The constitution is crumbling before our eyes, its frailties brutally exposed by the Brexit storm. But something even more fundamental has been shattered, and that is the country’s national identity. The English no longer know who they are, or what they are for
EveryoNE agrees we are in a mess, perhaps even in the first stages of a revolution. But actually there are two messes, and deeper beneath them both lies a mess from long ago that only some kind of revolution can now clear up. We are in two crises simultaneously: a constitutional crisis, and a crisis of identity. So what do they have in common?
The constitutional crisis is obvious enough, but it is far broader than is generally admitted. It originates partly, we know, in the attempt to root the legitimacy of government both in the “direct democracy”, as it is called, of referendums, and in the “representative democracy” of a Parliament. In one of his historical essays, Britain’s supreme constitutional theorist, Walter Bagehot, remarked that plebiscitary government was not only incompatible with parliamentary government, but probably hostile to it. Rarely outside Holy Scripture can a prophecy have proved so accurate so long after it was made. If the coming general election will, as Nigel Farage promises us, and as Dominic Cummings clearly intends, pitch “the people” (an irresponsible phantom) against “the politicians” (a derogatory term for our elected and dismissible personal representatives), it will indeed presage the end of the 300-year reign of the sovereign “Crown in Parliament”. But the rot goes further.