Lords have mercy in Brexistential Breakdowns

All has not been quiet aboard the good ship Brexittania in recent days, especially not since Theresa May announced a timeline to the triggering of Article 50 (on April Fool’s day, no less). You see, it turns out that repeatedly stressing the importance of Parliamentary Sovereignty during campaigning gives Parliament the impression that it gets to have a say in things, and consequently Parliament started to ask Mrs. May if they were actually going to get a say in things. May responded by telling them no, mumbled something about a “Royal prerogative” and then went back to repeating “Brexit means Brexit” over and over again, brushing their concerns aside and letting Chancellor of the Exchequer Philip Johnson take much of the shit for warning about the effect of Brexit on the economy. In the background, during the time frame between the referendum result and the globally monumental event that was me getting off my arse to write this entry, a lawsuit was making its way through the courts to determine whether or not Parliament actually had any right to a say in the matter, or whether Theresa May could in fact just do what she wanted, when she wanted, how she wanted.

The High Court ruled that Parliament must get to vote on the triggering of Article 50, and a significant number of the population promptly shit itself into fits of apoplexy. I can’t give you an exact number here, but if I had to ballpark it I’d say around 52%.

This is a significant ruling for several reasons, chiefest amongst these is that it basically says that Parliament was right, it has a legal right to vote on legislating to trigger Article 50 and so Theresa May can’t simply damn the consequences and give the finger to Jean-Claude Juncker by herself, the other 649 MPs have to tell her she’s allowed to do first (well, a majority of them, at least). This is literally Parliamentary Sovereignty, one of the crutches upon which the argument to Leave the EU rested; the dread spectre of the European Courts being able to cast its insidious black magic and override domestic laws is a fear that’s easily played upon, and was very much the bass player in the Leave campaign’s “Reasons to Leave the EU” supergroup (joined by “£350 million for the NHS” on vocals, “control of our borders” on guitar and guest starring “7 million Turks ready to swarm the UK” on drums, who appeared courtesy of UKIP Records). The idea that where national and EU laws conflict the EU law automatically prevails is one that’s simple and flexible enough to twist into any narrative, from minute and seemingly trivial things like the materials you’re allowed to put in pillows through health and safety practices in the workplace to the obviously serious and significant stuff like “don’t execute prisoners” and how bendy your bananas can be, it’s astonishingly easy to paint the EU as some giant bureaucratic Lovecraftian Elder God, its meddling ethereal tentacles coiling around every aspect of your daily life and changing everything about the country you love. The EU has basically been painted like this since 1972, when the UK first joined what was then the EEC, though the finer details only really started being filled in once Boris Johnson became a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph and just started making shit up.

However, the idea that EU law trumps what may have been British law since the 1700s is actually a pretty reasonable one, as it’s basically “if you want to join our club, here’s our rules”, and that’s not a bad thing at all when it guarantees things like the materials in the things we wear and sleep under won’t be toxic to us, the electronics we buy won’t be prone to exploding thanks to shoddy construction or cheap wiring, the cars we drive won’t fall apart when we’re on our way to work at jobs we’re allowed to have time away from, and we’re basically not going to be imprisoned because we happen to believe in a different god than the majority of the country we’re in. “We want the things we buy from you to meet this standard” is an absolutely understandable and acceptable position for an economic union of countries to hold and enforce on other member states, and it’s one of the greatest failings of… Well, I suppose “the left” in general, I guess, that the positive aspects of the EU and our continued membership were not portrayed better to the general population.

I can also accept that another failing of the left is properly addressing people’s fears of immigration, and the warping of the EU’s “freedom of movement” principle to fuel this narrative is, again, obscenely easy to do and consequently has been done frequently over the years; the argument that “we’re full” is a potent one that takes hold especially easily in island nations, whilst the corresponding emigration figures tend to go unmentioned, presumably because those that would mention it have already left to live in Spain. The vague confluence of media, politicians, activists and hippy stoners like myself that I’m lumping together in one amorphous mass and calling “the left” has done a terrible job of pointing out that maybe our housing situation being so fucked up right now is Thatcher’s legacy and not the fault of migrants from other EU countries coming over here for both our jobs and our benefits, and allowed UKIP and similar right-leaning politics and attitudes to flourish in the traditionally left-leaning working class areas. That anger and resentment towards the EU has been invoked and warped time and time again throughout the years, reaching orgiastic fury in the lead-up to the referendum, and exploding ferociously once the result came in. Parliamentary Sovereignty had been asserted, we’d taken back control, we could make our own laws.

