Back in late July, I tweeted this Order of the High Court in the legal challenge to the Government’s position that no Act of Parliament is needed to trigger Article 50:

I think that is a pretty remarkable Order for Government to have procured in an action of enormous and legitimate public interest.

Today, John Halford at Bindmans LLP has applied to the High Court to amend the effects of that Order. I have reproduced, following, that application.

Should you want to fund the legal challenge you can do so here. And I have also, today, in a separate blog post, reproduced one of the Skeletons produced by those bringing the challenge.

What follows is a copy of the Skeleton served by the ‘Interested Parties’ in the action before the High Court to establish whether an Act of Parliament is needed to trigger Article 50.

You can fund the action here. And you can read more about why I think democracy demands that Parliament decides here.

You will note that, in consequence of an order made by the High Court, certain sections of this Skeleton have been blacked out (or ‘redacted’ if you want to Talk Like a Lawyer). I am publishing, separately, a copy of the Interested Parties’ application to overturn that order of the High Court.

A political party is a machine for turning values into actions. In viable Opposition it’s powerful and in Government there is none better. But, like every machine, it can break beyond repair. If it does, it’s not merely useless. It actually gets in the way of achieving those values. Keep it and you can’t get a better machine. One that works.

Under the first past the post system there’s only room for one party on the Left. If that party is Labour there can be no other. That’s great if Labour is, or reasonably hopes to be, in Government. But, if you want to turn your values into actions, and Labour can’t, you need a machine that can. 

So the question you should be asking yourself is whether Labour is broken. Be honest: is there a realistic route back to Government for it? Is it still a powerful machine for turning values into actions? Or is it just a space where people go to talk to one another about what they want?

Those questions aren’t easy to answer.

For many, your attachment to the Labour Party goes beyond the rational. Your narrative of who you are, your relationships, your career and status, all are bound up with the Labour Party. But if you believe it is broken and you stay with it just the same you should be honest with yourself that it’s not about the values. You’re not achieving change in society, indeed, you might even be impeding it.

Leaving isn’t about letting ‘them’ win, or it being ‘our’ Party, or us being a ‘family’,  or whether we still have values in common. Those questions face inwards to the Party rather than outwards to the country. If your focus is on making the country a better place the only question is whether Labour can function as a powerful Opposition or is viable as a party of prospective Government. 

I’m not going to help you answer it. I’m not even going to tell you why I’ve answered it ‘no’. I just want to pose what I think is the right question.

Many of us are wondering, if we leave, where do we go?

At the moment, because there is Labour, there is no new machine.

But at the moment that doesn’t matter. 

Fewer than 1 in 50 of us is a member of a political party. But the votes of the other 49 count just the same. Indeed, they may even count for more. Don’t be taken for granted. Let them come to you – Labour and the Lib Dems and the Tories and the SNP. Let them try and persuade you that they can deliver what you want to see. On competence, on Brexit, on employment, on welfare, on immigration, on the economy, on defence, on our place in the world.

And when something new rises – and if Labour fails it will – join it. But by propping Labour up you make that impossible.

Buried in the EU Commission’s State Aid Press Release was this invitation to other Member States to share in Ireland’s prospective €13bn (plus interest) tax bonanza from Apple.

Italy already has. Apple handed over €318m last year, it would seem. Spain, Austria and France have now signalled that they will look again at whether Apple has paid the right amount of tax. This is no surprise. Even without the Commission’s prompt, given how Apple’s operations are structured, if it owes hundreds of millions in Italy, you would expect it to owe equivalent sums to member states across the EU, including here.

But there’s been no public signal we will look again. This will – and should – give rise afresh to the question whether HMRC is acting in the public interest.

I ask this question now because later this month we will hear how HMRC proposes to answer it.

Back in February 2012, following widespread concerns that HMRC was doing sweetheart deals, the Public Accounts Committee noted:

Governance procedures have lacked the independence and transparency needed to provide sufficient assurance to Parliament. Tax settlements with large companies are inevitably complex and involve the exercise of judgement. Parliament needs assurance that these settlements are appropriate and good value for the taxpayer. The Committee welcomes the Department’s proposals to introduce an independent assessor, or assessors, to sit alongside Commissioners, who would carry out independent review of settlement proposals.

Because we treat taxpayer confidentiality as sacrosanct, Parliament lacks the ability to scrutinise whether HMRC is acting in the public interest.

