Thursday, June 06, 2019

Echoes of the Enabling Act

Dominic Raab is best known as the Brexit Secretary who resigned in protest at the Brexit deal he negotiated. Now he wants to be Tory Leader and PM. With a large number of contenders for the top position, the race is on to make the most extreme pledges on Hard Brexit. It is reported that Raab is ready to prorogue Parliament to stop MPs having a say on a No Deal Brexit. In effect, the future of the nation would be in the hands of the loonies of a government of the Extreme Brexit Right. So much for Parliament "taking back control".

One of the worrying features is that the exclusion of Parliament and MPs from decision-making has echoes of how the Nazis seized control and turned a democracy into a dictatorship. Hitler used a crisis (the burning down of the Reichstag) to pass the Enabling Act, a move which put legislative power into his hands, thereby sidestepping all Parliamentary representation.

Were we to crash out of the EU without an agreement, it is almost certainly the case that the government will need emergency powers to deal with the crisis that will arise from what effectively is our own, self-imposed siege of our own borders. Perhaps the Raab idea of proroguing Parliament is a hint of how governance will operate under a Raab premiership.

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