The allure of the political strongman, who kicks over Parliament & the law in the belief that he alone knows "the will of the people", is becoming dangerously mainstream. If a historian cannot understand the dangers, our politics is truly lost. [THREAD] dailymail.co.uk/debate/article…
2. The core of Roberts' argument is this: "when leaders represent the will of the people – & the laws they are breaking are illegitimate or undemocratic – violating them is nearly always justified". Every tyrant of the 20th century made the same claim, on the same flawed premise.
3. How do we know what "the will of the people" is? Roberts seems very confident in his own judgement - so confident, in fact, that he is instructing ministers to sweep aside the law and our elected representatives in order to carry it out. But what is the evidence he is correct?
4. Roberts might be a prophet or a clairvoyant, with a unique insight into the minds of the people. Or he might be a crank with an inflated ego. So might I. To decide between us, we need institutions that don’t rely on intuition to decide what “the will of the people” could be.
5. The only such institution we have is Parliament. It’s not perfect (I'd welcome Roberts' support for electoral reform) but it is our *only* elective institution. Knock that aside – decide that its laws don’t matter & can be ignored – and all that's left is “who shouts loudest”.
6. Let's assess Boris Johnson's popular credentials. He was elected by 90K Tory members. He has a negative approval rating & no parliamentary majority. The evidence that he, not Parlt, speaks "the will of the people" looks compelling to Roberts; it seems thin to me. Who's right?
7. Johnson is not, of course, the only one who purports to speak for "the people". Labour claims to represent "the many" against "the few". Remainers demand a "People's Vote", while Farage boasts of his "People's Army". We need mechanisms, like Parliament, to decide between them.
8. The referendum doesn't get round this. In blocking No Deal, Roberts claims, MPs have subverted "the clearly expressed will of the people". But Michael Gove, who led Vote Leave, says No Deal was *not* what people voted for. Again, we need a mechanism to decide who is right. 
9. For a historian, Roberts deploys some peculiarly bad analogies. It's hard to see, for example, how the case of John Hampden, who "refused to pay the Ship Money tax ... because it had not been agreed by Parliament", justifies a prime minister in overriding that Parliament.
10. As for Gandhi, Mandela & the US Revolution: they were demanding representative institutions of their own, not trashing the laws of parliaments they themselves had elected. This is junkyard history, scavenging for parts & welding them together into some hiccoughing old banger.
11. Papers like the Daily Mail have always favoured declamatory models of popular politics, in which they simply pronounce "the voice of the people" without the tiresome interference of elections or the need for other voices. They should remember where that led them in the 1930s.
12. If Roberts wants a more representative Parliament, he can work for voting reform. In the meantime, he does not get to decide which laws "the will of the people" support. Nor do I. Nor does Johnson. We need elective institutions to do that, & we break them at our peril. [END]
