The Brexit Parliament is now the longest since the Civil War. What have we learned?
This session of Parliament has now been sitting for 300 days — the longest since the Long Parliament during the Civil War, nearly four centuries ago. This one will presumably enter the history books as the Brexit Parliament. Since MPs and peers have had practically nothing else to do since this session began on June 13, 2017, it certainly has no other claim to be remembered.
Yet during those 300 days, the world has hardly stood still. Parliament may have been paralysed, but history has carried on regardless. Wars and revolutions, massacres and migrations: all the trials and tribulations of humanity have occurred while the elected representatives of the British people have debated one thing only.
And to what end? It is not as though we are any the wiser as to the future direction of the country. This Brexit Parliament is better at deciding what it doesn’t want than what it does. And its focus on a single overriding priority has left everything else to be debated elsewhere. In the absence of our national forum, we have improvised, creating virtual parliaments in cyberspace and private ones in public places. From Twitter to Trafalgar Square, from Question Time to closing time at the Dog and Duck, the nation has been conducting its own discussions of everything under the sun. The whole country has become a collective House of Commons.
That experience sounds good for democracy. But there’s a risk involved in the displacement of debate from the chambers of Westminster to the online echo chambers or the open air rallies and TV studios. Parliament is a talking shop — that’s what the Anglo-French word really means — but it is a talking shop with rules: of procedure, of propriety and of evidence. These rules may strike outsiders as arcane: they struck Guy Verhofstadt and his team from the European Parliament, watching the debate last year on the Withdrawal Agreement, as “insane”. On the opposite side, Nigel Farage says that Parliament has betrayed the people. But the rules of Parliament reflect the rule of law. Our legislature is officially the High Court of Parliament for a reason. From the rule of law, everything else flows: our freedoms, our rights, our democracy.
The Brexit Parliament is deeply unpopular. So was the Long Parliament, which sat from 1640 to 1653. After a session lasting 3,322 days — more than ten times as long as the present one, and a record unlikely to be broken — the “Rump” of some 210 members who had survived Colonel Pride’s purge of the original assembly, were confronted by an angry Oliver Cromwell.
On April 20, 1653, having listened to a few speeches, the Lord Protector delivered a harangue that still resonates today. “It is high time for me to put an end to your sitting in this place, which you have dishonoured by your contempt of all virtue, and your practice of every vice; ye are a factious crew, and enemies to all good government…You have no more religion than my horse…Ye are grown intolerably odious to the whole nation. You were deputed here to get grievances redressed, are yourselves gone!” Cromwell had summoned a detachment of soldiers to clear the chamber, which they proceeded to do. Pointing at the Mace, symbol of parliamentary sovereignty, he ordered his troops: “Take away that shining bauble there, and lock up the doors.” Then he rounded on the departing MPs: “In the name of God, go!”
The sentiments which Cromwell articulated (though there are various accounts of what exactly he said) are shared by many people today. Our grievances, too, have not been addressed. Many cannot see the point of this “factious crew”. Politicians are certainly seen by many, perhaps most people, as “odious”. And almost everyone agrees that they have taken too long over Brexit.
Yet the rule of law — fought over in a bloody Civil War, elaborated over centuries of precedent, enshrined in our unwritten constitution— lies at the heart of the Brexit debate. Where sovereignty resides, what balance we strike between the UK and the EU, who decides and how the decisions are made: all are at stake. And lest we forget: it was because Parliament delegated the biggest decision of all to the people that we find ourselves in this predicament.
The nation is as exasperated with the Brexit Parliament as Cromwell was with the Long Parliament. Next week’s EU elections will send MPs the message that the country needs to move on. Whichever side of the argument we take, however, we are united by far more than divides us. Indeed, our divisions have forcibly reminded us of all the reasons why we love our country. Whatever we may think of Brexit, we now know Britain better than before and why its future destiny matters so much.
