THE last thing on the mind of a generation of politicians who grew up imagining the neoliberal agenda to be the norm was our history.

It is no surprise then to find so many of them in Parliament rejecting that history and allowing a new authoritarianism to emerge in which Parliament dictates to the people.

The civil war was waged in the 17th century to place property and landowners in charge of the House of Commons and not the king. A step forwards.

As industry rose manufacturers wanted a say in Parliament and slowly but surely the rotten boroughs and power of the landed aristocracy were replaced. Another step forwards.

Importantly, as trade union democracy developed, so the demand for political representation and the universal franchise took hold.
The demand for full voting rights for women led to some of the bravest and most influential acts of sacrifice in our history. Further steps forward.

As young people increasingly came to centre stage in our unions, culture and consciousness, so the demand for votes for everyone over 17 began.

From the first presentations of the Charter in 1832, to votes at 18 in 1969, our predecessors fought to make Parliament reflect our views and respond to our needs as a nation.

But no sooner had the franchise been fully extended to all adults, than the Tories were hatching the plot to take us into what was clearly planned as a European super-state. This would be impervious to the democratic demands of nations. Our newly won voice was being silenced.

Socialists opposed the move and the Labour Party, even as late as 1983, called for withdrawal from the EC in its manifesto.

The Tories loved the move into the EU and this led to their first catastrophic act of national betrayal in 1979 when Thatcher pioneered the key neoliberal act of removing exchange controls on the flow of capital. Our wealth drained away into the global finance casino.

So began the globalisation agenda that glorified the freedom to move capital, labour, goods and services and replaced national democracy.

To say that the deindustrialisation, denationalisations, deregulation and privatisations and pulling apart of our social fabric since 1976 were the result of the nasty Tories alone and nothing to do with our EU membership is just plain wrong.

Thatcher destroyed the industrial economy to make us a dependant nation and Tony Blair gave up our public services and political independence.

A series of major EU treaties from Maastricht, which introduced austerity, the Single European Act, which brought us mass unemployment and limits on state aid, to the Lisbon Treaty which installed the unelected in charge of our affairs, were all introduced without a referendum.

Along the way some even tried to get Britain into the disastrous, now collapsing, eurozone. This was stopped both by active campaigning and the relatively recent memory of the collapse of Exchange Rate Mechanism in 1992.

With this background it is hardly surprising that Parliament, when faced eventually in 2016 with its biggest ever mandate, has fused.

While 64 per cent of parliamentary constituencies voted to leave the EU, about 74 per cent of MPs voted to remain. To their credit, many Remain voting MPs have recognised they must follow the majority voice nationally and in their constituencies.

But some MPs have, it seems, set about frustrating the will of the people in a new and worrying way.

Forget the rabid right on the streets, Parliament could seek to rule directly over us on behalf of the EU. A bid for unelected power is in effect being made. In a cruel irony, it is seeking to put those we don’t elect in charge in the name of parliamentary sovereignty.
The most bizarre paradoxes some of us have ever experienced are taking place.

The Parliament our predecessors in the movement fought and died to democratise is in danger of rejecting our strongest-ever demand on it. So-called nationalist parties want to break a national majority vote bigger than that which brought their assemblies into being.

A Green MP conjures up the virtues of cross-continent, just-in-time production, the goods equivalent of zero-hours contracts, one of the most environmentally unfriendly things there is, to warn of the calamity for big business. Scaring us all about chlorinated chicken, some MPs conveniently forget that British animal welfare, food safety and veterinary practices are superior to the EU’s.

Then there is Ireland. Sinn Fein wants Brussels to rule Dublin and Belfast. The DUP has less ambitious objectives and just wants Westminster to run Belfast, which it is now having to do because the DUP and Sinn Fein can’t form a governing body to run things in the north.