Have the Brexiteers achieved a coup?

The word 'coup' is French and is not often used in English politics, being felt to be an alien beast. We define it as:


1. a sudden, violent, and illegal seizure of power from a government.
"he was overthrown in an army coup"

2.
an instance of successfully achieving something difficult.
"it was a major coup to get such a prestigious contract"

We've not had a case of number 1, but we have had a case of number 2. 

For the first time this week it appeared the opposition forces had seriously entered what appeared to be constructive and cooperative talks about how best to use Parliamentary procedure to stop a no-deal exit from the EU at Halloween. We had been waiting for this sign of working together, it seemed, almost forever. It was a classic situation in which 'there were more of us than them' and yet we could not win the argument. We could not win because we could not unite: could not apparently sink our differences in concentrating on the one principle we had in common, namely resistance to a disorderly Brexit, which seemed the worst possible option in the turmoil of an already messy and dangerous situation for us as a country. In response, the Brexiteers on the far right of Parliament felt the panic of facing what they had never faced before:  the combined will of some very determined people, and realised that there were more of them than the ERG! Their response has been swift (obviously pre-planned, Boris Johnson is not that clever) and decisive and brutal. Do whatever you have to do to stop them! The result is the threat of the prorogation of Parliament.

It is skilful because it leaves just barely enough room to allow them to argue that it is not a coup - debate has not been shut down altogether, as with a total prorogation of Parliament until after Halloween. That would have been too obviously a coup. No, this is simply a rational decision of convenience by a new government, and there will still be 'plenty of time' for the opposition to emerge with a plan of its own and hold the government to account. 

It's hard to know whether to laugh or cry at this stupendous falsehood. Since all the evidence of the past three years is that it takes a month at least for the combined opposition to decide to go to the same toilet, 'plenty of time' would require another three years for them to work out how to get together. Game over. The right wing of the Tory Party is free to self-justify, smile politely and move on. They need only send out their monkey, Jacob Rees-Mogg, to spin the organ grinders' tale of a perfectly rational decision taken as always 'in the best interests of the country.'

1. 
   

This was a pretty smooth coup by any standards. The placard bearers and those who specialise in dressing up like enraged teddy bears will be on parade in big numbers, but unless more than a million of them appear on the streets, as happened at the time of the Iraq War, they will occupy headlines and newscasts and make absolutely no difference. Jeremy Corbyn, who once basked in the adulation of thousands, suddenly looks pretty fragile and lost. Jo Swinson, newly elected to the top job as Liberal Democrat leader and eager to put on her warrior clothes, looks to be flailing against a tennis ball that has already passed her left shoulder. The Change UK group simply does not figure. Where are they now? Nobody bothers to ask Caroline Lucas and her colleague, since they are presumably as usual busy working out what it has to do with the environment before they can speak about anything. (Everything, is the answer.) While Nicola Sturgeon, devoted democrat herself, bangs on about another Scottish referendum, her message very clear as always:  'How can I get my hands on the levers of power? I'm not interested in stopping anybody else from doing it! I just want to know how it's done!' The Welsh wring their hands, and Sinn Féin, usually feisty fighters where Irish interests are concerned, defend their absence with: 'it was a “nonsense” to propose Sinn Féin should be sitting in the House of Commons 'as impotent as the rest of the MPs'. Who would join a club that would have me as a member? 

Are you by any chance feeling the pain as you read this? I sincere hope so. I hope we are all bleeding at the heart, all of us who have watched this unfolding nightmare of Brexit with growing incredulity and a gathering sense of impotence.  

The first thing we have to do is feel it! Everyone is so masterly at denial. 'No, it isn't a disaster, a bit of a setback... There will be less time to implement our plans but we haven't abandoned them... We have several possible options we are discussing...'  And blah, blah, blah, and on they go like the hurdy-gurdy man as if they don't hear their own inanity!  They all sound an awful lot like people who have learned their politics from Jacob Rees Mogg! Like the Chorus in Henry V he advances to centre stage whenever required, to paint a glorious word picture of the way he has assisted the process by which his nation has been carved up and eaten for breakfast, and how we can all go home and feel thoroughly satisfied and in our cups remembered!

