Across an extraordinary week of events in the British House of Commons, members of Parliament on both sides sought to seize control of the parliamentary agenda from Prime Minister Theresa May’s government. In three days, there was a veritable bonfire of parliamentary and government conventions played out on the floor of the House and, therefore, on television. And the MPs largely succeeded.
As long as they maintain seizure of the parliamentary agenda, Britain is being governed without proper democratic accountability, since the MPs will be passing measures for which they are not constitutionally accountable, against the advice of ministers who are.
That only begins the list of novelties. MPs rebelled not only against their own party’s agenda and election pledges but also against their own votes of a year ago to leave the European Union with or without an EU-U.K. deal.
May, having seen her own proposal for such a deal defeated twice by huge majorities, now proposes to present it for a third time before Brexit day, which is March 29, 2019, arguably treating the House with contempt. Cabinet ministers and their junior colleagues voted against government policy on issues where they had not been granted a free vote by the whips but will not be required to resign for doing so, as is convention.
There was even dirty work at the crossroads. To the fury of the Tory whips, a “senior Downing Street aide” told several rebellion-minded ministers that they could safely vote against the government on a motion that was ultimately defeated by the narrowest of margins. If the aide retains his post, there will be plausible suspicions that the prime minister was complicit in the defeat of a motion that she herself advocated and supported.
What could possibly have provoked such anarchy?
Even before May’s deal met its second massive defeat, one issue dominated. It has been central to the debate over Britain’s membership of the European Union since the Macmillan government and the early 1960s. And its fingerprints were on the dagger that Attorney General Geoffrey Cox plunged into May’s entire Brexit strategy last week by telling the House of Commons that though the EU-U.K. joint declaration “reduces the risk” that Britain would be held against its will inside EU rules and regulations, he could not say as a lawyer that such a risk didn’t exist.
That issue is sovereignty. It’s a simple idea, though many people have an interest in complicating it. A state is sovereign when it is the final decision-maker in politics. Let’s right away deal with a common confusion: Sovereignty is not power. A sovereign state may occasionally find that its choices are limited and unpalatable — for instance, between raising interest rates and seeing the value of its currency fall, or between fighting a war and surrendering an invaded territory. The point of sovereignty, however, is that it is the state’s own government that makes those decisions rather than some distant imperial capital.
[Also read: British Invasion: The Corbynization of the Democratic Party, and what to do about it]
Those who consider power to be more important than sovereignty argue for “pooled sovereignty,” the idea that a polity uniting several smaller states would be better able to win wars or solve “global” problems than any single state other than a superpower. Whether or not that’s true — sometimes yes, sometimes no — the smaller state in a new federal body no longer makes the decision. It can be outvoted by its “partners.” Pooling sovereignty creates a new sovereign power that may and often will override the aims and objections of its founding states, now provinces.
Consider a homely analogy: A bachelor is a sovereign power. So is a spinster. But a married man or woman enjoys the benefits of pooled sovereignty. The couple is now sovereign, rather than the husband or the wife alone. That’s why men find themselves vacationing in spa hotels or wives at football games.
It’s also why the once-famously truculent British have been restive inside a European Union that makes more and more decisions across the political board on behalf of its member states. And why they eventually rebelled in the 2016 referendum on Brexit and voted to leave.
There’s no great mystery here. Relations based in pooled sovereignty work only when the partners place collective interests above their individual interests, not only on this issue or that issue but across the board. Say, when partners love each other in a marriage, or when individual states develop a new, “higher” loyalty to some post- or transnational entity such as the EU.
As several distinguished British Europhiles have lamented, notably the late Roy Jenkins, most peoples in Europe have not developed this sentiment to the point where they feel “European” rather than French, German, Italian, etc. The EU is a polity without a demos. And the British have been more recalcitrant than the rest.
Sovereignty has long been the issue the U.K.’s voters most care about in relation to Europe. At the same time, it’s been the issue that governments and politicians don’t want to talk about. It’s almost as if they fear that the mention of it would madden the people like a fierce cordial. But most Brits were quite sober in the 1960s and 1970s when they didn’t see why they should yield sovereignty to a new European federation when their own self-governing democracy had helped win the war against fascism, dismantled an empire relatively peacefully, and was delivering modest prosperity in a welfare state.
