No 49 - Not Again? Not another vote?
Dear James,
Hold on a moment. Can this really be true? Is Mrs May’s only new initiative, to do for a fourth time, what’s she’s already done three times before - without success? Is this what tramline thinking amounts to? Just to keep on bludgeoning away until something happens? Surely this is the constitutional equivalent of assault and battery? Except that we have no constitution to stop it. So why is our politics so bankrupt of ideas, leadership and initiative that Mrs May’s decision is seen as anything more than a desperate last gasp of a dying government?
Until yesterday I had been enjoying the lull in the Brexit process. The analgesic of the EU’s October 31st extension seemed to be working. For six weeks we had been basking in the unreality of normality. The Brexit fever had left us and we were in remission. Everything had been in slow motion and even the early summer sunshine had come out to make it seem all so wonderful. This is how life used to be. This how it should be.
Except that it was all a dream. For six weeks our two major parties have been playing the charade of talking ‘in good faith’ about finding a compromise solution which would get Mrs May’s Withdrawal Bill through parliament. Both sides have bent over backwards to show their good intentions in order to maintain the fiction of their particular indivisibilities. But as long as the parties refuse to face the facts of their own internal divisions, our politics will soon erupt once more into its full blown awfulness. We are no nearer a cure. The problems remain.
James, your party and Labour are living in the past, pretending that your old values are still relevant to everyone in each of your parties. You cannot admit that, whether we like it or not, Europe is now the crunch point for the nation. The blockage in parliament is due to the fact that your party values do not reflect this. Many of your members are being whipped against their own dispositions. The Tories continue to represent the nostalgia of its ageing grass roots membership and Labour continues to fight for its out dated dream of a socialist utopia. With this fixation on party loyalty the national interest is being ignored at best and trashed at worst.
What is the national interest? Its fundamental assumption used to be the increase in national wealth as represented by the growth of GDP. The Remainers still stick to this assumption. They point to the dramatic fall in GDP from almost 3% in 2015 to under 1.5% today. Even though we’re not out of the EU yet sterling has fallen against the Euro by 12% since the 2016 referendum. And every Brexit scenario since then has shown that the nation will be poorer than if we stayed in the EU. And even Labour is not immune from this analysis. Last week the NIESR offered the first independent assessment of the economic impact for the UK of a customs union as preferred by Labour in the current negotiations. It concludes that it would deliver an annual £80 billion hit to our national income and leave people an average of £800 worse off, reduce the Treasury’s tax revenue by £26 billion and cut money available for public services by £13 billion.
The truth is that thinking and facts have been replaced by attitudes. An attitude is a baked-in set of values that is no longer susceptible to change because it is essentially an emotion wrapped in a simplistic mantra. Once it has become attitude, thinking stops. We all have attitudes, in fact life would be far too complex without them. Even Remainers have attitude but their attitudes are essentially more open to new evidence. The Leavers simply ‘believe’. Blindly.
And it is attitude that is today blocking parliament. Neither party can contemplate division. You are part of this James. You seem unable to do any new thinking and yet you are soon going to have to bite your particular bullet. The Euro elections next week are going to be disastrous for your party and the split may be forced upon you. If the Tory Party splits then it will become largely a Party of the ‘almost far Right’. This may skewer Farage’s new Brexit party but will alienate a sections of your own party. They will then have to make a decision about where to go next – to Change UK or some other centrist home. On the Labour side, their own Brexiteers will have similar decisions to make. To go to Farage or UKIP or to find some other home. After the splits there we will certainly be in a new political landscape. But at least it will reflect the true divisions in the nation upon which to build a new democracy.
So what does Mrs May expect from a fourth vote? Assuming that she will not be charged with assault and battery, I think she expects it to be her swan song. After that, parliament will remain blocked and the only way around this will be as it has always been. To put the vote back to the people. So please James, break out of your own attitude. Take a risk. Vote for a second vote to re-legitimize parliament. Please!
Kind regards,
BH - Your Concerned Constituent