Breaking free from the EU will not solve all the issues facing Britain, but it should catalyse a serious debate in the future. And if Britons have the courage to reject a purgatory of endless Brexit recriminations and embrace a long period of rebuilding, they could do far worse than turning to the example of the Founding Fathers. Especially one of their leading lights: Alexander Hamilton.

Suggested reading

Tories will reap the Brexit whirlwind

By Matthew Goodwin

Interest in Hamilton has already undergone a revival, thanks in part to the musical bearing his name. But even in his own right he stands out as someone who planned, set up and nurtured many of the important institutions of the United States.

Alexander Hamilton had a hand in the creation of its currency (his portrait graces the $10 bill), in the foundation of the Treasury, a prototype central bank, as well as the Coast Guard and West Point military academy, on top of the US Army. He was also a mastermind of American foreign policy and its trade relationship with Britain.

He was one of the lead authors of the Federalist Papers, the collection of essays that sought to clarify, strengthen and promote the US Constitution. Few men or women have had as enduring an impact on their nation.

His name serves as shorthand for the establishment of the institutions, laws and skills needed for countries to be able to thrive, in the sense of enjoying durable economic growth, high human development and a stable public life. All of these factors are on the wane in Britain — and the wider world – and need to be revived.

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Brexit's unheard voices

By Rakib Ehsan

The nascent democracy within which Hamilton acted was as noisy, nasty and chaotic as the Brexit climate is today. His enemies used the press ruthlessly against him, but he was careful that the will of the people be channelled by institutions and laws, and that distorted accounts of his policies be rebutted.

He was diligent in seeking out political opponents and trying to convince them of his views, and Hamilton and the Founding Fathers generally are the benchmark for political classes in terms of their vision, comportment and the durability of their policies.

The conciliatory and relatively open way he and others built a consensus over the Constitutional Convention, when the United States Constitution was drafted, is a model for how relations across the British political spectrum, as well as relations between London and Brussels, should be handled.

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Who'll blink first: Trump or Xi?

By Helen Thompson

That they are not is in part a question of leadership, and the quality of the current political cohort. In time, it may be that Brexit catalyses a new generation of politicians and parties, and that these shape what “Global Britain” becomes.

Here, Hamilton would also be a useful guide. He might set the scene by counselling that, as the trade war between the US and China is proving, a globalised world is becoming a multipolar one where Britain will simply be a mid-sized power like South Korea and Australia.

The notion of Global Britain will need to be conceived in the context of this reality, with implications for corporate governance, tax laws, the legal system and the City. It may also mean that Global Britain is founded on a meaningful security and defence agreement between the UK and the EU.

Hamilton would then focus on at least two other areas – both at the centre of the Brexit vote. One is low, poorly distributed economic growth and the other is immigration.

Suggested reading

When will we tackle the housing crisis?

By Liam Halligan

Economic growth in Britain has slowed dramatically and has become too financialised: it has increasingly relied on the accumulation of debt and priming by central banks to keep it going. The distraction of Brexit has meant that there has been too little attention paid to the rattling engine-room of the economy. It has been hollowed out by austerity and the labour market has changed radically for the worse in terms of the way workers have exchanged flexibility for security.

What debate there has been has focused on redistributive measures, a difficult policy to execute ahead of an impending world recession. What is much more important is to rediscover the source of high, organic economic growth.

The secret sauce of “growth” lies in many of the things Hamilton developed and that equally Britain is well known for — education, good institutions and laws. If he were with us today, Hamilton would lay out a plan to boost human development (education, longevity, mental health and equality), and to harness the parts of ‘intangible infrastructure’ (eg education, socially friendly use of technology, rule of law) that Britain is good at.

Suggested reading

What has 'flyover country' got to complain about?

By Peter Franklin

Then given the uncertainty, animosity and opportunity afforded by Brexit, Hamilton might propose a very clear contract on immigration. The aim of this would be to lay out the conditions that immigrants are welcomed into Britain, the help given to them to settle, assimilate and find work, their rights in the UK and a framework that would ensure they are respected and integrated into British society.

Given his aptitude for the infrastructure of state, Hamilton would not neglect the neglected parts of Britain. He would recommend a Marshall-style fund to help reshape their economy and society.

