Last Thursday, Sette - one of the Corriere della Sera’s weekly supplements - published an article by Beppe Severgnini, a journalist who lived in London in the nineties working for the Economist. Having spent the previous weekend in the UK visiting friends and former colleagues he came to the conclusion that ‘Brexit è uno psicodramma. È piombato sulla nazione più stabile d’Europa e l’ha trasformata in un manicomio democratico’ [Brexit is a psychodrama. It pounced on Europe’s most stable country and turned it into a democratic loony-bin].
The Brexit mindset was exemplified last Friday: Brexit Direct Action planned major disruptions to the nation’s road network as a protest against the March 29th leaving date's being postponed. The Mirror reported that ‘One driver taking part said: “We can and will bring the country to its knees”. ’ In other words, I don’t care how much inconvenience I cause to others, because all that matters is what I want. Few people took part and the effect on traffic was negligible.
In contrast, around a million people took part in the People’s Vote march in London the following day, my younger daughter and her son - on the right in the photo - amongst them.
Rather than seeking to inconvenience others, or force their opinions on them, they simply asked that the country should be given the opportunity to accept or reject Theresa May’s Brexit deal or, alternatively, rescind article 50. When the Commons rejected her deal by a crushing majority in January the Prime Minister brought it back for another vote on the 13th March. Once again it failed to pass. However, rather than accepting defeat she was planning to bring it before the House a third time if the proposal hadn’t been ruled unconstitutional by the Speaker. Despite this, she has rejected suggestions that the UK should vote in a second referendum, saying that the public has already made its decision. One rule for you, another for me.
Most political commentators consider the majority of MPs voted to remain in the EU in the 2016 referendum. The same commentators believe it highly unlikely that a motion to rescind article 50 would command a majority in Parliament. MPs of leave-voting constituencies, frightened that they would lose their seats if they supported revoking Brexit, put their own interests in front of their country's. Brexit is also supported by the USA, Russia and China. Any measures that weaken the EU are in their economic interest: it would be much easier to impose advantageous trading conditions on individual European states than it is on a trading bloc of over 512 million people. And, finally, Brexit is in the interests of the very wealthy, opening the possibility of deregulating financial institutions and watering down the employment rights enjoyed by workers under current European legislation. For everyone else Brexit is a disaster inflicted by a misinformed 27.55 percentage of the British population* not only on their fellow countrymen but on themselves as well. So it's easy to see why Beppe Severgnini thinks the inmates are running the asylum. In reality, of course, they are simply being manipulated by their warders: foreign governments promoting their countries' economic interests, and rational but utterly immoral British plutocrats.
*Although 52% of those who voted in the referendum opted to leave the European Union, only 37% of the total electorate did so. Minors, who are going to have to live with the consequences long after the majority of those who voted Leave are dead, had no say in the decision. Assuming they like their elders are 'people', the Will of the People was decided by just 27.55% of the UK's total population. In the Scottish and Welsh devolution referenda in 1979 as well as a majority 'yes' vote, a 40% majority of the electorate was needed for parliament to implement the devolution legislation. In Scotland, on a 64% turnout, 33% of the electorate voted for devolution while 31% voted against. The government did not proceed with devolution even though a majority had voted for it. In Italy the result of a legislative referendum is only valid if at least a majority of all eligible voters go to the polling station and cast their ballot. If this quorum is not met, the referendum is invalid. A case can be made for saying that an Italian referendum does express the will of its people, to a lesser extent the same holds true of the 1979 devolution referenda. But, not I think, for the Uk wide one held in June 216.
A final reflection: enacting 'the will of the people' is not a moral imperative: in the 1933 general election in Germany the Nazis won 43.9 percent of the vote and with their coalition partner, the German National People's Party obtained a working majority in the Reichstag. One assumes the 'will of the people' didn't include demanding the deaths of fifteen million armed servicemen and women and forty-five million civilians. Ordinary people suffered; big business made a fortune. Does something ring a bell?
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