One Prime Minister gambled he could quiet the grumblings about Europe, and lost: a section of the British public voted to leave the European Union, and he, David Cameron, resigned, giving another politician in his party the dubious duty of carrying on with that questionable policy; she, Theresa May, has been trying to push an elephant through the eye of a needle.
British politicians have simpler, and more apt, names than we Yanks do. There is no Newt in Parliament (again, our English cousins are lucky). Tony Blair, whatever one thinks of him (and there is much passion surrounding that topic), that's a nice simple name. They have a Margaret, we have a Nancy. We had Franklin, they had Winston. They had John Major; mediocre politician, great name. What can we offer to counter Theresa May? Nothing. Theresa is such a name, not at all common; but May? Can't top that.
Our governmental system (leaving aside contemporary politics, for now) is derived from the British: we also have two houses of Congress, though we do not have Lords (no matter what some wealthy wish, thank goodness), but do have a Senate; our Founders made three branches of government, rather than two, and I have yet to hear about anyone qualified to criticize those wise men; we also have a Speaker of the House, but the British equivalent has a different role.
The British speaker, unlike his American counterpart, is required to drop his party affiliation and remain neutral on matters of policy, tells a New York Times article.
The current Speaker, John Bercow, is a former Conservative Party right-winger (grandson of Jack Bercowitch, a Jewish Romanian immigrant, he actually supported "assisted repatriation" of immigrants) who drifted to the other end of the political spectrum. He became the scourge of Parliament Tories, including the hapless David Cameron, who took to making fun of Bercow's height (5'6½") by calling him a dwarf (proving the Brits don't have it completely over us Yanks; US politicians do not make fun of the opposition's anatomy, generally).
Mister Bercow is quite a good speaker (pun intended) of the English language. According to people who knew him as a small lad, he has always been so. In rejoinder to Cameron's insults, Bercow sneered that “Eton, hunting, shooting and lunch at White’s,” an exclusive St. James’s gentleman’s club, did not qualify him to lead.
Which brings me to the current Brexit imbroglio. After the British public — or a section thereof, those who bothered to vote — opted to leave the European Union, Cameron resigned and left the business to May. It has been a bloody mess, the whole lot of it.
Hard exit, soft exit, no exit, do it over; the British don't quite know what they want, or enough of them don't agree on any one course of action. Labor opposes whatever the Tories propose; the Tories can not agree, as a party, on one course of action: some Tories want to depose May and become leader of the party and the nation (such as Boris Johnson, himself a thoroughly British chap who, of all things, was born in the United States, and is thus an American citizen; he was named after a Russian chap his parents knew in Mexico), others want something or other.
A big mess. Theresa May negotiated a pact with the EU, which very few Brits liked; when she submitted it to Parliament for its approval, it was defeated in a rout. Labor then called for a vote of no-confidence in Prime Minister May, but that was defeated. And there it stood last week, when Speaker Bercow stepped in.
With less than 10 weeks left before the country is set to leave the bloc, he has broken precedent by wresting some control over the Brexit decision-making from Prime Minister Theresa May, allowing Parliament to act to stop the country from leaving without a deal, according to the Times article.
Breaking precedent is a big deal, of course; precedent is an important tenet in a system of laws. However, following precedent can become a hindrance. As Speaker Brecow is quoted in the article, “I understand the importance of precedent, but precedent does not completely bind, for one very simple reason,” he said. “If we were guided only by precedent, manifestly nothing in our procedures would ever change. Things do change.”
Predictably, that has pleased some and enraged others. Guessing whom is easy. For example, here is video of a Tory who does not, it well appears, like Speaker Bercow.
Speaker Bercow's language and logic are most impressive, to me. But others surely would disagree with such a conclusion. PM May's team on Friday threatened Mr. Bercow with the most supercilious of punishments: blocking his entry to the House of Lords — an honor bestowed on every speaker for more than 200 years.
Others are still seething over his decision not to wear the traditional speaker’s regalia, including wig and knee-breeches, which he said created “a barrier between Parliament and the public.”
The son of a cab driver from North London, Mr. Bercow propelled himself through the Oxbridge-educated upper reaches of British society by sheer determination and is viewed, variously, as a sharp-elbowed bully and a champion of the rights of Parliament.CreditAndy Rain/EPA, via Shutterstock
For a Yank, that's quite formal, but that's how the British are.
For those interested in long parliamentary debates, this very long video is catnip. One interesting detail is the dress of these parliamenterians: suits, yes, but not stripped ties, and no lapel flag pins.
And as to the use of the English language, I close with this paragraph from the Times article:
In the wretched purgatory that was Westminster last week, there was precisely one person who seemed to be having fun. From the silk-canopied speaker’s chair of the House of Commons, John Bercow looked out over Britain’s squabbling Parliament and brayed, “Order! Order!” in that undrownoutable voice, something like an air-raid siren with postnasal drip. He doled out his pompous, antiquarian insults, cheerfully rebuking one member for “chuntering from a sedentary position ineloquently and for no obvious purpose.” The outside world rarely takes much notice of the speaker of the House of Commons, a nonpartisan and typically low-profile figure who presides over parliamentary debates. But Britain’s last-minute paralysis over exiting the European Union, or Brexit, has made Mr. Bercow into a kind of celebrity. [emphasis added]
Hear, here!