If you’re aiming to refute the suggestion that you can’t comprehend the difference between mob rule and the rule of law, then I suspect it’s probably a bad idea to raise a mob and lead it marching on a law court. Just my little hunch. Yet here come Nigel Farage and his piggybank Arron (Piggy) Banks with a plan to do just that. When the Supreme Court meets next month, the chaps behind Leave.EU aim to lead a march of 100,000 people to Parliament Square, to remind the chaps in wigs what Britain jolly well voted for. As if that had anything to do with anything at all.
So far, criticism of the High Court judgment — which the Supreme Court will affirm or overrule — has come in three distinct varieties. We have had the valid, the dim and the frankly sinister. In the first category sits anybody who simply wonders whether the court has got it wrong in claiming that the law requires a parliamentary vote on triggering Article 50. Perfectly reasonable, that. Disputing the independence of judges may nudge you towards being a conspiracy theorist, but disputing their infallibility most certainly does not. I’ve read arguments on both sides, and what the hell do I know? This is what appeals are for. We’ll see.
Then comes the dim, which I’m afraid includes the likes of Andrew Murrison, the Conservative MP for South West Wiltshire. ‘If judges can frustrate a referendum outcome,’ he tweeted last week, ‘why not the result of a general election that isn’t to their liking?’ Thereby in only 114 characters displaying that he had either failed to understand what the judgment had meant, or what the referendum had meant, or perhaps what courts are for, or possibly all three.
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