ROBERT TOMBS
British history has been shaped by the will of the majority. The same must be true of Brexit
Our present turmoil seems to be a lurch away from our historical traditions of pragmatism and frankly rather dull politics. Are we not a sensible people, who have a suspicion of “extremes” and “ideology”, and who regard “moderation” and “compromise” as the essence of political wisdom?
It is true that we have a political system whose outward appearance is one of long continuity. We have avoided violent political conflict for over three centuries. For one thing, evolutionary change is easier without a codified constitution. Political extremism is hobbled by first-past-thepost. So our system seems stable.
But every so often, the pot boils over. Indeed, our political constitution is the result of a long series of crises and upheavals. We don’t need to go back as far as Magna Carta – though it is worth remembering that what is still the basis of our fundamental legal rights was the consequence of a rebellion. It was foreign invasion backed up by popular resistance that consolidated our parliamentary system in 1688. It was mass violence that began a succession of reforms in 1832. The primacy of the Commons was the result of an angry “Peers versus People” battle. Our three main parties hatched from crises. Division over agricultural tariffs wrecked the old Tory Party. Divisions over Ireland did permanent damage to the Liberals. It took the First World War to bring us genuine democracy and to bring Labour into the front rank of politics. None of these great changes was planned by the political elite: they came about through the inability of that elite to stop changes they disapproved of.
Parliamentary sovereignty really meant, and still means, the unchallenged right to put the people’s will into law. Past rulers had the good sense to accept the inevitable: that, more than anything, is the secret of our political stability. Those who claimed the elite knew best found themselves on the scrap-heap of history.
Now part of the elite is making a sustained and possibly successful effort to oppose a legally enshrined majority choice: made first in the 2016 referendum, then confirmed in the 2017 general election, when 85 per cent of the vote went to parties committed to respecting the result.
I cannot think of a precedent in modern times on this scale and with this persistence. Of course, there has been plenty of elite dissidence in the recent past. The 20th century saw both Right-wing and Left-wing minorities paying allegiance to foreign ideologies and foreign powers. They were vocal and sometimes influential, but few in number. They are now more numerous. Globalisation and our membership of the EU have created a new elite whose careers, interests and social relationships largely exist outside the boundaries of Britain. For them, the idea of “taking back control of our borders” is a threat and even a moral affront.
What is now being proposed by the government as the best deal available is in historical terms a monstrosity. It is practically unheard of in modern international relations for an independent state to place itself under foreign jurisdiction and foreign legislation. One would have to think of colonial status (for example of the American colonies before 1776) for an adequate analogy. For a modern democratic state to deny its own citizens even an indirect voice in deciding the laws governing them for an indefinite period would previously have been unimaginable: taxation without representation, to the tune of £39 billion.
I am not presuming to judge the motives of today’s Remainers, or whether they are right or wrong in their analysis of Brexit and its consequences. Now, as in the past, one can oppose the will of the majority on principle, argue against it and try to alter it. But the extremism of their arguments, the predictions of disaster, the assertions that people will die due to lack of medicine, the unwillingness to look dispassionately at the evidence are more strident than is normal in our politics. The lavishly funded campaign to undermine and block a democratically chosen policy has gone far beyond previously accepted political bounds.
To behave in this way seems to me reckless and fundamentally subversive of democracy. The purpose of democracy is not to find the right answer to technical problems, as judged by “experts”, but is to maintain an acceptable political community based on consent. The EU has aspired to establish the rule of experts in order to constrain democratic choices that the elite thought dangerous.
Remainers are attempting to fix us to that system not merely by opposing a democratic decision, but by denying that such a decision is possible. This, they assert, is harsh “reality”: There Is No Alternative. As the EU accumulates crises, it is a strange kind of reality. If Brexit is defeated, it will prove not only the impotence of democracy in Britain, it will confirm the impotence of democracy throughout the EU. The lid will have been screwed down. We all know the eventual consequences of that. Our long history of peaceful politics has been based on accepting the will of the majority. Attempting quite openly to thwart it is a dangerous step backwards – and a long way backwards.