If Democracy is Dead, do Voters have a Legitimate Recourse to Violence?

Okay, so today the Courts overruled a democratically elected government on a point of law that was previously assumed not to be justiciable.

The Supreme Court has now ruled that they are above a democratically elected Government, they are above even the Monarch and  can rule that a government's motives have to be considered when proroguing Parliament. They have also ruled that the Monarch's decision to Prorogue Parliament is unlawful, because the motive for the advice she was given was in their eyes unlawful.

By extension this could also be applied to legislation. For instance if a government brought forth legislation that someone with enough money disagreed with, they could if they had enough money and time, run the Government's policy decision through the courts, to the Supreme Court and overrule the government.

So, democracy itself ceases if a Democratically elected Government can be overruled by the Supreme Court. We now have the law.

Democracy is the thing that allowed the UK to change in a peaceful manner for 1200 years. Maybe we've only had truly representative one-person-one-vote democracy for less than 100 years, but we still had accountability even way back at the beginning.

The Supreme court has no such accountability. If it now has, by dint of the law it has passed, primacy over the Government and the Monarch, then by extraction they should be voted in to office and also out of office by the people to keep them accountable.

So, given that democracy as we understood it to be, is actually not available and democracy is de-legitimised, does that mean the means by which we settled arguments before (violence) now re-legitimised?

I don't know. These are interesting constitutional questions. The one thing that does come out of this is that there is a lot of constitutional change that needs to happen so that this does not happen again.

Personally I think the Supreme court have overstepped their remit by overruling the Government and the Monarch.

In effect the Supreme Court have now given themselves the power to scrutinise and overrule any piece of legislation that goes before the Queen, irrespective of whether it is arrived at by a democratically elected Government. They have the power to rule on it's legitimacy, rather than the legitimacy being given to the rule of government by democratic mandate.

There is much do to repair the injustices of the past 3 years.

Firstly either the FTPA needs to be heavily modified or abolished. MPs moving from Government to opposition or vice versa should automatically trigger a by-election.

If a government loses a working majority in Parliament it should automatically trigger a general election. No zombie governments should ever be held in place by opposition MPs.

The Supreme Court should also be abolished and the Law Lords reinstated so they have the ability to scrutinise legislation as it is being made. No legislating after the fact.

There is so much more to be thrashed out...