# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Start studying Europe. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

# data[].attributes.body
2019

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
There are a growing number of Conservative MPs, including former Ministers, willing to rebel to back a People's Vote and completely change the terms of the Brexit debate. With Labour's backing it...

# data[].attributes.body
2016

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Chuka Umunna today urged Remain campaigners to abandon calls for a second referendum or risk being seen as a metropolitan elite "who think they know best".

In an interview with the Evening Standard, the influential Labour backbencher urged fellow pro-EU campaigners to show more respect for the 17 mil- lion who voted for Brexit. He also:

Said there are now "no safe Labour seats" after the rise of Ukip, whose new leader Paul Nuttall has vowed to target Labour's heartlands.

Blamed the Blair government's decision to allow free migration from Poland and Bulgaria for the discontent that led to Brexit.

Revealed that he is touring Brexit-backing areas from Dagenham to Halifax in West Yorkshire, to learn "with humility" what drove voters.

Chuka Umunna 'couldn't be happier' as he reveals his wife is pregnant

Urged the public to back tomorrow's Small Business Saturday, the day that urges people to "shop local" and support small firms.

For the Streatham MP, the June 23 vote was a traumatic defeat after months of campaigning. But he says fellow Remainers must now stop complaining and start listening. "Remain didn't lose by a landslide but was clearly defeated at the ballot box on June 23," he said.

"I think it's really important we listen and more deeply understand why people took a different view to us."

He added: "The 52 per cent are no more a bunch of racists and bigots than the 48 per cent are a well-heeled metropolitan elite. I have no time for either characterisation."

In a personal crusade to understand what happened, he visited Boston, Lincolnshire, which could not be more different to his multicultural London constituency. Although many problems were identical, only the Lincolnshire town was stressed about immigration, seeing it as unmanaged.

Tony Blair's government, he said, lost trust by underplaying the numbers who would come from the EU accession countries and the pressures on public services in some communities.

"That one mistake, among all the many good things that the last Labour government did, may I think have been the biggest driver of why we left the European Union," said Mr Umunna.

In the New Year he will spend time in Dagenham with Labour MP Jon Cruddas, learning from the people of Essex. He urged Remainers, such as the Lib-Dems' Nick Clegg, who have threatened to delay Article 50 unless given a second referendum on the exit deal to show the poll verdict more respect.

"I really have no time for calls for a second referendum because I think it comes across as disrespectful to those who voted to leave," he said.

"Those calls reinforce what I feel is a false stereotype - of a bunch of people in London who think they know best."

He went on: "We are going to leave - it hurts me to say that - but we have got to move forward and work out how to get the best possible deal."

We met in his constituency at Fizz DJ & Pro Audio, where Mr Umunna, an ex-amateur disc jockey, spun some vinyl with owner Roland Boakye - exactly the kind of small trader he wants to promote through tomorrow's Small Business Saturday.

The event, an idea the MP imported from the US while he was shadow business secretary, is now worth about half a billion pounds in extra revenues for small traders.

"Small businesses are vital," he said. "Not just because they provide two-thirds of private sector jobs but they make every high street unique and are meeting points for the community."

Mr Umunna had his own taste of small business working on his mother's market stall, which sold Nigerian jewellery and textiles, from the age of 11.

"This time of year was our busiest season - but it was freezing cold in those early mornings," he recalled.

Although he predicted that voters will recoil from Mr Nuttall's "Tory" policies such as privatisation, he saw Ukip as "a danger to the Labour Party, not just in the North but in the South as well".

And he warned: "There are no safe seats for Labour any more."

He described Labour's leadership as "a settled issue at the moment".

Jeremy Corbyn, he said, should now be given "the chance to show what he can do".

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Chuka Umunna: 'Remain campaigners must drop calls for new Brexit vote'

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Chuka Umunna today urged Remain campaigners to abandon calls for a second referendum or risk being seen as a metropolitan elite "who think they know best". In an interview with the Evening Standard, the influential Labour backbencher urged fellow pro-EU campaigners to show more respect for the 17 mil- lion who voted for Brexit.

# data[].attributes.body
2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jacob Rees-Mogg Says NO to a Second Referendum

# data[].attributes.body
2011

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video

He argued 'it might make more sense to have the second referendum after the renegotiation is completed' during an address to the Commons during a debate on the National Referendum on the European Union held on October 24th, 2011.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Jacob Rees-Mogg suggests holding a second referendum on Brexit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
He argued 'it might make more sense to have the second referendum after the renegotiation is completed' during an address to the Commons during a debate on the National Referendum on the European Union held on October 24th, 2011.

# data[].attributes.headline
Article about how the Irish prepared for negotiations well ahead of the British

# data[].attributes.subject
Article about how the Irish prepared for negotiations well ahead of the British

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
How the Irish backstop emerged as May's Brexit nemesis

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Ireland was streets ahead of the UK when it came to planning for Britain's exit

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
House of Lords - Brexit: UK-Irish relations - European Union Committee

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Paragraph 3 of Strand Two (the relationship of Northern Ireland with the Republic of Ireland) states that the North/South Ministerial Council will meet "in an appropriate format to consider institutional or cross-sectoral matters (including in relation to the EU) and to resolve disagreement".

# data[].attributes.headline
Jonathan Powell in the New Statesman- talking about Northern Ireland and the constitution

# data[].attributes.subject
Jonathan Powell in the New Statesman- talking about Northern Ireland and the constitution

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
The British political system used to be seen as one of the wonders of the world. A hundred years ago last month, Max Weber, the great German sociologist, gave a seminal lecture on "The Profession and Vocation of Politics" in Munich. Speaking in the chaotic and revolutionary aftermath of the First World War, he expressed his admiration for the British system and the way its politicians and officials managed to maintain prosperity and stability while allowing a working democracy to flourish. We were reputed around the world as the cradle of democracy, tolerance and downright decency. No longer.

