Interesting times

These are interesting times. The images of people marching up Pall Mall towards Buckingham Palace will have caused some particular concern in Whitehall and may have a bearing on what follows if only to stiffen some Conservative MPs’ spines in the coming weeks.Of course, all the talk of this being a coup is absolute nonsense. Johnson is operating within the established conventions but doing so to the absolute limit. What he is doing will result in the number of days being lost over September and October being higher than the average for the last 10 years. The lying about why this is being done is an insult to our intelligence and a reduction in parliament’s sitting time is exactly the opposite of what should be done. Instead it should have been working through the summer recess to sort this out. The proper response to Johnson is to seek to defeat him politically. The nationwide demonstrations over the coming weeks may have a real influence on that. The time for court cases is over.

It is useful to reflect on how we got to the UK still being at the default position of leaving the EU with no deal over three years after the referendum. A common heard complaint is that parliament has messed around with this since 2016 and so for MPs to complain about democracy is entirely cynical. This rewrites history. Parliament's opportunity to debate and scrutinise the deal negotiated by May was delayed by her until January this year.

However, the actions of government and parliament have left a lot to be desired. MPs need to recognise that they borrow from their constituents the powers that they have. Many of them were re-elected in 2017 on manifestoes recognising the result of the 2016 referendum and committing to carrying out. Their actions and words since have not always shown that they are interested in fulfilling this commitment. Rather than close down parliament and stopping it from functioning, the electorate should have the opportunity through a General Election to make their MPs accountable for their actions.

In February 2017 the Commons voted to allow the government to initiate Article 50. In doing so it threw away the power handed to it by the judgement in the Miller case in January 2017 that prohibited the government from triggering Article 50 without an Act of Parliament. Rather than amending the Act brought forward by government to ensure that parliament had oversight of the process, MPs gave carte blanche to the government. Only 114 MPs voted against.

As a result, May was able to pursue her strategy of engaging with the EU without any idea that what she was negotiating would be approved by parliament. Even with a small majority in the Commons this looked foolhardy. The general election of 2017 saw the electorate make the judgement that the Conservative Party should not operate in government with a majority. This did not lead to May changing her approach. Instead she fills Arlene Foster's mouth with gold whilst at the same time UK negotiators were suggesting the backstop as a way of accommodating May's red lines.

MPs then voted against the WA three times over a period of two months, the third time in mid-March. During this period, we had the bizarre spectacle of a government being defeated when it whipped its MPs to vote against its own amendment only to win the vote unintentionally because opposition MPs voted in favour of it.

From there the Commons had control over matters that it had blithely let go over two years before, only for it to let the opportunity to slip through its fingers yet again with its failure to coalesce around any single way forward by defeating all of the options in the indicative votes at the end of March. The Commons also voted against the parliamentary supremacy proposal, thereby handing the initiative back to a government that was in no position to take it.

So, the opportunity was wasted, and the UK remains on track to leaving the EU without a deal. People suggest that this is what we voted for. It isn't. In 2016 the referendum question was "should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?" In other words, we were being asked for the principle on which the government should proceed. We weren't being presented with a process of how that was to be achieved.

At this current juncture Labour is in danger of making the errors it did during the referendum campaign on Scottish independence: being too closely identified with a liberal-centrist position that side lines a socialist programme for the country. This is one of the problems of Corbyn’s election as leader in that it has excited middle-class radicals who identify Greens and (still!) Liberal Democrats as “people like us” with whom “we can do business” and it has been exacerbated by Labour’s pivot towards remain.

Centralists are not the compromise option on this occasion. They have taken a mainly economic cost-benefit analysis of the question of EU membership. The objections they present to leaving the EU with no deal are proxies for saying that the UK should not leave at all. This position ignores not only the referendum result but that their economic situation is not replicated for many people across the country. A sensible course for Labour is to continue to stand by the referendum result and leave with a newly negotiated deal that leaves the UK in a close relationship with the EU but outside of it. The close nature of the referendum result points to this even though it would represent difficulties for parts of Labour’s programme, e.g. nationalising the railways.

But a core part of democratic socialism is being democratic. The conduct of the present parliament should not be allowed to continue without the electorate having an opportunity to renew the mandate of their MPs to act on their behalf. — Sean Fernyhough

Protesters against the prorogation of Parliament walk towards the Buckingham Palace in London (Photo: REUTERS/Peter Nicholls)