Presumably, Theresa May is not planning to raise her standard in Nottingham; she’s learned that much from history. But she has raised her standard for acting outside the Westminster system in the interests of those who voted Leave. To complicate matters, though, more than six million people have signed a petition demanding that the Government revoke article 50, and hundreds of thousands marched in central London for a second referendum. The Government, though, claims this does not compromise its efforts to represent “the people” against Parliament.
It is and always has been entirely open to the people to petition Parliament, as well as to lobby their MPs, and they did so frequently during the English Civil War. The most famous petitioners were women; first came the women’s peace protesters, followed by the Leveller women. On both occasions, they were derided by their opponents as whores who had been inveigled by men.
A group of women wearing white ribbons gathered outside the House of Commons in August 1643 to demand that Parliament make peace with the King, presenting the house formally with a signed petition. One newspaper called them “whores, bawds… beggar women and the very scum of the suburbs, besides a number of Irish women.” (Those damned foreigners.) Parliament paid them no real attention, in part because it believed that they had been organised by a conspiracy of royalists or Catholics or Irish Catholics; conspiracy thinking was rife during the period. They were sent home, to ‘meddle’ with their ‘huswifery’.
It was the same story with the Leveller women’s petition. In April 1649 a group of them declared:
“That we have an equal share and interest with men in the common-wealth, and it cannot be laid waste (as now it is) and not we be the greatest & most helpless sufferers therein.”
They also demanded the release of the recently arrested authors of a pamphlet that supported universal male suffrage.
Despite efforts to connect women’s protests with the idea of “the world turned upside down”, petitions like this were highly conventional. Usually, women whose husbands had been imprisoned and especially those whose relatives had been condemned to death would address their petitions to the monarch; with Charles’s authority in abeyance, these women addressed their grievances to the Commons.
Petitioners have brought great changes, not by terrifying or threatening MPs, but by peaceful mass demonstrations. Such petitions are the usual way for people under the Westminster system to make it clear that in their minds, the government is in danger of betraying their trust. Governments that take no notice usually face a backlash, as both the Long Parliament and Charles I can attest.
When it came to a shooting war, one Civil War battle was amusingly characterised by both sides having the same war cry: “God with us!” In the same way, all sides in the Brexit debate claim to be trying to save democracy. All sides claim to be representing the will of the people. The problem is that the nation is now so deeply divided – and not in ways that can be represented by the division in the Commons into two parties, government and opposition – that claims to “represent the people” leave other people feeling unrepresented.
This illustrates the failings of populism; anyone can claim that they have the will of the people behind them. MPs, however, are supposed to be willing to put aside the interest of party – and let’s recall that parties came relatively late to the Westminster system and were themselves the result of a particular political crisis over Charles II’s successor – in order to arrive at the best decision for the country.
In his history of his own times, far better known to 17th-century MPs than it is now, the fourth century BC writer Xenophon tells the story of the way the democracy condemned military commanders in the Navy who had successfully defeated a Spartan fleet, but had not returned to pick up survivors of the battle. He says the crowd in the assembly was whipped up to a fury by one of the rowers who had survived the battle. A few brave people spoke against condemning the admirals to death, but then, Xenophon says, a shout went up “that it was intolerable for the people not to be given what they wanted”. The admirals are duly executed en masse. After Athens is conquered by Sparta, the mass trial is used as a precedent by the 30 tyrants for further mass executions.
Brexit seems to some like justice, others like democracy in action in its purest form. What our 17th-century ancestors knew much better than us is that populism invariably opens the door to tyranny in the long- and medium-term, however good the justification for its inauguration. The Westminster system, like every other long-lasting modern democracy was built to prevent tyranny. We are now in danger of opening the door to it.
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