My work nowadays requires me to travel from conflict zone to conflict zone to meet elected leaders and guerrilla leaders. A strange thing has happened in the past six months. After half an hour discussing the Farc in Colombia or Mozambique's Renamo or North Korea, they will turn to me and ask, "What on earth has happened to Britain?" They are not enquiring about the latest on Brexit, but rather the complete collapse of our political system. It is painful to see people engaged in real civil wars pitying us for the deep division in the country and the inability of our political leaders to resolve it. In the words of Sylvie Kauffmann, editorial director of Le Monde, "Continental Europe has watched with bewilderment, despair and exasperation as the world's oldest democracy... a former empire, winner of two world wars, aspires to become Singapore upon Thames."

We have gone from being the most stable country in Europe to one of the least, from a country governed by a broad pragmatic consensus to a society divided into two doctrinaire camps and from a government that managed crises well to political leaders who can't even control their own parties. Worst of all we have gone from a relatively civilised and tolerant political discourse to violence on our streets directed at people who have different points of view.

When the inquiry is eventually held into Brexit it will, unlike those into the Iraq War and the Scott affair, focus not just on individual failings but the whole system - the government, the opposition and even the civil service.

It starts, of course, with the government's abominable handling of Brexit - in what is perhaps the worst-managed negotiation in living memory. This botched process arose in part out of a failure of political leadership. The Prime Minister and many of her colleagues knew they were doing something that would do great harm to the country but did not dare stop it for fear of being unseated by the extremists in their own party. This fear prevented the Prime Minister from being honest with the public about the difficult choices it faced. She tried instead, as the Brexiteers did, to pretend they would be making "one of the easiest trade deals in human history". But it was also a failure of planning. As Ivan Rogers, the former British ambassador to the EU, puts it: when they triggered Article 50, "they had not the slightest fag packet plan on what they were going to try to do and in which order".

Theresa May established a series of red lines without real thought of what might be achievable with our European partners and walked into a deal where she sacrificed free access to the European market for British services - which make up 80 per cent of our economy - in return for an end to free movement of labour from Europe, even though migration from EU states to the UK has fallen dramatically since the referendum in 2016. The government failed to think through the logical bind it was getting into, notably on the Northern Ireland border, despite copious warnings about the dangers of promising all things to all people.

Instead, the Prime Minister tried to play hardball, employing the mantra that "no deal was better than a bad deal". In a negotiation it is certainly a good idea to know what your best alternative to a negotiated agreement is, but that is not the same as threatening to shoot yourself in the head unless the other side do what you want. In those circumstances they are likely to invite you to do it. Theresa May has now belatedly discovered that no deal wasn't such a good idea after all. As Ivan Rogers rightly concludes, "the whole conduct of the negotiation has further burned through trust in the political class".
****
But it is not just the government's incompetence in the Brexit negotiations that has led to the collapse of the political system. The all-consuming obsession with Brexit has prevented the government from addressing the deep problems that confront the country. It has no time or energy to develop serious policies on the challenge of artificial intelligence and automation for traditional jobs, or to address the housing crisis for young people or the social care crisis for older people. Even if it did, they would be no legislative time available. For everything but Brexit the country is on autopilot.

This is not the first time Britain has been saddled with an incompetent government. The system has a built-in remedy in the form of a competent loyal opposition ready to take over power. Unfortunately, that part of the system has broken down too. No one, not even his closest colleagues, remotely thinks Jeremy Corbyn would make a competent prime minister. That is why he is still well behind in the opinion polls despite the collapse of the governing party. The problem is, however, not just one of competence. He has not even fulfilled the opposition part of his mandate. He has been notable by his invisibility during the Brexit debate, not least because he knows his Eurosceptic views do not fit with the beliefs of the 80 per cent of party members who strongly support Remain. In the words of the excellent former science minister Sam Gyimah, "Labour is not a government in waiting, it is an opposition in hiding." The opposition has not had an intelligible position on Brexit. Both the prime minister and the leader of the opposition support Leave, so who is there to oppose the government on behalf of the more than 50 per cent of people who, according to the most recent polls, support Remain?

What is perhaps most surprising is the absence of courageous political leadership to fill this vacuum. Normally, if the prime minister and the leader of the opposition have failed to rise to the challenges of the moment a Churchill would appear, as in 1939. But there is absolutely no sign of a political saviour. On neither side of the House of Commons has anyone raised a standard to which people have rallied. I can't think of a moment in my lifetime when there has been such a paucity of political talent on display. I am not saying there aren't any potential leaders out there; just that they haven't seized the day yet. Ask yourself this question: if there were a referendum tomorrow who would lead the Remain campaign?

The absence of political leadership has allowed our tradition of relatively moderate and polite political discourse to be replaced by a populism of the left and the right where anything goes, as seen with outbreak of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party; Boris Johnson's comments on the burka; Tommy Robinson suddenly becoming an acceptable face of Ukip; the pushing and shoving outside parliament; and the relatively sober Conservative MP Bernard Jenkins saying recently, "If you try to stop Brexit, you will unleash Hell."

But most disturbing is the disappearance of the concept of facts. If I go on television to debate with a Brexit politician such as Jacob Rees-Mogg or Michael Howard on the Irish border, I can explain a fact I have come to know over a long period of time; he can respond with a barefaced lie about the answer being technology. The journalist, in the interest of balance, can treat the two as if they are of equal weight. Boris Johnson can use the lie that 80 million Turks are about to enter the EU and later deny he ever said anything about Turkey. What are the public supposed to do when faced with such relativism? Nothing is true and everything is possible, as they say in Russia.

