YES! Judges Tell Lawless Tory Government That UK Cannot Leave EU Without Parliamentary Approval

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YES! Judges Tell Lawless Tory Government That UK Cannot Leave EU Without Parliamentary Approval

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Great, great, great news from the High Court, as three of the most senior judges in the UK — the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Thomas of Cwmgiedd, Sir Terence Etherton, the Master of the Rolls, and Lord Justice Sales — have ruled that “Parliament alone has the power to trigger Brexit by notifying Brussels of the UK’s intention to leave the European Union,” as the Guardian reported it, adding that the ruling was “likely to slow the pace of Britain’s departure from the EU and is a huge setback for Theresa May, who had insisted the government alone would decide when to trigger the process.”

Despite Theresa May’s wishful thinking, the Lord Chief Justice reminded her — and her ministers — that “the most fundamental rule of the UK constitution is that Parliament is sovereign,” something that those us with better knowledge of British democracy than our most senior ministers have been pointing out for the last four months.

Lord Thomas said, specifically, “The court does not accept the argument put forward by the government. There is nothing in the 1972 European Communities Act to support it. In the judgment of the court, the argument is contrary both to the language used by parliament in the 1972 act, and to the fundamental principles of the sovereignty of parliament and the absence of any entitlement on the part of the crown to change domestic law by the exercise of its prerogative powers.”

Unless the ruling is overturned on appeal at the Supreme Court, it “threatens to plunge the government’s plans for Brexit into disarray as the process will have to be subject to full parliamentary control,” in the Guardian’s words.

And so we have it. Finally, 133 days after the EU referendum, a body of unarguable weight and authority has told the unelected Prime Minister Theresa May and her deluded ministers that they cannot behave like tyrants. Sovereignty in the UK lies not with the Prime Minister or the Cabinet, or the 72.21% of the eligible electorate who voted in a non-binding referendum, giving a slim majority to those voting to leave the EU (by 51.9% of those who voted to 48.1%), but with Parliament.

Three-quarters of MPs support the UK remaining in the EU, so the challenge now is to persuade them to vote in the interests of the UK rather than deciding that they must comply with the narrowest of majorities in an advisory referendum that should never have been called in the first place.

I very much hope to hear in the imminent future that some of the 16.1 million people who voted to remain in the EU will be setting up a massive lobbying campaign to persuade MPs that they must not endorse any effort to leave the EU that will be an economic disaster; in other words, that preserving the single market is unarguably much more significant than efforts to curb immigration — which, it should be noted, are in any case likely to be as effective as King Canute, the Danish king of England a thousand years ago, attempting to hold back the tide.

As the ramifications of the ruling sink in, it’s worth just looking back at how we got to this ridiculous place, where Britain has become an international laughing stock — except to far-right and hard-left separatists of various kinds — and racism is now so open and so openly hostile that anyone who can be regarded as “foreign” can likely expect abuse — or, at a familiarly polite English level, controlled disdain, via, for example, inquiries about where they’re from, questions that, it should be noted, people living here for decades have never been asked before.

So let’s begin with the man who should one day be held primarily accountable for this debacle, Little “Dave” Cameron, whose arrogance was such that he called a referendum he should never have called to placate those to the right of him (the far right of the Tory Party, and the slimeball UK Independence Party), and arrogantly assumed that a campaign led by himself would walk to victory.

And yet, despite this, it turns out that Cameron was not as terrible a Prime Minister as he could have been; that award actually goes to Theresa May. Don’t get me wrong. Cameron was an irritating, patronising would-be smoothie, and his regime was foul and cruel, with an unparalleled assault on the fundamental bases of decent society (essentially, recognizing that the state provisions of services is both worthwhile and necessary, that the drive to privatise almost everything is ruinous, and that everyone is society should receive basic protections).

In his six years as Prime Minister, the country became a darker, more hard-hearted place, via — to name but a few of the main culprits — his dysfunctional, tight-fisted, austerity-obsessed Chancellor, George Osborne; the vicious Iain Duncan Smith, with his Victorian Social Darwinism, blaming the poor for their poverty by calling them dysfunctional rather than recognising them as the victims of a fundamental and ever-growing economic inequality; the slimy school destroyer Michael Gove; the supremely incompetent justice secretary, Chris “No Brain” Grayling; and the money-grabbing, social mobility-wrecking universities minister, David Willetts, known as “Two Brains” for his supposed intellect, although, as I have always noted, he may have two brains, but neither of them actually work. And, of course, let’s not forget his home secretary, Theresa May, whose dangerous authoritarianism and racism I have written about previously — see As Theresa May Becomes Prime Minister, A Look Back at Her Authoritarianism, Islamophobia and Harshness on Immigration

I could go on, but I think I’ve established well enough how desolate the political landscape was from May 2010, when the Tories first installed themselves back in power with the help of the hapless Lib Dems, until June 23 this year, and the EU referendum.

