Liberal anti-Democrats are saying b******s to democracy

“The public have voted and I do think it’s seriously disrespectful and politically utterly counterproductive to say ‘Sorry, guys, you’ve got it wrong, we’re going to try again.’ I don’t think we can do that.”

That is a robust statement of democratic principles, denouncing the proposal for a second EU referendum. Who said it? It sounds like Nigel, batting them over the pavilion at one of his rallies. Is that who uttered those admirable sentiments in defence of the primacy of the electorate’s verdict at the ballot box?

Actually, no. It was Vince Cable, speaking at the Liberal Democrat party conference in September 2016 in opposition to Tim Farron’s policy of making the public vote again on Brexit, in the hope it would come up with the correct answer second time around.

You may detect certain nuances of difference between that downright declaration of respect for the public will and Vince Cable’s remarks on the most recent Andrew Marr programme. After Marr had refused to read aloud the title of the Liberal Democrat manifesto for the European elections, Cable himself spelled it out: “B******s to Brexit.”

Asked by Marr if he felt embarrassed by the coarseness of his main election slogan, Cable replied: “I’m not in the least bit embarrassed. It made it absolutely clear that we’re about stopping Brexit.” He added: “It’s absolutely clear that no Brexit is where we should be going. The Liberal Democrats are campaigning in these elections to stop Brexit.”

So, it took just 32 months to convert a politician from being an upholder of democracy to leader of a campaign to defy the result of the largest democratic exercise in UK history. It is an additional irony that Vince Cable is the leader of the only major political party on mainland Britain with the term “Democrat” in its name.

Today, Cable is the most aggressive and shameless exponent of reversing Brexit, in other words of trashing the democratically expressed will of 17.4 million voters. Daily he ratchets up his rhetoric promoting the anti-democratic course of action he previously denounced as “seriously disrespectful” of the electorate.

He has been joined by many others among the entitled denizens of Westminster. They have become emboldened by the example of the rogue Speaker of the House of Commons and the mutual encouragement of colleagues, across party divides, similarly contemptuous of the mug punters of the electorate.

Do you remember the hypocritical assurances that MPs, in the wake of the referendum result, fell over one another to utter, promising to respect the verdict of the voters? In that same chastened mood, 498 MPs voted to trigger Article 50. See, they seemed to be saying, even though we dislike the outcome we are honouring the principle that, in the British political system, the ballot box is paramount.

It was all hypocrisy. Soon they were vigorously engaged in sabotaging anything that resembled a genuine Brexit. At first they operated by subterfuge: the Prime Minister herself, as she and Olly Robbins constructed a toxic treaty that would reduce Britain to de facto EU membership, but without representation, continued with a straight face to describe this cynical subversion of the popular will as “delivering Brexit”.

She is still sticking to that, as to all her other fatuous mantras, but bolder spirits have broken free of subterfuge and openly, shamelessly, proclaimed their contempt for democracy. This is a bigger sea change, a more dramatic watershed in history than Brexit itself. It represents the rolling back of an evolutionary continuum in constitutional development that can be traced back, in its embryonic stages, as far as Magna Carta.

The attempt to award supreme power to around 500 MPs, at the expense of 17.4 million voters, is the most reactionary enterprise since before 1832. It is totally at odds with every current and flow of British constitutional history. It is an impudent project to replace democracy with oligarchy and it has been recognized as such by its intended victims who are now fully alerted and resolved to thwart it.

That means dismantling the legacy parties: both Tories and Labour have long departed from their core principles and are now mechanisms of oligarchic rule and entitlement. They will be destroyed simply by desertion, by emptying them of supporters and leaving them as lifeless husks.

Democracy is not a particularly good political system. It was designed to govern small city states and is ill-suited to 21^st-century mass society. As long as seventy years ago the percipient Austrian political scientist Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn warned that democracy inevitably led to tyranny – a metamorphosis we are witnessing today. Churchill damned democracy with faint praise as the “least worst” system of government.

No intelligent person should rule out the possibility of replacing it, or at least modifying it, in favour of a system that more effectively protects freedom. But the notion of ditching democracy to reinstate what Disraeli denounced as a “Venetian Oligarchy” – the Whig heritage of Cable’s party – and restoring to parliamentarians the extravagant privileges and power they enjoyed prior to the Reform Act of 1832 is an extravagant provocation.

The delusion of fanatical Remainers that if they cry “B******s to Brexit!” with sufficient swagger and shamelessness they will convince the public it is an acceptable position can only, in Cable’s now disowned words, be “politically utterly counterproductive”.

It is not hyperbole to term this attempt to reverse Britain’s democratic system both sinister and wicked. Once democracy is replaced by oligarchy no citizen is safe. The “liberals” who have warned so stridently for years against “fascism” – even as they progressively suppressed freedom of speech and thought (cf. any university campus) – are now incautiously trying to abolish democracy. It is as serious as that. “B******s to Brexit” means “B******s to the Ballot Box” and ultimately “B******s to Democracy”.

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