And the High Court agrees.

The problem many Leavers have with that is that the majority of MPs were in favour of remaining in the EU, and consequently their wet dreams of a throbbing huge and hard Brexit may now not reach their climax, as a significant majority of MPs - by far more than the 326 needed to secure a majority vote - are pro-Remain and would likely make negotiating a hard Brexit basically impossible. Instead of just rushing blindly to the negotiating table come the end of March the Government now has to lay out its plans to Parliament, who then get to debate and vote upon them, which could massively delay triggering Article 50 and actually leaving the EU, as well as outright refusing to accept to pass any of the demands a hard Brexit requires (such as complete withdrawal from the single market). Consequently, upon the announcement of the High Court’s ruling we were thrust into the ironic situation of seeing people who’d campaigned for Parliamentary Sovereignty from the EU now furious that British judges in British courts had ruled in favour of Parliament exercising its sovereignty, and having those same people who for months had been vocal with their opinions that upset Remain voters simply accept that they’d lost and move on with things now outright refusing to accept that they’d lost and instead announcing their intentions to appeal the decision in the Supreme Court. It should surprise nobody that the side who warned a few days before the result that a 48-52 win for remain would demand a second referendum - and even prepared a petition calling for another go ahead of time when polls showed they were likely to lose - yet considers those calling for a second referendum now “traitors” to be somewhat full of fucking hypocrites, but there’s another dramatic irony we can wring from this predicament. If the Supreme Court rules in agreement with the High Court (which they presumably will, as the whole fucking point of Parliament is to be a check on the powers of the Government and its leader) then there is one last court the Government can appeal to, namely the European Court of Justice.

We are in a situation where the Government could end up appealing to the EU courts to rule that it can ignore its own Parliament in order to leave the EU.

At this point, I think we should all take a moment to sit back and let that sink in.

Seriously, just take a moment to think about it, really think deeply and reflect on that possibility, on the likelihood of that situation. The Supreme Court is highly likely to vote in agreement with the High Court, not because it has to or traditionally does, but because one of the basic and fundamental principles of our democracy is that the leader of the Government cannot amend, remove or enact legislation without the consent of Parliament, and that is exactly what the High Court found in its ruling. By our laws she is required to seek the passage of an act through Parliament in order to formally trigger Article 50 and begin the process of leaving the EU, and it’s highly unlikely that the Supreme Court will interpret our laws differently in this case. This all leads us to the situation described above, the situation I’m about to paint just slightly differently in my repetition because it’s still so utterly fucking stupid that it bears repeating: we could soon be in the position where the people who campaigned to leave the EU on the basis of taking back control of our courts, our laws and our Parliament from the European Court of Justice will soon be appealing to that very same European Court because they want to ignore our laws and our Parliament so they can begin the process of leaving the European Union.

And that court will, presumably, also tell them to get fucked, as their laws state that the triggering of Article 50 by any country has to be done via the constitutional process of the country in question, which our courts have just ruled to be Parliamentary.

Now that we’ve savoured the irony of the Government’s predicament like a fine wine that nicely compliments a meat-based dish, I’d like to discuss one last aspect of this situation that has similar ironic overtones, though on a far more personal scale and one which entails a brief history lesson as I’m about to talk about the House of Lords.