But amazingly, since then, the new reality has been even worse. Theresa May, it turns out, the only contender left standing after a virtual shootout that wiped out Cameron, Osborne, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove, is not a safe pair as hands, as the Thatcher-loving right are desperate to gush about, but, as those of us paying close attention already knew, a colossally small-minded, Home Counties bigot, whose lukewarm support for the Remain campaign turned to an evangelical fervour for leaving the EU as soon as she became leader.

As a leader, she has been a disaster — visionless, rudderless, still fundamentally bigoted, and capable of wiping eye-watering amounts of money off the value of the pound every time she has opened her mouth to bleat on about pursuing a “hard Brexit.” Unable to contemplate resisting any kind of exit from the EU that would be disastrous for our economy, and for our well-being as a modern tolerant, inclusive society (which we largely were before June 23), she has blundered on, pointless and clueless, flanked by her three horsemen of the Apocalypse, her Brexit ministers — David Davis, an admirable figure over the last decade or so as the Tories’ conscience on human rights, but hopelessly out of his depth as the minister for the UK’s suicide (sorry, the Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union); the idiot Boris Johnson, who “won” the Brexit campaign but didn’t even want to, and has been beyond satire as foreign secretary — including at the Spectator Awards this week, when he promised that the UK would “make a Titanic success” of leaving the EU, prompting George Osborne, presenting him with a comeback of the year award, to remind him that the Titanic sank; and, last but not least, the dangerously right-wing Liam Fox, the Secretary of State for International Trade, who somehow crawled back to ministerial life after the disgrace of his companion Adam Werrity being allowed to attend meetings of international government business when Fox was defence secretary in 2010-11.

In response to today’s court ruling, a government spokesman said ministers would appeal to the Supreme Court, and it has already been announced that that hearing will take place on December 7 and 8. I am pretty much 100% convinced that the Supreme Court will not disagree with the High Court’s ruling, so today I am going to carry on celebrating the fact that, when it came down to it, and as has happened sporadically during my life, judges have been there to stop the government from turning the executive branch into a tyranny; and please, let’s not forget the irony of this coming from ministers whose reason for wanting to leave the EU was that they regarded it as having been detrimental to Britain’s own sovereignty; the sovereignty that, in closing, for now, I must once more reiterate lies with Parliament and not with the Prime Minister and her cabinet.

So now, let’s please bring on the concerted campaign to persuade MPs to vote with their brains and their hearts, and to have the courage to say what Theresa May and her Cabinet have not: that the referendum result was only advisory, and that anything that fundamentally and profoundly damages our economy to the extent that the Brexit debacle is already doing cannot be accepted based on an advisory referendum that should never have been called and whose alleged victory was only secured with majority so slim that it does not represent a sufficient mandate for such devastating upheaval.

Andy Worthington is a freelance investigative journalist, activist, author, photographer, film-maker and singer-songwriter (the lead singer and main songwriter for the London-based band The Four Fathers, whose debut album ‘Love and War’ and EP ‘Fighting Injustice’ are available here to download or on CD via Bandcamp). He is the co-founder of the Close Guantánamo campaign (and the Countdown to Close Guantánamo initiative, launched in January 2016), the co-director of We Stand With Shaker, which called for the release from Guantánamo of Shaker Aamer, the last British resident in the prison (finally freed on October 30, 2015), and the author of The Guantánamo Files: The Stories of the 774 Detainees in America’s Illegal Prison (published by Pluto Press, distributed by the University of Chicago Press in the US, and available from Amazon, including a Kindle edition — click on the following for the US and the UK) and of two other books: Stonehenge: Celebration and Subversion and The Battle of the Beanfield. He is also the co-director (with Polly Nash) of the documentary film, “Outside the Law: Stories from Guantánamo” (available on DVD here — or here for the US).