Revolting!: How the Establishment are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid Of

Similar ‘democratic’ arguments for overthrowing the referendum result were advanced by all the other voices arguing against the Brexit vote, many of whom appeared to believe that the granting of democratic rights means you keep people voting until they arrive at the right result.

The Brexit-bashers all seemed keen to draw parallels between the Leave campaign and the Trump crusade in the States. Yet it was their refusal to accept the referendum outcome that more closely chimed with the pre-election attitude of Donald ‘I’ll respect the result – if I win’ Trump.

There were the handful of backers who funded a legal bid to get judges to rule that, regardless of the ‘advisory’ referendum result, the government could not trigger Brexit without the backing of MPs and lords in parliament. In true Newspeak-style, this stunt was called ‘The People’s Challenge’. Thus the real people’s challenge to the technocratic political elite, as seen in the referendum result, was threatened by a self-interested ‘People’s Challenge’ and dressed up in the finery of the Royal Courts of Justice. In November 2016, three high court judges ruled in the legal claimants’ favour, and declared that the government must have the approval of parliament before it could trigger Article 50 and begin the Brexit process. In effect the Lord Chief Justice Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, the Master of the Rolls Sir Terence Etherton and Lord Justice Sales took it upon themselves to shelve the democratic decision of the electorate. The people might have spoken, but three law lords had told them to shush and let their betters talk among themselves. This was a microcosm of the trend for unelected bodies to assume authority over the demos.

Then there was the apparently four-million-strong online petition calling on parliament to hold another referendum that would require a larger margin of victory (a petition initially launched before the referendum by a Leaver who feared a narrow Remain win, which suggests that faith in popular democracy is not necessarily stronger on the other side). When this demand was debated in parliament, as petitions which garner more than 100,000 signatures must be, Tim Farron MP, leader of the pro-EU Liberal Democrats, said (seemingly with a straight face), ‘We demand that the British people should have their say on the final deal in a referendum!’56 (#litres_trial_promo) Never mind that the people had just had their say in a referendum; that could not be final, since too many people had misspoken and said ‘Leave!’ Not for the first time it might occur to some that the Lib Dems have a strange idea of the meaning of liberal democracy.

In similar vein was the letter signed by around a thousand top lawyers, demanding that parliament must decide (i.e., vote for Remain). As the Queen’s Counsel who organised this initiative, Philip Kolvin QC, explained, ‘In times of crisis people often turn to lawyers to ask them how we should behave in society.’57 (#litres_trial_promo) Of course we do. The notion that the opinions of 1,000 lawyers on ‘how we should behave in society’ could outweigh those of 17.4 million voters mostly without law degrees summed up the some-are-more-equal-than-others essence of the backlash against Brexit. Even though this top legal advice was unusually offered free of charge, the price to pay for a free society accepting such guidance would be far too high.

In parliament, meanwhile, a cross-party alliance – including Labour MPs such as leadership contender Owen Smith and Tory lords such as Baroness Patience Wheatcroft – was busily conjuring up constitutional and ‘democratic’ arguments as to why they should act to ignore, overthrow or otherwise seek to reverse the referendum result.

Leading Labour MP David Lammy wrote that ‘we cannot usher in rule by plebiscite which unleashes the “wisdom” of resentment and prejudice reminiscent of 1930s Europe’.58 (#litres_trial_promo) Note the inverted commas around the word wisdom when applied to the masses. For the likes of Lammy, it appeared, overturning the EU referendum result was now on a par with defending democracy against fascism.

This was a sure sign of what democracy has come to mean: a hollowed-out, narrowly defined system of rule which denies a meaningful say to the demos – the people – from whom the idea takes its name, and concentrates control in the hands of an elite that looks more like the privileged oligarchy of ancient Athens. Where the Greeks practised direct democracy, we have long been told that representative democracy is better suited to modern times. Now it seems we are left with an increasingly unrepresentative form of democracy – and when people revolt against the orders of the elite, the response is to try to make our democracy less representative yet.

Those arguing in the language of constitutional law to delay or reverse Brexit boasted impressive legal and academic credentials. Yet in the language of real democracy, their arguments against accepting the referendum result were bogus. They constituted a legalistic mask to disguise the authoritarian intent.

The referendum was in no way merely an ‘advisory’ measure, to be ignored or accepted at parliament’s pleasure. It was legislated for by parliament in a 2015 Act, passed with overwhelming support, which made no mention of a referendum being advisory, and conveyed the clear understanding that the government would give effect to the result. If there was any doubt about that, during the referendum campaign the Conservative government which commanded a majority of MPs sent out a propaganda pamphlet to every household, clearly stating the government’s belief (backed by the official opposition parties) that Britain should remain in the UK. This document concluded: ‘This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.’59 (#litres_trial_promo) Nothing advisory or open to interpretation there.

