The government is neglecting its highest responsibility—Remainers are entitled to ask how on earth this happened

It is said that a majority of members of parliament want the UK to remain in the EU. They can make that happen quite simply. Chaos on 29th March can be avoided by extending the period of negotiation. The notification of the UK’s intention to withdraw from the EU can be withdrawn at any time. Why don’t they do it?

For those of us condemned to watch the strange goings-on in the House of Commons, it is a deep mystery. We all know that liberal democratic politics is its own mind-world, its own team-game, but we the people have the right to intervene occasionally and to ask for some sort of an explanation of what is going on.

When the whole future of the country is at stake, say under a threat of war or as now, our right is also a duty. We may make a valiant effort to stay calm, but we cannot allow things to carry on as they are.

We immediately discount the possibility that members of parliament are showing loyalty to the prime minister or the leader of the opposition. The votes in parliament have in effect been free votes. And the two political leaders are puzzling figures, strangely isolated, incapable of leading anyone anywhere.

The prime minister is set on her lonely and obsessive path of giving effect to what she calls the “will of the people,” even if the rest of us have not the slightest idea what the will of the people now is, given all that has happened, and all that we have learned, since June 2016.

The leader of the opposition is practising something that might be called unleading, that is to say, not sharing any particular policy in the matter with anyone, even with those who might normally be expected to follow in his wake.

The public debate has also been unusual. British politics in the past was haunted at different times by problems that involved ideas. The ambiguities of imperialism, the perennial problem of Ireland, pacifism in the First World War, the general strike of 1926, and, in the 1930’s, the temptation of Soviet communism and the clash of ideologies in the Spanish Civil War. They were times when an unusual intellectual seriousness found its way into the pragmatic and deeply untheoretical normality of British politics.

We are increasingly bad at discussing big ideas collectively. The debate about our future in the EU has been an extreme instance of that. The nature of liberal democratic politics has changed in recent years. The full cases for leaving or remaining in the EU have never been set out. Very local political argument has swamped what is really a problem of global politics.

There are those who believe that liberal democratic politics is in a state of terminal decline—not only institutionally, but also substantively. The old relative certainties of the rule of law, checks and balances, public opinion, and periodic elections are not working well, and have lost implicit respect. They have worked very badly in relation to Brexit, an immensely complicated problem of politics and law.

The referendum of June 2016 was unusual, perhaps unique, in the practice of constitutional referendums across the world, in that it asked an abstract question, not seeking approval of a legally formulated government proposal. This has meant that the ensuing public debate has been formless.

The government has not enlightened public opinion with analyses of the implications of the alternatives. The thinking of think tanks has been dismissed as parti pris. Public debate has been religious in a bad sense. The dogmatic assertion of articles of faith with crude intolerance of opposing arguments, reflecting the new tragic ethos of public debate on social media. Above all, the full weight of the case for remaining in the EU has never been deployed.

Since the end of the British Empire, Britain has not found how to place itself in a world that directly and unavoidably determines its survival and prosperity, a place that we cannot safely occupy in isolation, but which we can choose to share with our near and very close neighbours in Europe.

The highest responsibility of a British government is the survival and prosperity of the British people, a duty that goes far beyond everyday politics. It surely cannot be a wise course for our government to undertake obscure international obligations that will lead, in a first phase, to our more or less powerless dependence on the EU, and, in a second phase, to our becoming a minor economic colony of some economic great power or powers, and, in a third phase, to the possible disuniting of the United Kingdom itself.

It is the job of parliament to change the course set by government when it is a course that threatens our ultimate national interests.

 

Philip Allott is Professor Emeritus of International Public Law at Cambridge and was the Legal Counsellor in the British Permanent Representation to the European Communities at the time of UK accession. His most recent book is Eutopia: New Philosophy and New Law for a Troubled World, first published to mark the 500th anniversary of Thomas More’s Utopia