In the aftermath of Sunday’s European election results, and as the ranks of Tory leadership contenders swell, every MP should be in a state of alarm about the condition of British democracy. The problem is not that people are denied a voice – millions of opinions have been freely expressed in polling booths – but that parliament looks incapable of satisfying voters’ conflicting demands.
Brexit, as it was sold to the country in 2016, cannot be delivered. The view asserted by Nigel Farage and much of the Conservative party that pro-Europeans are refusing to deliver it is false. It is true that parliament prevented the UK from leaving the EU without a deal, but that outcome would have betrayed promises made by the leave campaign three years ago. The offer of that campaign was an easy glide into a brighter future where Britain would have “taken back control”. But the reality of unilaterally breaking treaty ties with the EU would be a surrender of control. Within weeks, possibly days, the prime minister, whoever that might be, and regardless of their preferred Brexit outcome, would be seeking emergency agreements in Brussels to avert chaos and restore severed links. The balance of power that favoured the EU during article 50 talks would be weighted even more heavily. The UK would be reduced to a supplicant.
Pro-European and moderate Eurosceptic MPs have so far been successful in averting that disaster, but not in explaining why it needed averting. As a result, a substantial minority in the country feels cheated. The Conservative party is close to being captured by a faction that indulges that view. Likewise, those who believe the best available deal between the UK and the EU is one of membership on the current terms have failed to communicate its benefits much beyond the pool of voters who backed remain in 2016.
The fundamental nature of the political impasse is that a decision made in an exercise of direct democracy has proved impossible to organise through institutions of representative democracy. That will be the case regardless of who succeeds Theresa May. It is part of a trend that predates Brexit. A powerful sense that Westminster politics is unable to respond to discontent and frustration was evident in the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence. It was palpable also in the 2015 Labour leadership contest, in which the party’s MPs found themselves on the wrong side of mass mobilisation by supporters of Jeremy Corbyn. Mr Farage’s Brexit party is only the latest political movement to demonstrate that there is more potent political energy outside parliament than there is within it.
The roots of this phenomenon run deep, but the twin shocks of the financial crisis and the expenses scandal played a decisive role. The nation’s political elite appeared to have been presiding complacently over a bankrupt economic model, pilfering public money along the way. Although many new MPs have since been elected, parliament’s corporate reputation has not yet recovered. This is dangerous because the Commons has supreme authority in guaranteeing constitutional order. When it is in decline, the whole system is made vulnerable to extremism. Representative democracy also plays a vital role in mediating between competing interest groups. For all the inefficiencies and frustrations of parliamentary deadlock on Brexit, it reflects the intractability of the underlying issue. Anyone who claims to have simple solutions to the crisis is a charlatan.
MPs must listen when voters cry out in frustration at the failure of Westminster to address their anxieties. But they also have a duty to find ways to communicate uncomfortable truths. Mrs May has many flaws, but she has also served as a vessel into which problems intrinsic to Brexit have been poured. Those difficulties will spill out now that the vessel has broken. Dealing with the consequences will be a perilous time for British democracy. MPs – and especially candidates for the Tory leadership – must at all costs resist the temptation to sustain the pretence that easy answers are available.
