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How Britain Plunged Into Its Worst Constitutional Crisis in 400 Years
Boris Johnson’s efforts to ram through a no-deal Brexit have unleashed a massive fight over who holds political power in the U.K.
The news hit like a shockwave across British politics. On Wednesday morning, three of Scotland’s most senior judges found that the government had unlawfully suspended its own Parliament in a desperate attempt to force through an extreme version of Brexit.
It was, without hyperbole, the most shocking legal decision in the modern history of British public law. The logical conclusion of the ruling was that Prime Minister Boris Johnson had lied to the public, lied to Parliament, and, most shocking of all, lied to the queen.
It looks like a frenzied political battle over Brexit. But the beating heart of this story is not Brexit. It is the question of where power resides in British politics.
The U.K.’s constitutional system hands sovereignty — supreme authority — to Parliament. That power is derived from the people. The public votes for who they want to represent them, and those people sit in Parliament as MPs. The government, composed of the prime minister in Downing Street and his ministers, ultimately answers to them. The MPs can vote for or against the laws the government puts forward.
But the 2016 Brexit referendum changed everything. The vote to leave the European Union was a new development. It wasn’t representative democracy. It was direct democracy. This was a completely new source of democratic legitimacy emerging from the womb.
The trouble with the vote was that it offered only a broad demand — leave the EU — but no details about how to pursue it. Should Britain pursue a soft Brexit, which stayed aligned to the EU economy? Or a hard Brexit, which pushed away from it? Or even a no-deal Brexit, which accepted no arrangements with the EU whatsoever? The referendum offered no answers to these questions.
The government responded by adopting a tried-and-tested sleight of hand much loved by authoritarians throughout history. The government claimed that it, and it alone, could interpret the referendum result. It represented the “will of the…