Much of the media is obsessed with the short-term drama — and who could blame them, such is the entertainment value. However, attention needs to be drawn to the deeper issues facing Britain and the potential solutions to them if Britain is to truly prosper and be at peace with itself after Brexit.

Sometimes, history and historical figures can anchor and steer these debates. I urge Britons to look beyond usual historical references such as Churchill towards someone who embodies the idea of nation building — Alexander Hamilton.

It is December 1788. George III is experiencing a protracted period of serious mental illness, and his physicians are unable to say if he will ever recover. He has retreated to Kew, in the care of his wife Queen Charlotte; the opposition, under Charles Fox, is working to install their ally, the king’s son Prince George, in his place as regent. After endless parliamentary negotiations, a bill is finally passed in the House of Commons, but the King recovers before the House of Lords is able to finalise the legislation.

This period, known as the Regency Crisis and chronicled by the film The Madness of King George, disrupted and disturbed the constitutional norms of the United Kingdom.

What the rhetoricians and cartoonists of the age were most struck by, was the sudden reversal in the two parties’ positions. Fox’s Whigs were traditionally in favour of shifting the balance of power away from the monarch, and towards parliament – but they found themselves arguing for the Prince’s prerogative right to assume his father’s throne during his incapacity. Pitt, the Prime Minister, was by contrast a Tory, and was as such expected to back royal rule. Instead, he acted to put parliament in charge.

Suggested reading

Whose side is parliament on?

By Diane Purkiss

George III’s mental illness was serious, and real. His symptoms are variously described as including ranting, foaming at the mouth, psychosis, delusions and rage. Some historians still believe it was caused by a genetic metabolic disorder called porphyria, which famously turns the sufferer’s urine blue.

The mainstream view, however, is now that Mad King George suffered from a mental, rather than physical, illness. Whatever the truth, the symptoms recurred throughout his lifetime, and by 1811 settled so profoundly upon his mind that he never recovered. At this point, the Regency Bill was finally approved: his son took to the throne.

So, if you think our current constitutional crisis is dragging on, remember that we lasted 23 years with a King upon whose sanity no one could rely. The British ability to postpone, delay and muddle through is perhaps our most dependable national trait.

Theresa May is not mad, in any clinical sense; she certainly doesn’t suffer from porphyria. But she has been accused of madness by at least one of her MPs, and far more have railed to the press with the question: “How the hell do we get rid of her?” – a question that seems to be echoing through history from the lips of countless 18^th and 19^th century politicians and constitutional experts.

More from this author

John Milton: smug liberal and free-speech warrior

By Polly Mackenzie

The Conservative Party’s constitution has – at least until December 2019 – given us a Prime Minister who cannot be removed from office by her party, no matter what she does. And, as in the Regency Crisis, an endless barrage of projects have been launched to try to navigate around this constitutional outrage.

Any number of efforts are being made to prevent a Prime Minister so many believe incompetent from continuing to govern. Examples include a party members’ petition to change the party’s constitution and enable a new vote of no confidence; a plot to steal the mace from parliament to prevent it from sitting; and a plan for the 1922 committee of backbench Conservative MPs to hold an indicative vote that reveals how much they hate her.

Most of these conspiring MPs claim that they’re acting according to principle when they pursue their plans. But as in the winter of 1788, individual and party interest is the driving force behind most of these apparent principles. Fox was suddenly in favour of hereditary monarchy and royal power because Prince George was an ally and friend. Pitt became a sudden convert to the cause of Parliamentary sovereignty because he knew that the Prince would sack him the moment he took the throne. The Prince’s obvious partiality was a decisive factor in enabling Pitt to secure a delay.

But it was the Prince’s character which made his father – in periods of lucidity – an intransigent opponent to his appointment as Regent. Perhaps Blackadder wasn’t entirely fair to the Prince of Wales, in its portrayal of him as a brainless dandy, but history offers us little evidence of the Prince’s good character. He seems to have taken every opportunity to annoy his father. He drank and ate to excess; he gambled and expected parliament to settle his debts; he conducted endless affairs, married illegally and against his father’s will and then, when forced by parliament to marry a Protestant, he effectively became a bigamist.

Parliament knew all this about him when they finally appointed him Regent in 1811. They put some controls on his Regency: he couldn’t confer peerages for the first year, for example. But they appointed him, nonetheless.