[Daniel Hannan: Parliament goes chicken on Brexit]
Their governments, worried about the country’s sluggish economy and impressed by Western Europe’s faster growth rates, took a gloomier view. They applied to join the European Economic Community to revive the U.K. economy by subjecting it to a “cold bath of competition.” Realizing the patriotic temperament of the voters, however, they flat-out denied that sovereignty was seriously at stake in doing so. And they won the 1975 referendum.
Three things then happened: Europe stopped growing in the stagflation of the 1970s; Margaret Thatcher gave the U.K. economy the shot in the arm that Europe had failed to do; and the British began to notice the creeping erosion of sovereignty under ambitious, integrationist EU treaties such as Maastricht, Nice, and Lisbon.
Unlike any other European country, Britain always had a significant percentage of its voters who wanted to leave the EU. Increasingly, the facts seemed to be on their side. Their numbers grew perceptibly in the new century, until political reality finally forced David Cameron to hold a referendum on EU membership.
As it developed, the referendum campaign soon became a battle between Remainers, who stressed that Brexit would be economically disastrous for Britain, and Leavers, who hoped it would regain the U.K.’s lost sovereignty. Most other issues were subsumed into these two choices. Remainers simply avoided the sovereignty issue as best they could after a perfunctory effort to deny it really mattered. Leavers concentrated on it heavily, with slogans such as “take back control.”
Both sides acted sensibly from an electoral standpoint. But sovereignty was a more powerful electoral issue than claims of future prosperity. Post-election polls showed that 53 percent of voters gave it as their reason for voting leave, the largest support for any single explanation.
The victory for Brexit was a shock to everyone, and it produced an upsurge of indignant anger on the defeated side, which, in turn, led to a search for explanations. Critics of the result soon talked in terms of xenophobia, racism, voter ignorance, nostalgia of various kinds including imperial nostalgia, and the lack of concern among the old for young people and their futures. What was interesting to me was that these explanations were immediately picked up outside Britain, some even crossing the Atlantic, apparently by Concorde.
Writing in the New York Times Magazine, Ian Buruma described a visit to his old friend, Sir Noel Malcolm, the historian and Hobbes expert, in Oxford:
“The Brexit vote, [Malcolm] maintained, had little to do with globalization or immigration or working-class people feeling left behind by the elites. It was primarily a matter of democratic principle.
“Malcolm seemed to think that Brexit voters, including former industrial workers in Britain’s rust-belt cities, were moved by the same high-minded principles that had made him a convinced Brexiteer. I had my doubts.”
Sir Malcolm responded civilly in Standpoint magazine that opinion polls, one based on 12,000 respondents, showed that voters themselves gave the explanation he had offered. What evidence did Buruma have for his skepticism?
Political wisdom was not the preserve of any social class but was spread through society. I threw in my 2 cents’ worth in Quadrant magazine, asking if industrial workers feared low-wage competition from Polish immigrants under EU rules, as Buruma speculated, might not lawyers, bureaucrats, and politicians fear the loss of high-salaried opportunities across Europe after Brexit? And if they did, would that weaken the force of their arguments for Remain?
Whatever Buruma eventually felt, his arguments continued to flourish in the heated post-referendum debate on Brexit. Undeterred by the failure of their predictions of economic catastrophe as a result of the referendum vote, Remainers have largely rerun what was known as “project fear” one more time. And again, it hasn’t really worked. Economic forecasts of that order are too speculative to be wholly persuasive. And recently, the governor of the Bank of England has sharply cut its negative forecasts of a “no-deal” Brexit in half. Whatever the reason, public opinion moved only slightly, and tentatively, in a Remain direction.
More interestingly, in debate after debate online and in the media, Remainers making a cost-benefit analysis of Brexit or “no-deal” Brexit attach no value whatever to living in an independent, self-governing democracy. Sometimes they never even mention it; other times they dismiss it with such arguments as, “No one voted to be poorer.” Yet, when opinion polls asked that question about Brexit, a significant number of respondents said they were indeed ready to sacrifice some wealth for freedom and democracy. Among them was Michael Caine, who said he’d rather be a poor freeman than a rich slave. Apparently, the voters are more high-minded than the politicians. Or, perhaps, the politicians simply have a lower estimate of voters’ morality and patriotism than seems justified by the evidence.
May’s Brexit strategy certainly seems to be rooted in this unflattering and ignoble Remain calculation of what the British want. Though she repeatedly proclaims her determination to deliver the Brexit the people voted for, her withdrawal agreement would keep Britain inside the EU’s tariffs and rules indefinitely so that EU-U.K. trade be as “frictionless” as possible. Oh, and yes, no deal would be worse than a bad deal. That is undoubtedly the private opinion of most MPs in this Remainer Parliament, as recent debates have illustrated.
Yet, as the shape of these calculations became clearer, public opinion, particularly Tory opinion, seemingly moved in an opposite direction. “No-deal” Brexit began to rise in the polls as a preferred option. A quarterly meeting of May’s senior Tory activists voted five-to-one for no deal over May’s deal. And when push came to shove in Parliament last week, May’s deal failed because her attorney general, who undoubtedly wanted to help save her withdrawal agreement, had to concede that it posed a real threat to the country’s sovereignty.
But May’s defeat had not vanquished the threat; after all, Parliament was still in session. It embarked the next day on its carnival of misrule. And it’s clear that hostility to national sovereignty was the motive that provoked it.
How do we account for the significance of sovereignty in the Brexit debate? There’s no need to explain why voters support it. It’s simple common sense that ordinary people should want to preserve a system of national democracy that enables them to exercise some control over government.
But how do we explain the Remainers’ and, more generally, the establishment’s deep hostility to sovereignty? What can account for cabinet ministers and ambitious junior ministers blithely kicking over the despatch box on which both the constitution and their ambitions rest? Indeed, passion on the Remain and establishment side is certainly no less than among Leavers and “populists” — and proving a good deal more destructive to democratic and parliamentary norms. Maybe the answer is an obvious one: another sovereignty.
To be sure, there are less significant motives. Some people just drift into a casual Europeanism because their jobs and lives take them to Brussels or Paris or wherever EU institutions and their camp-followers gather. Others think easy access to homes and vacations in Europe is more important than the system of government under which they live. Still more take their cues from the regnant cultural groupthink of media and academia.
But a conscious transfer of loyalty and allegiance from Britain to the EU seems to be the strongest and most plausible explanation. Perhaps it, too, is where most of the drifters end up.
Hard-line Remainers have switched more consciously to a European political identity over a British one. They see themselves as the vanguard of a new European patriotism that has yet to spread deeply into any one country, but which has taken root in their political and bureaucratic classes.
Some might see Europe, with its democratic deficit, as a more attractive political structure since it gives people such as them, civil servants, lobbyists, corporate executives, and the like, more power than they enjoy at Westminster. Others might be victims of the so-called neo-imperial nostalgia mindset, a desire among some Remainers to regain their lost great-power status via the rise of a European superpower. As Enoch Powell disparagingly explained it: “We were big once; we want to be big again.” Still more might contrast the parochial character of their own society with the putatively more sophisticated and richer cultures of France and Germany.
Whatever the reason, they devote to Europe the emotions that most people reserve for their native land. This Europeanism is what George Orwell, in his essay “Notes on Nationalism” described as “a transferred nationalism,” and against which he warned:
“But for an intellectual, transference has an important function which I have already mentioned shortly in connection with Chesterton. It makes it possible for him to be much more nationalistic — more vulgar, more silly, more malignant, more dishonest — than he could ever be on behalf of his native country, or any unit of which he had real knowledge.”
The description fits some of the parliamentary Remainers all too well.
Even while sovereignty is driving both sides, only the Leavers can admit it. America has a stake in which sovereignty wins, as one element of Europeanism has always been anti-Americanism. In the U.K., this emerges as hostility to the special relationship, which is seen as an anarchic hindrance to Britain’s natural future as “part of Europe.”
Remainers can’t politically concede these new allegiances, their desire to overturn a democratic verdict they’d pledged to support because they prefer European nationalism over British patriotism. But that’s undoubtedly what many feel. And why they rebelled against democracy last week.
John O’Sullivan is an editor-at-large of National Review and president of the Danube Institute in Budapest.
