There’s no precedent for this, it is something new ... Clio, the muse of history, would despair

History can help in understanding politics. It can explain how situations have arisen, put things into context, show how institutions developed, and how they work. But we have got to a point at which Clio, the muse of history, raises her arms in despair. For, as Remainers in Parliament gear up to wreck Boris Johnson’s revised Brexit deal, we have never been in a situation like this.

This is not to say that it is the worst situation. We are not at war. There is no socioeconomic crisis. The country is – to the surprise of many visitors – astonishingly normal. Even Saturday’s demonstrations in London were pretty light-hearted compared to Hong Kong. Nevertheless, our crisis, entirely caused by and – for the moment at least – confined to the political world, is one we have never experienced before.

There is nothing new under the sun, and we could doubtless find exotic parallels in other times and other countries, when elected assemblies looked to some outside power for permission to act. Perhaps to the 18th century Polish parliament, where members took their voting orders from foreign ambassadors. Or to defeated states – say Germany or Japan after 1945 – whose political choices were decided by their occupiers. But this is not our situation, all the more bizarre as it has no obvious cause.

So what is the nature of our crisis? Liberal thinkers have long recognised that a parliament that rules without popular legitimacy is a form of tyranny, and we have plenty of precedents for Parliament opposing the people in previous centuries. But for the first time since we became a democracy, a large part of the political class, including nearly half of elected MPS, are now resisting the legally expressed decision of the majority. Parliament and the Supreme Court have both acted unconstitutionally, not to defend the will of the people, but to oppose it.

The SNP and DUP have their own particular and understandable reasons. What about the rest? Most have used and exhausted a variety of pretexts, the most obvious being that they were merely opposing a no-deal, for which “no one had voted”. This week, most of these excuses fell away. The Lib Dems are unabashed in their contempt for the electorate’s choice: at least they are honest. What of the majority of Remainers, elected on a promise to accept the referendum result? Even their claim that the electorate had changed its mind – an argument utterly subversive of orderly democratic government – has been exploded. So how can they now justify both blocking Brexit and refusing a general election?

There is no precedent in our history for this, so we have to accept that we are facing something new. True, there have in the past been people, including MPS, whose higher loyalties were somewhere else. On Nov 5 1605, some tried literally to blow up the whole political system in the hope of a religious counter-revolution. In the Forties and Fifties, some worked for the Soviet Union in the hope of a socialist utopia. But never before have hundreds of MPS worked to undermine the edifice of democratic government. Our long membership of the EEC and then the EU has created something like a state within the state. We must look at Ireland, France, Denmark, Italy and Greece, where democratic votes were in one way or another neutered by a Europe-wide political establishment, to understand what is happening. In all these countries, a substantial section of the political, administrative, business and intellectual classes have been absorbed into a supranational system, which treats national democracy as a problem to be circumvented. Absorbed ideologically, absorbed in their material interests, their careers, and even their social lives.

British electors have become the latest and biggest obstacle to be overcome. Centuries of representative government, and a century of democratic practice, are being pushed aside by many of those whose duty it is to defend them, but who see their interests, prejudices, hopes and ambitions in conflict with their own voters. The institutions, conventions and rules that we thought we could rely on have proved a house of straw. “Who guards the guardians?” asked Juvenal nearly 2,000 years ago. In Britain today we have no answer. After the next general election, we shall need to find one, and quickly.