Britain's Reichstag Fire moment

[muriel_volestrangler]

Weimar’s democracy did not exactly commit suicide. Most voters never voted for a dicatorship: the most the Nazis ever won in a free election was 37.4 per cent of the vote. But too many conservative politicians lacked the will to defend democracy, either because they didn’t really believe in it or because other matters seemed more pressing. As for rule by emergency decree, few people thought Hitler was doing anything different from Ebert or Brüning when he used Hindenburg’s powers to suspend civil liberties after the Reichstag Fire on 28th February 1933. That decree was then renewed all the way up to 1945. In this sense, democracy was destroyed constitutionally.

The lesson seems to be that to prevent the collapse of representative democracy, the legislature must jealously guard its powers. Can we rely on that happening today? It doesn’t help that the British parliament, as was its counterpart in Weimar, has become more or less paralysed on the most important issue of the day. As in Weimar, the only majorities are negative ones—against, for example, Theresa May’s Brexit deal as well as, so far at least, every available alternative.

With parliament gummed up, the great danger is of MPs giving up on themselves. By proroguing, Johnson signals his contempt for MPs, and his readiness to ride roughshod over their objections to a no-deal Brexit, a policy almost nobody voted for in 2016. His aim is clearly to deny parliament the time to force him to request an extension before the current 31st October deadline—so that, whatever the Commons thinks, the UK then leaves the EU by default: hence the five-week prorogation, unprecedented since 1945. There have been signals, too, that a potential vote of no-confidence could be shrugged off with contempt. If that were to happen, parliamentary democracy would truly be in trouble in this country. This is Britain’s Reichstag Fire decree moment.
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It’s only after they’ve been elected that men like Orbán begin to dismantle the very system that brought them to power—muzzling a free press, attacking independent courts, even seeking to overturn election results they don’t like (as we’ve seen recently with the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an in Istanbul’s mayoral contest). The drive of Trump’s Republicans to impose onerous voter registration rules in the US, designed to depress turnout by African-Americans and others, also reveals an alarming contempt for basic democratic values. So too does the determination of Johnson and Dominic Cummings and their unelected, hard-right government to force through a disastrous no-deal Brexit without parliamentary approval and against the wishes of the majority of the population.

https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/britain-prorouging-boris-johnson-parliament-suspension-richard-evans-weimar

The author, Richard J Evans, is "one of Britain’s foremost historians of Germany and the Third Reich".