No.48 - Take a Holiday James – See the Bigger Picture!
Dear James,
You will not have noticed but I have been away. An African wedding. A safari in Zambia and a bit of lake dwelling in Malawi. You should try it. Or at least try something similar because a break from the Westminster hothouse may just allow you stand back and think about bigger things than being the dutiful servant to a failed government. From your most recent e-mail to those of us who write to you, I can see that you are stuck in a mixture of blind loyalty to Mrs May and a futuristic fantasy about Britain having an independent trade policy if we leave. You are trapped in 2016 James. You need to get way. Get some fresh air, acquire some new perspectives. Because 2016 is a distant land and you seem to be afraid to open your eyes to the new realities of 2019.
The results of last Thursday's local elections should have helped. It was your party’s worst performance for 25 years. I would have thought that this was enough to stimulate new thinking. Yet despite the new facts staring you in the face, Conservative Central Office continued to programme you with the same old lines. Yesterday Matt Hancock, depressed, fumbling, and only semi-coherent, said on the radio that the local elections showed that ‘the people just wanted us to get on with delivering Brexit’. The sheer effrontery of such statements merely shows up the absence of any new thinking in the Tory Party. There are no new plans, no new strategy, no new tactics. Just the same old tramline thinking that brought us to this mess in the first place. Hancock's assertion was pure propaganda and another example of why voters distrust politicians. It was clear he didn’t believe his own rhetoric. It was so much garbage James and he knew it. He knows the nation has changed but dare not face the facts. The majority now know they were hoodwinked in 2016 and it is now the hoodwinkers who are doing everything in their power to hang on to the narrow victory they won in 2016.
But Mrs May and her followers have always been very bad at facing facts. Since 2016 they have claimed to know the will of the people – which translates for her as the 17.1m leavers. What she ignored were the other 48%. This week that 48% made its voice heard when the Lib Dems won 700 seats in last week’s elections. Many others went to the Greens, Change UK and smaller independents. That is possibly in excess of 1000 seats going to Remain voting parties.
On returning to the UK at the weekend, one of the first sounds I heard was of a cuckoo. It got me thinking. When in 2016 the Brexiteers told the nation that leaving the EU would be a piece of cake, they were guilty of one of the greatest political deceptions of our times and the subsequent three years have proved this. For a decision involving such a massive dislocation of political and economic relationships grown over 45 years, it was madness to expose this to the whims of individuals and especially with such fantastical promises of riches to come. But Cameron was panicked by the internal civil war of your party. His desperate decision has led to the present disaster. No responsible leader would have subjected his nation to such a gamble. It is a measure of his weakness and the manic noise of the Brexiteers that he succumbed.
So if you stand back a bit you will see that the device of a referendum was like a cuckoo laying its eggs in the painfully developed nest of our representative democracy. It took a thousand years to reach the principle that every four years each voter decides to hand over his or her judgement to a representative to vote according to his or her judgment on their behalf for a fixed period of time. A referendum breaks this bond by offering a by-pass to this fundamental principle. Parliament has been mugged by the desperate use of this alien device by David Cameron. That’s why parliament is fighting back against this usurper of its powers. The referendum was the cuckoo’s egg that has now delivered its grossly over-sized chick into Westminster politics. Parliament, that patient builder of our democratic home, has been invaded by this alien bird. So when you say you want to deliver what the British people voted for in 2016, you are abandoning the very principle upon which your position as an MP is based. One day we will need a Commission of Enquiry into the question of referenda but for the moment the only way to deal with this malign creature is to kick it out of the nest by introducing another cuckoo. A second referendum. Following that there should be a national agreement to use referenda only under a carefully calculated list of conditions and always with a confirmatory referendum to follow. The nation will never again want to go through what this crazy bird has delivered unto its erstwhile hosts.
As it is, by sticking to your unchanged position, you are now prolonging the agony. We now have to face the charade of the Tory-Labour ‘negotiation’ which will end in failure. In the unlikely event that these two parties agree a final deal, it has an almost zero chance of getting through parliament. In essence parliament is fighting back against the cuckoo in its midst. So take a holiday James. With more perspective you might expand your vision and find that bigger picture. Your government does not know what the population of 2019 wants but it has the means to find out. For God’s sake break out of your rhetorical straightjacket and think for the nation, not just the Tory Party. After all the damage that your party has done to our country, surely it is not not too much to ask to put the vote back to the people?
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent