Brendan O’Neill

Sadiq Khan has got some front. He is complaining about the government’s voter ID plans, claiming it will lead to ‘voter suppression’. And yet he is engaged in the most explicit and awful act of voter suppression in the living memory of this country — the elitist effort to suppress the votes of the 17.4m people who backed Brexit. Sometimes you wonder if the Remain-leaning elites can even hear themselves. These people have spent almost three years agitating against the largest democratic vote in UK history. Some of them want the vote to be revoked entirely (the ‘Liberal’ ‘Democrats’) while others, like Sadiq, want a second referendum to override the first.

It’s tempting to laugh at Extinction Rebellion. I do it myself frequently. Those yoga sessions on Westminster Bridge. The amateur dramatics of wandering around in naff crimson-red outfits to symbolise ‘the common blood we share with all species’. That lame rave-style dancing they do as some bloke in an overlong beard plays the drums while his parents in the Home Counties wonder when he’s going to come to his senses and join his dad’s law firm. It’s all so ridiculous. They fancy themselves as revolutionaries but really this is just Hampstead and Homerton, the posh and the hip, descending on Westminster for a few days to wail about how howwible modern society is. It’s primal therapy for crusties.

Rarely has there been such a flagrant display of hypocrisy and cant as there was in the House of Commons last night. Opposition MPs stood up one after the other to denounce Boris Johnson for his use of apparently toxic and dangerous words like ‘surrender’ and ‘sabotage’. Such language is polluting the public sphere and making life hell for politicians, they claimed. Their ostentatious offence-taking would be a tad more convincing if they had ever said anything about the bile heaped on Brexit voters these past three years. Where were these people when it became positively vogue to refer to lower middle-class Brexit blokes as ‘gammon’?

These days everyone in politics is obsessed with ‘optics’, with making sure they never do or say anything that might look bad to the public. Which makes Emily Thornberry’s European Union outfit all the more extraordinary. Thornberry paraded around Brighton in a blue-and-gold EU dress like some wide-eyed devotee of the cult of Brussels. What the hell was she thinking? It was at the ‘People’s Vote’ march in Brighton to coincide with the Labour conference. (Those quote marks around ‘People’s Vote’ are necessary because of course we already had a people’s vote, in 2016. What these people really want is a second referendum to try to erase the people’s vote in the first referendum.

The Lib Dems are now the most extremist party in the UK. They might not look like extremists, being made up of mostly nice, middle-class people from the leafier bits of the nation. But they have just adopted a policy that is arguably more extreme, more corrosive of British values, more counter to the great traditions of this nation, than any other party policy of recent decades.  Yes, this is the new Lib Dem policy to cancel Brexit. At their party conference in Bournemouth the Lib Dems voted overwhelmingly in favour of a policy of ‘stopping Brexit altogether’, in Jo Swinson’s words.

Anyone who doubted that John Bercow is an arrogant blowhard who harbours a seething contempt for Brexiteers will surely have been disabused of their doubts last night. After he announced his resignation as Speaker, and received a fawning and utterly unparliamentary round of applause from his fellow Brexitphobes on the Opposition benches, Bercow lost it. He went nuts. He was puffing himself up, as usual, as the sole guardian of parliamentary convention and general political decency when an MP had the temerity to interrupt and contradict him. Those who have accused me of bending the rules are utterly wrong, Bercow was saying. Tellingly, he kicked off his one-man orgy of self-congratulation by saying: ‘Can I just say...? Well, whether I can or not, I’m going to.

I have a real problem with the term ‘Tory rebels’. Because it’s questionable, to put it gently, that either of these words apply to the Conservative Party MPs who are threatening to side with Labour and the Lib Dems in tonight’s parliamentary battle against no deal. They don’t sound much like Tories. And rebels? Do me a favour. Phillip Hammond, Ken Clarke, David Gauke, Phillip Lee and the others — the ‘Gaukeward Squad’, as some refer to them — pose as valiant insurgents against Boris and his overreaching executive. The media madly flatter these pretensions by talking up the MPs as the bravest politicians in living memory.

This morning, a petition demanding ‘Do not prorogue Parliament’ is doing the rounds. At the time of writing, more than 1.4 million people have signed it. Remainers are very excited. They’re holding the petition up as proof of a mass outpouring of democratic disdain for Boris Johnson’s decision to suspend Parliament for a few more days than is normal. It is no such thing. It looks more like yet another middle-class hissy fit against Brexit and the people who voted for it.  As the petition map demonstrates, the signatories are strikingly concentrated in certain parts of the country, especially the leafy, super-middle-class bits of southern England.

Not content with agitating against democracy with his relentless Remainer shenanigans, now Tony Blair appears to be aiming his fire at freedom of speech. Seriously, is there no civilisational liberal value this man doesn’t want to take down? A new report for Blair’s think-tank, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, says hard-right groups should be subjected to censorship even if they are not involved in any kind of violent activity. The report says the government should draw up a list of ‘designated hate groups’ — you mean a blacklist? — and these designated groups should be prevented from appearing in media outlets or engaging with public institutions.

Last night’s ‘F**k Boris’ demo in London really was an extraordinary spectacle. It felt almost historic. For what we had here was a gathering of radicals raging against a new Tory PM for threatening to upend the political status quo. Yes, these supposedly edgy, rebellious, pink- and blue-haired haters of Conservatism were essentially pleading with Boris not to be so revolutionary. It was bizarre. There may have been music and dancing and weed — the soulless whiff of that deadening drug was everywhere — but this was fundamentally a conservative protest. Small-c, natch. It was a plea to keep Euro-technocracy intact and not to cave in to the demands of the hoodwinked masses who voted for Brexit.