Back when “the divine right of Kings” was a thing, in a time where the landed gentry literally owned the land and most people weren’t subjects so much as they were subjugated, the king would regularly meet in Westminster with a Parliament of various Lords of the realm and discuss the matters and issues of the day. The signing of the Magna Carta basically started the slow, centuries long process of shifting power from the king and granting it to other people, gradually leading to Parliament being split into two distinct houses, with the House of Commons being initially composed of merchants and knights, whilst the Lords remained mostly hereditary peers, landowners and clergymen. Power has shifted between these three to varying degrees through the centuries, with the Commons gradually becoming more powerful, mostly at the expense of the King (specifically Charles I), though also taking some from the Lords through the centuries as well. The House of Lords, too, has not been immune to the passage of time and has also undergone reforms through the ages, most notably in the 1950s with the passage of the Life Peerages Act, which allowed women to be granted peerages and a seat in the House, with further changes aimed at reducing the amount of hereditary peers in the House and preventing Lords from passing on their seats to family members taking place in 1999.

Nowadays, to become a Lord a committee has to recommend you to the Prime Minister, who then recommends you to the Queen, who then grants you your new title and seat. This means that the House of Lords isn’t just composed of the upper classes, people from all walks of life have been granted peerages and not all of them have a party affiliation, so a Conservative majority in the House of Commons doesn’t translate to an equivalent majority in the House of Lords. This means that, crucially, the House of Lords isn’t beholden to any one party, and is under no obligation to follow the party whip; the Lords can (and frequently does) refuse to pass an act and send it back to the Commons for further amendment. The House of Lords acts as another check on the power of the Government of the day, and though it’s always at risk from manipulation via a party simply “flooding” the house by granting peerages to people the party knows will vote in line with them, generally the Lords is a fairly decent and robust temper on the excesses of Parliament as it remains composed of people who have better experience and understanding of (what I can’t help but think of as) “the outside world” since they’re not primarily career politicians. They remain the final hurdle any act authorising the triggering of Article 50 has to clear in order to start the Brexit process proper.

And the irony is that whilst I, personally, believe so deeply in the fundamental principles of our democracy - even though FPTP is broken as shit - that I should be morally opposed to a house of unelected peers having the power to reject an act passed by a house of elected representatives, I find that I’m instead hoping that the Lords do everything in their fucking power to bitchslap the taste of Brexit from the mouths of the Commons, because they’re the only people in any position of power with the big brass ones to say “no, this is an act of pure folly, and we’re not going to allow it to pass”.

I’ve been wrestling with this moral quandary for years, as the Lords have in recent times been really good at tempering the excesses of governments, mainly thanks to their very nature of being not-politicians and not-subject to the whims of the electorate, and I should fundamentally oppose that lack of democratic accountability. Yet I don’t, and now more than ever I appreciate the fact that they don’t have to tow the party line nor live under the threat of election into office every five years. They’re beholden to nobody but the country as a whole, and as such can consider issues on a much grander scope than a Government with a specific mandate to deliver.

As the Brexit bus approaches the cliff, the House of Lords might be the ones who’ll slam on the brakes, and I’m totally okay with that, even though I shouldn’t be.

BONG!

Of course, Leave MPs weren’t the only people unhappy with the High Court ruling, tax-dodging non-dom media overlords were also somewhat disappointed with the announcement that Parliament had a right to set British laws after all, so inevitably…

The Daily Telegraph’s parent company, Telegraph Media Group, is owned by brothers Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, who currently live in Monaco.

You all know who’s responsible for this.

Interestingly, The Sun used the same picture of litigant Gina Miller as its sister paper The Times…

…only The Sun chose to slightly tweak the levels of the image so that her skin appears darker, and zoomed in close enough to crop out the poppy she’s wearing. It’s subtle and devious shit like this that lets them twist the narrative so much and so easily, as it’s harder to paint this woman as an enemy of our democracy when she’s wearing a symbol of memorial for those who gave their lives to protect it.

Other papers, however, tend to avoid subtlety like it’s a Polish family living four doors down, and don’t bother masking their xenophobia because they know nobody’s able to do shit about it…

The Daily Mail’s parent company, Daily Mail and General Trust, is owned by Jonathan Harmsworth, 4th Viscount Rothermere, who has non-dom tax exempt status despite living in Wiltshire and runs his company through a complex system of off-shore accounts and trusts. It should always be remembered that The Daily Mail supported the blackshirts - the British Union of Fascists - during WWII and there’s an infamous picture of its owner at the time meeting Hitler in 1934, because it’s hard to say they’ve moved on much from their right-leaning past in recent years.

