What’s wrong with calling a Surrender Act a Surrender Act?

WHY should the Prime Minister not describe the law banning a No Deal Brexit as The Surrender Bill? By robbing him of a key negotiating strength, it does indeed make it more likely that the EU, not the UK, will get their way over the terms and timing of our departure.

Why should he and others not accuse Parliament of ‘betrayal’ when it seeks to frustrate the open will of the electorate? MPs authorised the referendum, knowing they would have to implement its result. Most then stood in a General Election and promised to do so. But they can hardly now be said to be keeping the spirit of their promise.

This sort of strong language is a key part of what Westminster is for. Our Parliament has survived for centuries precisely because it has represented so well the real tensions and angers which inevitably divide any free society.

Far better that both sides can hurl invective and insults at each other in the Commons chamber than that those feelings, bottled up and unexpressed, eventually surface as real violence. A rowdy, redfaced late-night session may look and sound ugly. But at the end of it, voters on both sides feel that their deepest frustrations and resentments have been expressed where they will do some good. No MP, on either side of the Brexit debate, can now be ignorant of the genuine strong feelings of those who take the other view.

Betrayal is not a word used only by Tories. Labour’s most distinguished leader, Clement Attlee, called Ramsay MacDonald’s decision to abandon the Labour government in 1931 ‘the greatest betrayal in the political history of the country’. Arthur Scargill’s coal strike in the 1980s provoked multiple accusations of betrayal and surrender within the Labour movement.

Worse than that by far are the Tweets which The Mail on Sunday reveals today, sent by a would-be Labour MP, Ian Byrne, crudely foul and personally hurtful – a style of attack far from unknown on the Left.

European history shows that countries which lack our tradition of plain, hard speaking in Parliament tend to have much more political violence than we do.

The claim that forceful speech leads to homicidal attacks against MPs is often made, but is very hard to prove. Such political violence is, happily, extremely rare and most of it in recent years has happened to Tories at the hands of Irish Republican terrorists – whose elected political representatives refuse to take their seats in the Commons. This is not to ignore or belittle the worries of those MPs who have been, or even feel threatened in the current atmosphere.

Those who are worried must have protection, and police must take their fears seriously. Direct verbal attacks against individuals, rather than policies, are simply wrong. Incitement to violence is a severe crime, not protected by the rules of free speech, and the police and the CPS should act vigorously against it.

But in such turbulent times as these, attempts to curtail or restrict robust free speech are mistaken. Strong feelings have been aroused by the mishandling of the Brexit issue, and they must be expressed and heard. Only then will all those involved understand the urgency of finding what we all long for – a decent, just solution to the crisis, and our departure from the EU which the majority voted for, so long ago. Then we can get back to attacking each other fiercely about all the other things which divide us.