RUTHFULLY YOURS

“The United Kingdom,” the New York Times proclaims with its customary tone of Olympian certainty, “has gone mad.”

That publication has become almost comically anti-British over the past two years, but on this occasion, it has a point — albeit an unintended one.

The author, Thomas Friedman, offers us his lofty diagnosis of Britain’s collective dementia. It is caused, he informs us, by “Conservative hard-liners who used to care about business but are now obsessed with restoring Britain’s ‘sovereignty’ over any economic considerations.”

What he means by “hard-liners,” to be clear, is “MPs who accept the 2016 referendum result,” something all sides promised to do in advance. It is worth pointing out that 12 months after the referendum, there was a general election, at which both the Labour and Conservative parties promised unequivocally to uphold the people’s verdict.

Only now, it turns out that when they made that promise, quite a few candidates had their fingers crossed behind their backs. The hard-liners, we are to understand, are those who actually meant what they said and plan to deliver on the commitments they made during the campaign.

That, these days, is what passes for psychosis.

To be fair, Friedman is not alone in this eccentric nomenclature. Liberal pundits have evolved a peculiar vocabulary to describe pledge-breaking by politicians. Words such as “leadership,” “compromise,” “maturity,” and “courage” are now used as euphemisms for “going back on what you promised when you were asking people to vote for you.” Conversely, those representatives who stick to their promises are called “extremists,” “hard-liners,” “obsessives,” and “swivel-eyed loons.”

What is unusual here, though, is the length to which the supposed moderates are prepared to go to defy the electorate. They are tearing down all the props and scaffolds which used to prop up Britain’s parliamentary system to guarantee its popular legitimacy. For example, the neutrality of the speaker of the House of Commons used to be a given, a datum on which everything else rested. But the current speaker, John Bercow, a passionate Euro-integrationist, is making up the rules as he goes along. First, he ignored official advice and precedent to allow an inadmissible pro-EU amendment. When challenged, he smirked, and told MPs that if we stuck with precedent, we would never change. A few weeks later, he refused to allow a pro-Brexit motion, citing a long-defunct rule from 1604 that forbade the same motion or amendment to be submitted twice in the same session. Precedent, he said, must be followed. Immediately afterwards, he made clear that he would allow pro-EU amendments to be resubmitted as often as the authors pleased, precedent be damned.

I could fill the rest of the column with examples of norms ignored, rules breached, conventions overturned, all for the sake of trying to keep Britain in the EU. Collective Cabinet responsibility, the balance between legislature and executive, the freedom of a government to contract treaties, the weight of election promises and even, possibly, the survival of the two main parties — all these are being tossed overboard in an attempt to capsize the referendum result.

Commentators are so used to applying the word “obsessive” to euroskeptics that they can’t bring themselves to acknowledge the mania of the Europhiles, who are prepared to tear down all the things that mainstream, liberal, sensible people used to value. Even the idea of democracy itself, the idea that elections matter and are not to be treated as an inconvenience, Venezuela-style, has been hacked aside by the Eurozealots’ machetes.

How did Edmund Burke put it? “Rage and frenzy will pull down more in half an hour than prudence, deliberation, and foresight can build up in a hundred years.” Yet, it is these Europhiles whom Friedman (and, indeed, the Financial Times, the BBC, and the rest) consider sane, simply because they won’t abandon a 1950s-era customs union.

The pundits have it back-to-front. Yes, a certain derangement has possessed some MPs. But the British people, I’m glad to say, are as sane, cynical, grumpy, and phlegmatic as ever. They never had much time for their politicians in the first place.

They suspected that their politicians would say one thing before the election and do another after it. They are not surprised to see MPs working to delay, water down, or block their decision, having always half-expected it to happen. But they know, too, that the 2016 referendum cannot simply be wished away. Sooner or later, Britain is leaving the EU. The only question is how many current politicians will survive the transition.