It would take a Monty Python, beyond my skill, to explain how utterly dead is the parrot of opposition as a combined, constructive force in Parliament and indeed outside it. As for the official Opposition, their short-comings have been done to death, left to the media to continually wave reality under their noses and say, "But wait a minute - don't keep repeating the same old arguments when its obvious nobody believes them anyway. What are you going to do?" And the answer is always the same - they will do nothing, except wait, and talk, repeat message and wait. 

If anything positive at all can come out of this quagmire, it has to be that we all reflect on the total uselessness of tribal politics when faced with something serious. It's all very well having your own passions in the forefront of everything you do, but your passions may not cut it, when faced with a disaster of mega proportions. Tribal politics is a game, a Saturday night at Christmas kind of affair, in which you determine to trounce cousin George once and for all.  Bang, bang, you're dead! I'm the king of Star Wars Version 38. The scenarios are pre-programmed by the makers:  only a few things are allowed to happen, only a few characters can engage, only a few scripts can be played out.

Human life is too complex for this kind of childishness. In human life, anything can happen, and frequently does! There is no prearranged rule book which says, 'In this situation, do that. For hints and tips go to... " We need to be able to think each step of the way through without preconceived formulae about what works and what doesn't. Every theory is out of date before it leaves the presses. All you can do is hang Karl Marx, bugger Keynes, and to the devil with Milton Friedman. They aren't here! They don't know:  this is not their world, it is ours! We alone can pick a precarious route through it, take responsibility for how things play out. And above all, listen to each other, from whatever background we first emanated. Good theorists enthuse us, liberate our energies, get us involved. But we have to learn to treat them with due caution and be prepared to jettison them as soon as the context no longer seems to fit. This is true of all our other heroes of bygone days. The world is full of dead heros! Great to read about, worth knowing about and listening to. But they can no longer run our lives, tell us how to deal with the now. A hero is one confronted by an entirely unprecedented situation, who deals with it. Like Ben Stokes at the crease during the Second Ashes Test! Who told him what to do? 

Brexit, as people keep saying, has placed us in an unprecedented situation: and they say it as though it's an original idea. I have news for the politicians. 90% of ordinary life is an unprecedented situation! Have you ever tried having your first baby? It has been done before, yes indeed. But YOU YOURSELF have never done it before, that is the point. Not at this particular time and place, and in this particular situation. As a nation shot through with convention, tradition, accepted ways of doing, it caught us up pretty short when we realised that there was no Erskine May to tell us how to proceed over Brexit. Historians in tomes will analyse it all one day, but what we need to learn from history is not how people played it then, but what kinds of qualities were displayed by those who won through. I can tell you now that their chief quality was not 'knowing' or pretending to know, in the unknown situation, but being able to recognise, listen and engage in an entirely unprecedented situation. Tribal politics does not allow this. It always has to fall back on concoctions within the tribe:  on past history, and how things are 'supposed' to be done, about what some guru or other says works, or what worked in 1875. And ultimately on loyal support for the party, the authority, the leader who knows - they claim - what works. 

The qualities of creative individuality, which often issue forth in rank rebellion and unwillingness to toe the line, and which have so often scuppered and enlivened the Labour Party in the past, have been sadly missing in a leader who made his reputation out of it. There are ironies within ironies about Jeremy Corbyn. It seems he can rebel about anything except what his own party tells him! So wedded to party 'democracy', he seems to have felt honour bound to hear, and keep hearing, their wishes and whims to the point of the cruel and passive death of all effective opposition. This is not democracy. This is a craven refusal to use the power you have to read the runes of the time. What the party decided years ago has hamstrung him, leaving him, like Hamlet, alone on the House of Commons stage, figuring the skull of a once-proud Party, unable to do more than ruminate on the tragedy of these times. 

Democracy is not a numbers game. If anybody else tells me it is, I may implode. Look:  what Susie Smith from Chippenham knows about the economics of Brexit would fit on a very small postage stamp. What I know would fit a slightly larger stamp, but not much. I have heard many sane and decent voters civilly admit this, and point out that that that's why we elected this bunch of twittering ninnies! To do the research, find out the really important facts, discuss issues among themselves, avail themselves of expertise that we do not have time or opportunity to probe for ourselves. And react to circumstances as they find them! Which invariably turns out to be the biggest part of the job! 

