Another day, another unintelligent article by The Daily Telegraph. In this <article>, Camilla Tominey says that there was nothing “fair” about Gina Miller’s 2017 <Brexit case>.
It was of course an entirely fair case, and a very necessary intervention – that is, if you care about the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Miller saved British parliamentary sovereignty from a pitchfork attack by constitutionally illiterate Brexit populists. As lawyer David Green noted:
“But for those in government, even this wasn’t enough. They quickly appointed themselves as tribunes for this popular will and sought to remove any parliamentary control and supervision of it. Anything from MPs that would delay, frustrate or merely shape the form of Brexit was intolerable to ministers heady with their sense of popular empowerment. This was a profound if opportunistic power grab by the executive, which could have distorted the UK constitution for generations.”
Read his article <here>:
A central Brexiter canard is that the Miller case was about “over-turning Brexit”. It plays well to their default self-pity setting, and their Trump-ian cult myth-making.
Miller’s case has absolutely nothing to do with “over-turning Brexit”, as so many choleric and poorly-read Brexiters like to feel. From paragraph 3 in the case:
“It is also worth emphasising that this case has nothing to do with issues such as the wisdom of the decision to withdraw from the European Union, the terms of withdrawal, the timetable or arrangements for withdrawal, or the details of any future relationship with the European Union. Those are all political issues which are matters for ministers and Parliament to resolve.”
The case was entirely about whether or not the British parliament had a right to be consulted on the terms of the Brexit deal.
The Brexit position was that Brexit was purely a matter for the people (who had voted in a referendum) and the cabinet of the day. Parliament could, and should, be sidelined. Any attempt to let Parliament have a look at the terms was, in Brexiter land, “undemocratic.
Parliamentary sovereignty, something that previous generations of Brits had struggled to obtain, and which had been in place since the late 1600s, was now presented, by an hysterical and constitutionally-illiterate Brexiter rabble, as being “undemocratic”.
The judges, who were merely upholding a fundamental British freedom in the teeth of right-wing mob hysteria, were publicly traduced as “enemies of the people”.
And this dumb article perpetuates this sub-fascist nonsense. I remember when the Daily Telegraph was a bastion of right-wing intelligence. I often disagreed with it, but I at least always respected it. Nowadays, tough times for papers, and a wider culture which seems to dumb down a few clicks every other month, has led it to pander to the worst, populist excesses of the febrile mob.
It’s pretty obvious that Camilla Tominey either: (i) has not read the case; or (ii) if she has, she has failed to understand a word of it.
Disjecta 