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.
