The political left have long given up even the slightest pretence of representing working people. The inner-urban elite who are the left’s contemporary base openly sneer at working-class people, the “basket of deplorables”.
In Britain, it is Brexit which has laid bare the left-elite’s absolute, visceral disdain for working people.
Each year of late has been packed with anniversaries of major events in working-class history…the many heroic moments in the struggle for the vote that was to culminate in another key anniversary for this year: the passing of the Representation of the People Act 1969, which reduced the age of enfranchisement from 21 to 18.
The struggle for the universal franchise had taken well over a century.
Yet, even as the people were given universal franchise, the political elite were working covertly to undermine them.
Ironically, this new voice elected Ted Heath’s Conservative government in 1970. As we now know, Heath was embroiled in secret talks to give powers to the then embryonic EU over and above our parliament. Our voice was hushed before it had properly spoken.
Even at the 1975 Common Market referendum, clear-sighted working-class representatives could see where the end game was headed.
They rejected the Project Fear of the day and asserted national independence and democracy above the control of our country by an unaccountable foreign body.
Our elected representatives in parliament duly began stripping parliament and the people of our sovereign powers…Stunned by the ferocity of Thatcher’s attack on the unions, in 1988 the TUC thought Jacques Delors sounded nice. They then started the long process of deluding organised workers that our salvation lay with those we don’t elect in the European Commission. Twenty years later, the European Court of Justice made it clear that workers’ collective rights were inferior to the rights of businesses in a number of landmark rulings.
The Tories signed the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, giving the unelected EU control over our public spending limits. And so it went on, EU directive after EU directive, treaty after treaty, draining away the democratic base of sovereignty in a parliament only able to pass laws if the unelected of Brussels approved of them.
But the final stroke of the EU’s pen completely ignored even paying lip-service to the will of the people. It was a Labour prime minister who presided over the final, undemocratic step to EU serfdom.
The British people were not even offered a referendum on the 2005 EU Constitution or the Lisbon Treaty in 2007 (a rebranded version of the constitution), which centralised powers in the unaccountable EU.
In the same period, the EU expanded its borders eastwards, making nomads of whole populations fleeing chaos and poverty and tragically believing that the grass was greener elsewhere…Britain’s unique system of negotiated final-salary pensions was kicked into terminal decline by the EU Directive on Pensions. Yet we are still told by some that the EU protects workers’ rights.
Over the past few decades, we went from the food mountains of the Common Market to mountains of mass unemployment in the permanently deflationary European Union. The country that gave us the word democracy, Greece, was ravaged and taken over to be ruled by bankers. Despite heavy austerity, money could always be found to pay German arms manufacturers.
When the hoi polloi had the temerity to ark up and vote “Leave”, the elite overlords resorted to any political hook and legal crook to deny the democratic will of the people.
In the process, a new authoritarianism was born. Some parliamentarians took it as their mission to remove any executive power that would allow the government to follow the mandate of the referendum, including via the Supreme Court…In a painful twist, the Fixed Term Parliament Act, passed by the coalition government in 2011, in the hope that it would extend the Liberal Democrats’ moment of glory, did the very illiberal thing it was designed to do – it made it impossible for the people to hold their MPs to account by recalling them.
To the very last, the Remainers are undermining democracy and resisting accountability. Remainers made Theresa May’s deal. Remainers opposed the May deal. Remainers opposed No Deal. Remainers will continue to oppose Boris Johnson’s deal. Yet now they face an election, and the people can finally pass their judgement.
spiked-online.com/2019/11/04/how-the-political-class-sold-our-sovereignty/
