PETER HITCHENS: Forget the EU vote - all Britain really needs is patriotic leaders
This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday column
This is what happens when you call in the cowboys to do an important job. It goes wrong and you can't afford to fix it. You thought you could trust the Tory Party. You thought you could ignore our rather good constitution and bypass it with a referendum. I did warn you.
In May 2013, I pointed out the dangers of a referendum, asking: 'Has Parliament been abolished? Has a constitution been quietly introduced, which demands that such issues are decided by plebiscite, and makes the result of such plebiscites binding on Parliament?
'I've heard no such proposal, and can't see how it could be so, given the cowardly, ignorant or plain stupid attitudes of most MPs to this question.
'It's certainly understood, by constitutional lawyers, that such an obligation is important for any serious plebiscite, and its presence or absence in any legislation will be crucial. I suspect it will be absent.' And so it was.
Now you find out you were wrong, who are you going to call? For years I explained that the only way out of the EU was to replace the Tories with a genuinely patriotic conservative party that could win an Election. The referendum proves that the votes were there.
In October 2011, I said: 'Even if they succeeded in getting their referendum, and even if they succeeded in winning it… it would not bind the British government. The only real solution is for a General Election to be won by a party committed to secession.'
We would then have had an actual government determined to do what the people wanted, without any need to hurry to prove itself, and with a good idea of how it would use our new-found independence once we regained it. Instead we had a cynical campaign led by people who still cannot escape the suspicion that they never intended to win and were shocked and dismayed when they did.
And we have a pantomime horse – a policy being ineptly and half-heartedly implemented by people who don't support it. And we have a constitutional crisis, as I said we would on June 12 when I also correctly predicted that 'Leave' would win.
So I can't join in the bizarre and rather lawless squawking of rage at the High Court's ruling that Parliament must vote on Article 50. It is a perfectly reasonable judgment, based on my favourite bit of the Constitution, the 1689 Bill of Rights which guarantees our freedom far more surely than any human rights rubbish.
Actually this doesn't mean that Parliament will block our formal exit from the EU. Only a small coven of kamikaze MPs would dare to do that. The elite have other, cleverer plans.
But it does mean that Chairman May will now have the excuse she needs to fudge our exit. Parliament, and the Civil Service, will 'take back control' of the process. And what we will get will almost certainly be the Norway option – continued access to the Single Market and very little control over our borders.
We will move from being halfway into the EU to being halfway out of it. The referendum's simple requirement, that we leave the EU, will be fulfilled, beyond question.
But of course that wasn't all that millions of people voted for. If we want the rest of it, especially border control, we simply cannot rely on the existing parties or the establishment to get it.
A monster created by 007
This is why it matters when films and TV series make things up and tell lies for effect – like the ghastly King's Speech and the new Netflix series that claims to portray the private life of the Queen.
Reality nowadays copies what is on the screen. Poor Mexico City must now endure annual macabre, pagan Day Of The Dead parades, because the James Bond film Spectre showed such an event taking place there.
It didn't until now. But the Mexico City government thought it would bring in the tourists, so now they have to have it. I'd travel a long way to avoid this creepy, ugly event, but, as I know well, I'm out of touch.
Even weirder than the effect of movies and TV on truth is their effect on fiction. My favourite example of this is Inspector Morse who, in the original books, drove a Lancia but acquired a Jaguar in the later ones to fit in with the screen version.
How long before all the classics are rewritten and crammed with panting sex and incest, so as to make them conform with Andrew Davies's ghastly adaptations?
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Sheer bleeding nerve department. One of the noisiest campaigners against new grammar schools is a body called the Education Policy Institute. It declares that it is 'independent, impartial and evidence-based'.
Oh, yeah? Here's some evidence-based research on it. It started life as a Liberal Party think-tank called the Centre for Reform and its main benefactors are often Liberal Democrats.
Among its leading figures are the former Lib Dem Minister David Laws, and the Blairite factotum Sally Morgan (neither known for their support of grammar schools).
Two of its major figures (one a donor to the Tories in the Cameron anti-grammar years) are also connected with 'Academy' schools, which tend to see grammars as rivals. Impartial? Independent?
Last chance for useless cops
The jailing of a Polish lorry driver for slaughtering a family while looking at his stupid phone is only partly just. Millions of British people have come close to doing something similar and have only been saved from it by the grace of God.
Using your phone while driving is about as sane and sensible as throwing knives at your children while blindfolded. The trouble is that people are so selfish and complacent that they do not find this out until they kill or maim someone.
And they don't believe they will. Nor are they in the least impressed by calls for 'tougher sentences' for this crime. Because they know –as one driver I upbraided recently told me – that the police don't care and will do nothing about it.
Indeed they won't. I continue to be amazed that anyone still defends our police against the charge of uselessness which I ceaselessly level at them.
What is it that they do, apart from monitoring Twitter, festooning the place with tape and racing to crimes after they have happened and it is too late? When did you last see an actual traffic patrol? I'd guess 1987.
The solution may well be to sack the police and start again. But let's give them one last chance. Get out there now and arrest everyone you see using a phone at the wheel. The CPS can join in by actually charging them.
Only when everyone knows someone who's in jail for this moronic offence will it cease. That's how drunk driving was stamped out and how seat-belts became standard. Enforcement.
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