The Government is steering us off a cliff with Brexit – but that’s fine, because it’s ‘the will of the people’

Every big idea in politics is baloney. If you think, to take one example, that you’ve given away a portion of your liberty in return for the greater liberty of living under the law, then try getting it back again, you will quickly find yourself at liberty to ruminate on the matter from the comfort of your prison cell.

Human life is organised by ruthless people taking what they can get. The weakling philosophers only ever turn up afterwards to offer some retroactive justification for the way things are. To take another example, neither in 1651, nor before nor since, did the people act on Thomas Hobbes’ advice that they should preserve their life and liberty by submitting virtually without condition to a Leviathan ruler. They were already living under one, Oliver Cromwell, who had, as Hobbes was very much aware, just chopped off the sovereign’s head.

Equip a person with a brain and a vested interest, even if that interest is merely to save their own life, and they will find a justification for anything. The spurious reasons Republican politicians have given for willing a Neanderthal bear into the Oval Office would fill a volume even larger than the reasons offered by men of the home counties as to why they support Manchester United. (“He may be a car wreck but at least his car is pointed in the right direction,” claimed Mike Huckabee, who had he spent his childhood in Basingstoke would doubtless have had a dentist from Salford who once gave him a sticker of Denis Law.)

Of these various fictions, none is so pervasive, nor so fictitious, as the one that is currently doing the rounds with such passionate intensity – “the will of the people”.

Theresa May, we know, is going to get on with the job of “implementing the will of the British people”, which last month we learned via her conference speech is to condemn with phoney inverted snobbishness the 48 per cent of the country whose side she was on for as long as it was politically expedient for her to be so.

Last week Boris Johnson told the German foreign minister how “the will of the British people was expressed very clearly”.

Sajid Javid has accused the three judges of the High Court, including the Lord Chief Justice, of “attempting to thwart the will of the British people”.

Cicero, contrary to reports, never actually said the phrase, not even in his preferred Latin. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to whom it is most commonly attributed, never wrote it. He did use the term the “general will” however, but so adamant was he that this “general will” should reflect the broad mass of views of the full voting population, that citizens could be forced, quite literally at gunpoint, to contribute to it.

Labour, too, has no problem with this view of “the will of the British people”. Tom Watson loves the phrase. So does Hilary Benn. They do so because the referendum result bisects political parties as perfectly as it has done families, friendship groups and the population as a whole. When the opposition party’s safest seats are the most Brexity in the country, don’t imagine anything that looks like actual opposition to last for very long.

But nothing suppresses the will of the people as surely as the entire political class batting on, to save their political skins, with an idea they don’t agree with, and which makes increasingly real the kind of serious economic ruin with which most people’s imaginations have not yet even started to try to come to terms.

Nigel Farage, that humble servant to the will of the British people, was agitating for a second referendum two days before the first. A few minutes before midnight on the night itself, he was blaming what he imagined to be his imminent defeat on government corruption and swearing that “win or lose this battle tonight, we will win this war”.

Britain, in all likelihood, will leave the European Union in March 2019. But if the Prime Minister wants this decision to be representative of the will of the people, it can only be so if those who are convinced of its monumental folly are louder, not quieter, than ever before. That 51.9 per cent of voters have propriety over the will of the people to the extent that the rest should be silenced, denigrated or generally ignored is only the latest bit of baloney, and don’t think for a moment that you have to swallow it.