So, Boris, How's It Going?

The Supreme Court in the UK has ruled that Boris Johnson illegally prorogued Parliament. Martin Kettle writes in The Guardian:

The supreme court has delivered a comprehensive demolition of Boris Johnson’s government and its handling of Brexit. The unanimous judgment of the 11 justices, announced by Lady Hale this morning, amounts to a root and branch rejection of the prime minister’s attempts to rule without parliament, to take Britain out of the European Union by 31 October without a deal, and to contrive a premature general election. The judgment was incisive and without any waffle. It was very consciously written in the best tradition of British constitutional law, of which parliamentary sovereignty is the foundational rock.

The immediate effect of the judgment is devastating for Johnson. It is expressed so cogently and unambiguously that it will be difficult for him to wriggle out of it – even though he is certainly foolish enough to try. Parliament will surely be recalled on Tuesday – since, as the judgment said, it has not been prorogued in the first place. Johnson’s efforts, to the extent that they exist at all, to negotiate a new or tweaked deal with the EU will be held up to the light. And, since Johnson spectacularly lacks a majority in the House of Commons, it is likely that the cross-party efforts to shape Brexit will be redoubled.

The ruling also puts the spotlight on Johnson's opponents:

His opponents, therefore, absolutely need to agree on the form, composition and, above all, the leader of any government that could replace him. If the court’s ruling means anything for politicians, it is that trying to govern as if you have a majority when in fact you do not is impossible. The belief of the hard-right Tory Brexiters that a party coup against Theresa May in a hung parliament would enable them to get their way by electing Johnson lies shattered. They need to learn the lesson very fast. Militant remainers will have to face the equivalent lesson, too. One notable consequence of the judgment, not to be overlooked in the other excitements, is for the Union. By not overruling the Scottish court of session decision on Johnson’s actions, the supreme court has upheld Scottish judges against English ones, and has removed a potential source of grievance for the SNP against “London judges” if the ruling had gone the other way.

Britons are still in a pickle. But their Supreme Court has upheld the primacy of democracy.

Image: IBTimes UK

Embracing Pessimism

The British, David Olusoga writes, are reflexively optimistic. But, as Britain hurtles to a messy Brexit, he argues that it's time to embrace pessimism:

Brexit, the rise of populism and the constitutional crisis in which we are still utterly ensnared – despite the passing distraction of the Tory leadership circus – undermines that sort of blithe optimism.

Now is not the time for upbeat endings. It is a moment to make the case for an ever unpopular and always controversial sentiment – pessimism.

But pessimism gets bad press. So Britons assume -- along with Boris Johnson -- that everything will work out:

“Why this defeatism? Why this negativity?” he blustered, in a pitiful effort to draw attention away from his demonstrable ignorance of his own Brexit “plan”. Don’t analyse, stop identifying flaws and inconsistencies, just be optimistic. Rejoice. Rejoice.

The prevailing cult of optimism reinforces the belief that Britain’s institutions – parliament, the civil service and that jumble of conventions and archaic procedures that are what passes for a constitution – will inevitably weather any future storm.

Well, it’s not been a great week for the civil service; a police investigation has been launched into a leak apparently designed to bring down our ambassador to the most powerful nation on earth, followed by his public defenestration by the PM-in-waiting. Month by month our constitution has been proved unfit for purpose and parliament’s physical decay is increasingly turning it into a vast, scaffold-covered metaphor.

A musty, chintzy kitschness lingers about the Palace of Westminster. A cabbagey, care-home smell wafts along its neo-gothic corridors. With Johnson refusing to rule out bypassing parliament (with his threatened prorogation and his opponents discussing setting up a rival assembly across the road, you have to really want to see the “mother of parliaments” cup as half full.

Other British leaders were not known for their optimism:

Winston Churchill [was] a man who suffered bouts of depression and spent a decade in the political wilderness for pessimistically predicting a global catastrophe. Hardly the ideal poster boy for the breezy optimism of Johnson and his cabal.

There are times when pessimism is the only appropriate response:

Whether we like it or not, there are moments in history when pessimism is the appropriate response. Times when, as the German philosopher Oswald Spengler said, “optimism is cowardice”. What is needed now is not a “nameless, unreasoning, unjustified” form of pessimism that “paralyses needed efforts to convert retreat into advance”, to quote Franklin D Roosevelt, but a sobering and energising pessimism. It is necessary because the cult of optimism, the original source of our national complacency, is in itself a clear and present danger.

The Brexit project exploited our cultural predilection for optimism. Leave was painted as the optimistic choice. Now, when the Brexiteers are not promising us “adequate food”, they are peddling another brand of optimism. No matter what happens at the end of October, they tell us, we’ll be all right. After all, if we can make it through the Second World War we can survive Brexit. One of the many holes in this “there’ll always be an England” line of argument is, of course, that half a million British people didn’t make it through the Second World War.

The simplistic belief that the old voted Leave and the young voted Remain ignores the fact that the most elderly, the people who actually remember the Second World War, who fought and suffered in it, were “far more likely to oppose Brexit”, according to some research, than the baby boomers – a generation brought up watching war films rather than cowering in Anderson shelters.

Sometimes pessimism is simply reality. And that is the place from which solutions arise.

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