Short of some Johnsonian deus ex machina, a last-minute fortuitous turn of events, or a glaring technical oversight (one can but hope), the third legally enshrined Brexit deadline of 31 October will pass us by and the UK will still remain, in one form or another, in the clutches of the EU’s anti-democratic tentacles, 3½ years after the referendum. SR readers will not be surprised. Disgusted, enraged, and horrified – yes; but surprised – no.
It is hard to fathom the depth of the parliamentary coup d’état that has overthrown our democracy. Even though the revolution has indeed been televised, the majority of people in the now redundant electorate seem blissfully unaware of the establishment’s coup de grâce administered to our democracy. Worse, many are aware but simply do not care, so long as their Remain side wins, by whatever foul means necessary.
Orwell’s dystopian future is manifesting itself before our eyes. It is bad enough that the media is under the control of the Remainer establishment, peddling politics disguised as knowledge, pretending to offer balanced reporting but deliberately failing to do so in their Newspeak of misleading labels, misrepresentations and sins of factual omission; it is a theatre of spectacle in which Remainer MPs are portrayed as heroically defending democracy while they are in the act of throttling it (‘War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength’). But now there are worrying signs that parts of the legal establishment are also playing their part in supporting the new post-democratic regime, with the Supreme Court having again seemingly nailed its colours to the anti-democratic cause. Any politicisation of the courts is a scary thing. Lenin. Stalin. Mussolini. Franco. Salazar. Hitler. All perfectly legal and approved of by the highest courts in their respective countries. The UK’s parliamentary coup looks as if it is being, or will be, endorsed by the country’s highest courts – which are, of course, comprised of unaccountable, unelected judges.
Have you ever met anyone who voted against the EU Commission in European elections? No. Nor has anyone else. Because there is no one to vote for. It is a variation of the one-party state system. From its foundations to today, the EU has been, and is, designed to be anti-democratic. In some ways Brexit is now just a sideshow of democracy: nearly 50 years of being in hock with the anti-democratic EU has so vaccinated the political ‘élites’ and their establishment acolytes against the ‘disease’ of democracy they are enthusiastically eradicating what little is left of it in Britain so the great unwashed – the unvaccinated – do not succumb to the democratic bacillus.
The 2016 referendum gives a clear result. Parliament blocks it. The General Election of 2017 gives a clear mandate. Parliament blocks it. How do they scupper these democratic mandates? They pass laws to do so. Every time they encounter the outcome of an electoral vote or other democratic processes they don’t like, they simply block it with new legislation. They can keep doing this until the cows come home – and they do. Only the votes they approve of are allowed. That is not democracy. That reeks of legislative dictatorship.
Remainer MPs hollowly maintain that they are defending their constituents from the inevitable calamity of Brexit, especially a No-Deal one. But that is merely a speculative assertion: no one can prophesise the future. And even in in the unlikely event that Brexit (should it ever happen) does turn out to be an economic disaster, then that is the price of democracy.
With Brexit and democracy being lined up in front of the new regime’s firing squads, what is there we can do? A boycott of voting? Our new masters would still take a majority of a 10% turn-out as a mandate and would anyway overturn any results they did not find congenial. Refusal to pay taxes without genuine democratic representation? The judges would be as keen to throw refuseniks in gaol as they are to prevent real criminals entering them. The establishment will confidently and smugly rely on the sentiment expressed by Samuel Johnson in Rasselas back in the mid-18th century commentating on the distance between rulers and ruled: ‘While courts are disturbed with intestine competitions, and ambassadors are negotiating in foreign countries, the smith still plies his anvil, and the husbandman drives his plough forward; and the necessaries of life are required and obtained.’
If Johnson cannot invoke that god – or, more likely, demi-god – from the machine, perhaps all we have left in the pending post-democratic age is that consolatory state described by George Eliot: ‘that mood of defiance in which the mind loses sight of any end beyond the satisfaction of enraged resistance.’
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Dear Andrew.
Thanks for refining my comment. Had there been more like Nicholas Ridley in the Conservative Party instead of the Tory ‘wets’ conspiring in the shadows to politically assassinate Margaret Thatcher as she finally woke up to the true nature and destination of ‘the Project’ I think that it’s likely that we would have left before Britain was signed up to the game-changing Maastricht Treaty which enshrined the road to a federal E.U.
The EU is in its very systems and methods of operation designed to be anti-democratic. There is a lot of voting, and an even greater degree of talking, but the outcome can only ever be that greater power will be handed to a self selecting and nepotistic euro-elite. The ordinary Britons understood this very clearly when they voted to leave in 2016, and the UK’s own eurocentric establishment, understands just as clearly that if the British democrats are allowed their will, they (the eurocentric establishment) will lose power, money and influence. So the mass media, the civil servants, the judiciary, the CBI, the TUC and all those others in the overpaid, overindulged classes who gain from euro-membership have plotted and schemed for the last three years to deny democracy. This is a most important fight, if the remainists win they will never allow the Britons a genuinely democratic vote on any issue ever again.
Nicholas Ridley’s comment that – the then EEC – was “a German Racket” got him expelled from the cabinet but his comment is well vindicated today and he would be horrified if he could witness the anti-democratic somersaults being performed by Westminster M.P.s and their legal co-conspirators effort to complete the sly and stealthy coup to make Britain effectively into a one-party state within the all encompassing web of the E.U.
The late Nicholas Ridley commented that Monetary Union was merely a ‘German racket to take over Europe’. He had to resign for it. This is what he actually said -:
‘‘This is all a German racket designed to take over the whole of Europe.