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Is Harry Potter an apologist for neoliberalism?

By Polly Mackenzie

In the context of a hereditary monarchy, you could argue that they had little choice. But parliament had taken an aggressive approach to choosing monarchs they liked ever since the Restoration: the Glorious Revolution replaced James II with his daughter Mary; when Mary’s sister Anne died without a living heir, it was her second cousin George I who inherited the throne, despite there being 50 living relatives ahead of him in the line of succession. Parliament effectively gifted the throne to the Hanoverian princes simply because they wanted a Protestant. Given this precedent, they didn’t need to choose Prince George to replace his father.

It seems that when your leader is mad, your standards drop. The Regency is a cautionary tale for those dreaming of replacing Theresa May. Don’t measure the replacements against the woman in Number 10. Measure them against history. Yes, she needs to go. But let’s not land ourselves with someone as inadequate as George IV.

“The safety of England in the estimation of every reflecting person in Europe is the preservation of all that is valuable to the peace and progress of mankind. They know that the commerce of England covers every sea, and that the security of England means the security of the only moderating and tranquillizing Power that exists in Europe. […] Every man who is the friend of his species, looks upon England as the great depository of political truth, her safety as their pride, and the peril of England as their despair.”

This kind of insular (and Anglo- rather than Britanno-centric) arrogance apparently never goes out of fashion.

But can we usefully apply experience of a piece of British history to the chaos and trauma of Brexit? British history has been treated recently as a great warehouse of romantic nonsense, a delivery hub of simplified historical trivia for politicians wanting to decorate their prejudices.

Boisterous prep school myths and Blimpish delusions are not an adequate basis for mature policy-making, nor a guide to future national performance. The value of your imperial legacy may go down as well as up.

Further reading

Can lessons from the past guide us through the present?

By Various authors

And yet there are lessons – or at least illuminating contrasts – in the way that politics and policy were done historically.

When the crisis of Europe broke in the summer of 1914, Britain had been looking the other way. Unionist and nationalist gun-running exploits into Ireland had raised the alarming possibility that Britain’s oldest colonial tension was about to turn into a civil war.

Following the Curragh Mutiny earlier in the year, the government wasn’t sure what orders the Army would follow in that situation. (Almost exactly a century earlier she had been similarly blind-sided, when Napoleon’s return from Elba found British attention and the best of her troops even farther westward, in America, another imperial difficulty.)

The assassination of an Austro-Hungarian archduke seemed both a long way away and one step removed from the direct confrontations between the European great powers that had intermittently threatened trouble during the previous two decades. In 1914 Britain had more diplomatic officials in Chile than in the Balkans. When she had focused attention on south-eastern Europe – presiding over the 1913 Conference of London to tidy up after the second Balkan war – it had been as a rather grand referee, not an interested party.

“The object was to localise the war,” the foreign secretary, Sir Edward Grey had declared to the House of Commons; “the primary essential was to preserve agreement between the Great Powers.” Britain’s only direct interest had been the Aegean Islands.

Further reading

The outgoing German ambassador fails to understand British history

By Allan Mallinson

Grey tried to maintain the same style in responding to the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and to the Austrian ultimatum to Serbia that followed. Instead of thinking immediately of Britain’s alliances, his instinct was to use her diplomatic pre-eminence to push for talks between Britain, France, Germany and Italy – the Great Powers not directly involved in the confrontation.

Once it was clear that continental war was inevitable, the question was whether Britain would be part of it. Grey squeezed limited commitments out of his Cabinet colleagues and made a series of delicately nuanced promises to France and Germany. These painstaking – perhaps self-defeating – subtleties were Britain’s last desperate attempt at impartiality. They were exploded by Germany’s declaration of war on France and invasion of Belgium. In a speech to the Commons of typical intricacy and atypical rhetorical strength, Grey shepherded the country to war.

There’s a theoretical debate about whether Britain’s more natural position in 1914 was instead to maintain the isolation that had – according to one side of the argument – served her well in previous decades, rather than sacrificing so much national resource in a continental imbroglio, accelerating her loss of influence relative to the United States and stepping onto the slippery slope of European entanglement. Regardless of that debate, in 1914 a moderate political leadership decided that it was natural and necessary, for Britain’s interest and her identity, that she should join the war.

