A Character Assassination: Brexit, Parliamentary Sovereignty, and Deception

While I was studying law, us students had a running joke about our supposed wisdom regarding everything and anything remotely law-related. Watching the news, some legal development would arise, and our family members would immediately ask us, “Well, what’s your thoughts?” as naturally, six months of criminal law should be more than enough for us to deliver a reasoned opinion. Very soon we realised that our gut reaction was to respond: “I don’t know enough about the facts, so I really couldn’t comment.”. Too many times we had attacked our legal problems in class with blazing confidence, only to be told bluntly it was all wrong. It tends to shut you up a bit. It was an automatic, glib comment that the students had perfected — a group of people who had been wrong countless times for diving headfirst into something they didn’t know a great deal about. This is the difficult and irreversible lesson that Britain subjected itself to on Thursday 23rd June 2016.

I would never advocate for the public to reject change because the consequences are unknown — history would simply not be possible if we followed this insular type of thinking. However, there is a characteristic difference between taking a leap of faith, and simply being unaware of the logistics of a situation. A percentage of the population fell victim to the latter on voting day.

Information about the European Union is readily available. Most of it is complex, but by and large it has been broken down into digestible and accessible chunks, previously for the benefit of bereft law students struggling through a mandatory EU Law course. Instead, the public have been required to wade through a sea of slander and downright untruths, and even for the trained eye it was difficult (but not impossible: remember this) to separate fact from fiction.

There have been elements about this referendum that are thoroughly deceptive. Take, for example, Nigel Farage’s callous £350million pledge in relation to the NHS. Have you ever seen someone backpedal so quickly? It was astonishing. And truly, it must have been devastating to have voted Leave on the strength of such a promise and have it snatched away. Everyone has their reasons to vote, and when an institution like the NHS is so tied to the things in life that affect us the most — namely, life, death, and everything messy in between — it is understandable that some would do anything they could to protect it.

For other reasons, less sympathy can be afforded. The arguments concerning immigration are so primitive and dire that many of us are shocked an entire nation has managed to catapult itself backwards 60 years. Indeed, they deserve an entire dedicated conversation. The next big offender is the supposed undemocratic nature of the EU and it’s severe lack of accountability. At this, myself and many others would like to take the opportunity to blithely wave an enormous, novelty foam hand in the direction of our very own House of Lords, which happily been sitting largely unelected for three centuries. As the results tumbled in, the entire event elevated itself to car crash status: we realised with every passing moment the result wasn’t going to be pretty, but it was near impossible to tear ourselves away.

Fast forward a few hours later, the prospect of Scotland leaving the United Kingdom becomes Lazarus and is suddenly bursting with life, and we have the Prime Minister’s resignation. We are reassured that the process is underway to choose his successor. Previously, the government of the day had the power to call an election at any given time, but this was curtailed by the introduction of the Fixed Term Parliaments Act 2011. Elections now may only be held every five years (save for the exceptional support of the House), and it has been a little over a year since the 2015 General Election. This complicates the process of an urgent election. So, what comes next? Are we stuck in Prime Minister and electoral limbo? Can Britain somehow retcon itself? No. Because Parliament is sovereign.

And thus, we have now come full circle in this miserable debacle.

It bears repeating. Parliament is sovereign. Parliament has been sovereign for a long, long time. Preservation or destruction of parliamentary sovereignty is a bloody battle fought by lawmakers, politicians, the monarchy and everyone else tailing the echelons of government. Regardless of what side of the battle you are on, its significance cannot be undermined here.

When it comes to the law of the land, Parliament is sovereign. When it comes to the interfering busybodies of the Royal Family, Parliament is sovereign. When it comes to the supposed oppressive beast we refer to as the European Union, Parliament is sovereign. This brute fact has not changed and one wonders why the sovereignty of Britain was ever questioned when an answer in the positive is so achingly simple. The EU can throw its weight around, but ultimately, if Parliament chooses to revoke or alter the European Communities Act 1972 with crystal clear intention, the courts will follow. Likewise with domestic legislation. The primacy of EU law developed because Parliament made it so. We were never forced at knifepoint or with economic sanction. This was our choice. And this is where the mass media has gone so horribly wrong.

The true culprit then is misinformation. Call it what you will: deceit, wilful insensitivity, unintentional ignorance about the true role of the EU. The answers were there, but many of us couldn’t find it in ourselves to abandon our prejudices. This is what happens when we move too fast and too carelessly. The whole affair became less about a monumental constitutional decision and instead turned into some kind of ‘bigotry activation point’ that hideously backfired. The reflection comes after the fact, but then it is too late. The Leave result looks an awful lot like self-laceration: for the public, for politics, for Britain. A slew of idioms fit this situation so aptly, it’s almost sad. We have well and truly thrown our toys out of the pram, cut off our nose to spite our face, and for what? Resignations, sackings and uncertain negotiations are just the beginning. It is time for Britain to push itself to the limits of its constitutional imagination, and we do not know yet whether it is for better or for worse.

How do we navigate this No-Man’s Land of uncertainty? We don’t. The truth is we do not navigate. We wander, arms outstretched, tentatively hoping we don’t trigger another unintentional cataclysmic political carte blanche such as this.