Brendan O’Neill

Theresa May has got to go. She has got to go because she has failed British democracy, failed the British people, and reneged on the Conservative Party’s own manifesto promise to leave both the Customs Union and the Single Market. She has got to go because 17.4m Britons, the largest democratic bloc in British history, voted to ‘Take back control’ and she responded by ceding even more control to Brussels. She has got to go because the British people clearly want someone to stand up to Brussels, yet she bows and scrapes before Brussels, capitulating to its every undemocratic demand and conspiring in its stitch-up of Brexit. Yet the expectation is that she will survive this evening’s confidence vote.

I always shudder when I hear people say, ‘Let’s stop Brexit’. They say it so casually, so cavalierly. It rolls off the tongue as if it were no big deal. They seem utterly unmoved by what ‘stopping Brexit’ would entail and the consequences it would have. It would mean blocking the largest act of democracy in the history of this nation. And its consequences would be to sow mass doubt in Britain’s democratic institutions and bring about an exodus of ordinary people from public life. ‘What’s the point in voting’, they would ask, ‘when they just ignore us?’. We have to get real. Stopping Brexit means stopping democracy. If we kill Brexit, we kill democracy itself.

What do people mean when they say Arron Banks ‘bought Brexit’? That phrase is everywhere. It’s a New Statesman headline: ‘The man who bought Brexit.’ He ‘bought Brexit’, the Observer informs us, with his ‘funding of the populist, social media driven Leave.EU campaign’. OpenDemocracy, like many others, wants to know where Banks’ money comes from, so that we can finally answer the question: how could he ‘afford Brexit’? This vision of Banks ‘buying’ one of the largest democratic votes in British history, as if it were a second-hand car or something, is weird. And very revealing. What it reveals is the alarmingly low esteem in which voters are held by the Remain-leaning section of the chattering classes.

If you had to draw up a list of people and things it is de rigueur to loathe, it would definitely include Ryanair. Tabloid newspapers, Jeremy Clarkson, Brexit, red-hued men who pop up in the Question Time audience to moan about Jeremy Corbyn, and Ryan-bloody-air — these are things that every self-respecting member of the chattering class must bristle against. And that is why one moral error made by a Ryanair crew member has led to demands for the entire company to be boycotted. ‘Let’s all boycott this airline!’, the right-on have cried in response to a racist incident on a flight being badly handled by an attendant. Yeah, right, like these people would ever deign to use this cheap airline with its cheap passengers in the first place.

It always amazes me that people think it is normal and acceptable to have hate-crime legislation. To have laws which allow for the harsher punishment of people who entertain prejudiced thoughts while committing an offence. To have it written into the actual statute books that the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates Buddhism can be punished more severely than the man who punches a Buddhist because he hates that individual Buddhist for some reason. When are we going to twig that this represents the punishment of thought, of ideology, of belief (warped belief, but still)? I don’t like that Britain has become a country in which people, especially the political class, think it is okay for the state to punish individuals for what they think.

Today Hillary Clinton slammed the Tories for failing to join the recent pile-on against Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban. In a speech described by the Guardian as ‘stinging’, Clinton said it was ‘disheartening’ that Conservative MEPs in Brussels voted to ‘shield Viktor Orban from censure’. She was referring to the 18 Tories in the European Parliament who last month rejected the invoking of the punishing Article 7 of the Lisbon Treaty against Orban’s Hungary for being a prejudiced and illiberal state. Hungary is no longer a real democracy but an ‘illiberal’ one, said Clinton — and it’s shameful that Tories are cosying up with such a regime.

No one knows for sure if Brett Kavanaugh is guilty of assaulting Christine Blasey Ford 36 years ago. But there is one thing he is definitely guilty of: being white. It’s written all over his face. All over his Caucasian face. He has committed what social-justice warriors and race-obsessed liberals consider to be the great crime of our era: he was born white. And male too! He’s the bearer of two original sins — whiteness and maleness — and his haters will never stop reminding him, and us, of this fact. The extent to which commentators have focused on Kavanaugh’s skin colour has been extraordinary. He is representative of ‘white male anger’, said the New York Times.

You would never know it from the shrill media coverage, but Tory MEPs’ refusal to back the EU’s censure of Viktor Orban’s Hungary is one of the most principled things they have ever done. They are, of course, being denounced as Orban apologists, as cheerleaders for the authoritarian turn Hungary has taken under his prime ministership. Nonsense. They have taken a stand against authoritarianism. Against the authoritarianism of the European Union, whose technocratic arrogance has now reached such dizzy heights that it presumes the moral authority to punish nation states for doing what their own people, the electorate, have asked them to do. That is a far greater crime against democracy than any committed by Orban.