Once again, the government has been seen to be not only incompetent, but also ignorant of the British Constitution. Nearly 50 years ago, as a student of 'O' level British Constitution, as part of a course on "Public Administration", things like parliamentary procedure, and the fact that governments cannot present the same motion to parliament twice within a single session, were routine bits of knowledge young students were expected to know. But, the highly paid professional MP's, and Ministers that comprise the government, with all of their highly paid, specialist advisors seem not to have known this basic fact of parliamentary procedure set out clearly in Erskine May. They seem to have been taken by surprise that the Speaker, has, therefore, ruled that it would be out of order for the government to simply keep submitting the same motion to parliament, in the hope of eventually getting the answer they want.
If they had even read my blog post from last week, they would have been forewarned of such a possibility. Information that I provided for them freely had they simply read it, as they sit on the front benches playing with their smartphones. If instead of playing Candy Crush, or looking at funny cat videos, with the sound of parliamentary procedure as merely background noise, they had read my blog post - The Government May Now Have To Revoke Article 50 - they would have read there,
"But, given that May's deal has been voted down massively on previous occasions, and that nothing will have changed, its not even certain it will even be voted on again. According to parliamentary procedure, it should not."
But, I was not displaying any specialist inside knowledge here. Not only is such knowledge available to anyone who has studied 'O' level British Constitution, the possibility that the government might not be able to bring the same motion to parliament twice had even been discussed earlier by the media. So, why didn't the government know that this would be the case? Why have they been so taken aback, and offended that the constitution has been upheld? After all, this is a government that has insisted that what the whole Brexit debate has been about is the question of parliament "taking back control", and is also about, having had one snapshot vote on leaving the EU, the electorate should be denied any further votes, on the same issue.
Of course, the reality is that the government must have known the constitutional position in regard to bringing this vote forward repeatedly. If not they are even more incompetent and ignorant than we have come to expect, even with our low expectations of them. The reality is that the government has become so used to riding roughshod over the constitution, and basic elements of democracy that it thought that it could ignore constitutional niceties, like parliamentary procedure, and simply use its muscle to keep threatening parliament until such time as it got the result it wanted. It is simply an illustration of the arrogance and authoritarianism that the Tories have shown over the last 9 years in office.
When the Brexiteering Tories coined the phrase "Take Back Control" , they, of course, did not really mean that the British people should take back control of their lives, because they have never had any such control for them to take back!
In terms of the economy, real control over things such as the level of the Pound, of interest rates, of levels of investment, long since passed out of the control even of national governments, let alone the people. The value of the Pound is determined by the hundreds of trillions of Pounds traded in international money markets, every single day, by global billionaires, by huge international banks, and investment houses. The way, during the ERM Crisis, the Bank of England had to raise interest rates to over 15%, and spent billions of Pounds of reserves trying to defend the Pound, shows how little control the nation state has over such things. Indeed, its one reason why it is only the currencies of huge economies like the EU, US or China that have any hope of being able to exert control over the level of their currency, in the face of such astronomical money flows.
In terms of politics, they people also have also never had real control. Their involvement is reduced to the most meagre, being asked to vote every four years for one set of politicians to simply replace those already in office. And, they have always been encouraged to see even that level of involvement as an imposition, as the concerns of Brenda from Bristol illustrated. They are encouraged not to get directly involved in politics, with those who do so continually being branded either as basically crooks, "only out for themselves", when they get elected to any position, or else as "extremists", if they are simply activists trying to exert some day to day oversight of those who might otherwise actually be guilty of such crooked, or corrupt behaviour. But even if the political system, did encourage greater democratic involvement and control by the electorate, over politicians and governments, it would not really represent actual control. For one thing, the government itself, as indicated above, has no real control over the economy, which is controlled by external economic and financial forces, much more powerful than the British state can muster. Secondly, real control over parliament, as with real control over local Councils resides not with the MP's, or Councillors who are elected for short periods, and come and go, but by the permanent state bureaucracy, which remains in place year after year, decade after decade, and is a self-perpetuating,a nd self-selecting bureaucracy, whose upper echelons, appoint those in the positions below them, so as to ensure that those that follow them continue with their work, within the same ideological framework. That ideological framework is not one that is geared to the interests of "the people", but to the interests of the dominant section of the ruling-class, the interests of the dominant section of capital.
When it comes to their daily lives, in its most important aspects, "the people" also have never had control. The vast majority of "the people", today are comprised of the working-class, including those often described as "middle-class", that is people who must sell their labour-power for a wage, in order to live. Such workers have no control over the wage they receive, because those wages are determined by the market, which, as seen above, means all of those trillions of Pounds, swilling around global markets, moving the Pound up or down, causing interest rates to move up and down, and determining whether billions of Pounds will be invested, creating jobs, in this country or some other, or none, and so dictating the demand for labour-power. Workers, have no control over any of that. Moreover, even if they are lucky enough to have a job, they have no control over the conditions of that employment. At best, if they are in a workplace that is conducive for workers to organise themselves into a trades union, they might be able to prevent their conditions falling below a given minimal level, which is itself determined at any particular time, by all of these wider economic factors. The people who get to vote on what the firm will produce, how they will produce, where it will produce it, and so on, are not the workers and managers in the firm, but a tiny group of shareholders, who have nothing to do with the company, other than that they have loaned money to it, in return for shares. Its like your bank insisting that it can tell you what colour to paint your living room, what TV you can watch in your house, and who you can invite around, giving you no say in the matter, simply on the basis that they gave you a mortgage to buy the house! In all those things the majority of "the people" have never had control in the first place, let alone be able to take it back!
Nor, indeed, had they had such control to take back, could they have taken it back from the EU,as the Brexiteering Tories suggest, because, as set out above, it was not the EU that would have taken away that control either. It isn't the EU that exerts such control, but British and global capitalists, global capital markets, global speculators, and so on. If control is to be taken back, or taken hold of at all, it is from those forces that it must be removed, not the EU.
The reality, is that when the Brexiteering Tories talked about "Take Back Control", they did not mean that the majority of British people should take back control over these things, that is the last thing they would want to see. They did not even mean that the British parliament should take back control, as all of their behaviour since the referendum has shown, where they have tried to remove any involvement of parliament in the Brexit negotiations. No, what they meant was that the relatively small segment of the people that make up the core support and membership of the Tory Party, whose economic and political interests are challenged by the EU, should take back control. And, because that section of the population is a relatively small proportion compared to the millions of people that make up the working-class, they have increasingly had to rely on support from those sections of society that exist on its periphery, and who have always been the foot soldiers of demagogues, Bonapartists and dictators in the past. They have had to rely on authoritarian measures, to try to cut parliament out of the process, to brand all who insist on any kind of democratic involvement and procedure being followed, as "Traitors", or "Enemies of the People", so as also to mobilise those dangerous classes as their stormtroopers.
The Tories hostility to Bercow's decision does not flow from any lack of understanding of parliamentary procedure, but is fully consistent with its authoritarian and arrogant behaviour over the last three years, as it pushes forward further towards the implementation of some kind of Bonapartist regime, of the kind seen elsewhere in the world, where the Tories hobnob with right-wing dictators and authoritarians.
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