People’s Parliament?

As Boris makes exactly the right, slightly threatening noises towards Brussels and Brussels responds with a petulant no pay/no deal stamp of its tiny feet, the panic on the remainer benches is bubbling over nicely. We have yet to witness a full-on stampede from the Commons back benches but this may be the precursor to that mad dash for the cliff edge of sanity which all fervent EU-philes are hilariously ready to undertake.

Leading a party which is backed by 0% of the public (allowing for rounding errors) Anna Soubry imagines she is somehow spearheading a cunning cross-party pincer movement to decapitate Brexit by sabotaging Boris Johnson’s premiership. His heinous crime? To dare to carry out what the people voted for when Parliament could not do its job and asked those same people for orders. Having returned the ‘wrong’ answer and after three years of refusal to honour it, Anna and her henchmen have now signed the Church House Declaration and posit themselves a ‘People’s Parliament’.

As opposed to what? Are you now admitting that the current Parliament does not represent the people? Are you actually arguing that our parliamentary system is broken? Because, if this is where you are going, here at last is one thing on which we are agreed. Politicians are not elder statesmen, worldly wise and heavily invested in the prosperity of the nation. They are instead driven by narrow interests – some would say self-interest – and rarely possess the nouse to grasp that there are some things which the ordinarily bovine British people will not simply ignore.

And biggest among them is our precious illusion of democracy. Ask the Lib Dems how they fared after Nick Clegg’s broken promise on tuition fees. Ask the Tories how presenting the hopelessly out-of-her-depth Theresa May as ‘strong and stable’ worked out for them. The electorate may be the lumpen masses, slow and thick, but they can see through this flimsy bullshit and know when they are being played. A ‘People’s parliament’ with no election, no recall and no accountability to the voting public? This is, unironically, the EU in miniature. Once again the solution to damaged democracy is to break it some more.

And who would lead this politburo? Obviously Jeremy Corbyn is desperate to plant his arse on the other side of the aisle, but his desperation shows as he has tried to frame his long-awaited desire to leave the EU as, variously, a ‘Tory Brexit, a ‘cliff-edge Brexit’ and yesterday a ‘bankers Brexit’. What?? As Daniel Hannan reminded him: “Remain was backed by every big corporate, every big bank, every party leader, the church, the civil service, NGOs, celebs - the entire Establishment. Does Jezza really think we’re going to fall for the idea that Brexit is elitist?”

The principle reason for the Brexit vote wasn’t immigration, it wasn’t NHS funding, it wasn’t even the elbowing out of the national story of the British people themselves. It was the root cause of all of these things: governance we can’t control. Hate policing, the no-platforming of unapproved speakers, the relentlessly negative coverage of national pride, the promotion of values at odds with most ordinary citizens; these are all manifestations of that overarching arrogance. The idea that replacing an albeit marginally elected government with one that has no such mandate is an effrontery bordering on tyranny.

How Anna Soubry THINKS she looks...

In the past, unsavoury ends awaited those who usurped power and tyrants have fared poorly. The traditional British have huge reserves of patience, but that patience is near-exhausted and the time has come for these rogue parliamentarians to be reminded who they are supposed to work for. And while British uprisings have tended be somewhat subdued, with violence rare, not everybody wants a bloodless solution to this attempted coup. This coalition of the treacherous had better back down or be prepared to face the consequences.