But that’s not the lesson of 1914. The fact that Britain declared war that mad summer has little to tell us about the best means of pursuing fisheries protection or energy security a century later, regardless of whether the flickering lamps of Europe are powered by Russian gas, Middle Eastern oil or our own patriotic coal or fuel rods.

There was political interest enough in the Government’s decision to conform to patriotic enthusiasm, and the dignified thunder of Ramsay Macdonald’s reply to Grey’s speech – “There has been no crime committed by statesmen of this character without those statesmen appealing to their nation’s honour” – reminds us that there was another point of view. Rather, the lesson is in the attitude to politics and policy.

Further reading

Whose side is parliament on?

By diane purkiss

1914 feels like the last flickering of an old idea of discretion and duty in political leadership. It is Grey himself who best embodies this. The ideal Government minister, he suggested, “may well be someone who has no itch to run other people’s lives”. Perhaps his performance in the summer of 1914 seems in hindsight naive; but he struggled desperately to avoid a war that he foresaw would be devastating, and to balance party political reality, personal principle and his own clear belief about what was essential for the country.

He echoes a greater age of principled political leadership, a sense of obligation to something wider. In 1846, Peel knowingly destroyed his own government and party because he believed it essential to repeal the Corn Laws that were keeping food prices impossibly high for much of the population. Forty years later Gladstone did the same to push Home Rule for Ireland.

It would of course be wrong to romanticise Victorian politics. It had its scoundrels and its self-interested. It had herds of bovine back-benchers who are forgotten for good reason. Its politicians could literally afford to care less about party politics, because their private incomes would continue to support them whoever was in power: it was unrepresentative not only because significant swathes of the population were not voting, but also because MPs were not paid.

Peel’s principle over the Corn Laws followed decades of selfishness by a landowning political class. Gladstone’s Home Rule was never implemented. Any credit due to Grey’s sense of duty seems lost in his own sense of failure at the ruin of his work.

Further reading

What scars do we bear from the First World War?

By Robert tombs

But there is still the impression that leadership meant something more than party and personal interest. Parties evolved according to the demands of the politics – Peel changed the Tories and split them over the Corn Laws; Gladstone migrated to the Liberals, and then split them over Home Rule – instead of politics being distorted by parties. There’s a ghastly irony in the fact that the apotheosis of Grey’s professionalism and principle was his surrender to a conflict he had done everything to forestall, the submersion of his courtliness in a wave of patriotic fervour.

His extraordinary speech on the 3 August 1914 is the least resounding of rallying cries, a bleak and unhappy explanation of the inevitability of a war in which, as he put it, the country would suffer terribly.

When Sir Edward Grey first left office in 1895, he judged that it was for the last time, and noted that he and his wife were “both very glad and relieved”. His sense of duty seems impossibly quaint, from the perspective of the 21^stcentury; it certainly seems very distant. To politicians who for personal political interest deliberately promote something they know will damage the nation, leaders who, for the national interest, deliberately brought on their own political failure must seem incomprehensible.

After three decades when the issue most significant for the future identity and sustainability of the nation has been managed according to what would placate one faction in one party, a past in which parties rose and fell and split and re-formed around definitive questions of policy principle seems like another country indeed.

The institution whose members, however arrogantly, debated, like Mr Horsman, the long-term obligations and interests of the country within the European order, is unrecognisable in a bewildered herd incapable even of understanding what their votes mean. The concept of leadership itself – of articulating and advocating a principled if unpopular position, grounded in a wise and measured view of the national interest, and so trying to bring people with you – is lost.

“The great duty of a Government,” Gladstone said in 1879, “especially in foreign affairs, is […] not to set up false phantoms of glory which are to delude them into calamity, not to flatter their infirmities by leading them to believe that they are better than the rest of the world.”

The demands on its leaders, though, were immense. Huge challenges had to be met: internal rivalries; migratory pressures; revolts by the left-behind. Confronted by these issues, it was hardly surprising that leaders in the continental heartlands of Europe should have wearied of one crisis in particular: Brexit.

Their initial hopes that it might be reversed had been dashed. Increasingly, rather than fight it, they had come to accept it as a fait accompli. In AD452, writing in Marseille, a chronicler duly recorded it as a simple statement of fact that the island was “lost to the Romans”.

