RUTHFULLY YOURS

On December 9, Geert Wilders was found guilty by a Dutch court of “incitement to anti-minority discrimination.” His crime was asking a crowd in The Hague in 2014, “Do you want more or fewer Moroccans in this city and in the Netherlands?” “Fewer, fewer!” came the reply, to which he responded: “I’ll take care of that!” That was enough to get Wilders arrested and put on trial nine months ago, and convicted last Friday.

Wilders called the verdict “madness” and promised to fight back, but other Europeans accused of deviant thoughts are not as sanguine. In late 2015, Christoph Biro, editor-in-chief of Austria’s top-circulation daily, the Kronen Zeitung, was charged with “hate speech” for writing that “young men, testosterone-fueled Syrians, carry out extremely aggressive sexual attacks.” Only weeks later, the New Year’s Eve orgy of rape and sexual assaults by Muslim immigrants in Germany and elsewhere in Europe provided ample empirical evidence of Biro’s assertions. He nevertheless had to take a month-long leave of absence, and was subsequently pressurized into confessing, Moscow-1936-style, that he had “lost a sense of proportion.” That will not save him from standing trial in Graz next year.

The writing on Europe’s wall was clear a decade ago, when the late Oriana Fallaci—for decades Italy’s best-known journalist—was indicted in the Italian city of Bergamo for “hate crimes” and “defaming Islam.” Fallaci, a self-described “Christian atheist” and a leftist, in the aftermath of 9/11 had become an outspoken foe of Europe’s Islamization. Her 2002 book The Rage and the Pridecaused a sensation. It is not just the Western culture and way of life that the jihadist hates, she wrote. Blinded as they are by cultural myopia, the Westerners should understand that a war of religion was in progress, a war that the enemy calls Jihad, which seeks the disappearance of our freedom and our civilization. It wants to annihilate, she wrote,

. . . our way of living and dying, our way of praying or not praying, our way of eating and drinking and dressing and entertaining and informing ourselves. You don’t understand or don’t want to understand that if we don’t oppose them, if we don’t defend ourselves, if we don’t fight, the Jihad will win . . . And with that it will destroy our culture, our art, our science, our morals, our values, our pleasures.

The most heartening poll of the post-Brexit era was published by YouGov last week. It shows that 68 per cent of people want Britain to crack on with Brexit. That’s a pretty clear majority in favour of enacting the June referendum result. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of Leave voters who responded to the poll said we should get on with leaving the EU, but strikingly so did around half of Remain respondents. That is, a great swathe of the people who on 23 June expressed a desire to stay with Brussels recognise that there’s something more important than their political preferences: democracy; the right of a majority within a nation to shape that nation’s political destin

There are many positive things about this poll. There’s its suggestion that, outside of the anti-Brexit bubble of the political class, business world and liberal media, a great chunk of people still understand that democracy is important. There’s its wiseness to the anti-democratic swindle of a second referendum: 59% said the call for a second referendum is ‘illegitimate’. There’s its scepticism about the insistence that parliament must get to pore over Brexit: 47 per cent to 36 per cent think the government should probably enact Brexit now.

But perhaps the most positive thing in the poll is what it tells us about that new political tribe ‘the 48%’, which presents itself as the voice of the 16.1million people who voted Remain. It tells us this tribe doesn’t really exist. That it’s a cynical fabrication of a small elite that merely uses the 16.1million as a cover to pursue its own self-interested agenda.

‘The 48%’ fancies itself as an edgy, rebellious movement. ‘We’re the insurgents now’, says Tony Blair. Blair, who has openly discussed the possibility of stopping Brexit, poses as the spokesman for a revolution when he says there should be ‘a new movement born from the 48%’ and it must ‘mobilise and organise’.

On social media, journalists and campaigners plaster their photos with stickers saying ‘I am the 48%’. There’s now a ‘newspaper of the 48%’, The New European, a superbly snooty affair whose first issue was adorned with a photo of two slovenly Leave voters plonked on a couch as their pet dog wonders why ‘these idiots’ voted against the EU (dogs being cleverer than plebs).

Who will speak for the 48%?’, cries The Economist. That bible of the business elite says ‘the 48%’ are actually probably ‘a majority of the British population’ — not all Remainers turned out to vote, or something — and these millions of ‘big-city dwellers, Millennials, globe-trotters, university students… [and] perfectly Middle-England types’ need to have their concerns about leaving the EU heeded, perhaps even as a means of softening Brexit. Keir Starmer, Labour’s anti-Brexit shadow Brexit secretary — like having someone who hates education in charge of education — says ‘the 48% feel they’re being written out of their own history’.