Nor is it just the politicians who have failed. So too, sadly, has the civil service. I say this tentatively because it is not responsible for what has gone wrong. But in the 1970s - a decade of revolving door governments and continuous political crisis, the heyday of Yes Minister - the civil service held the fort. A strong civil service provided continuity and a certain degree of stability. It has not been able to do so this time. Its morale has collapsed and there is an exodus of talent. It is not just the hapless Chris Grayling who is responsible for drone-gate at Gatwick and the inability to prepare for new rail timetables, nor successive welfare secretaries for the failure of Universal Credit. The civil service should have been prepared and should have demonstrated competence in terms of policy development and project management. And on Brexit it appears to have failed to drive home to Theresa May and her colleagues the real position of our European partners, what was possible and what was a unicorn.

The most worrying thing of all is the resulting collapse of public confidence in the political system. The verdict of the public is devastating: in a recent private unpublished poll 66 per cent of voters thought the current system of politics doesn't work and has to be fundamentally changed; 64 per cent thought most politicians come from the same political class, which is out of touch with most people; 59 per cent thought Labour and Conservatives behave alike and neither of them can be trusted to get anything done; and 52 per cent thought that neither Labour nor Conservatives are fit to govern because their leaders are unable to unite their own parties. If the people lose faith in our democratic system we are a short step from a more authoritarian form of government.

****

Politics as a vocation: Max Weber gave his celebrated lecture on 28 January 1919​

Why has a once great and effective political system collapsed so suddenly? It is not just due to Brexit and it won't be resolved by Brexit passing. Rather, the system has been shown to be like a tree that was apparently healthy on the outside but rotten to the core, where only a small push was needed to make it fall.

Some of the clues to the underlying problems are apparent in Max Weber's lecture in 1919. Weber acknowledged "one cannot predict yet how the apparatus of 'The Profession and Vocation of Politics' will be structured". Nonetheless, he foresaw some of the root causes that led to this collapse.

First, Weber warned of the dangers inherent in the professionalisation of politics. He identified the first steps towards this professionalisation in 19th century Britain with the rise of full-time election agents. He thought this change would hand control of parties to the full-time functionaries and could lead to an unhealthy centralisation of politics. In Britain that professionalisation reached a new level in the past 20 years with the creation of a separate caste that spends its whole life in career politics and has little experience of life outside. Ed Miliband can pass from Oxford straight to being a special adviser to Harriet Harman in opposition, to working for Gordon Brown in government, to becoming an MP, a minister, leader of the opposition and, finally, an ex-leader of the opposition on the back benches, without ever stepping into the real world. On the other side, David Cameron went straight from Oxford into the Conservative Party apparatus, became a special adviser, an MP, leader of the opposition and prime minister, then ex-prime minister, with only a very brief stint outside politics as a PR man for a TV company. I don't pretend I am not part of the problem, having spent most of my life as an official and a political appointee, but this hyper-professionalisation has led to the development of a sort of monastic order and fuelled the belief in the wider population that they are governed by a separate, out-of-touch class that serves its own interests.

Crucially, Weber distinguished between those who lived "for politics" and those who lived "from politics". We have developed increasingly into the latter. Aspiring politicians are less inclined to take risks and say what they think because it may undermine their careers. Weber says the need for mass propaganda and organisation makes the development of unity and strict discipline crucial to the success of political parties. Real power, he says, belongs to the people who run the parties as they "can checkmate the parliamentarians and, for the most part, force their own agenda". This makes it easier to run the business of government, as long as MPs remain lobby fodder, but it suppresses the development of independent thinking and nascent political leadership abilities.

Second, Weber saw the need for charismatic leaders in politics, saying that "the charismatic element of every leader is the main motivating force that satisfies the idealism" of their followers rather than "just working for the abstract program of a mediocre party". But he also warned against demagogues who lacked a sense of responsibility. Eerily, he sees journalism as a particular route into this sort of politics, writing about papers hiring "gifted writers as 'celebrities' who always explicitly wrote under their byline", which had "showed that in some famous incidents no elevated sense of responsibility was cultivated as one would have hoped for". It was almost as if he had met Boris Johnson. Weber was clear politicians need to be able to make their case convincingly, but once opportunistic politicians are prepared to deploy any lie to justify their case, and are not held accountable for doing so, then political dialogue is fatally undermined. The public comes to believe that all politicians are lying.

Third, Weber warns of the danger of spin, although he doesn't call it that. He says that "politics is to a large measure shaped by the means of the publicly spoken and written word". He lamented the success of British propaganda during the First World War because it had been able to "argue a weak case in a technically effective fashion" whereas German officials had been too bureaucratic. But he warned too of the "the work of the irresponsible journalist" because of the "terrible and long-term effects" it might have. And he also saw how the "journalistic worker" was losing out as the capitalistic press magnates gained more political influence, citing Lord Northcliffe as an example - think Rupert Murdoch.

As the media's economic model has demanded that the voracious beast is fed more and more often, spin has become increasingly important as a political tool. That then drives political discourse - so Theresa May keeps repeating "Brexit means Brexit", or "No deal is better than a bad deal" - until the words uttered by politicians cease to mean anything to the ordinary person. This is then compounded by the role of social media, where members of the public no longer all get the same news but live in echo chambers where their own beliefs are reinforced again and again. This is the ideal ecosystem for demagogues, as illustrated by James Graham's recent Channel 4 film Brexit: The Uncivil War.

