The elite thwarting Brexit risk damaging the fabric of democracy
HAVE you ever had trouble persuading a dog to release its bone? At first you play nice, asking Rover to surrender his prize, but this is met with snarls.
You try alternatives – mild reprimands, distractions, simmering exasperation – but these only result in truculence from the dog.
Eventually, your patience snaps. You wrench the bone from those clenched teeth and throw the treat into the bushes. A happy day has ended in aggro and you vow never again to indulge the mutt.
Much the same is happening with our ruling class.
In recent days we have seen, in Westminster and Whitehall, appalling behaviour from the pampered pets of our political Establishment.
For years they have gnawed on the bone that was the post-war liberal, Brussels-centred consensus. How delicious it was for the people at the top. Chomp, chomp, chomp.
Two years ago, they were told in the EU referendum – by their masters, the British people – to surrender that bone. They have no intention of complying.
And so they are growling and snapping and holding tight with increasingly bared fangs.
This unedifying tantrum was most glaringly on display in the House of Lords on Monday, when peers voted to let Parliament force Theresa May to accept a bad deal from Brussels as we quit the EU.
This could prevent her from walking away from the talks, should she wish to resort to that maybe necessary extreme.
Walkout
By denying Mrs May the option of saying to the European Commission: ‘Right, that’s it, we’re off without a deal and we’ll resort to World Trade Organisation rules, thank you,’ the Lords hopes to rob our Prime Minister of the vital backstop in any negotiation: the walkout.
It is hard to think of a surer way of weakening our country – or, for that matter, of fomenting a public desire to scrap the Upper House.
One of their number, a crossbencher called Lord Bilimoria, actually blurted it out. The Indian beer tycoon gloated that Parliament would have ‘the ability to stop the train crash that is Brexit’.
That is exactly the goal set by Tony Blair and Remain campaigners funded by the Hungarian-American billionaire George Soros.
Ah, Brexit. That mighty 2016 plebiscite – the biggest vote ever held in Britain – has driven our political elite round the twist.
If you think that allegation of madness is unkind, consider the hyperbole of Lib Dem peer Lord Roberts, who compared Mrs May to Adolf Hitler.
Lord Roberts is a Methodist preacher. If he made that sort of unjustified claim from his pulpit, one trusts he would be struck by a thunderbolt.
Most members of the Lords, composed as it is of Establishment careerists, wanted to remain in the EU.
Many of them, in the diplomatic corps, home Civil Service or the law, devoted their professional lives to the European project. Several even receive hefty pensions from Brussels.
When the British electorate voted clearly, in its millions, to leave the EU, these privileged pooh-bahs were aghast.
Like Hillary Clinton, who contrived to lose the US presidential election to Donald Trump, they considered the common people to be ‘a basket of deplorables’.
Parliament may have created the referendum and may have promised to abide by its result – but not that result, for goodness’ sake!
Ordinary Remain voters, being decent and reasonable, accepted the verdict of the majority. That, after all, is how a democracy works.
But Europhile hardliners reacted differently.
First came angry disbelief in snippy social media comments about the vulgarity of Leave voters. This was followed by breezy predictions that support for Remain would grow in time.
Almost two years since the referendum, there is little evidence of a change in public opinion. The voters are not budging. They voted out and they still want out.
What, therefore, must those voters make of current attempts by Downing Street officials and some Tory ministers to weaken Brexit by another avenue: making us stay in the EU’s customs union?
The customs union is an arrangement whereby countries surrender their independence. Instead of making their own trade deals, they let Brussels technocrats set import taxes on goods. This is the very opposite of ‘taking back control’, the slogan of the winning Leave side in June 2016’s referendum.
Worse, it looks like a ruse for delaying or thwarting Brexit.
If Mrs May, Chancellor Philip Hammond and a clutch of other pro-Remain Cabinet ministers go along with this ‘cretinous’ plan, as Jacob Rees-Mogg was so right to call it, they will lead their party to General Election defeat.
You will hear lawyerly talk from Europhiles such as Labour’s Sir Keir Starmer and the Tories’ Dominic Grieve that customs union membership is not the same as being in the EU. Ignore it.
Sickening
The distinctions are as minor as the differences between identical twins.
The Starmers and Grieves know that the customs union would prevent us striking trade deals with countries such as India, the US, Canada and China. They know that it would wreck Brexit.
Their cynicism is sickening, as is that of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party.
Mr Corbyn is widely thought to be a Eurosceptic, but for political advantage he goes along with the plots to stop our departure from the EU.
Labour voters who supported Brexit can get stuffed. Jeremy is a member of the game-playing political elite.
Oddball Tory backbencher Anna Soubry argues that the people’s referendum vote was superseded by the General Election of June 2017, which resulted in a hung parliament.
The General Election saw the national vote go overwhelmingly to two parties (Labour and Conservatives) who promised to honour Brexit. Game over.
Except the Establishment is fighting hard and its enemy is the British public.
June 2016 was exceptional not only in that it was an extra-parliamentary election (i.e. set up to give Parliament an express order) but also in that it saw many people vote for the first time.
These were citizens, many of them working-class, who had never bothered to vote because they thought their voices would never be heard.
For the referendum they came out and they seized the democratic moment. They felt strongly about immigration and UK sovereignty.
Now they are seeing their vote being dragged into legalistic alleyways and mugged by the very people it was meant to instruct.
That could so demoralise them that they will give up on democracy altogether.
When the masses give up on democracy, bad things happen.
Such an awful possibility must be resisted, so I plead with our truculent and selfish elite to surrender their bone and do as they have been commanded.
There can be no alternative.