A detailed account of how Britain came to leave the Roman Empire is impossible. The written sources are brief and fragmentary; the evidence from archaeology hotly contested. Only the dimmest outline of the story can be distinguished, silhouetted against the general murk. One thing, though, is clear: the narrative is one of gathering chaos. “Fertile in rebels,” St Jerome called Britain: a breeding-ground of dissent.

In 383, an ambitious warlord had stripped the island of its garrisons, crossed the Channel, and ruled as emperor in Gaul for five years. Then, in 406, the remnants of the field army in Britain backed and murdered two new usurpers in quick succession. In 407, a third pretender, the self-proclaimed Constantine III, left for Gaul. There he succeeded in obliging the offical ruler of the Roman West, a pallid and decidedly low-energy emperor by the name of Honorius, to recognise him as his partner in the purple.

Meanwhile, back in a Britain denuded of its defences, pirates from across the North Sea had begun to raid its shores. Accordingly, in 409, the Britons took up arms themselves.

Further reading

The EU is flunking its Brexit opportunity

By Helen Thompson

A century later, writing in distant Constantinople, a historian named Zosimus spelt out what this had meant in practice. The Britons, he recorded, “were obliged to throw off Roman rule, and live independently. No longer were they subject to Roman laws.”

Unsurprisingly – the study of the period being what it is – these brief comments by Zosimus raise almost as many questions as they answer. Who precisely had the Britons been rebelling against? It is possible that it was specifically Constantine III, and that the British rebellion had been, not a rejection of Roman rule, but the precise opposite: a display of loyalty to the legitimate emperor.

Evidence for this is to be found in a letter that Honorius may have sent to the Britons in 410, authorising them – while he was distracted by barbarian invasions and his on-going rivalry with Constantine – “to take defensive measures on their own behalf”. It is certainly the case that elements within the British elite continued to identify with Rome for decades to come. Writing to officials on the continent, they would describe their representations as “the groans of the Britons”.

Such despair was only to be expected. Britain had long been a part of the imperial system. Over the course of four centuries, its upper classes had been marinaded in classical culture, its economy woven inextricably into the continental single market, and its sense of its place in the world founded on its identity as a Roman province. For many among the British elite, then, the prospect of being abandoned by the imperial authorities was a horrifying one. It was a leap into the dark.

Further reading

We must defeat the false idea of Europe and again respect national identity, truly free speech and our continent's Christian roots

By Roger Scruton

And yet there were many in Britain, perhaps, willing to make just such a leap. It is notable that in 411, when Constantine III was defeated and his head sent to Honorius, Britain was not restored to imperial rule. If there were many in the province who identified strongly with Roman order, then it is likely that there were many as well who deeply resented it.

Out in the fields no one studied Virgil. The peasantry had always had good cause to resent the exactions of the imperial tax-collectors. Increasingly, though, as Britain was stripped of its garrisons, and both internal and external security went into freefall, it seems that many among the ruling classes as well began to feel that they were getting no return on their taxes.

In Britain – more, perhaps, than anywhere else in the empire – loyalty to Rome co-existed with a sense of alienation from its rule. No matter how assiduously a British aristocrat might take baths or invest in central heating, he was almost certain to be viewed on the continent as a redneck. Centuries after the absorption of Britain into the Roman empire, the very notion of a civilised Briton was still capable of generating hilarity. “There’s no such thing,” one poet in fourth century Gaul had sneered.

To Roman geographers, Britain had always ranked as a place of mystery: for to lie beyond the bounds of the Ocean was to lie beyond the bounds of the civilised world. The crisis of 409 demonstrated just how ruinously the ambivalences of Britain’s status within the Roman empire had been metastasising.

The Brexit of the fifth century AD was a hard Brexit indeed. With the severing of the sinews that for so long had bound it to the imperial bureaucracy and economy, the society of the erstwhile province endured a cataclysmic implosion. Cities were abandoned to squatters; coinage vanished from circulation; the richest and most fertile portions of the island began to be carved up by barbarian warlords. Nowhere else in the Roman world was there collapse on quite this scale.

Further reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

The process of transformation that would see the province of Britannia emerge, over the course of five centuries, to become the kingdom of England was far more total than anything experienced in Italy or Gaul. So alien, indeed, did the stone roads and towering walls of the vanished imperial order appear to the Anglo-Saxons to seem “orthanc enta geweorc”: “the cunning work of giants”.