Fourth, while favouring a non-political civil service, Weber flagged up the potential problem. He says "the honour of the official comes from the ability to carry out any order - regardless of his own opinion - with the same diligence, as if he is fully supportive of the order". But the danger is that the official does not have a sense of responsibility - they are just fulfilling orders. Weber was scarred by the so-called Daily Telegraph affair of 1908, when officials supinely went along with publication of a disastrous interview with the Kaiser that poisoned Anglo-German relations. Weber says that an official should not act as a politician or try to be a demagogue - he would in any case be a lousy one - but manage his task in an objective fashion. He argues, though, "An exception is made when the essential interest of the state and the survival of the existing order is threatened." When the government pursues a policy civil servants know to be wrong and dangerous to the country, should they just stand by? Or do they have a duty to take steps to protect the survival of the polity?

At the core of Weber's argument is the idea of balance in the ethics of politics. He warns against the dangers of extremism: "an absolute ethic is not concerned with the consequences it may cause", and points out that "every politician engages with diabolical powers, which lurk in every kind of violence". So your passion for any cause must be balanced by an ethic of responsibility, thinking about the consequences. He famously said that "politics is like slowly but forcefully drilling holes in hardwood boards, and that with passion and, at the same time, with a sense of proportion".

The trouble with many of the politicians engaged in the argument over Brexit is that they have not absorbed that duty and have let their passion and the means they are prepared to use overcome their sense of proportion. They are also disregarding the consequences, intended and unintended.

The reason this particularly matters in Britain is that we have an unwritten constitution. It depends largely on convention and precedent rather than written rules. It is a delicate balance and when people no longer care about the means they use or the consequences of their actions then it risks collapse. We have seen Brexit MPs challenging the good faith of the Speaker, the government being held in contempt of parliament for the first time in history and Brexiteer rebels arguing that pro-European parliamentarians are usurping the role of the executive.

Most of all, we have failed to understand that in our system parliament is sovereign, not the people. If we want to run a plebiscitary system in parallel, where the people govern through referendums rather than representative democracy, then we need a set of rules about thresholds and whether the outcome of a referendum is binding or advisory before we embark on it. This is as opposed to a vote being called on a whim, as David Cameron did, and then insisting that the outcome is holy writ and that it is undemocratic to consult the people ever again, even though this frequently happens in other democratic countries. Even worse, each individual's interpretation of the result is set up as "the will of the people", which cannot be challenged. Most importantly, we have to understand the consequences of dividing the country 50/50 on an issue without any thought about how to bring it back together.

We have become complacent about the fragility of that constitution and about the stability of our politics, just as our ancestors were complacent about the stability of the international system before the First World War. We haven't been tested by a crisis of this magnitude for a generation. Unless rapid steps are taken to regain people's confidence in the political system this country, and the union on which it is based, could be broken irretrievably.

****

Weber is more useful in his diagnosis of the problems we currently face than in finding the solutions, but the public are clear about what they favour: 89 per cent think political parties should work together constructively on addressing the big challenges; 88 per cent want politicians to treat them like adults and be honest about the problems facing the country; 87 per cent think politicians should put their point of view forward in a civilised and respectful way and respond constructively to other ideas; and 84 per cent want them to focus on the future of our economy and society rather that talking about the past. When Liam Fox warns that the people's trust in politicians and politics will permanently break down if there is a second referendum, I'm afraid I have to tell him it already has because of what he and his colleagues have perpetrated.

And the people are right. This is not a conservative, with a small "c", case for keeping things the same. On the contrary, it is a case for a new way of doing politics as soon as possible to save the polity. We need some way to come together, whether it is through a government of national unity like that which Churchill and Attlee put together in the Second World War, or Conservative and Labour backbenchers who have grown used to working together in opposing Brexit forming a new "Sensible Party" that actually addresses the country's problems. Above all, we need a new generation of political leaders, rather than a leader of the opposition nearly in his seventies and a prime minister in her sixties. We need political leaders with a stake in the future to lead us out of this mess to a new sense of optimism. As Max Weber says, "politics is about the future, not who is guilty for the past".

Jonathan Powell was a civil servant from 1979 to 1994 and Tony Blair's chief of staff from 1995 to 2007

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The rise and fall of Britain's political class

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The British political system used to be seen as one of the wonders of the world. A hundred years ago last month, Max Weber, the great German sociologist, gave a seminal lecture on "The Profession and Vocation of Politics" in Munich.

# data[].attributes.headline
In the talk wanted to mention Emily Thornbury - a Labour MP- sounding tired and defensive. Here is the link.

# data[].attributes.subject
In the talk wanted to mention Emily Thornbury - a Labour MP- sounding tired and defensive. Here is the link.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
BBC Radio 4 - Any Questions?, Gerard Batten MEP, Baroness Sal Brinton, Nicky Morgan MP, Emily Thornberry MP

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Jonathan Dimbleby presents topical debate from Stamford in Lincolnshire.

# data[].attributes.headline
Guardian article about Boris Johnson's influence

# data[].attributes.subject
Guardian article about Boris Johnson's influence

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Boris Johnson has just launched his latest Euro-myth | Sarah Helm

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
In Brussels I saw how he dealt in half-truths. With his latest political move as a Brexit campaigner, it seems we now have another

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mark Francois dismisses and insults Airbus boss over Brexit warnings

# data[].attributes.body
These are the notes for a previous seminar at the British Council

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Start studying europe. Learn vocabulary, terms, and more with flashcards, games, and other study tools.