The issue of parliamentary sovereignty became the major smokescreen for attacking democracy. The apparently lofty and learned argument is that the UK parliament is sovereign, so that the government could not act to implement Brexit without gaining the approval of MPs and Lords. Under Britain’s largely unwritten constitution, however, ultimate sovereignty still rests with the sovereign of this constitutional monarchy, exercised through the device of the Crown-in-parliament. The Royal Prerogative gives the government the power to do all manner of things in the name of the Crown, from waging war to signing treaties, without parliamentary approval.

The royal power that the Royal Prerogative grants to a government should be a big problem for anybody seriously concerned about democracy in Britain. It is the main reason why some of us have always favoured abolishing the monarchy. Curiously, however, it had never seemed much of a problem before the Brexit vote to those arguing against accepting the referendum result. Leading Remainers such as ex-New Labour prime minister Tony Blair and his allies certainly never had a problem with using the Royal Prerogative to launch destructive foreign wars while in office. Yet now they suddenly object to its use to pursue Brexit.

Most strikingly, few of the new champions of parliamentary sovereignty appeared in the slightest bit bothered about having that sovereignty overridden via the EU, by both European bureaucrats and British governments, through the previous forty years. It seems that they only became excited about the need to defend parliamentary sovereignty against the people.

These pseudo-democratic arguments were just a device to discredit the referendum which had been a genuine exercise in mass democracy. By August 2016, Labour front-bench MP Barry Gardiner could even accuse the new Tory prime minister Theresa May of acting ‘with the arrogance of a Tudor monarch’ by insisting that she could implement a form of Brexit without a further vote of MPs.60 (#litres_trial_promo) Leaving aside for a moment the fact that Mrs May was a Remain campaigner who did not want Brexit; Mr Gardiner may have studied some different history from me, but I do not recall the well-known Tudor monarch Henry VIII reluctantly breaking with the Church of Rome or beheading two wives and assorted enemies because the people demanded it in a referendum.

These issues highlight bigger problems with British democracy, on both sides of the Brexit debate. For one side, it appears, representative democracy means that MPs should have the right to do as they see fit, regardless of the referendum result, in our increasingly unrepresentative system. For the other side, it seems, the Royal Prerogative gives the government the right and power to do as it pleases – including either implementing or delaying Brexit – not in the name of the people, but of the Crown.

Neither side measures up to the standard of meaningful democratic politics. But however we see these problems, the solution to the ‘democratic deficit’ in the UK cannot be even less democracy. That is what it would mean if we were to allow the elites to undermine or ignore the clearly expressed will of the majority who voted in the EU referendum. (If politicians now claim that 52 per cent of those who voted is not a legitimate mandate, by the way, then the UK has not had a legitimate government in living memory, since no party since the Second World War has ever achieved as many as 50 per cent of the votes cast.)

We need to find new ways to bring British democracy to life and make it mean more. Instead we are faced with a situation where democracy means so little that the Left can join with Tories in looking to the House of Lords to thwart the popular Brexit vote.

The unelected, unaccountable character of the upper chamber ought to be a problem for anybody who believes in democracy, making the Lords prime candidates to be voted into the dustbin of history. Yet that, it seems, is precisely why the unelected peers are considered so well qualified to ‘defend democracy’ against the referendum mob! As Baroness Wheatcroft spelled it out, the House of Lords was better placed to lead a ‘rebellion’ against Brexit because it is unrepresentative and unelected. (The Conservatives, despite winning a majority in the House of Commons in the 2015 general election, had only a minority of 254 peers out of an inflated total of 798 in the Lords, while the openly pro-EU Liberal Democrats, then reduced to a rump of just seven elected MPs, could still boast 105 unelected members swanning about in the House of Lords.)

Baroness Wheatcroft gave the game away when she boasted that, ‘with no constituents to fear’, the Lords would be freer than the Commons to vote against the wishes of the electorate. It is fear of the mass of constituents that drives anti-democrats of every political stripe to seek refuge in the Lords, while claiming to be upholding parliamentary democracy.61 (#litres_trial_promo)

After the American election, the reaction against Trump voters also adopted the bogus language of democracy to disguise its anti-democratic intent.

Almost as soon as the overall result of the 8 November elections became clear, the cry went up that Trump would not be a legitimate occupant of the White House. Film-maker Michael Moore spoke for many top Democrats when he denounced the Donald as ‘an illegitimate president’ who ‘does not have the vote of the people’.62 (#litres_trial_promo)

Anti-Trump protesters angrily pointed out that, while the Republican candidate had won a majority in the electoral college – the system the US uses to elect its president indirectly – Democratic Party candidate Clinton had won a larger share of the popular vote. By the end of November, with late votes still being counted, Clinton had some two million more votes than Trump – about 2 per cent of the total – but the way these votes were distributed between states meant the Republican had easily carried the electoral college by 306 votes to 232.