Look into the mirror of the first Brexit, and a sombre parody can be found there of the country’s current agony. Lurking behind the nightmares of Leavers is a dread of the Brussels bureaucracy as the agents of an overweening imperium, impatient to reduce Britain to the status of a province; lurking behind those of Remainers is the vision of a once prosperous part of a European union reduced by its departure to rubble and weeds.

The story of Britain’s exit from the Roman empire might seem, then, to offer nothing but the grimmest of lessons. The dilemma with which geography has always confronted us – too close to continental Europe to separate ourselves from it, too peripheral ever to be at its heart – is not going away, after all, no matter how the current imbroglio may end up resolved.

Yet if the events of the fifth century offer warnings, so also do they offer reassurance. The European Union is not the Roman Empire; a no-deal Brexit will not lead to the total de-monetisation of our economy. Bad though things may seem now, they have been infinitely worse in the past.

Small comfort it may be, but to look back at Britain in the fifth century, when social and economic chaos was total, and long established bases of power and authority were collapsing all around, is to appreciate just what a crisis can truly be.

The reason was simple: they understood that Parliament was trying its best to check the swelling power of an over-mighty executive that was ignoring not only Parliament and the gentleman who sat in it, but the ordinary people in the street as well.

In 1641, that overmighty executive was the monarch, Charles I, and his court, a court that included the Archbishop of Canterbury William Laud, who had imposed very unpopular reforms on a reluctant Church of England with the king’s support.

Ecclesiastical reform doesn’t make the political pulse race in 2019. Perhaps Brexit will be as incomprehensible to our great-grandchildren. But the nation was as passionately and bitterly divided over religion as it now is over the European Union. This was not only a matter of faith; it was also a matter of identity.

Further reading

Can our politics survive Brexit?

By James Kirkup

Like some members of the current executive, Charles I claimed that his position was the traditional one, that he was defending the Church of England and the historical constitution of the three kingdoms. Parliament was deemed an obstacle because it wouldn’t give him his own way. Parliament, though, was simply doing its job of reviewing legislation and restraining recklessness.

Charles reacted to Parliament’s criticisms by refusing to summon it and trying to rule the country alone – the personal rule, something of a figleaf term to cover what was really a power grab by an absolutist monarch – a policy that led him into increasingly unjust and resented taxation policies that directly affected the gentleman landowners who made up the vast majority of members of Parliament. And for which he paid dear.

This complex history illustrates the sophistication of the Westminster system. Like all successful democratic systems, the Westminster system is dependent on a series of checks and balances. Central to these is Parliament’s role in reviewing the legislation put before it by the executive – currently the Prime Minister and Cabinet, previously the monarch. In such reviews, it acts as representative of constituencies, well understood as having diverse and sometimes conflicting interests.

The Westminster system was brutally revised by the shooting war that followed. Ironically, the king’s power grab led to the rule of half the country directly by Parliament, and that in turn led people who were willing to die to defend the principle of parliamentary sovereignty to ask whether that sovereignty itself needed some examination and improvement.

Further reading

How the Eurozone could avert disaster

By Peter Franklin

This in turn led to one of the most important events in English history, the Putney House debates. These were a series of discussions within the Army held on 28 October 1647 concerning the make-up of a new and more just system of government for England.

The name of Colonel Thomas Rainborough is not well known, but it was he who took up the theme of why ordinary men without a vote had shed their blood for Parliament: “I would fain know what the soldier hath fought for all this while?  He hath fought to enslave himself, to give power to men of riches, men of estates, to make him a perpetual slave.” The army commander and Oliver Cromwell’s son-in-law Henry Ireton responded as follows:

“I will tell you what the soldier of the kingdom hath fought for. First, the danger that we stood in was that one’s man’s will must be a law…”

But Rainborough replied:

“Really I think the poorest he that is in England hath a life to live as the greatest he; and therefore, truly sir, I think it’s clear that every man that is to live under a government ought first by his own consent to put himself under that government, and I do think that the poorest man in England is not at all bound in a strict sense to that government that he hath not had a voice to put himself under.”

This is a ringing endorsement of franchise independent of property, and an illustration of the way Parliamentary democracy was believed to work at the time when people were willing to die for it. The individual voter, by voting in parliamentary elections, ceded sovereignty to their Member of Parliament to act on their behalf, voluntarily putting themselves under the government.