# data[].attributes.headline
Enoch Powell urged people to vote for Labour, who were promising a referendum on Common Market membership in 1974

# data[].attributes.subject
Enoch Powell urged people to vote for Labour, who were promising a referendum on Common Market membership in 1974

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
enoch powell denies he is a judas   1974

# data[].attributes.body
Vernon Bogdanor a professor on constitution affairs
-government and MPs  constrained to do something they don't want to do.
- people become a third chamber
- national sovereignty a tradable asset (NATO)
- parliamentary sovereignty either exists in absolute terms or doesn't
-take back control
- pre 1972 Unwritten constitution said 'Whatever the Queen and Parliament enacts is law' no point in having written constitution.
- British courts (acting on behalf of the EU) were considered a higher power than parliament
-Thatcher wrote in 1975 that she people didn't put enough thought into the ramifications of the European Courts power over the UK parliament.
- people generally not aware
-European convention of human rights is different to European charter of fundamental rights came in with Lisbon treaty. Courts could strike down UK law
- he continually uses the 1st conditional if... we leave
- devolution in '98. Some things retained by Westminster. In theory agriculture devolved. In practice European union over saw it. Those are being retained by Westminster.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Brexit and the Future of Britain with Vernon Bogdanor

# data[].attributes.body
Conservative MP invokes the second war and calls Germans arrogant

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Mark Francois on Brexit being attacked, esp. by industry bosses (25Jan19)

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
We are reduced to this. A humiliated, supplicant British prime minister sitting alone in a Brussels side room for six hours while the rest of the European Union discusses our fate. A government no longer capable of governing. A country that has become a byword for chaos and dysfunction. A sundered "United Kingdom". Hundreds of thousands of Britons seeking citizenship in other EU states. Industry howling in rage and frustration. MPs needing police protection. People stockpiling food and medicines. The public discourse poisoned. Families split. Friends riven. The military on standby in case of civil unrest.

This is not "taking back control". This is not the proud, independent, liberated Britain that the Brexiteers promised. It is grotesque, calamitous, an epic act of self-harm brought about not by some war or disaster but by our own stupidity. And the true "enemies of the people" are not those opposing this catastrophic Brexit. They are not the million decent people from every background who marched in London last Saturday, or the five million who have petitioned to revoke Article 50, but those whose lies, zealotry, and political recklessness have all but broken Britain. For posterity's sake, those self-styled "patriots" who have so grievously betrayed their country should be named and shamed.

The original sin was that of David Cameron, now blithely writing his memoirs in his shepherd's hut, enjoying exotic holidays and enriching himself on the speakers' circuit.

The public was not clamouring for a referendum on EU membership. Cameron called it for the narrow purpose of uniting his party and fending off Ukip. He offered an ill-informed electorate a binary choice on an extraordinarily complex issue of profound constitutional importance without even the safeguard of a 60 per cent threshold for approval.

It was one of the most foolish gambles ever taken by a British prime minister, and one that unleashed the charlatans, rogues and demagogues of the Leave campaign.

They proceeded to seduce voters with fake facts and bogus promises. They stoked fears, fuelled grievances and inflamed prejudices. They appealed to the lowest human impulses, and unlocked the ugliest features of the British character - xenophobia, jingoism, aggression, insularity, arrogance and a perverse, pig-headed pride in our own ignorance.

The insurgent Leave.EU camp of Nigel Farage and Arron Banks broke electoral laws, and had links with Donald Trump's campaign advisers and the Russian ambassador. The official Vote Leave campaign, with Boris Johnson and Michael Gove as its figureheads, spread blatant lies - the £350m weekly NHS dividend, the 80 million Turks heading our way. Johnson shamelessly promised we could "have our cake and eat it". Gove shamelessly trashed experts.

They and other leading Leavers offered a fantasy Brexit - all gain, no pain. The trade negotiations would be "the easiest in human history", said Liam Fox. "The UK will retake her seat at the top tables of the world where the EU has replaced us," said John Redwood. "Absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market," said Daniel Hannan. "EU politicians will be banging down the door for a trade deal," said Johnson. "The day after we vote to leave we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want," said Gove.

Worst of all, having defeated Cameron's hapless Remain campaign, the luminaries of Leave turned out to have no plan whatever for implementing their fairy-tale Brexit.

People feel sorry for Theresa May. She certainly faced a formidable task after replacing Cameron. The Leave campaign's promise of a painless Brexit was impossible to fulfil, and she was surrounded by cabinet ministers who coveted her job (has Johnson ever knowingly put anybody else's interests ahead of his own?). That said, May sought the premiership, and having secured it she proceeded to play a weak hand dreadfully.

Stubborn, unimaginative, secretive and charmless, she pursued the hardest possible Brexit, claiming with no shred of evidence that that was what "the people" wanted. She completely ignored the 48 per cent who voted Remain, contemptuously dismissing them as "citizens of nowhere". She triggered Article 50 without any agreed negotiating strategy. She squandered her parliamentary majority with a needless general election, surviving in office only with a £1bn bung to the singularly unlovely Democratic Unionist Party. She antagonised the EU by appointing the spectacularly ill-qualified Johnson as her foreign secretary. She frittered away two valuable years seeking in vain to secure a consensus within her cabinet on the way forward.

May never levelled with the British public about the conundrum at the heart of Brexit: namely, that to enjoy the benefits of EU membership you must abide by its rules. She never put the interests of the country first. Instead she pandered endlessly to the extreme right of her party, even after it sought to oust her. She constantly sought to frustrate or bypass parliament, though the whole point of Brexit was to restore its powers. In order to hold her government and party together she delayed and delayed until time finally ran out. She then sought to bully, blackmail and browbeat parliament into approving a deal manifestly inferior to the status quo.

Cameron may be the worst prime minister of modern times, but May runs him close. She is certainly the only one to pursue a goal that she knows to be immensely damaging to her country.

