No. 72 - So the Mask is Off!

Dear James,

So the mask is off. You’ve finally come off the fence. After months of attempting to justify every wriggle and turn in your party’s rapid slide to the right you have chosen to be an unapologetic follower of the party line. Shame on you!

I had always entertained a small hope that you might reveal a few higher principles in your role as MP. That hope has proven to be futile. With your government’s decision to prorogue parliament under patently false pretences you became complicit in the Boris-Cummings plan to block parliament’s scrutiny of the executive in our nation’s most critical crisis since the second world war. That is tantamount to a criminal act. We are a parliamentary democracy which means that all authority derives from parliament and that includes the government’s authority. Since Boris has managed to engineer a minority of -43 for himself, he has shown that any scrap of legitimacy that he might have had has vanished. To make it worse, he was selected by a mere 90,000 Tory members from a turnout of 150,000, and which is, as The Economist pointed out, ”all that remains of a Conservative Party that was once 3m strong.“ His ‘electors’ represented 0.25% of the population, more than half of them over 55 years old, 70% men and 97% white. It makes a mockery of our democratic system especially since Boris, and now you, are pursuing an extreme right agenda against the views of most of the population.

On Tuesday morning, – at the final sitting of parliament before it was politically gagged though legally suspended – the cries of ‘Shame on you!’ must have rung in your ears. Those cries did not do justice to the situation.

Few people trust Boris Johnson any more and for that reason, the normal resort of a government with no authority i.e. to call an immediate election, was rightly seen as more chicanery. Fortunately for our constitutional health, today’s parliament consists of a majority that does not agree with his crazed determination to get us out of the EU by October 31st and, although also asking for an election, parliament has kept the power to determine the date out of his hands.  Boris has lost six out of six of his first votes and he is now in a legal straightjacket that requires him to ask the EU to prolong the exit date, to release private communications of his advisors to clarify the basis of his justifications to prorogue parliament and to reveal the papers behind the leaked Yellowhammer report on the impact of a no deal Brexit (Johnson’s feeble arguments about protecting the confidentiality of civil servants are nonsense). And, finally, for parliament to debate and pass a resolution that a government should respect the rule of law is astonishing in the Mother of Parliaments. But there is the core problem. Boris and Mr Cummings seem not to give a damn about the rule of law. Our ‘Unwritten Constitution’ has always depended on the integrity of individuals within parliament. With Boris Johnson that has now gone.

But for the moment at least Boris has achieved his immediate aim and won five weeks of political quietness and absence of scrutiny, allowing him to grab the headlines. He is held in Mr Cummings’s vice like grip and instruction to ignore criticism, parliamentary votes, and perhaps even legal decisions. Boris’s Ministers have been cut out of the Downing Street decision chain for fear that they will lose their nerve. For the moment Boris and Cummings have possession of 10 Downing Street and therefore command the political heights. We are in the hands of a tiny cabal, lead by a fanatic and his ‘useful’ idiot’ to quote a similar revolutionary of yesteryear, one, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. 

But let’s get one thing straight. The reason for what Boris has called ‘three years of parliamentary dithering’ is that parliament has been doing exactly what parliament was designed to do - to insert wisdom into the democratic process by analysing and debating all the elements of a situation. In a parliamentary democracy, parliament is a buffer to absorb, analyse and, if necessary, modify - on the basis of clear analysis of facts - the enthusiasms and impulses of individual voters. The process is called representative scrutiny. This scrutiny has shown that any Brexit deal would fatally damage existing supply lines and leave the nation poorer than if we stayed in. In other words parliament has been trying to protect the nation from a fall in standards of living, a collapse of international authority and endless years of turmoil as we try to dig ourselves out of the situation created by the Tory Party civil war. Thank god for parliament!

You had your chance James and you fluffed it. But you may or may not be glad to know that I shall persist with my letters to you in the hope that one day you may come back to plead redemption. 

Some hope I know. But I can dream! 

Kind regards,

BH - Your Concerned Constituent