I
Distributed to Congress by Irish National Caucus
“The Guardian headline bluntly sums it up, ‘Cornered Johnson suffers triple Commons defeat’ ( The Guardian. London. Thursday, September 4, 2019). And it continued : ‘The prime minister was thwarted three times in the House of Commons: an attempt by opposition parties and Tory rebels to block a no-deal Brexit easily cleared its second and third readings, and Johnson later failed in his attempt to force a snap general election.’
Members of Congress—concerned about justice and peace on the island of Ireland; and who want the United States to continue supporting the Irish Peace Process—must raise their voices in opposition to Boris Johnson’s colonial mindset and the damage it is going to inflict on Ireland, North and South. Irish-Americans see this as a defining moment for their Members of Congress.
Distinguished columnist Fintan O’Toole provides important insight in the attached article.”
—Fr. Sean McManus
Welcome to the United Kingdom of Absurdistan
Britain’s democracy is built on
feudalism and its unwritten constitution is feeble…
How weak does your constitution need to be when it can’t even stand up to
a bluffer like Boris Johnson?
Fintan O’Toole. Irish
Times. Dublin.Tuesday, September 3, 2019
There are two things we know about revolutions. One is that they get more
radical as they go along. The revolutionaries start out demanding
specific reforms and end up imagining that they are inaugurating a whole
new world. The other is that revolutions expose the great cracks in the
ancien regime that should have been obvious all along. In retrospect,
after the upheaval, it is clear that the old system was doomed by its
own failure to manage necessary change.
Brexit is a very strange kind of revolution – the heroic overthrow
of imaginary oppression, in which tragedy and farce are not
sequential but simultaneous and deeply interwoven. But it is a revolution
nonetheless, and it is conforming to these patterns. A goal that was
unutterable in 2016 – the Year Zero of No Deal – is now mainstream policy.
And the ancien regime of the Westminster system is having all its
delusions mercilessly exposed by, of all places, Italy.
One thing that still unites the warring factions in England is the
belief that Westminster is “the mother of all parliaments” and the
envy of the democratic world. Well, it sure looks like the mother of all
something right now, but it’s not parliamentary democracy. Consider
what has happened. Boris Johnson was elected leader of the Tory party
by 92,153 people. He was then appointed prime minister by a
hereditary monarch with no parliamentary involvement whatsoever.
Since July 24th, when he became prime minister, he has appeared just once
in the House of Commons to answer questions. And he has now used
those monarchical powers to prorogue parliament and make himself even
more unaccountable to it. The one virtue of Johnson’s brazenness is
that he has surely made obvious to his compatriots what outsiders can
see—that the system in which all of this is possible is a democracy built
around a solid core of feudalism.
Unconstitutional vs unlawful
To grasp the absurdity of this spectacle, we might turn to one of England’s
great minds, Jonathan Sumption. He is simultaneously one of his
country’s most distinguished lawyers, recently retired from the UK’s
supreme court, and one of its leading historians, whose superb ongoing
multivolume history of the Hundred Years War is much better than
Game of Thrones. Last week, the London Times asked him to pronounce
on the legality of Johnson’s prorogation of parliament. “I don’t think
what the prime minister has said he is going to do is unlawful,” he said.
But he added: “It might be considered unconstitutional in as much as
it might be argued to be contrary to a longstanding convention of
the constitution.”
So what Johnson is doing is probably unconstitutional but probably
not unlawful. I don’t think most people in England have any idea how
utterly nonsensical this seems to all the rest of us. It’s like saying
that a man is almost certainly dead but nonetheless in quite good
health. In any other democracy, if it’s unconstitutional, it’s unlawful.
Only in the United Kingdom of Absurdistan can it possibly be otherwise.
And the heart of the absurdity is that great tautology,
the “unwritten constitution”.
The British constitution is so fine a thing that it would be positively
insulting, even dangerous, to actually write it down. The people who
need to know what it is are able to divine its mysteries – ordinary
subjects are not among them. Johnson, for all his habitual mendacity,
is exposing the truth that this arcane system of accretions and
conventions is of little use when a shameless chancer is given the
keys of the kingdom. His maneuver is not even a coup – when you
can do all this lawfully, who needs coups?
Right-wing opportunism
Until very recently, most people in England would have pointed to Italy,
with its infamous political instability, as the great counter-example
that proved the wisdom of the British system. Last week, both countries
were faced at the same time with a remarkably similar challenge: a
radical right-wing opportunist seeking to bring down his own
government and force a general election in which he would run not so
much for parliament as against parliament. Matteo
Salvini, leader of the prefascist League, has been governing in coalition
with the populist Five Star movement. He tried to pull off pretty
much the same trick as Johnson and for the same reason: to position
himself as the voice of “the people” against the political “elites”.
How puny is Britain when it comes so badly out of a comparison with a country
that is a byword for democratic fragility?
But Salvini was stopped – for two reasons. First, enough people within the
political system were willing to stop fighting each other and start
fighting the radical right. Second, Italy has a written democratic
constitution with an elected president who could manage the process
of creating an alternative government. The UK does not have the second
of these things, and it is not at all clear that its parliamentarians
can manage the first.
How weak does your constitution need to be when it can’t even stand up to
a bluffer like Boris Johnson? How puny is it when it comes so badly
out of a comparison with a country that is a byword for democratic
fragility? It has come to something when an Italian might well look
at the goings-on at the “mother of parliaments” and exclaim “Mamma mia!”
Fr. Sean Mc Manus
Comments are closed.