The roll of ignominy does not end there. Next up is May's de facto accomplice, Jeremy Corbyn. He is a covert Leaver masquerading as a Remainer, the opposition leader who refuses to lead, the head not so much of a government-in-waiting than of an "opposition in hiding" as one commentator put it.

With even a halfway decent opposition leader, Britain would never have voted for Brexit. Though Corbyn and his coterie of far-left aides profess to believe in
people power, they have since done their best to frustrate the overwhelming majority of Labour members who abhor Brexit. The grass roots feel betrayed. Chants of "Where's Jeremy Corbyn?" punctuated last Saturday's march.

And then, of course, there is the deceptively innocuous-sounding European Research Group (ERG), a party within a party, the Tories' very own Militant Tendency. Led by Jacob Rees-Mogg, with a snarl behind his smile, these right-wing zealots have zero interest in the "people" they profess to champion. They seek to turn Britain into the low-wage, low-regulation Singapore of Europe, which is certainly not what disgruntled blue-collar workers in Stoke or Sunderland voted for.

Though relatively few in number, parliamentary arithmetic has given these ideological extremists a disproportionate power over May's minority government.

They cosy up to Trump while rubbishing our European friends and partners. They trash the institutions of the country they profess to love - the judiciary, the civil service, the BBC, the Bank of England and any other body they suspect of resisting Brexit. They fail to condemn the racist attacks, intimidation of pro-European MPs and threats of extra-parliamentary action that Brexit has engendered. They treat Northern Ireland and its fragile peace process with disdain. They have made May's life hell, but at no point have they produced any plausible Brexit plan of their own.

The "will of the people" is the mantra they use to close down any argument or dissent. The "will of the people" must prevail, they cry like so many Bolsheviks or 18th-century French revolutionaries. But whether a majority of the "people" still back Brexit three years on is doubtful. May failed to secure the mandate she sought for a hard Brexit in the 2017 election. Almost every poll for the past two years has put Remain ahead. It is extremely unlikely that the Brexiteers could coax a million demonstrators on to the streets - or that a pro-Brexit demonstration would be as good-humoured or peaceful.

Secure in their MPs' salaries, gold-plated pensions and personal wealth, these ultras blithely dismiss the increasingly irrefutable evidence that Brexit is a social, political, economic and diplomatic catastrophe for Britain. Indeed they are willing to inflict even the incalculable damage of no deal on their less privileged compatriots to achieve their ends. As Johnson said at an event for EU diplomats in 2018: "Fuck business."

****

The ERG has been shamefully aided and abetted by much of the British press - most notably the Telegraph, the Sun, the Express and the Daily Mail under its former editor, Paul Dacre.

First those papers brainwashed the British people with three decades of relentlessly negative and mendacious coverage of EU matters of the sort that Johnson pioneered as the Telegraph 's correspondent in Brussels from 1989 to 1994.

You would never have known from their coverage that Britain was actually a big, powerful player with plenty of allies in Brussels - not a lone member state fighting a valiant rearguard action against scheming continentals bent on destroying our way of life. Or that that EU membership greatly amplified - rather than diminished - Britain's global influence. Or that Britain, more than any other member state, created the EU's single market of 500
million people.

During and since the referendum campaign those papers have abandoned any pretence of impartiality, of seeking to enlighten their readers or of holding our government to account. They pump out propaganda worthy of a second-rate banana republic. They downplay Brexit's rapidly escalating costs, savage its opponents, and accuse the EU of negotiating in bad faith.

The Mail's front page denunciation in November 2016 of three High Court judges who upheld parliament's right to approve the triggering of Article 50 as "Enemies of the People" was one of the most chilling headlines ever to appear in a British newspaper. A typical Sun front page headline described the EU's leaders as "dirty rats" and declared: "We can't wait to shake ourselves free from the two-bit mobsters who run the European Union". In November 2017 an infamous Telegraph front page denounced, with names and photographs, 15 pro-European Tory MPs as "Brexit Mutineers"; their crime was to support what had been, before the referendum, official party policy for more than 40 years.

The Telegraph is now so debased that its main front page "news" story on Mondays is frequently a report on whatever pseudo-Churchillian nonsense Boris Johnson has just produced in the weekly column that it pays him £275,000 a year to write.

****

Last but not least, a sizeable number of MPs should be included in this hall of shame. At least two-thirds voted Remain in 2016. Most privately consider Brexit an act of folly. Some have since shown great courage in fighting for their convictions, but too many have chosen to take the path of least resistance, to put their careers and party before the interests of the country, to follow and not to lead.

Events are now moving so rapidly that it is impossible to predict what the situation will be even by the time this article is printed. Just conceivably, enough MPs will have discovered their spines to avert a complete disaster. Just conceivably they will have paused to ask themselves what was so awful about EU membership that leaving is worth such turmoil. Just conceivably they will have realised that there is no deal nearly as good as the one we already have.

Otherwise Britain will slink shamefully away - impoverished, marginalised and vastly diminished - from the greatest experiment in multinational co-operation the world has ever known. There will be no sense of joy, no national celebrations. As we live with the consequences the Brexiteers will inevitably blame anyone but themselves, but they will assuredly deserve what Donald Tusk, the European Council president, called their special place in hell.

Martin Fletcher is a former foreign editor of the Times and a New Statesman contributing writer

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
We are reduced to this. A humiliated, supplicant British prime minister sitting alone in a Brussels side room for six hours while the rest of the European Union discusses our fate. A government no longer capable of governing. A country that has become a byword for chaos and dysfunction.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
THE Brexit campaign has been plagued by little white lies, half-truths and disinformation. Neither side has showered itself in glory in its attempts to persuade the British public of the benefits or drawbacks of EU membership. But Britain has a long and well-observed tradition of fabricating facts about Europe-so much so that the European Commission (EC) set up a website to debunk these lies in the early 1990s. Try our interactive quiz below and see if you can spot the myths.