Does ‘the 48%’ really feel this? All 16.1million? Of course not. There is no movement of the 48 per cent. There’s no mass desire to thwart Brexit. As that YouGov poll shows, a nice majority thinks democracy should take its course. The vast majority of both Leavers and Remainers, having made their political views plain on 23 June, are now getting on with life again. One side has not launched an insurgency against the other, except in Blair’s febrile imagination. ‘The 48%’ is an utter invention, a front for tiny but influential cliques that want to appear at least semi-democratic as they seek to thwart Brexit. Let’s call them by their real name: the 0.48%. Actually, that might be too generous. Perhaps the 0.048%.

The brilliant democratic cry of the Levellers remains unanswered

It is arguable that democracy as we know it, the modern, much fought-for ideal that a people should be sovereign over itself, was born in a pokey church in Putney in south-west London. There, in St Mary’s, by the Thames, members of the New Model Army that fought on the side of parliament against the king in the English Civil War met in 1647. They spent 15 days, from 28 October to 11 November, discussing the constitutional set-up of a new, freer Britain, the fate of the king, and the idea, put forward by more radical attendees, that there should be manhood suffrage — that is, one man, one vote; a parliament elected by all men, including poor men. For two weeks the church fizzed with ideas and proposals that would reverberate not only across Britain, but around the world, inspiring American revolutionaries, French revolutionaries and others to depose of rotten regimes and stagger towards democracy. The church is still there, and emblazoned on its wall is perhaps the key cry of the more radical elements who gathered in it 350 years ago: ‘The poorest hee that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest hee.’

‘The poorest hee hath a life to live as the greatest hee.’ It was a plea for the franchise for all men, regardless of station or wealth or even intellect. The words were uttered by Thomas Rainsborough, an MP for Droitwich in Worcestershire and a leading spokesman for a group called the Levellers in these Putney Debates, as history has recorded them. Rainsborough continued: ‘I think it clear, that every Man that is to live under a Government ought first by his own Consent to put himself under that Government; and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that Government that he hath not had a voice to put Himself under.’ It was a searingly radical idea then, and arguably remains radical now: that even the poorest, least well-educated person should not be ruled by any institution whose existence he has not in some way consented to. It was the expression of a new idea — or rather of an old idea stretching back to Athens, but lost for millennia, in a new form. And it’s no exaggeration to say, as one historian does, that this proposal in a church to enfranchise ‘the poorest hee’ became ‘the spark that was to light the fire which eventually razed centuries of tyranny, monarchy, feudalism and oligarchy’, not only in England, but beyond (1). Around the world, ‘the poorest hee’ forced himself into public life, rudely intruded on history, remade the political world.

The Levellers were not an especially coherent group on the parliamentarian side in the Civil War. They were also not the most radical body in this most brilliant and tumultuous of periods in English history. The Diggers, for example, a collection of Protestant radicals who called themselves True Levellers, went further in terms of agitating for a wholly open politics and even economic equality. But the Levellers’ case for democracy, and for the thing that is essential to democracy, freedom of the press, stands as the most articulate and long-lasting cry of the Civil War. It’s also an unanswered cry. It helped to raze tyrannies, and moved millions, yes, but it remains unfulfilled. The Levellers’ proposals, or questions, on how the sovereignty of the people should be embodied and exercised, and why all ‘hees’, not just the ‘greatest hee’, should get to steer the fate of the nation, and why press freedom must be unfettered and unpunished if we are genuinely to have an open, democratic politics, remain unsettled, remain unresolved. Indeed, events of 2016, in particular the rash, unforgiving reaction of the elites to Brexit and the ill-educated ‘hees’ who voted for it, show that the ideas pushed by the Levellers in that church 350 years ago are still controversial; they’re the unfinished business of history brimming under the terra firma of our polite politics; they’re yet to be won.

The ideas pushed by the Levellers in that church 350 years ago are still controversial; they’re the unfinished business of history brimming under the terra firma of our polite politics

The English Civil War was in fact three wars, which took place between 1642 and 1651. They were wars over the manner of government in England, pitting parliamentarians, or Roundheads, against royalists, or Cavaliers. Their impact was extraordinary. There was the execution of Charles I in 1649. There was the complete replacement of the monarchy with a Commonwealth of England from 1649 to 1653, and then a Protectorate from 1653 to 1659, through which Oliver Cromwell, the key commander of the parliamentarian forces, and later his son became Lord Protector — effectively dictator — of England, Scotland and Ireland. In 1660, the monarchy was restored, with Charles II put on the throne; but his successor, James II, was then deposed in 1688 by the specially arranged coup of an invasion of England by the Protestant William of Orange from the Netherlands, who ruled under terms set by parliament. These terms imposed dramatic limits on royal power. And so, following years of conflict and monarchical rearrangement, was the supremacy of parliament established.