Brexit as Democratic Crisis: Parliament, People and Prophetic Democracy, 2016–2019

The vote to leave the European Union in 2016 triggered the most serious democratic crisis in Britain since the summer of 1914. Over the next three-and-a-half years, Brexit engaged fundamental democratic questions about how democracies make decisions, who speaks for ‘the people’ and what happens when different visions of democracy collide. With judges cast as ‘enemies of the people’, Parliament temporarily suspended and Members of Parliament denounced as ‘saboteurs’, it became almost routine to say that democracy had been ‘hijacked’, that a ‘coup d’état’ was afoot or that one side or other was trying ‘to shut down democracy’. This article asks why Brexit was so difficult for Britain’s democratic institutions to resolve, why democratic thinking became so fractured, and how it was possible to build a democratic case against Parliament. Rather than blaming ‘bad actors’—from whatever side of the political divide—it demonstrates how Brexit activated long-standing tensions within democracy as an idea: one that is both hegemonic and ‘essentially contested’. It shows how Brexit drew on a critique of British, as well as European, democracy, exposing and then amplifying a loss of faith in representative institutions. It argues that the referendum issued a new kind of democratic instruction, of which British politics had little experience, while disabling any agreed arbiter of democratic conflict. As such, it deploys Brexit as a case-study in the history of democratic contention, contributing to our understanding of how democratic ideas are contested and reimagined in specific historical contexts.