Tranquillus in Exile
New member
Daniel Hannan, MEP (Con)
It’s not about Brexit any more, at least not primarily. It’s about whether we remain a democracy in the fullest sense.
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 the 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 (supposedly neutral) 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 19 October. 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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politic...ngth-must-subvert-internal-democracy-survive/
(abbreviated)
It’s not about Brexit any more, at least not primarily. It’s about whether we remain a democracy in the fullest sense.
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 the 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 (supposedly neutral) 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 19 October. 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.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politic...ngth-must-subvert-internal-democracy-survive/
(abbreviated)