The parent company of The Daily Express, who are very much the racist old Grandfather of the newspaper world, is owned by Dirty Des Richard Desmond, who actually lives in this country and pays his taxes. However, he’s also basically the Josef Goebbels of UKIP thanks to the vile rhetoric the Express routinely prints and his donating obscene amounts of money to the party, so, y’know… Godwin’s shits and roundabouts…

Let’s stop and consider for a moment the invective printed on the front pages of the nation’s papers, and recall that it’s less than five months since Labour MP Jo Cox was shot and stabbed to death by a man who gave his name to the court as “death to traitors, freedom for Britain”. If, by some slim chance, you’re still wondering where the hatred and xenophobia that fuelled the phenomenal spike in hate crimes seen in the months since the referendum came from, the evidence is on the shelves of shops nationwide, blatant in bold print. And there is no recourse, at least none effective: press regulator IPSO recently ruled that Kelvin MacKenzie was “entitled to express” the views published in his Sun column where he criticised Channel 4 for allowing Fatima Manji to cover the Nice terror attacks, despite complaints from Manji, news company ITN, and over 1,700 members of the public. IPSO board member and assistant editor at The Sun Trevor Kavanagh wrote in his own column (which I’m not linking to, because fuck The Sun) that Manji “knew precisely what she was doing”, and that “she singled herself out by dressing as she did”.

BONG!

Hysteria is so close to a peak that Labour MP Yvette Cooper wrote an opinion piece on HuffPost calling for calm over the High Court ruling, in which she states “To hear some Government Ministers talk, you’d think Parliament was about to vote to overturn the referendum result. It won’t. Most MPs will not vote against Article 50. Nor is there any serious chance that the House of Lords will block Article 50 - as Labour in the Lords has already made clear.”

This is because “We’ve had a referendum, people voted in good faith. In the interests of democracy, that result has to be respected.”

And I have to ask: Why?

Because is it really in the best interests of democracy to respect the result of a referendum that was provably, undeniably not conducted in good faith, but was instead based on outright lies and rhetoric designed to whip up exactly the sort of hysteria you’re now calling for an end to? I will scream “remember £350 million on a bus” until the day I die, because it’s the most egregious example of the myriad lies that were told by the side that won by a margin of 4%, and the very idea that a result born of those lies has to be respected is surely a toxic and dangerous one to our democracy? Why should we have to respect the decision that a bare majority has reached when that majority was lied to and misinformed on an almost-industrial scale, and can we really say that the result was reached on the backs of people acting and voting “in good faith”?

I could more easily accept the result of the referendum had the main reasons for leaving the EU not been outright lies, and had the people parroting those lies been held culpable for their actions.

BONG!

A little bit of Twitter madness now, as the easily-pronounceable @hrtbps posted this very obviously sarcastic and piss-taking tweet:

Predictably, some people missed the joke somewhat and took it at face value, despite further revelations that hrtbps had “taken Article 50 out of the binder and shredded it. It now goes straight from 49 to 51” and had “switched the labels on the “hard Brexit” and “soft Brexit” pigeonholes” in Parliament’s mail room. Idiots plus Twitter equals comedy gold, and an inevitable appearance from Louise Mensch who just can’t pass up an opportunity to make herself look like a complete tit on social media, it seems.

Seriously, that whole thing’s fucking ridiculous, you should really check it out.

BONG!

Speaking of things that are fucking ridiculous, Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell called on the BBC to start playing the national anthem daily, just before BBC1 switches to BBC News 24. Here’s how the BBC responded:

And just in case you can’t view it overseas, have a slightly lower resolution reupload:

Nicely done, Newsnight.

Nicely done…

BONG!

And on that note I’m going to end this entry because I’ve got a huge backlog of comments to get through and I’m having a pretty severe reaction to the neuropathic medication I’m taking to treat my back problem, which makes sitting at my desk to type incredibly painful.

Yours sincerely,
An enemy of the people.

Last updated November 07, 2016