The purpose of any government and any parliament is to make decisions and implement policy.
It is clear now that Britain's executive and legislative are in a complete constitutional stalemate on Brexit, where the executive cannot agree with the legislature, and the legislature cannot agree with the executive.
The executive - the government - is headed by Theresa May, who has effectively taken unilateral control of all decisions on Brexit since coming to power.
Her party lost full control of parliament - the legislature - eighteen months ago, but Theresa May seems never to have noticed, with her continuing to act as though having almost unlimited powers. In spite of the self-evident necessity to come to some kind of cross-party agreement when running a minority government, her approach has been divisive and autocratic from the start. She sees things only from the perspective of survival, through exploiting divisions in her enemies combined with the fear of the alternative: the classic approach of an autocrat.
The number of blows and setbacks she has received has become almost difficult to keep up with, but with parliament voting down her agreed deal with the EU by an unprecedented margin - yet her government still staying in power - the sense of constitutional crisis has become irrefutable.
By all historical precedents and conventions, any Prime Minister with a sense of decency and self-awareness would have stood down after such an enormous defeat, made possible only through masses of backbenchers on her own side turning against her. But Theresa May is someone whose character seems as immovable as granite when it comes to facing reality.
It is self-evident that the only way to resolve the impasse between the government and parliament is through a fresh election.
What is so cravenly-hypocritical about May's resistance to new elections now (which she saw as only "heightening divisions") is that only eighteen months ago she called for a new election when she already had a majority. Her justification then was that parliament was somehow "blocking" her government's strategy on Brexit (itself a disingenuous accusation), and that she needed a larger majority to ensure she got legislation through parliament. This was already the strategy of someone who clearly had little real sympathy for democratic principles, and only saw "democracy" as useful when it was useful to her.
Now though, when the chaos is worse than ever because parliament cannot decide and the government cannot pass legislation as a result, May claims that elections only "heighten divisions". So she has gone from wanting elections eighteen months ago because parliament was divided, to now claiming that elections only create divisions. She wanted elections eighteen months ago to make her more powerful; now she wants to prevent them (even though they are self-evidently needed more than ever) in order to cling on to power.
She bears all the hallmarks of a power-obsessed narcissist, who will twist logic into contortions in order to justify her own selfish actions.
May's evident obsession to cling to power appears to stem from a fundamental aspect of her character. She is deeply-traditional by temperament and, as a "dyed in the wool" conservative, sees her position as Prime Minister as one of "duty".
That sense of "duty" she appears to interpret into an almost sacrosanct sense of mission: that she was "chosen" to lead the country through Brexit, and in her role as Prime Minister she is uniquely endowed with the responsibility to decide on the right path of the country.
The problem, when one thinks about this mindset for more than a few seconds, is that same sense of "duty" is what any despot in history also has used to justify their actions.
"Duty" quickly can become corrupted into doing whatever one can to achieve your aims: it might start with dissemination, then using fear, dirty tricks and before long someone can become paranoid and will only listen to advice from those they trust. This is the slippery slope, and Theresa May has shown more than enough evidence of displaying these characteristics.
A "personal rule"?
There is a case to be made that this is the worst constitutional crisis since the Civil War of the mid 17th century.
Charles I got into problems with parliament because he began to act as a despot. At the time, monarchs had a great deal more power to do as they pleased. Charles I, typical of monarchs of the time, saw his right to rule as "God-given". It was his "duty" to rule as much as it was his God-given right, and if parliament were preventing him from doing so, then he saw it as his role to put them right. This was the basic reason for his attempt to arrest troublesome parliamentarians, which quickly escalated into outright war between the two factions.
Charles I was a deeply-proud man, and even after losing the war and under house arrest, he still refused to make serious compromises; instead, he stalled and dragged out time by exploiting the weaknesses and divisions within his opponents, flattering one faction in at attempt to win favour and isolate another, meanwhile blaming his opponents as the ones causing all the problems. While this was going on, he was still trying to organize supporters into a military counter-strike. Eventually, parliament's patience (and their gullibility) was exhausted.
Now that May's deal was voted down in parliament, May has claimed she is ready to listen. Given that this approach would have evidently made more sense after she lost her majority in parliament eighteen months ago, scepticism of her sincerity is not unwarranted.
She had already delayed the vote by a month since December, for the blatantly cynical motive to move the timing closer to the Brexit "cliff" at the end of March, and thus intimidate parliament into backing her deal. Her justifications to parliament before the vote amounted to same thing: intimidation, and threatening that the choice was her deal or the chaos of "no deal".
As parliament didn't buy this line, May's new tactic is for parliament to show the necessity to compromise, but also by highlighting the evident differences between the different factions. In this way, while she claims that her "red lines" (that were the reason for the unacceptable "deal" with the EU in the first place) are inviolate, it is others that must give ground.
She sees her "red lines" as part of her "duty" to implement the "will of the people", conflating what she wants into what she thinks the country wants. In this twisted rationale, if parliament is against her, then it is, by extension, against the people as well.
The cause of this constitutional crisis is clear: Theresa May.
Now that she has technically opened negotiations with parliament, her motives are as transparently-cynical as ever. The negotiations are not there to allow for genuine compromise; only to provide May with the narrative that she "tried" to work with a divided parliament, but because parliament refused her deal and couldn't agree on a compromise, a "no deal" Brexit became inevitable. Her primary aim is that it is not Theresa May who gets blamed for any "no deal" scenario, but someone else. She will happily deflect the blame onto the stubbornness of the opposition in parliament, or even better, the EU. Due to aspects of her personality, she seems to have little genuine ability to compromise, and just stall for as long as necessary, when the blame can be transferred from her to a convenient scapegoat. This is the same tactic used time and again by the autocrat.
We are now in a situation in Britain where the parliament is divided between May's supporters and her opponents, whose own allegiances are hazy and sometimes cross party lines. The parliamentary system is broken, and the country is ran by someone who is only interested in her own survival - for what purpose, it is unclear.
With the military reserves now on stand-by in the result of a "no deal" Brexit, with companies being gagged by Theresa May's government through NDAs, and with the very real threat of shortages and transport chaos, all the signs are that Britain has reached an institutional "tipping point". There seems no way back from the current crisis.
The question is: what on earth comes next?
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