Cut down every law in England to stop Brexit
Nick Hubble
Brexit is starting to remind me of high school. In quite a few ways too.
................
At school we studied the film A Man for All Seasons based on the play by Robert Bolt. It’s about Sir Thomas Moore agonising over whether to back Henry VIII’s religious reform/philandering.
My English teacher pointed out how this was an extraordinary display of something called integrity – a wonderful trait. My essay was about how integrity isn’t always such a wonderful thing. Suicide bombers have more integrity than anyone else. Judges are supposed to set their integrity aside in favour of the law and enforce the rules, not what they believe in.
I was a pain in the neck, even then.
The quote below is the relevant bit of the film for Brexit today. William Roper is More’s son-in-law, or pitching to be at the time:
William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!�
Sir Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?�
William Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!�
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!�
Right now, MPs and activists are busy cutting down all the laws of England to stop Brexit. But I worry about what their campaign will leave behind. What would Britain be like if Brexit is stopped? What winds would blow?
Consider what abandoning Brexit would violate.
First they told us the referendum would be binding. “We’ve never had a referendum in the United Kingdom that we’ve not honoured the result of,� said the prime minister.
Then the British voted for Brexit in a referendum with high participation.
Then the prime minister told us no deal would be better than a bad deal.
Then both parties overwhelmingly passed the Withdrawal Act, which specifies that Brexit will soon leave the EU without a deal if a deal is not reached. This is recent law, passed by both parties with strong support.
Then both major parties ran for election on a platform of delivering Brexit. They got overwhelming support from the electorate while the rest of Europe turned to anyone with beef against the EU.
The drama over the speaker of the house allowing an amendment to May’s bill caused uproar recently. Apparently it goes against established conventions.
So, at this point, stopping Brexit goes against the referendum, the terms of the referendum, the law, the prime minister’s statements, political manifestos, the result of the election, parliamentary convention, and even the EU.
That last one will take a bit more explaining.
The modus operandi of establishing the European Union against the will of European people and their pestering referendums has been consistent. If the EU faces opposition from the national electorate it tries two alternative routes. The first is an international treaty with a government directly.
Governments must honour international treaties going forward. It’s much more binding than a democratic decision or a law, which can be changed. And it’s much easier to convince career politicians in charge of a country of the need for a country to join the EU than it is their voters.
This allows the EU to grow and integrate in leaps and bounds against the will of voters. It’s how the EU was built. With international treaties between governments, not by democratic will. Often against democratic will.
However, sometimes the pesky national courts and laws intervene in the process. Sometimes parliaments must be consulted before countries have the authority to delegate their powers to Brussels.
This is where the EU turns to its alternative method. It runs down the clock until the last moment – an artificial deadline it creates by pretending negotiations are somehow tough and therefore slow. Which is odd given the premise that joining the EU is a good thing. So what is there to negotiate about? Unless, of course, parts of EU membership are bad…
After the clock runs down, then the government and the EU present the national parliament with a choice. The EU’s deal or no deal. No amendments, debate, delays or renegotiation. It’s too late. And we’ve been negotiating very hard.
That’s how parliaments and their nations are tricked into integration. Much the same tactic that was used during the financial crisis by bankers, incidentally.
Faced with these same tactics during the Brexit negotiations, Remain campaigners are now seeking to argue against that method. They argue that May’s deal is a false choice. Yet such false choices are the only way the EU managed to come into being in the first place. Arguing against such methods would undermine the EU itself.
Remain campaigners deny the nature of the prime minister’s negotiated deal with the EU, despite the fact that their beloved EU is the one pushing it.
They are trying to change the deal, despite the fact that it is an international agreement between the EU and the UK government. A national parliament can’t just fiddle with an agreement at the last minute. It’s take it or leave it by its very nature.
As an aside, this is what makes the European Parliament’s powers so pathetic. They can’t really mess with what the European Commission comes up with because that is often what the European Commission negotiated with national powers. You can’t fiddle with something that others negotiated between themselves. You can only pass it or oppose it.
If the UK parliament could just amend which parts of past deals with the EU would apply and which wouldn’t, the whole thing wouldn’t make sense. It would make the initial negotiations meaningless.
You can’t just go back and start negotiations again either.
The same goes for Article 50. EU law is clear about the process. Remainers are trying to subvert it. The laws that govern the institution they want to remain in. Irony abounds.
A lack of respect for the nature of the EU is an odd way to go about trying to stay in it.
Back to my main point and the quote. If Brexit is overturned either completely or for all intensive purposes, then why on earth would people believe in political institutions or the law after that?
Why would Brexit voters abide by the law, keep their promises or believe the promises of politicians, respect parliament or its institutions, vote, participate in a referendum, believe in the power of democracy, or perceive Britain as a country? It can’t even leave the EU when every possible institution we respect compels it.
And what would referendum voters do after it becomes obvious that their democratic powers and institutions were taken away from them? Would they start to behave like the French?
Where would anti-EU sentiment in places like Italy turn to if the EU does not allow them to express it by voting and leaving? What would EU opposition look like in the years to come if it couldn’t be part of a democratic process?
The strongest argument against my point is the one I usually make in this situation. I’m mystified why anyone expected anything different to what’s happened.
I’ve been regularly shocked that we’ve even come this close to politicians honouring the referendum, the law, parliamentary convention and political promises. Historically, they don’t care about them much.
The EU, by its nature, is a process, not an institution. That’s why none of the assurances about things like no bailouts, no money printing, no fiscal transfers, no EU army, and fiscal sanity were kept historically. Integration rolls on, no matter what legal limits the EU claims to place on itself. When things get serious, they lie and ignore the rules, as Jean-Claude Junker and Christine Lagarde said openly.
The EU’s integration cannot be stopped from the inside. Only by leaving.
But back to my main point again. If Remain campaigners manage to subvert Brexit, they’ll have destroyed huge chunks of the institutions that keep Britain civil. And they will have undermined the EU itself.
So, “do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then?�
Brexit voters will get their way in the end if they hold their nerve. Within two months, a failed Brexit would also trigger an event that leads to the implosion of the euro and the greatest financial crisis in history.
Because without Brexit, eurosceptic British voters will bother voting at least once more in their lives. Two months after the day we’re supposed to leave the EU, the EU will hold its own elections.
Who do you think British voters will vote for in those elections? What sort of MEPs will they send to Brussels? And what do you think an unexpected eurosceptic wave would do to the balance of power at the European Parliament? It’s already tipping to the likes of Marine Le Pen, Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orban, and plenty of others.
