There can be no doubting the mandate given to Boris Johnson to take the UK out of the EU and, barring some kind of divine intervention, we will be leaving on Jan 31st. We on the liberal left fought a strong, democratic, fact-based battle for the last 3 years for the country to think again - which it had the chance to do on Thursday but sadly the country confirmed the decision to leave.
So the agonising contortions, the venom and the bile spilled over the widespread misunderstanding (wilful or otherwise) of the democratic legitimacy of representative and direct democracy ballots may finally come to an end. The architect of those contortions since the referendum of 2016 was of course David Cameron, the densest Prime Minister to take office during my lifetime. Cameron's mistake was the wording of his manifesto pledge that if he won a majority in 2015 his government would hold an in/out referendum and that "Parliament would implement the result". That pledge did not take into account that there may be another General Election before leaving the EU and that it is simply undemocratic for a Tory manifesto to dictate the contents of other Parties' manifestos for future elections. The pledge should have made clear that the only Parliament that could possibly be bound by that pledge would be the one elected in 2015. As it turns out that Parliament was dissolved by Theresa May in 2017, and the mandate to implement the referendum result with it, and a new Parliament was elected.
We had been gridlocked ever since as Labour MPs were elected on a platform of remaining in the single market/customs union and Tory MPs of remaining closely aligned to the EU but out of all of its structures (single market, customs union, ECJ), while the Lib Dems had sought a mandate for a second referendum.
In last week's election though there was a specific commitment in the Tory manifesto to take us out under the terms of the Withdrawal Agreement Bill laid before the last Parliament, and Johnson got a clear mandate to pursue that path. This is the way our Parliamentary democracy works - Parliament is sovereign and parties stand on a published manifesto and either do or don't get given a mandate. Referendums cannot ever be allowed to overrule that - if they were permitted to do so then Cameron could never have pledged to overturn the 1975 referendum result. Anyone who still doesn't understand this really doesn't understand how our democracy works - and that worries me because it seems like too many in the media want to undermine our democratic institutions under the guise of defending democracy. This has been the trick used by authoritarians down the centuries. We will have to wait and see how this administration conducts in that regard itself over the next 5 years.
Call me naive, but I actually still believe that under all the bluster and pretence Boris Johnson is a liberal at heart but I am not sure the same can be said of those that surround him - they appear to have no respect for democracy as evidenced by the dishonesty of the campaign they ran. Any political party that knowingly misrepresents itself as a fact-checking service, publishes fake versions of its opponents manifestos, wilfully plants untrue stories in the nation's media, avoids scrutiny of its leader and deliberately misrepresents the numbers in its own manifesto simply cannot be trusted. Johnson has won his mandate but he is far from winning the nation's trust.
No comments:
Post a Comment