Democracy is about far larger things than not offending your mates when they elected you back last year. It is a set of principles, not a perpetual spin of the roulette wheel. Once in five years, we count the numbers which has to be done, but only once. And not before we have had a lengthy public debate about everything we care about that we feel matters for our nation at this time. We do this on a broad basis of principle:  what the key issues are for us, and what the forward direction we want to set for the next few years. If circumstances change, we expect those we elect to pivot with them. If an alien appears on Broadstairs beach, do we expect our leaders to say, 'sorry, it's not what we voted to deal with in the party caucus?' I am not here offering a prescription for dictatorship, as I know many people fear, just pointing out that you have to offer to some degree a free hand to those who govern. Yes, knowing they will disappoint us, and that not all will prove trustworthy. Our job as the electorate is to judge the size and shape of the offence, if offence there is. Parliament calls the offender to account. It's an imperfect system, by all that's holy, but look around you. Where is there an unalloyed clear example of something better? We can tinker with our system, change the voting system, spend more time bickering in weekend retreats and so forth. I'm all for improvements where we can. But whatever we do, we will still have to rely on trust and good judgement as the bedrock principles on which we have built human life and society.

What is leadership for, for heaven's sake, if it is not to be able to get on with things that I cannot deal with myself? The one at the front has the best view! He or she cannot keep harking back to what they said at the party conference months ago. He needs to read the runes before him, not the ones somebody saw long ago and far behind him (the very problem that has made this referendum an unqualified disaster for the whole country). This is not to be anti democratic! It is to truly act in the spirit of what is best for the country NOW, including when it makes you really unpopular! Corbyn, sadly, could not be unpopular with his fans, and when his prescription for change based on party democracy failed, he had no alternative to look to. And Boris Johnson, a far less able man, bested him, by having a far bigger streak of ruthlessness. 

Can we survive this disaster? I think so. But let us never forget it!  

What now? One looming scenario is that no combined opposition ploy will succeed, even if it emerges, and that soon after the disorderly exit takes place, a general election will be called, which will be won by the Conservatives on the spurious grounds that they 'kept to the will of the voters at the Referendum.' (Notice how insane this is in reality! It implies support for ongoing maladaptation forever! Telegraph Darwin:  'sorry but survival of fittest repealed - not democratic!') The Alt-Right Tories would not have supported the outcome of the Referendum for ten minutes, had it not suited their own position! 

What will then follow is a long period of social chaos, a plunge of the pound, dips in the economy, job losses, poor people getting poorer,  more anti-welfare legislation,  lip service to climate change measures? Nobody in the ERG will get notably thinner or sell their yachts? The Lib Dems will meanwhile fail to unite the centre ground, other than absorbing the last remnant of Change UK, the Greens will discover that they do not have a chance of raising the profile of climate change in the new Johnson world, where claims galore will be made on entirely business grounds of how the climate is being saved, but where nothing happens if there is no profit in it for the richer industrialists. (But they will tell us it's ok, won't they? Keep drinking your Costa coffee, dear, as the seas rise and the heat burns your bum.) The Scots and in due time the Irish will demand new independence referenda which will be won be the 'leaves'. Boris Johnson will explain how much better off we are without them, and that this is not in any way a breach of the most fundamental principles of the Conservative and Unionist Party! Meanwhile, Donald Trump will fail to get re-elected at the next Presidential election, the American voters having discovered the dark side of populism to their pain. The new Democratic President will shatter Johnson's dreams of an American deal, and Britain will be economically isolated, and regulated to the 'also rans' for future membership of the clubs of the world. 

And what of Corbyn?

My guess is that the Party will be too tribal to let him go, and he too stubborn to resign. The result being that the Labour Party will become a reduced rump of HM Opposition, only because none of the others can score a fuller house. And they will make no collaborative plans:  it wouldn't be what the Party voted for. Leaving the way open for the new hard right government to make of Britain what they have always wanted - a rich man's paradise and a poor man's hell. Just like Trump did in the US.