Since then the EC has responded to over 400 myths published by the British media. These range from the absurd (fishing boats will be forced to carry condoms) to the ridiculous (zippers on trousers will be banned). Some are seemingly the result of wilful misunderstandings. A story published by the Sun, a tabloid, in 1999 claimed that the queen would suddenly have to make her own tea because of new EU rules. Not only is this inaccurate, as a patient EC official pointed out, but the laws that this referred to were enacted by Britain itself in 1993. Another article in the Daily Star in 2004 reckoned that the EU was going to limit the speed of children's playground roundabouts. This voluntary guideline, it turned out, was not proposed by the EU at all, but rather by a different organisation with the word "Europe" in its name. Other myths do not originate from anything close to reality, such as the allegation that the EC would ban darts from pubs or outlaw unwrapped sweets.
Get our daily newsletter

Unsurprisingly, the Daily Mail spreads more EU-linked lies than anyone else. But it's not just right-wing tabloids that are guilty. The Daily Telegraph also performs well on this measure, and even the BBC has had its wrist slapped on occasion. The issue that riles up all media outlets, it seems, is the suggestion that Brussels will meddle with good ol' British food. From fry-ups to French mustard, the British dinner plate is sacred. Eurocrats trying to change that will incur the wrath of Britain's press-and its readers.

Sadly, for all the commission's hard work, it is unlikely to be heard. The average rebuttal is read about 1,000 times. The Daily Mail 's website, by contrast, garners 225m visitors each month.
This page has been updated to include the interactive quiz.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Debunking years of tabloid claims about Europe

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
THE Brexit campaign has been plagued by little white lies, half-truths and disinformation. Neither side has showered itself in glory in its attempts to persuade the British public of the benefits or drawbacks of EU membership.

# data[].attributes.body
From the London Review of Books at the end of last year.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
David Runciman writes about the Brexit puzzle

Brexit has arrived at its witching hour. Seemingly plausible schemes are being conjured out of thin air and every meaningful question has many possible answers, and therefore possibly none. It is hard to think of anything to say which is not being said somewhere else by people you'd prefer not to associate with. Still, here is a question I have not seen posed elsewhere: why did not one Tory MP abstain from the vote of confidence in Theresa May? The whole process felt a little uncanny. The poll was triggered in secret one night and fully concluded by the next. Turnout was a Stalinist 100 per cent - a figure only achieved by allowing two MPs who had lost the whip over allegations of sexual misconduct back into the fold for this occasion - and there were no spoilt ballots. Every single eligible voter expressed a view one way or the other: 200 for, 117 against. Was there really no one who felt truly conflicted, unable to convey confidence in the prime minister but unwilling for her to be replaced by someone even worse? When Jeremy Corbyn faced - and overwhelmingly lost - a confidence vote in 2016, 13 Labour MPs declined to take part, along with four who spoiled their ballots. Are all Tories so much clearer in their minds than that?

Of course not. The reason no one abstained is that this was a secret ballot and refusing to participate is a public act. The whips could not know how anyone voted - not even whether all government ministers followed their constitutional duty either to support the prime minister or to resign - but they would know the names of all those who failed to collect their ballot slips. If you have to vote, you might as well pick a side. As a result, the starkly divided outcome was perfectly calibrated to resolve nothing and to entrench mistrust. Enough MPs voted for May - including those who wish her gone - to keep her safe for now. Enough voted against - including those who dread the alternatives - to ensure she could not move forward with her deal. In Brussels the effect seems to have been to harden the resolve of European leaders not to budge, for fear of being beholden to intransigent, organised opposition inside the parliamentary Conservative Party. Yet appearances can be deceptive - there was nothing organised about this opposition. It was a contrivance of the occasion itself.

Here in microcosm is the essence of the Brexit puzzle and the reason it is proving such a nightmare to resolve: are we stuck because we are so divided or are we so divided because we are stuck? The various political mechanisms we have for getting out of this impasse seem inadequate to the task of bridging so many fundamental differences of opinion, yet those differences are being exacerbated by the mechanisms at work. It should in theory be possible to secure parliamentary approval for the sort of compromise deal that May has been working to achieve, given that hardline Brexiteers ought to prefer it to the prospect of not leaving the EU at all, and Remainers should prefer it to the prospect of leaving with no deal. Yet both sides seem united only by their loathing of the sort of compromise May's deal represents. It is far from clear that committed Brexiteers do prefer it to not leaving at all. They have invested too much in this struggle to be content with any outcome that gives them a half-baked version of their heart's desire. A compromised Brexit - especially if the biggest compromise is on the question of national sovereignty - does more to devalue the price they have paid to get here than an outright rebuff: better that the struggle should continue fruitlessly than having to live with the thought that we did all that just to get this. Better still to let the clock wind down to 29 March in the hope that no agreement in Parliament means that no deal can be struck.

Meanwhile, for Remainers, secure in the knowledge that there is no parliamentary majority for a no-deal exit, the temptation is always there to push for a second referendum in the hope of overturning the original result. Why settle for this when that might be just around the corner? While the three options of May's deal, no deal and a second referendum are all on the table, there is little prospect of making progress. For that to happen, one of the three options would need to fall away, forcing at least one side to choose between compromise and intransigence. But that is the reason it is proving so hard to whittle three down to two, because it would force at least one side to compromise. We are divided because we are stuck as much as we are stuck because we are divided.