Within days of the election, a Washington Post-ABC poll found that one in three Democrat voters believed Trump’s win was ‘illegitimate’, with 27 per cent of them feeling ‘strongly’ about it.63 (#litres_trial_promo) Those feelings appeared strongest within the metropolitan strongholds of the Democratic elite, where both their votes and media-focused protests against the result were concentrated.

Those modern tools of passive political activism, the online petitions, quickly began gathering support, calling on the 538 members of the electoral college to go rogue – or act as ‘faithless electors’ – and refuse to endorse president-elect Trump when they congregated on 19 December, even if voters in their state had supported him. The largest petition of this sort on Change.org (http://www.change.org) quickly gathered more than 4.5 million signatures, demanding that the electoral college make Hillary Clinton president because ‘SHE WON THE POPULAR VOTE’. Meanwhile college electors reported being ‘bombarded’ with phone, email and social-media messages calling on them to ignore their electorates’ wishes and vote against Trump. Some Democrat electors themselves admitted to lobbying for their counterparts in the college to vote for ‘Anybody But Trump’ and switch support to a more ‘respectable’ Republican such as Mitt Romney.

As with the anti-Brexit forces in the UK, the anti-Trump protesters were using the language of representative democracy in an instrumental way, to justify their attempt to overturn a result they did not like.

The US electoral college does indeed represent a strange, distorted and undemocratic brand of representative democracy. That is precisely why it was established in the first place – to provide a potential brake on popular sentiments of which the US elites do not approve.

The Founding Fathers who led the American revolution against British rule from 1776 and established the US as an independent republic were fearful of ‘too much’ popular democracy. They created a system of ‘checks and balances’ that could, if necessary, restrain the people in the name of representation. As James Madison wrote, the US system was founded to give the political elite powers to stymie the electorate when people were ‘stimulated by some irregular passion’ to ‘call for measures which they themselves will afterwards be the most ready to lament and condemn’.

The constitutional checks and balances were put in place to check the power of the people and to counterbalance the will of the majority. The powerful Supreme Court is one arm of this system. Another is the Senate, the upper chamber of Congress which gives two seats to every US state, regardless of population size, and thus enables smaller, rural and generally more conservative states to outvote the big urban centres.

And another elitist arm is the electoral college, through which electors, nominated from each state on the basis of the election result, cast the final vote for the next president. This likewise favours conservative smaller states and also gives a few hundred electors – members of the political establishment appointed by the major parties – the potential to overturn the election result.

The electoral college has never done that, although there have now been five elections where the new president lost the popular vote. The most recent one pre-Trump was in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush became president despite winning fewer votes than Democratic challenger Al Gore. Some researchers claim there was also a sixth occasion, in 1960, when Republican Richard Nixon might have won more votes than iconic Democratic president John F. Kennedy, but the close-run result was left ambiguous by the confusing electoral system in the state of Alabama.

Despite the electoral college’s evident democratic shortcomings, however, there have been few serious attempts to reform it. America’s powerful elites still prefer a system with inbuilt brakes that can prevent popular sentiment running riot.

Yet there was little that was democratic about the sudden upsurge of protests about the US system after the 2016 election. Those happy enough with the electoral college when it delivers results they want were simply furious because it allowed for the election of the despised Donald. Indeed, their demand for 538 members of the electoral college to overturn the votes of 62 million ‘ill-informed’ Trump voters represents a new face of anti-democratic politics in the US and the West.

The sudden outburst against the ‘illegitimate’ election result was really no more democratic than the electoral college itself. Few of those protesting or signing petitions were concerned about the system until it enabled Trump to win. We might recall how, before election day, these were the people outraged by Trump’s suggestion that he might not recognise the result if he did not win.

Yet overnight, leading Democrats would have us believe they were genuine democrats who just wanted to uphold the popular vote. How? By using the undemocratic electoral college to overturn the election result. Their loud talk of Trump being an ‘illegitimate’ president was really a coded attack on the millions of deplorable Americans who cast their ‘illegitimate’ votes for him, rather than being any principled defence of American democracy.

Bill de Blasio, the Democrat mayor of New York city, told CBS it was ‘inconceivable’ that Clinton had been denied the presidency despite winning more votes: ‘It doesn’t make sense. And it’s supposed to be in our constitution: one person, one vote. That’s not what happened here.’64 (#litres_trial_promo) Anybody might have imagined that this system had just been invented to get the Republican candidate elected, rather than being the same one under which every Democratic Party president has entered the White House. Everybody’s vote has never been of equal value under a system designed to restrain democracy in the name of representation. These sudden converts to electoral reform were only objecting now because too many of those persons had cast their one vote for Trump.

