A bit like Brexiteers’ ambition to have cake and eat it

HAVING read Tim Hicks’ letter (Echo Letters December 20), I was interested in his point “Sadly, there is little hope for the UK with the existing parties. What a shame a new party has not come to the fore.”

The UK Independence Party (UKIP) was formed as recently as the early 1990s to do just this. Even now it has 20 Members of the European Parliament (MEPs), making it the joint-largest UK party. However it has no MPs in the UK Parliament despite representing quite a large proportion of the population. I wonder therefore whether the EU or the UK provides the better form of representative democracy?

Mr Hicks also brings out another point where he deprecates the failure of Parliament to press ahead enthusiastically with Brex- it. We live in a Liberal Representative Democracy. The system has evolved to avoid “the tyranny of the majority” whereby a majority can dictate to an almost equally sized minority.

The powers of Government over the individual are limited by the Human Rights Act 1998 (which replaced older Bills of Rights that protected the liberties of Britons) while our representatives in Parliament are required to achieve a degree of consensus about a programme of government and know that they will be held to account at the next election for their decisions.

If we held two referenda, one asking if we should spend more on the NHS and the other asking if we should cut taxes, I surmise that both would achieve a majority, representing the “Will of the People”. A bit like the Brexiteers’ ambition “to have their cake and eat it”.

However, in the real world compromises have to be made and this is the responsibility of our elected representatives.

I believe that most Members of Parliament have strong criticisms of the way the EU operates, as they also have about the UK. However, on balance, most believe that they can deliver a better life for the people of the UK if we are a member or closely allied to that group, rather than trying to plough a lonely furrow in the mid Atlantic. Hence instructing them to do something against their better judgement is unlikely to produce a high degree of enthusiasm for the project.

A better way forward would have been to wait for UKIP to achieve a majority in Parliament and then we would have had a united government enthusiastically leading us into the wonderland of HardBrexit.

Being born in 1950 I too recall life before we joined the E.U. As Mr. Hicks says “We managed before the EU.” However my recollection is that we were just about managing and slowly declining.

In a world where we were free to trade with anyone, we were losing out. Hence the leaders of all the political parties at the time of the 1975 referendum and just about all of the national newspapers saw membership as the best way to promote our future security and prosperity.

John Catt.