‘It has to be thwarted. This rushed takeover by the Germans on the worst possible basis, with the French behaving like poodles to the Germans, is absolutely intolerable . . . I’m not against giving up sovereignty in principle, but not to this lot.
You might just as well give it up to Adolf Hitler, frankly.’
The interviewer, Dominic Lawson, was surprised by these comments so interjected to say that the then German Chancellor, Helmut Kohl, was preferable to Hitler — ‘he wouldn’t be dropping bombs on us, after all.’
Nick Ridley was having none of it and went on -: ‘I’m not sure I wouldn’t rather have the shelters and the chance to fight back, than simply being taken over by economics.
He’ll soon be coming here and trying to say that this is what we should do on the banking side and this is what our taxes should be. I mean, he’ll soon be trying to take over everything . . . You don’t understand the British people if you don’t understand this point about them. They can be dared. They can be moved. But being bossed by a German — it would cause absolute mayhem in this country, and rightly, I think.’
So glad I no longer subscribe to the SR if this is what you are churning out. It is about time people got over WWII. The EU was always a FRENCH idea. Briand presented the blueprints to the League of Nations for it circa 1930. All of my life I have had to listen to uneducated drivel about Nazis and the Germans. It is time people grew up.
E O Anthrobus.
That the EU is the continuation of Germany bu other means is clearly demonstrated in Paul Lever’s excellent book “Berlin Rules. Europe and the German Way.”
Mr Lever, despite clearly being a Remainer has,as
the former United Kingdom ambassador, written an informative and insightful guide to the symbiotic and dominant role played by Germany in the EU. I commend it even as I shuddered reading it.
It’s NOT a Greater Germany project, it’e a Greater France project kept afloat by Germany.
“Our new masters would still take a majority of a 10% turn-out as a mandate”
Brilliant! And yet you think 52% of an 80% turnout is a clear and inviolable mandate.
You seem to be slightly confused, Yves. The British system, for god or ill, accepts a majority, even of one vote, and even if that one vote is by someone who shouldn’t have been there to vote (as in a recent example in the H of C). So 52/48 is a clear decision, whether 80% or 30% (bother to) turn out, the lower figure being quite common in local elections, and the result is accepted.
The 2017 election was indeed a clear mandate because both main parties said that, if elected, they would implement Brexit, which they have subsequently clearly reneged on. They won their seats on a clear commitment, a mandate, which they have betrayed.
In respect of the 2017 election, there is an alternative possible interpretation, namely that T May wanted to lose the existing majority, for two reasons. First, it would relieve her of the underhand battle to stay in the EU (her deep desire) while pretending to get the UK out. Second, if Labour had won, and overturned Brexit, then she could have gained Brownie points by telling us that if we had only voted Tory, we would be out now. As it happened, her reduced majority achieved the same result – no Brexit.
Some of us are not fooled by what has been done; we can see it quite clearly.
What a load of utter drivel, written by somebody who clearly doesn’t understand how our democracy works.
One sentence exemplifies your muddle-headedness perfectly: “The General Election of 2017 gives a clear mandate.”
Erm, actually, it was anything but clear, which is why we are where we are more than two years later. May previously had a mandate, but regardless of that she called an election explicitly in order to get what she thought was going to be a bigger one, and lost it.
I bet you brexiters wish you’d worked out exactly what you all wanted before the stupid referendum. At the moment you’re coming across like five year olds stamping their feet and screaming because you can’t have what you wanted – which turns out to be a pet unicorn. Perhaps you should just let the grown ups run the country instead.
Funny you should bring up stamping 5 year olds. On Sunday, Andrew Marr interviewing Priti Patel was just that – and his tantrum-induced lie about her ‘smile’ is now topping the pile of fake news we cool, dispassionate brexiteers have grown accustomed to.
If you think the gang of unelected crooks who run the EU are democracy in action you must mourn the collapse of 1989/1991 as our labour party does,
The stupid referendum was proposed by David Cameron and agreed to by the majority of MPs, most of whom are remainers, not brexiteers. Cameron didn’t have a plan to cope with the possibility of a leave outcome. Obviously such a plan would have encouraged people to vote to leave.
The referendum was an abrogation of the responsibility that elected representatives have to make decisions on matters such as these. And there are those, the most vocal of whom is Jo Swinson, Captain Democracy, who want another.
We have it on the good authority of Cameron and Donald Tusk that Johnson never thought that Leave would win. He only entered the campaign, according to these two gentlemen, to make himself a name so that he could be Tory Party leader in the future.
One other thing to bear in mind. The day after the referendum the then American secretary of state, John Kerry – the very capable negotiator who formulated the Iran nuclear treaty – flew into London to visit Cameron. Kerry announced at a press conference that he thought that he referendum result could be ‘walked back’, but not immediately.
Given that it’s not brexiteers who are stamping their feet like five-year-olds, but MPs, one of whom wants to be queen of a Scotland that pays fealty directly to Brussels rather than going though London and other who desperately wants to be prime minister, Britain might be better off being governed directly from Brussels. Why bother with middle men?
Guido has a 20 second clip of Marr throwing a tantrum today and falsely accusing Priti Patel of laughing at the concerns of industry. Already this lie has been picked up in the media. However did we manage in the past without the expression ‘fake news’.
George Eliot ends Middlemarch with acknowledgement of the disenfranchised who impede our glorious EU masters: ‘… that things are not so ill with you and me … is half owing to the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.’