Brexit has pretty much taken over political life in this Country at the moment and it is set to continue doing for some time.
The most regrettable part of all of it is the division that the whole process has caused. I am sure that if any of us were to stop, stand still for just a moment and reflect upon how we really feel about other people – whether they voted Leave or Remain, as soon as politics is taken out of the equation, we like all of them pretty much the same.
As regular readers will know, I have been blogging about the Brexit process pretty much non-stop for a number of weeks now.
I make no apology for continuing to hold the genuine conviction that the best future for the UK and all of it’s People will be experienced as a Sovereign Nation and standing independent of Europe on our own.
I also understand why people have and do reach other conclusions too and accept that if I held precisely the same experience of life and the understanding that they do, my views would almost certainly be the very same.
The reason for being here and writing today however isn’t about Brexit itself, but about the issues for democracy upon which the Brexit process has become embroiled and underpinned. Issues which are actually not new, but have been forced into daylight by the behaviour of our Politicians over the European Referendum, the ongoing debate over what will happen after 29th March 2019, and what now seems like the eternity in between.
Whilst hiding in plain sight, Politics in the UK has been broken for a very long time.
In fact, the downward spiral has been in play since at least the 1980’s when Margaret Thatcher was PM, and has probably been in motion since long before that time.
People become Politicians in this Country for as many worthy but also non-worthy reasons. But the way that the Political System now works, with a near-monopoly status of a triumvirate of Political Parties holding sway over the gain or loss of Parliamentary Seats, it is the people at the top of the Parties themselves which now hold the real power over Policy in this Country, and not each and every MP working collectively, as it always should be.
The system corrupts entrants just as soon as they have been elected. They are greeted with the choice of becoming subservient to the will of the politicians who lead them if they want to progress, thereby selling out all thought of genuine representation of the people who elected them.
It has simply become a numbers game. Those who lead the Parties are in charge of everything that we do and it is a majority-sum game which itself gives the lie to the idea that we are now living in a genuine democracy.
In simple terms, those who can win the Party, run the Country.
All good until the point that a major decision is tossed back to the Electorate in the form of a Referendum, bucking the long-term trend of autocracy running our Parliament in all but name. Bewildering for those who have become complacent with their place within a broken system that feeds itself on ensuring that the status quo is fully maintained.
In a system that has increasingly worked because there has been a top to bottom absence of genuine leadership skill, the moment arrived in 2016 when the UK suddenly required real leadership. But no real leadership was actually there. There was no good leader available and ready to lead.
Be under no illusion, the crisis that we are all experiencing now began in earnest the very moment that an MP who represents all that is wrong with this broken system found herself achieving the dream of making it into No.10.
From that point the decisions were only ever going to be about maintaining the ‘existing’ system. For that to happen, everything that came after had to be favourable to what we now call ‘Remain’.
Yet under the cloud of considerable democratic intervention which was the European Referendum, the writing was from that point on the wall.
Whilst what appears to have been blunder after blunder and opportunity missed after opportunity missed seems to easy for this Parliament to blame upon the People’s decision to instruct the Government to deliver Brexit, the truth is much darker. It may now be the real reason why the UK could instead of capitalising fully from Brexit as it should have done, inadvertently be about to experience what will feel like a considerable fall.
The sickness and condition of British Politics exists because the political classes at all levels of Government are now made up in the majority by very ambitious people who put self-interest, furthering their own opportunities and being seen to have ‘glory’ before any recognition of what their positions and responsibilities were created for.
In Parliament, Members at all levels are now putting their own aims first, being disingenuous in painting themselves as the equivalent as the shining knights riding to the UK’s rescue from an out-of-control Brexit, when the cause of the very problems they are telling us they are equipped to solve are of their own making, not of the People who Elected them, despite the proposition of a second referendum which is by the very nature of this action, the clear Statement that we are now being told.
That Parliament tossed this decision affecting all our futures out to the Public and now plans to rescind upon the obligation to them which then followed, using whatever method that it can, has simply removed all value from the democratic process.
In an already politically disenfranchised Country, this is now making tangible the foundations upon which an alternative to this disrespectful treatment of the Public en masse could very realistically stand.
Now before you get carried away and think I’m simply setting up the suggestion that a Corbyn-led Government is now imminent, whilst that in some respects could be true, its manifestation because of everything that is happening, could actually be a catalyst to something much more profound, which sweeps away the corrupt and pyrrhic forms of democracy that we are used to, including the political parties as we know them, and opens up a very different kind of door.
Yes, the self-interest in Parliament has now reached such levels, that consensus is possible no more.
And this means that if groups of MP’s cannot work together in the majority to take the decisions that each and every one of them was elected for, thereby making the Parties they represent completely defunct, we must surely be in the position where the responsibility will fall on an individual to break the deadlock. Not only with Brexit, but with just about every policy where lack of consensus has led to damaging forms of compromise which never hurt the people making the decisions, but make life very difficult for the people they never consider, at cost to everyone and everything and a whole lot more besides.
We can only hope that if it happens, this will not become the UK’s Trump moment.
But if our MP’s continue with this unbridled attack on the little that is left of our democracy, they will soon have zero legitimacy and not be left in the position to decide.
History tells us that such an option manifested could be quite chilling.
But if such a thing as a worthy dictator existed, compared to the current shower in the majority sitting across Parliament giving the lie to our democracy as it currently stands, it is quite possible that the People of this Country might not actually mind.
Adam Tugwell 