The same seemed true of the high-level demands for recounts of votes in several key states, supposedly because the polls might have been ‘hacked’ by Russian cyber-terrorists. Can anybody imagine such ‘principled’ protests in defence of American democracy being backed by the establishment if Clinton had been elected?

Endorsing claims that Russia somehow hacked the US election ‘to promote a Trump win’, one liberal blogger announced that ‘the only Constitutional solution available to us is for the electoral college to serve the function that the Framers intended for it, namely to serve as a check on elections gone wrong’.65 (#litres_trial_promo) Thus the radical wing of American liberalism lined up with the most conservative Founding Fathers in their determination to halt the ‘wrong’ election results. What ultimately unites them is contempt for millions of voters whom they cannot comprehend.

Of course, Trump is no champion of American democracy – commentators had fun unearthing his tweets calling for a ‘revolution’ to overthrow Obama’s election win in 2012.66 (#litres_trial_promo) He is an illiberal at heart who poses a potential threat to precious liberties such as freedom of speech.

But the backlash against ‘illegitimate’ Trump voters is a sham defence of democracy that is just another attack on the independence of the demos. Anybody must have the legitimate right to protest against a president they don’t support or to demand genuine democratic reforms. Demanding backroom deals among the political elite to overturn an election result you don’t like, however, is potentially far more dangerous to the future of democracy than a President Trump.

However the arguments have been packaged, there is one underlying message of the backlash against Brexit and Trump: that ‘too much’ democracy is dangerous. The elites do not trust the mass of voters because they believe we are too unintelligent, misinformed and emotional to make the right decisions on important issues. And they do not really trust a lot of politicians either, who they think only win elections by pandering to the base appetites and instincts of the vulgar voters. An anti-democratic prejudice about lying ‘populist’ political demagogues and stupid voters is taking hold across the political and cultural elites on both sides of the Atlantic.

Open debate about borders

The Brexit referendum vote was not a racist backlash but a revolt of the Others. It opened up the opportunity for a new kind of political debate about the future of our society, involving many who had previously been excluded from public life. Instead the reaction from the Clerisy and the political elites was to use it as an argument for even less democracy and openness in future: they want no more simple referendums on big issues, a bigger role for the courts in policing politics, official fact-checkers to sanitise ‘post-truth’ politics by restricting freedom of speech.

But more free speech and democracy, not less, is the best possible way forward, to give us a chance of addressing divided opinions, settling political differences and deciding which way to go. There is no point calling for unity and then demanding silence from dissenting viewpoints on any side. Democracy is about divided opinions and debate as to the way we shape our future.

An open democratic debate, for example, involving all opinions, represents our only chance of resolving a divisive issue such as immigration in UK and Western politics today.

In recent years, the prevailing view in British public life has been that anybody who raises the issue of immigration risks being branded a racist. This has suppressed debate on the question. Those deluded enough to imagine that was the same thing as winning the argument for open borders have had a rude awakening.

The first thing we need to do is clarify the issue through a clash of opinions rather than an exchange of insults. Concerns about immigration in the UK today generally have little in common with old-fashioned send-them-back racism. Instead mass immigration to the UK, especially from Eastern Europe, has become a symbol of the way that many people feel their world has been changed without anybody asking them. They have woken up to find that their communities are disintegrating, their traditional values trashed from on high. Some of their new neighbours may have their own native tongues, but the ones who really seem to speak a foreign language are the UK elites ignoring the UK’s own ‘ghastly people’.

In particular since the New Labour government of the late 1990s, mass immigration to the UK has been encouraged and organised from the top down, but without any public debate about its benefits or costs to society. Indeed any attempt at discussing immigration has been effectively barred as racist. Think of Labour prime minister Gordon Brown, unknowingly recorded dismissing a lifelong Labour voter as ‘some bigoted woman’ because she asked him about Romanian immigration on camera in the 2010 general election campaign.

Britain’s borders have effectively been opened by the state, not as a consequence of governments or experts winning an argument for mass immigration, but instead by avoiding one and going ahead without public consent. In this context the immigration issue has become another symbol of the yawning gap between millions of people and the political establishment, of the absence of democracy and open public debate. You did not need to be a racist to revolt against that state of affairs.

Those who want a more liberal, open society would do better trying to win an argument for one than condemning those who disagree with them as xenophobes and thugs. The fact is that the precondition for any progressive policy on migration is establishing democratic control over borders – and then winning a democratic debate about the need to open them. The alternative of leaving it to the closed world of courts and Euro-commissions can only make matters worse.

Free speech and democratic debate are our best tools to tackle the political and cultural divide in our societies and arrive at some conclusions. Yet we live in a culture of conformism where the motto of the age is You Can’t Say That, ‘offensive’ opinions are frowned upon or banned, and ideas that stray from the straight and increasingly narrow path approved by the Clerisy are ruled out-of-bounds.