The speech of, unsurprisingly, a constitutional reactionary. But our constitutional arrangements are manifestly not up to the task of delivering Brexit: let alone other 21st century tasks such as dealing with trade, a multi-national State, more local control ...
Worth thinking here about a central theme of Robert Tombs’ interesting history of England: the English/UK state rose to the challenges of the early modern world because in Parlt it had a way of generating swift and accepted legitimacy for tax rises and other necessary reforms.
But the question as to whether our Parliament is capable of generating consent and legitimacy is, to put it mildly, far from obvious.
And confidence in our Parliament is hardly helped when MPs like @Jacob_Rees_Mogg fail to be straight about the real choices to be made.
Put shortly, you cannot hope to restructure an economy currently structured to be part of a single integrated market without huge cost. Nor can you hope to impose the hard border in Ireland entailed by his preference without damaging the hard won settlement on that island.
It’s the lack of basic honesty about the hard choices to be made (and @Jacob_Rees_Mogg is just an egregious example) that is, I suspect going to generate an enormous political/constitutional crisis.
Especially as the leaderships of both our major parties are both - in their slightly different ways - failing to warn people of the real choices to be made. When the cry of “why weren’t we told?” goes up, neither will be able to give an answer.
No Brexit settlement can pass this “but why weren’t we told about the downside?” test. So none is likely to have legitimacy or consent. Our system will have failed in what was (according to Tombs) once its greatest strength.
Hopefully that will lead to a major restructuring of our constitution to prevent anything like this ever happening again (and to address the fundamental weaknesses that were, like the Palace of Westminster itself, already showing).
But how that happen is as yet unclear, given that both main parties are led by constitutional reactionaries (as far as I can see, like Tony Benn, Corbyn’s only criticism of our constitution is that he isn’t in charge of it). /ends
PS - a further thought that I’ll add to this thread for convenience.
