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[https://nationalpost.com/opinion/np-view-boris-johnson-strikes-a-blow-for-british-democracy-and-self-government
Boris Johnson strikes a blow for British democracy and self-government
National Post
January 31, 2020 6:23 PM EST
They laughed when he sat down to play. Then Boris Johnson made Brexit look easy. Which did not just confound conventional wisdom. It struck an important blow for self-government.
Johnson is an odd character and this newspaper deplores his government allowing Huawei into Britain’s 5G network. But it is not too strong to say that those who sought to sabotage Brexit, including semi-closet Remainers like Theresa May, had put British democracy at risk.
By the end of her administration, the British system of government was on the verge of disintegration. Because nobody had the confidence of Parliament or could gain it, there quite literally was neither ministry nor legislature. Yet May remained ostensibly prime minister without powers, mandate or purpose while MPs remained ostensibly legislators though they could not legislate. It was constitutionally essential that Johnson secure dissolution of this Parliament caroming rudderlessly about.
That his party then won a decisive victory and used it decisively was also crucial because behind this embarrassing crisis was a deeper one. Whether the referendum ever should have been called, and however fatuous David Cameron’s cunning plan to derail Brexit thereby, the British people actually were consulted on the most fundamental question they had faced since Margaret Thatcher’s reforms and probably since the Second World War. And they voted to leave.
It was a narrow vote. But on sound Lockean principles, a simple majority suffices to bind the political community on fundamental questions. A narrow Remain vote would have been taken as decisive. So for the political class to treat the June 23, 2016, vote as vulgar impertinence to the vanguard of history risked bringing the entire system of government into disrepute. Whereas even a Brexit gone bad would simply be a mistake requiring correction.
We anticipate no such result. The argument that Brexit could not work wasn’t just a matter of underestimating Boris Johnson or even the British people. It was a matter of underestimating how free societies work. Which was the third and most serious crisis behind Brexit.
It is now the conventional wisdom to say the hard part is yet to come. But this warning, like declaring Brexit impossible, fixates on governments as though they created trade, jobs and more. They don’t.
Politicians may thrash about trying to negotiate a new U.K.-EU trade treaty. But it is not the state that creates society, or the economy. It is the other way around. And it is individuals, firms and institutions that will make the new U.K.-European relationship work. Indeed, they already are.
Brexit has been looming since 2016 and people are not such fools as their voting choices often suggest. For over three years, everyone with skin in the game has been trying to figure out how not to get skinned. And through their energy, ingenuity and foresight the hugely mutually rewarding business and personal dealings between Britons and Europeans will continue largely as before even without, though far more probably with, a sensible trade treaty.
Consider warnings that Brexit might suddenly leave Britons resident in Spain unable to rent cars because their licences and insurance would not automatically be valid. It was not even credible that the two governments would allow the disruption, a.k.a. unhappy voters and lost tax revenue, that botching the licensing issue would cause. It was certainly not credible that all the Spaniards who earn a living in part from those resident foreigners, in real estate, retail and so on, and the multinational firms who sell insurance and rent cars, would not find solutions even before governments did. Or that banks would let ATMs in Spain stop giving Britons Euros, or Spaniards in Britain pounds, and shrug off the angry customers and lost profits.
Of course governments could impose irrational barriers out of spite, incompetence or both. But a major reason for Brexit was that they already were. The image of Nigel Farage’s final speech as an MEP cut off by some snippy chairperson because his delegation waved British flags, only to have him laugh in her face, underlines that Brexit was not some Colonel Blimp fantasy of returning to long-gone days that never were and stank anyway. It was a very real response to a very real problem: the EU’s inextricably linked bureaucratic excesses and democratic deficit that were harming the British and indeed Europeans.
Finally, it is clutching at straws to suggest that by disrupting the EU Brexit risks a repeat of 1914 and 1939. The Anglosphere was never the problem and Germany and France are done with internecine warfare.
Brexit won’t be easy because nothing in life is easy. Certainly nothing in government is. But it was far easier than thought by people who lacked faith in the British people and in self-government. By showing it, Boris Johnson has done us all a great service.
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