On and on goes the Prime Minister, despite one smashing
defeat in the Commons after another. She clings to power like a limpet; or
perhaps, more like a limpet mine, primed to sink the ship of State.
This is autocracy.
Perhaps, if all else fails, her last card, the one that
loses the stately pile and rolling acres, will be the use somehow of an Order
in Council (such a favoured tool of Blair, ACL.)
Fanciful? Is there anybody who predicted what we have seen
so far?
When all this Brexit business is done one way or another,
the work of reassessing the British Constitution must begin. Perhaps we could
start with a motion similar to John Dunning’s in 1780,
altered to say: ‘The power of the Prime Minister has increased, is increasing,
and ought to be diminished.’
What is the point of the 2002 High Court ruling that ‘The British Parliament .. being
sovereign… cannot abandon its sovereignty’ if it simply delegates away most of
its power, either to the EU under the 1972 ECA, or to Ministers via ‘Henry
VIII’ clauses that allow them to issue secondary legislation, or to the Privy
Council so that the occupant of No. 10 can govern by fiat?
What is the point of having extended
the franchise to 47 million voters, under a First Past The Post system that
regularly sees some two-thirds of MPs elected on a minority of votes cast? Of
‘safe seats’ that turn some MPs into complacent, negligent absentee landlords?
Or of a Fourth Estate that suppresses
and twists the information the voter needs? – even (this is the one that for me
exploded Jon Snow’s credibility, I can cope with his infantile remarks about
white people) allowing Blair’s right-hand man to take over one’s currentaffairs TV show without warning, to spin the ‘Iraq WMD’ controversy and then shaking his hand in fraternal thanks at the end (oddly, not shown here, but I cannot forget.)
What is at stake here – what greater
theme of history is there? - is overweening Power. We thought we’d settled that
in the 1640s and 1680s and the political reforms in the 150 years after 1789. But
the barrack-room grumblings of the people today could eventually become
something worse, if democratic checks and balances fail to stop Power becoming
once again arbitrary and absolute.
Is the EU prepared to reform? Oh yes
– in exactly the wrong way. Only last November, the enthusiast Mr Verhofstadt
was calling for the abolition of member nations’ individual veto:
‘You cannot manage a continent of that magnitude with such a system.’
Even as it is, AfD leader Alice
Weidel’s much-circulated 21 March speech to the Bundestag worried that the UK’s departure threatens Germans’
ability to muster a blocking minority EU veto (min. 35% of EU population.)
Already, she says, Merkel and Macron’s Aachen Treaty stands to jam open Germany’s wallet for the depredations
of French profligacy and the free movement of eastern Europeans per Schengen
rights have led to growing strains on the German economy under Hartz IV socialsecurity arrangements.
It’s not about us ‘crashing out’ of
the EU; it’s about the EU crashing around like a bull in a china shop. If
no-one will put a ring through its nose, we have to leave the premises. If we
mess about, the Germans may get out ahead of us!
And if we do finally manage it, we then
have to face the other systemic wreckers closer to home: the ones at the top of
our country.
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