Daniel Hannan:
For the first time in my life, I fear for the stability and legitimacy of our parliamentary system. Observing the response to the idiotic prosecution against Boris Johnson for supposedly misleading people during the referendum campaign, I wonder whether we are heading for a Latin American style of politics, where the rules are treated as contingent and politicians are threatened with jail.
The case itself is so obviously frivolous and vexatious that it shouldn’t need refutation. For what it’s worth, I stand absolutely by the £350 million a week claim. Remainers argued at the time – and have argued especially vehemently since – that that number was misleading because it did not count the money returned by Brussels to the UK. But it is standard in politics to use gross rather than net figures. If I were to ask you what the basic rate of income tax is, you’d say 20 pence in the pound. You wouldn’t say: “Well, actually, it’s zero, because it’s all ‘given back’ in roads, schools and hospitals.”
Whatever view you take, the arguments were endlessly picked over during the referendum campaign. People heard from the two sides and made up their minds. That is how a democracy works.
Not that Marcus Ball, the Remain activist behind the case, seems to believe in democracy. “Our education system sucks,” he says. “People are not capable of making these hugely complex decisions.” Which, of course, is the justification of every dictatorship in history.
Did the entire country come
together to laugh at this nonsense, and at the asinine district judge who has allowed the case to go forward?
Au contraire, as we Old Brussels Hands say. The first reaction of Robert Peston, doyen of our political commentators, was to declare how impressed he was with Ball and to salute his “tenacity”. Labour and Remain leaders lined up to repeat their dreary plaint that the British people had been led astray by unscrupulous demagogues – of whom, in their eyes, Boris is the worst, since they see him as a class traitor: an educated, multilingual writer who inexcusably refuses to support the Brussels racket.
There are honourable exceptions. The Leftist historian Robert Saunders, a staunch Remainer who “abhors” Boris, makes the point that, in politics, the external regulator is the electorate. If someone is believed to have misbehaved, it is for his constituents, not some magistrate, to remove him.
Even two years ago, Saunders’ observation would have gone without saying. But, in our current mood, plenty of people are prepared to tear down all the guardrails in order to get at politicians they don’t like. And some of those people can be found in the institutions of the British state. The district judge in this case may be an outlier, but she reflects a wider official readiness to go after Leavers.
I wrote in this column a few months ago about how Leave donors were being pursued by the Electoral Commission and even the tax authorities. Trivial accusations, usually involving tiny technical infractions, were used to embroil people in cases that absorbed months of their lives and cost tens of thousands of pounds. They usually emerged unblemished, but the message went out to other potential supporters: we can do this to you if we want. The process is the punishment.
Such behaviour should horrify us all, Leave or Remain. The use of state officials and prosecutors to go after people on the basis of their political views is something we associate with countries like Turkey, Russia and Venezuela.
Not that the abandonment of norms is confined to Remainers. Many Leavers are drifting toward a form of British Trumpism, in which grievances are elevated over practical solutions. How would you get Brexit past a Remain Parliament? “I don’t care, that’s your problem!” Aren’t you worried that a split Tory/Brexit Party vote might let the other side win and so see Brexit lost? “All Theresa May’s fault, you’ve got it coming!”
With that sense of grievance, as we can see from the Trumpsters, comes a number of other attributes: paranoia about the other side, a desire to “lock up” opponents, a slavish willingness by people to follow their leader through 180-degree turns without a blink and, worst of all, an elevation of outcomes over process.
It happened very suddenly in the United States, recently a model democracy, but now a country where 48 per cent of Democrats and 50 per cent of Republicans admit to “hating” the other side, and where almost any action that hurts opponents is seen as justified.
It is happening here, too. We used to pride ourselves on our civil, civilised and civilian politics. We had not had a revolution or a dictatorship since the 1650s. That record depended on norms – unwritten rules that allowed opponents to work together. It depended on the willingness of the government to eschew a “winner takes all” approach, and of the opposition to accept when it had lost. It depended on the understanding that good people may sincerely disagree about politics. It depended, not least, on a sense of proportion.
Politics was a way to mediate competing interests, not a proxy war. Prosecuting politicians was something we left to countries where the leaders wore sunglasses and uniforms.
I grew up in such a country: Peru in the 1970s was the kind of polarised society that saw coups, unrest and the use of criminal proceedings to silence opponents. To Peruvians, in those days, the British (or “the English”, as they called us) stood for restraint, decency and courtesy. We could say what we liked without having our collars felt. We could change our leaders without anyone being exiled or imprisoned. We were so orderly that, incredibly, our police carried no guns.
Peru is nowadays an altogether freer and more democratic place. But I have a horrible sense that Britain is sliding in the other direction.
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet, lest we forget – lest we forget!