Interesting article on how Brexit has exposed the fragility of UK democracy:
https://unherd.com/2019/02/how-parliament-disdains-the-people/
The Burkean philosophy on MPs not being delegates but representatives has now become the standard line for expressing the relationship between MPs and the people who voted for them. But we shouldn’t be too comfortable with it. Burke was a terrible constituency MP. He visited his Bristol seat infrequently, and he disagreed with the city’s merchants over opening up trade to the Irish. So when Burke told the voters of his Bristol seat on the day of his election in 1774 that “your representative owes you … his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving, you if he sacrifices it to your opinion” he was, in a fancy way, telling them to get stuffed – that he would vote however he likes.
Burke was no great fan of democracy. He was terrified at the prospect of a French revolution coming to Britain to destroy the established social order of church and nobility. Burke believed that government should be the preserve of the “natural aristocracy”. And he had little time for the views of uneducated, common people whom he thought could be easily swayed by the those who would appeal to their emotions and their prejudices.
This Burkean line, of course, is remarkably similar to a view that has often been repeated by Remainers – that poor, simple, ordinary people didn’t really know what they were doing when they voted to leave because they were being manipulated by demagogues and liars.
Fast forward to our current political quagmire. On the 9th June 2015, the House of Commons voted by 544 votes to 53 to have a referendum on our membership of the EU. In other words, the Commons itself agreed by a huge majority to have an exercise in direct democracy to break the Parliamentary log-jam over Europe. And what many MPs initially accepted at least was that such an exercise, albeit it advisory and no legally binding, nonetheless morally trumped the representative ‘think for yourself’ functions of an MP. Going into the lobby in early 2017 to vote for the triggering of Article 50, many MPs felt obliged to act more like delegates, ventriloquising the people’s will. And many deeply resented it.
What Brexit has exposed is how much our supposedly democratic system is weighted against democracy itself. When an exercise of direct democracy is conducted within a representative system, the representatives generally don’t like it. For the very idea of representative government still contains a sort of Burkean snobbishness about the general will.
The battle over whether Brexit will be implemented is not just a battle about Brexit per se, it is also a battle about who is boss: the people or MPs. Brexit may be an exercise in repatriating power from Europe to Westminster. But it is also a reminder that the moral source of political authority lies ultimately with the people and not with politicians.
