Dear Elected and Unelected in Parliament,
It is the voting public which is sovereign, not you in Parliament who are there to reflect or carry out the decisions made in elections and referendums by the electorate.
Now, for the first time in our glorious parliamentary history the vast majority of you are preparing to make yourselves illegitimately sovereign and overturn the largest democratic vote in our history.
You are set to make this “Overturn Parliament” by far the worst ever in its 800 year history.
Do you think we don’t know what you are doing, that we don’t see that you have been constructively trying to obstruct, destruct, and then overturn the result of the Referendum by tying it up in parliamentary knots, suffocate it with verbal subterfuge, and then strangle it in your pseudo-Parliamentary entanglements ?
Do you imagine that we don’t see that you think you know better but know full well you are doing wrong and hope to get way with it ?
You know exactly what this Parliament is flagrantly trying to overturn but as this is an Open Letter, here are the decisions, pledges, and promises you are planning to destroy:
1. Announcing the Referendum in November 2015 the PM said “This is a huge decision for our country, perhaps the biggest we will make in our lifetimes. And it will be the final decision. When the British people speak, their voice will be respected – not ignored. If we vote to Leave, then we will Leave. There will not be another negotiation, and no other referendum.”
2. 17 December 2015 – MP’s voted 544 – 57 in favour of the Bill to hold the Referendum.
3. “This is your decision. The Government will implement what you decide.” Statement by HM Government in a leaflet sent to 27 million households before the Referendum in which it also repeatedly advised against leaving the Single Market.
4. 23 June 2016. By the biggest vote ever the country decided to Leave the EU.
5. 29 March 2017. MP’s voted 498 – 114 to enact Article 50 to begin negotiations with the EU to agree the terms of our leaving, and, failing that, to leave without an agreement on 29 March 2019: either/or.
6. June 2017 Election. Both main Parties’ Manifestos pledge that in leaving the EU we would do so by leaving the Single Market and Customs Union.
7. 26 June 2018. MP’s voted 319 – 303 to pass the EU (Withdrawal) Act defining the legal process of leaving on 29 March 2019 and in the event of our leaving the EU without a negotiated agreement.
All of these solemn, legally binding commitments and promises to your Paymaster and Sovereign, the British people, you have either already broken, or are in the process of breaking, overturning, and reversing.
In which other of the 4 Referendums held since 1975 has Parliament tried to do that ?
Does this make you the very worst Parliament ever in our great history ?
There are only two previous occasions when Parliament was set to deny the manifest decisions of the results of an election – The 1832 Reform Bill to extend the franchise, and the 1911 Parliament Act to limit the power of the Lords, when in both cases the Lords were acting against the elected Commons, and in both cases they were finally prevented from doing so by the threat of the Government and Monarch of the day to create enough new Peers so as to outvote the reactionary old Lords. In both cases, the thwarting anti-electorate Lords were overcome.
But we now have the unprecedented situation of the vast majority of elected and unelected in Parliament openly conspiring to overturn the 7 times expressed commitments of Government and Parliament.
In so doing you will, by a long way, show yourselves to be the very worst Parliament in our history, and your shameless, brazen, effrontery and arrogance without parallel.
And in this you have been aided and abetted by the most unconstitutional and partisan Speaker in parliamentary history, and by a Prime Minister whose political record is one of always making the wrong decisions, vacillation and capitulation, all with a toxic duplicity which corrodes and poisons everything she touches.
SHAME ON YOU ALL ! SHAME ON YOU ALL !
I don’t know the remedy, but I am confident that in the longer term you will not be allowed to get away with this theft of our democracy.
Sincerely
Peter Semper
