Tuesday 14 March 2017

How Wallonia looks set to do more democratic scrutiny of Brexit than the UK!


The Tory party have used Brexit to engineer an extraordinary anti-democratic coup. It was somewhat ironic that unelected peers in the House of Lords put up the fight in favour of democracy and parliamentary sovereignty, but their "meaningful vote" amendment to the absolute insult of a Brexit bill was defeated in the House of Commons as the Tories (assisted by UKIP, the DUP, the UUP and six appalling democracy-hating Labour Party rebels) cleared the path for Theresa May to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and set herself up as an autocrat who is beyond democratic accountability.

This defeat for democracy means that the Tory government will be able to make up the terms of Brexit as they go along, with no parliamentary scrutiny or approval whatever. Theresa May and her three incompetent Brexiteers will decide the future direction of the UK and there will be nothing that parliament can do to stop even the most brazenly self-serving of their machinations.


The Brexit situation is now utterly farcical. According to the terms of Article 50 the European Parliament will get a democratic vote on the post-Brexit agreement, but the Tories have engineered it so that the British parliament won't get a vote!

If things get complicated (which they likely will) and the post-Brexit trade deal becomes what is known as a Mixed Agreement, it won't just be the European Parliament that gets a vote, the individual national parliaments of the remaining 27 member states will all get a democratic vote on whether they agree to the terms, but the Tories have engineered it so that the UK parliament won't get a democratic vote!

If the post-Brexit deal becomes a Mixed Agreement it won't just be the national parliaments of the 27 remaining member states that get a vote either, the ratification procedures of Belgium include giving their regional parliaments a veto on the deal. This means that if the post-Brexit deal becomes a Mixed Agreement the Belgian regional parliament of Wallonia will get a democratic vote on it, but the UK parliament won't!

If the EU fail to cave into Theresa May's ludicrous threat-based posturing to fulfil her ridiculous list of demands for special favours for her corporate mates, there's the chance that she will launch a retaliatory and mutually ruinous "nuclear Brexit", and there will be no democratic means available for parliament to stop her doing it.

The only way for this anti-democratic Tory power-grab to be stopped now will be through the courts. However if the courts do decide to reassert that parliament is sovereign, we can be absolutely sure that whoever brings the case will be inundated with rape threats and death threats by the Brexit mob, and the pro-democracy judges will be declared "enemies of the people" again by extreme-right propaganda rags like the S*n, Daily Mail and Express.

The Tories have voted to scrap the principle of parliamentary sovereignty in favour of giving Theresa May authority to do whatever she likes free of any kind of democratic scrutiny. There's absolutely no way that such an anti-democratic power grab could be achieved within the framework of the EU. It's only by quitting the EU that such anti-democratic Tory extremism has been enabled.

It's becoming ever clearer that the European Union is actually very much more democratic than Tory Brexit Britain, and that Brexit was just an excuse for an anti-democratic Tory power-grab to free them from the democratic constraints of parliamentary scrutiny and approval. This anti-democratic Tory scheming makes me wonder how all of the people who voted for Brexit because of issues like "democracy" and "parliamentary sovereignty" are taking this.

I guess the most likely option is total denial, because for Brexit voters to accept this anti-democratic coup for what it is, would mean them accepting that they've been duped into signing a blank contract with the hard-right fringe of the Tory party, and we all know that people have a tendency to prefer the comfort of denial rather than taking the huge self-esteem hit of admitting to themselves that they've been played like gullible fools.


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