Jeremy Warner
Yes, it’s been a turbulent week – but unlike the EU, at least our political system is accountable
‘This land of such dear souls, this dear dear land,/ Dear for her reputation through the world,/ Is now leased out, I die pronouncing it,/ Like to a tenement or pelting farm:/ England, bound in with the triumphant sea/ Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege/ Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,/ With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds:/ That England, that was wont to conquer others,/ Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”
Part of the genius of Shakespeare is his timelessness; his writings seem as relevant to the contemporary world as they were to the age in which he lived or was addressing. John of Gaunt’s famous deathbed speech in Richard II seems perfectly to encapsulate the sense of shame that has engulfed our politics these past several years, with Parliament and Government alike paralysed by the challenges of Brexit.
Britain’s hard-won reputation for pragmatism and functioning democracy is being tested as rarely before. If today’s press, not just in Britain but throughout Europe, is to be believed, we have indeed made a shameful conquest of ourselves. The world sniggers at our predicament. On all sides, our system is accused of monumental failure, uselessness and incompetence. Our democratic institutions seem to be proving themselves unequal to the task of delivering a successful Brexit.
That in any case is the prevailing narrative, but it is one with which I can’t agree. To the contrary, there is something rather magnificent in what is now happening, for it is a powerful demonstration of representative democracy in action – imperfect, turbulent, anarchic, even archaic in nature, but also accountable, transparent and strangely civilised and courteous in the way it conducts itself.
It could have been very different. In less clement jurisdictions, it almost certainly would have been. Yet there is no civil war, no public disorder, and no revolutionary Terreur, only the sound of bellowing and heated debate, of argument and counter argument, from which, in time, a resolution of sorts will emerge. Whether it is no deal, Theresa May’s deal, a second referendum, Labour’s Brexit in name only or another general election is not yet clear. But one way or another, by default or design, when all is said and done, the process will deliver a result that will have been transparently and exhaustively reached.
Anger among Brexiteers at a referendum supposedly betrayed is understandable, yet no one has a monopoly of understanding of what that instruction meant; interpretation and implementation is for Parliament to determine, not some self-appointed political minority.
What do citizens want? It’s hard to know, but certainly not a system where, armed with the supposed “will of the people”, the executive bulldozes all before it, with elected representatives expected meekly to acquiesce as if forced to fight for a cause in which they do not believe. That way lies authoritarianism and the People’s Republic of China.
None of this is to argue that our politics are faultless. Even acknowledging the constraints of minority government, ministerial competence has to be seriously questioned. Playing the game of historical parallels, it might be argued that nothing quite as bad has been seen since the days of Lord North, the prime minister widely blamed for having “lost” the American colonies. From start to finish, he completely misread the situation, culminating in a vote of no confidence that dislodged him.
Turning that around, however, the more exact parallel with Lord North is not Mrs May, but the European Union. When the dust settles on Britain’s rupture with Europe, the question historians will be keenest to address is not how Britain came to botch Brexit but how the EU could have been so careless, unaccommodating and blind to democratic legitimacy as to lose and destabilise its second-largest economy.
In his book, How Democracy Dies, David Runciman, professor of politics at Cambridge University, points out that Greek democracy recently suffered a blow which in some respects was much worse than the military coup in 1967; in the face of an intransigent EU, an elected government found itself unable to carry out its promises, leading many Greeks to conclude that they no longer ruled themselves, but had become subservient to far away forces.
As we are discovering, one of the drawbacks of representative democracy is that it is very good at saying what it doesn’t want, but much poorer at defining what it does. In the case of Brexit, however, this apparent indecision reflects not so much a broken system as the divisions which are apparent in the country as a whole. If achieving more decisive action means suppressing debate, riding roughshod over the sensitivities of others, deselecting those who disagree, and being closed to argument, then warts and all, I’d prefer to stick to what we’ve got.
Democracy is about pluralism; it presupposes a capacity for frustration and patience. If we stifle these traits, we fall prey to the same democratic deficit that we accuse the EU of.