For the Labour Party, the situation is further complicated by the fact that it is committed to a fourth option, which is to bring down the government and force a general election. Corbyn has been much criticised for using process as a fig-leaf to cover his own reluctance to reveal his hand. It is widely assumed that he is stalling on a vote of confidence in the government because, were that to be defeated, he would be required to take a position in favour of a second referendum, something that as a convinced Brexiteer he is deeply reluctant to do. But this is the sequence that was mandated at Labour Party Conference, where it was agreed that the strategy should be to push for a second referendum only if it was clear that the government could not be collapsed through a vote in Parliament. So it is not really a position on Europe, or even on a united Ireland, that lies at the heart of the Corbyn project, but rather a commitment to allowing party conference - and therefore party members - to set the course of policy. Process is something on which the current leadership is not willing to compromise.

The way the forces are now lined up, each of them dug in behind their respective red lines, gives the strong impression that our politics is currently organised around commitments that no one can deliver. Is that the way this whole episode will appear to future historians, as a case of grotesque political overreach? Does Brexit represent the limit of what is politically possible? Perhaps. Even so, it still matters whether we think the limit was set by the end itself - leaving the EU - or by the means we have employed for achieving it. If it is simply not possible for a nation to leave an international organisation with which its laws and economy have become intertwined over more than forty years then that is a lesson for all major democracies in the 21st century: you are not as sovereign as you might like to think. Certainly, that is the lesson many European leaders would like their electorates to take from the Brexit fiasco. But if this is a story of unfortunate accidents rather than inevitable disappointment then the moral might be different: not don't do Brexit, but don't do politics the British way. The UK political system - parliamentary sovereignty, a strong executive, first-past-the-post, no codified constitution, and therefore a referendum on a whim - is designed to facilitate decision-making. If we can't arrive at a decision, maybe there is something wrong with the whole set-up. Political realists say that to will the end is to will the means. We lack the means to will the means.

As a case of political overreach Brexit is fundamentally different from the other notorious modern instance of Britain's political elite biting off more than they could chew: Suez. Then it became rapidly clear that a small group of politicians, acting in secret, had dangerous illusions about the scope of their power. They thought they could get others - above all, the Americans - to do their bidding. They were wrong. With Brexit, it is true that many politicians - above all, Boris Johnson - appear to harbour Suez-like illusions about how easy it should be to get others to do our bidding. But the difference is that Brexit is not a policy concocted in secret by an out-of-touch political elite. It was the choice of the people in a referendum. If we conclude it cannot be done, we are also drawing a conclusion about the political overreach of the voting public when offered a direct say in the future of the country. That is potentially a much more uncomfortable place to be.

There is enough that is contingent about the present situation to suggest it was not bound to end up like this. Much of the mess is a consequence of major political change being attempted by a minority government, beholden to small factions on which it has to depend but which it cannot control. The centrality of Northern Ireland to the whole process was underplayed in the original vote. But it has surely been exaggerated by the fact that the government found itself reliant on DUP support to remain in office at all. Had May held the parliamentary majority she hoped the 2017 general election was going to deliver - say, fifty or more - she would not be where she now is. Yet that, too, is not a straightforward way of saying that this is some terrible accident. It was the same voting public that produced the current configurations in Parliament that produced May's original task of finding a Brexit deal that could pass Parliament. May went to the country on the prospectus that a big majority would strengthen her hand in negotiating the best Brexit deal. Maybe people didn't believe her. Maybe they didn't care. Either way, they didn't give her what she asked for. They gave her this.

Whatever happens, the fundamental question to be resolved is whether those disappointed by the outcome decide it was reached because some original promise was betrayed or because we have arrived at the limits of the possible. If Brexit goes to a second referendum, and that vote overturns the result of the first, it could be argued that the people changed their minds in the face of the evidence of what their original decision would result in. But anyone convinced of the virtues of the first vote will likely remain convinced that we only arrived at a second one because of deliberate sabotage of the original decision. The great danger of a second referendum is that it creates the illusion that the system either corrected itself or betrayed itself, when it would be closer to the truth to accept that the system simply revealed itself as inadequate to the task at hand. The referendum result, whatever the merits of the case, has exposed the limits of our institutional arrangements. It is not that parliamentary government has failed. Or that plebiscitary democracy has failed. But this way of trying to combine parliamentary government with plebiscitary democracy has failed.

In this context, the great advantage of May's much hated deal is just how hated it is. The fact that no one likes it means that if it passes Parliament, no one can be in any doubt that we have reached the limits of the possible under the current system. The greatest danger comes if the Brexit outcome fuels the view that one group manipulated the democracy we have to thwart the will of another group, who can therefore neither forgive nor forget. Better to recognise that we have exhausted the options than to believe that there is a version of our present politics that allows our preferred option to prevail. Better, in other words, a miserable compromise and then to get on with reforming the democracy we have, so that the next compromise is a better one.
21 December 2018

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
LRB · David Runciman · Which way to the exit?: The Brexit Puzzle

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Brexit has arrived at its witching hour. Seemingly plausible schemes are being conjured out of thin air and every meaningful question has many possible answers, and therefore possibly none. It is hard to think of anything to say which is not being said somewhere else by people you'd prefer .

# data[].attributes.body
Writing about the unwritten constitution

The Human Rights Act was introduced in 1998; a Scottish Parliament and a Welsh Assembly were established following referenda held with a majority voting in favour; most hereditary peers were removed from the House of Lords in 1999; the Greater London Authority and the position of Mayor of London were established in 2000; and the Freedom of Information Act was passed later in the same year, with its provisions coming into effect over the following decade.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
Post-Brexit Britain may need a constitution - or face disintegration | Vernon Bogdanor

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The EU is the glue that holds the UK together. Devolution and the Good Friday agreement are now under grave threat, says professor of government Vernon Bogdanor