No 23 – Frustrating, Infuriating, Exhilarating to "Speechless-Angry-Optimistic".
Dear James,
As one of my friends, and one your constituents, said to me yesterday evening, today, will be “frustrating-infuriating-exhilarating" and it will leave us "speechless-angry-optimistic". Take your pick. From the outside, the world in the Westminster village seems to have gone mad. And this madness is infecting the whole of our society. Once this is all over, we must make sure that such a situation never happens again.
The intricacies of parliamentary procedure combined with the kaleidoscopic positioning and re-positioning of the countless factions within parliament leave us all confused. Why, after a lifetime of leaving parliament to make decisions for us, are we all thrown into chaos and anxiety when this once trusted organisation can no longer give us this result? The ultimate reason is that the notion of referendum has crashed into our normal form of democracy and created a car wreck with enormous consequences for us all. Once the current shambles has been resolved, this must never be allowed to happen again. Unfortunately, the only way in my view to resolve the current crisis is precisely to do the opposite of what I have just recommended - to have another referendum on the same terms as the first referendum. I was out on the streets in Bury St Edmunds at the weekend and many people said that they had changed their minds since voting for leave. No system of democracy that I know of disallows people from changing their minds? Referenda - if we are to use them at all - should be be based on a much more careful notion of the nature of such plebiscites e.g that they are secondary to any decision made by parliament and that they are merely advisory devices to help parliament, as the ultimate source of our sovereignty, to make decisions; that they are a kind of super-opinion poll that may be taken every five or ten years to gauge public opinion on the basis of full disclosure of whatever facts pertain to the vote in question; and finally, that they should reserved for the Biggest Questions and therefore a full 66.66% majority should be required for any government action to be set in motion. But all this is for the future. What about today?
Today is Amendment Day. We are all getting very excited. There will be 14 amendments for the Speaker to choose from. The voting will be this evening. At the moment the House of Commons is like a padded cell in which various crazed inmates slog it out towards exhaustion. Amongst these inmates you have Mrs May (and yourself?) still refusing to bury her long dead deal. She is backed by Liam Fox who continues to claim that the government is carrying out the’ very clear instructions of the British people in June 2016’, thus continuing to ignore the 48% who voted to remain and refusing to countenance the possibility that the British people have moved on since then. Next to him the ERG is still screaming that, despite the claims of people who know - the CEOs of Airbus and JLR for example, a No Deal Brexit would do no damage to the economy. At the other extreme Mr Corbyn, seems to be in a permanent trance, dreaming of an election to deliver his fantasy land, socialist utopia. In the midst of all this a group of the sane is attempting to inject common sense into the proceedings. Dominic Grieve’s amendment will require parliament to essentially look at and exhaust all competing options in the next six weeks. Yvette Cooper’s, amendment will remove a ’No Deal’ from the table and extend Article 50 for up to 9 months. It would seem to me that by the time that Parliament has exhausted every possible solution to our current crisis, there will be one way one way forward. It is to let the people vote again. The second vote may still go for the Leave side but if it does, I for one, will accept that the nation has made its ultimate choice on the basis of all the new information now available. And I will accept that choice.
To sum up, please spare us this endless, time-wasting, self-defeating refusal by Mrs May to see the obvious with its associated confusion, pain and anxiety. The only solution to the nation’s quagmire has been staring everyone in the face for many months now. Let the people choose!
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent