Last week, the speaker of the House of Commons ripped up the rulebook and changed procedure because, he claimed, not allowing MPs to vote for a ceasefire in Gaza would endanger them and their families. In other words, Parliament altered its rules under the threat of physical violence — something that would recently have been unthinkable in Britain.
I had been planning to write about the continuing global retreat of democracy. I was going to argue that 2024, the year in which more ballots are cast than ever before, is, in fact, seeing a further swing to dictatorship. I was going to condemn the disgusting cowardice of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ordered a prison hit in the manner of some mobster. I was going to describe how, in Pakistan, where Imran Khan’s party managed to win despite having been effectively proscribed, a returning officer resigned because of the massive fraud he was required to carry out against Khan, and an MP refused to take up his seat on the grounds that Khan’s candidate was the genuine winner. But the danger is closer to home than I had imagined. When mobs intimidate politicians, the Mother of Parliaments has crossed a line.
I should explain that, in the British tradition, the speaker must be neutral. He is the referee, the ultimate arbiter of parliamentary procedure. Almost anything else might be forgiven in a speaker: drunkenness, lechery, and stupidity. But not bias. When the last speaker, John Bercow, began to bend the rules in an attempt to frustrate Brexit, it felt for a moment as if the very survival of parliamentary democracy was in the balance. MPs on all sides drew back, and Bercow was replaced with Lindsay Hoyle, a traditional, old-fashioned speaker, who mainly concerned himself with things like making MPs wear ties in the chamber. Then, last week, everything went wrong.
MPs were supposed to be voting on a motion by the left-wing Scottish National Party, which uncomplicatedly blamed Israel for the tragedy in Gaza. Because the previous Labor leader, Jeremy Corbyn, had allowed antisemitism to grow in his party, its present leader, Keir Starmer, knew that the slightest hint of bias against Jews would be electorally toxic. He therefore convinced the speaker to break all the rules and allow a vote on a Labor motion that, while still demanding that Israel cease military operations, did at least also make the same demand of Hamas. The speaker later justified his extraordinary violation of precedent by claiming he was “very concerned about the security of members, their families, and the people involved.”
Whether or not that was true, it was plausible. The previous week, pro-Palestinian protesters had targeted a Conservative MP in his home. Three years ago, another Tory MP, Sir David Amess, was murdered at a constituency meeting by an Islamist extremist. Even as MPs deliberated last week, a crowd outside Parliament was chanting, “From the river to the sea.”
Threats against elected representatives are not new. Nor, tragically, is political assassination. What is new is the readiness to change your rules so as to accommodate those making the threats. This is what multiculturalism has led to in practice.
Physical coercion is incompatible with democracy. Locking up your opponents on a pretext, having them bumped off in prison, or threatening their families at home — these things are all manifestations of the same authoritarian impulse. Instead of Russia and Pakistan becoming more like Britain, Britain is moving, ever so slowly, in the direction of Russia and Pakistan.
What we see in all three countries is the same as what we see in the United States, namely, a determination to win at all costs, even if doing so means tearing down the democratic norms that we expect to protect us.
“We’re no better than some of these Third World countries around the world,” Eric Trump said. “We’re literally trying to imprison political opponents.” Quite so. This is from the man who told a rally, “Maybe we should change ‘lock her up’ to ‘lock him [Joe Biden] up.’” You see where it leads?
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As John Dryden put it in the 17th century, when the price for failure in politics was higher still:
This side today, and that tomorrow burns;
So all are God-a’mighties in their turns.
A measure of violence in politics, a readiness to burn, if not always your opponents, at least the rules that stand in your way, was normal for most of history and is normal in much of the world today. Why assume that our own country and our era are any different?
