Our democracy is being overthrown by the EU’s Hideous Strength

It’s not about Brexit any more, at least not primarily. It’s about whether we remain a democracy in the fullest sense. Our system depends on unwritten conventions and precedents. We expect winners to show restraint and losers to show consent. We expect our officials – including judges, civil servants and, not least, the Commons Speaker – to be impartial. We expect the electorate to be the final umpire.

All these norms are coming under pressure as the campaign to reverse Brexit intensifies. The EU, as well as being undemocratic in itself, tends to degrade the internal democracy of its member nations. Everyone knows that

the Brussels institutions are oligarchic, combining executive and legislative power in the hands of commissars who are immune to public opinion. What is less widely appreciated is the extent to which the 28 member states are also required to alter their domestic constitutions so as to sustain the requirements of membership. Elections are rerun, coalitions broken, laws ignored, parties annihilated, referendums overturned, prime ministers toppled – all for the sake of deeper integration.

I think of it as the EU’s “Hideous Strength” – the title of C S Lewis’s adult novel about a diabolical plot to take over Britain through a seemingly bland bureaucracy. Until now, the most shocking examples were the civilian juntas imposed on Italy and Greece in 2011 to keep them in the euro. But ponder the past three years here. Look at the way our most basic understandings and conventions have been torn up. Look at the policies now being put forward by the main Opposition parties. Labour is proposing to get a better deal from Brussels and then campaign against its own deal in a referendum. The Lib Dems, less entertainingly but more shockingly, want to annul the outcome of the referendum that they were the first party to propose.

For as long as we have had party politics, we have expected the losers to respect the verdict of the ballot box. That is no longer happening. All of a sudden, politicians are making hysterical claims of Russian interference, insisting that elections don’t count because they consider opposing arguments dishonest, demanding that the people who didn’t vote be tallied. We have seen repeated attempts to overturn the referendum result in the courts. We have seen a Speaker brazenly promising to thwart the Government even “if that demands additional procedural creativity”.

How much more of this can we take? Our political discourse is angrier and more violent than I can remember. The legitimacy of our governing institutions is in the balance. We keep reading that this acrimony is “because of Brexit”. But, as you can hardly fail to have noticed, Brexit hasn’t happened. What we are seeing is not a “Brexit crisis” but the precise opposite: an un-Brexit crisis, a crisis caused by the refusal of our MPs to do what they repeatedly promised.

Now those MPs are simultaneously paralysing Parliament and preventing a general election. First they said they were waiting for their anti-no-deal Bill to be passed. Then, when it was approved, they said that they would wait until the European summit on Oct 19. Now they are talking about sitting through to next summer, still in the EU, and still with a disabled Parliament. Do they truly not realise what is at stake? It is not just their careers that are in jeopardy; it is the authority of our entire parliamentary system. Marvel at the EU’s hideous strength.