tudor monarch Henry VIII reluctantly breaking with the Church of Rome or beheading two wives and assorted enemies because the people demanded it in a referendum.
These issues highlight bigger problems with British democracy, on both sides of the Brexit debate. For one side, it appears, representative democracy means that MPs should have the right to do as they see fit, regardless of the referendum result, in our increasingly unrepresentative