To overturn this today, by claiming that the 2016 referendum returned the favour by ceding parliamentary sovereignty to the voters is a dangerous fiction. It is a fiction because the legislation said no such thing; it is dangerous because it threatens to overturn the Westminster system in favour of the rule of an overmighty executive claiming to be acting on the people’s behalf.

Presumably, Theresa May is not planning to raise her standard in Nottingham; she’s learned that much from history. But she has raised her standard for acting outside the Westminster system in the interests of those who voted Leave. To complicate matters, though, more than six million people have signed a petition demanding that the Government revoke article 50, and hundreds of thousands marched in central London for a second referendum. The Government, though, claims this does not compromise its efforts to represent “the people” against Parliament.

Further reading

How Parliament disdains the people

By Peter Franklin

It is and always has been entirely open to the people to petition Parliament, as well as to lobby their MPs, and they did so frequently during the English Civil War. The most famous petitioners were women; first came the women’s peace protesters, followed by the Leveller women. On both occasions, they were derided by their opponents as whores who had been inveigled by men.

A group of women wearing white ribbons gathered outside the House of Commons in August 1643 to demand that Parliament make peace with the King, presenting the house formally with a signed petition. One newspaper called them “whores, bawds… beggar women and the very scum of the suburbs, besides a number of Irish women.” (Those damned foreigners.) Parliament paid them no real attention, in part because it believed that they had been organised by a conspiracy of royalists or Catholics or Irish Catholics; conspiracy thinking was rife during the period. They were sent home, to ‘meddle’ with their ‘huswifery’.

It was the same story with the Leveller women’s petition. In April 1649 a group of them declared:

“That we have an equal share and interest with men in the common-wealth, and it cannot be laid waste (as now it is) and not we be the greatest & most helpless sufferers therein.”

They also demanded the release of the recently arrested authors of a pamphlet that supported universal male suffrage.

Despite efforts to connect women’s protests with the idea of “the world turned upside down”, petitions like this were highly conventional. Usually, women whose husbands had been imprisoned and especially those whose relatives had been condemned to death would address their petitions to the monarch; with Charles’s authority in abeyance, these women addressed their grievances to the Commons.

Petitioners have brought great changes, not by terrifying or threatening MPs, but by peaceful mass demonstrations. Such petitions are the usual way for people under the Westminster system to make it clear that in their minds, the government is in danger of betraying their trust. Governments that take no notice usually face a backlash, as both the Long Parliament and Charles I can attest.

When it came to a shooting war, one Civil War battle was amusingly characterised by both sides having the same war cry: “God with us!” In the same way, all sides in the Brexit debate claim to be trying to save democracy. All sides claim to be representing the will of the people. The problem is that the nation is now so deeply divided – and not in ways that can be represented by the division in the Commons into two parties, government and opposition – that claims to “represent the people” leave other people feeling unrepresented.

This illustrates the failings of populism; anyone can claim that they have the will of the people behind them. MPs, however, are supposed to be willing to put aside the interest of party – and let’s recall that parties came relatively late to the Westminster system and were themselves the result of a particular political crisis over Charles II’s successor  –  in order to arrive at the best  decision for the country.

Further reading

Bring on the People's Peers

By Richard Askwith

In his history of his own times, far better known to 17^th-century MPs than it is now, the fourth century BC writer Xenophon tells the story of the way the democracy condemned military commanders in the Navy who had successfully defeated a Spartan fleet, but had not returned to pick up survivors of the battle. He says the crowd in the assembly was whipped up to a fury by one of the rowers who had survived the battle. A few brave people spoke against condemning the admirals to death, but then, Xenophon says, a shout went up “that it was intolerable for the people not to be given what they wanted”. The admirals are duly executed en masse. After Athens is conquered by Sparta, the mass trial is used as a precedent by the 30 tyrants for further mass executions.

Brexit seems to some like justice, others like democracy in action in its purest form. What our 17^th-century ancestors knew much better than us is that populism invariably opens the door to tyranny in the long- and medium-term, however good the justification for its inauguration. The Westminster system, like every other long-lasting modern democracy was built to prevent tyranny. We are now in danger of opening the door to it.