Weeks are passing and I’m not posting. I can blame work, blame a social life, but overall I blame Boris Johnson. I have never found clowns funny, but BoJo is terrifying, the clown of nightmares. He has a cohort of cronies who are equally awful. And some of the press… OMG. The usual suspects: the Express, the Mail, the Sun somehow spinning that Parliament is being anti-democratic, when to the meanest intelligence, Parliament is trying to do its job. The same papers, and the cohort, are telling people that the Supreme Court is biased, that the decision of the eleven judges was due to undue influence by the EU. This isn’t just nonsense, it’s dangerous nonsense.
The government is accountable. This government doesn’t want to be accountable. The judiciary is an institution that protects us, in this case form a government that wants to break the law; it is not a poodle, though the current government would like it to be.
We are in this mess because of the Conservative Party. It was the Conservative government who held an ill organised referendum without any plans for how to deal with the outcome whatever it turned out to be. It was the leader of that government who resigned immediately in the wake of the referendum instead of dealing with it. It was the next Prime Minister, also Conservative, Theresa May who made meaningless announcements ‘Brexit means Brexit’, made it a party issue when people did not vote along traditional party lines, and tried to exclude Parliament from the process.
The role of the Prime Minister is not to make unilateral decisions, it is not to encourage animosity, threats and violence, but to lead the government and to liaise with the sovereign. Leading is not using intemperate language, dismissing the very real fears of MPs about the threats they and their families are receiving.
I make no secret of being a staunch supporter of the EU. I believe leaving the EU is an act of self sabotage. However, the current shambles is much more than Brexit; it is a threat to our democracy, and whatever happens the shocks are likely to be seismic and unpredictable for some time to come.
We got into this mess via the ill thought out referendum where the Leave campaign campaigned dishonestly and illegally. We can get out of it with a referendum which is well thought out, where the different campaigns place truth and honesty above ideology. But how likely is that?
Isobel (and Cat)'s Blog 
Hello. Good to see you back and posting – one was a touch worried. But as we are all enthralled with the current politics, most understandable. The competition for which head of government will fall in the most spectacular way will be an exciting one with Boris and Donald neck and neck. I’m still betting on our institutional governance – a confidence myself from 50 years ago would have found ludicrous – to let us escape our populist enthusiasms.
I wish I had the same faith in our system to get us out of this quagmire. I was pretty horrified to see the Brexit Party handing out their hate paper on the Walworth Road today. Slightly relieved to see very few people took a copy. However, one person reading and believing that nonsense is one person too many.