What was then proposed was that we would appoint a “Tax Assurance Commissioner” who would act independently of HMRC. A People’s – to use the nomenclature du jour – Champion who would zealously guard over the public interest and fearlessly disclose naughtinesses at HMRC.

The appointee was Edward Troup, and here’s what he said in his Tax Assurance Commissioners’ report published just a couple of months ago.

That’s all reassuring. Until you remember it was written five months after he was also given the job of Executive Chair and Permanent Secretary of HMRC. For the last few months he has, in effect, been scrutinising himself. And prior to that – at least it might be seen in this way – he spent several years as gamekeeper whilst auditioning for the job as Chief Poacher.

I’m not advancing an assertion that Edward has done those jobs otherwise than well. But when it comes to appearances? It’s quite fantastically unattractive.

In an age of enfeebled nation states and mighty corporates – remember “the tax treatment in Ireland enabled Apple to avoid taxation on almost all profits generated by sales of Apple products in the entire EU Single Market” – democracy demands meaningful scrutiny of these hugely valuable deals done behind locked doors.

I’ve addressed this problem before.

I wrote:

We can generate a dozen different layers of assurance. But if we populate them with individuals with a cookie cutter outlook the result will neither look like – nor represent – good scrutiny. The reality is that few people move into HMRC from the outside world – the traffic is almost all the other way – and the pool of Tax Commissioners is drawn almost exclusively from HMRC and the tax profession. I am aware of no-one who occupies a role of strategic importance in the process of approving deals whose background is such as to reassure the public that they are likely to provide independently minded challenge.

Let’s hope we end up with real scrutiny. Scrutiny that’s meaningful. That the public can have confidence in. That’s in everyone’s interests. Because if we can’t have confidence that big taxpayers are being made to pay the tax they owe, we’re bound to wonder whether we should bother.

[The following was commissioned by Counsel Magazine and is also published here.]

I’ll take some things as read.

You’ll know there’s a legal challenge to the Government’s position that it is for it and not Parliament to decide what action to take following the result of the Referendum. And that the challenge will be heard in the Divisional Court in October with a likely leapfrog appeal to the Supreme Court in December.

You’ll be aware that the challenge raises a question about the nature of the limits to the Royal Prerogative. Will triggering Article 50 denude the European Communities Act 1972 of content? Will it deprive UK nationals of their rights as an EU citizen? Is it Theresa May’s finger on the trigger? Or is must it be by Act of Parliament?

Published alongside this piece is another arguing that these are political questions – and that the courts should not get involved. I disagree. That there are political ramifications to the answers doesn’t change the nature of the questions from legal.

Few of us would baulk at the suggestion that the courts have an important role to play in regulating the relationship between the citizen and the Executive. Or in circumscribing when the Royal Prerogative can and cannot be used. Baulkers, if there are any, should read the words of Lord Oliver in Rayner (Mincing Lane) v DTI [1990] 2 AC 418, 462:

as a matter of the constitutional law of the United Kingdom… the Royal Prerogative, whilst it embraces the making of treaties, does not extend to altering the law or conferring rights upon individuals or depriving individuals of rights which they enjoy in domestic law without the intervention of Parliament.

Indeed, publicly at least, even the Government says that the challenge raises a justiciable question. I can’t tell you what the Government’s pleaded position is because, remarkably, the Divisional Court has ordered that all documents produced by the Government be kept confidential.

But, as far as we are aware, the issue is not a live one. So let me turn to the question why the proper functioning of democracy requires that Parliament decide. There are at least four overlapping reasons.

First, Parliament is supreme. It chose to enact a referendum that doesn’t mandate our departure from the European Union. It chose one that the then Foreign Secretary recognised in Parliament as merely “advisory”. Mr Hammond went on to say that the Government would regard itself as bound by the result – but that political commitment does not alter the legal character of the European Union Referendum Act 2015 as advisory. To treat it as binding is to undermine the Supremacy of Parliament. It is to replace its intention, as enacted in the Referendum, with the intention of the Executive.

Second, the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union gives us rights as individuals: to live abroad, healthcare cover on temporary travels, to accrue pension rights working in other Member States, and so on. Parliament has not acted to modify or abrogate those rights. It cannot be right that the Executive can. To say this is to do no more than articulate a specific instance of an important general rule about the limits of Prerogative Power. To ignore it is to put citizens at the mercy of the Government.

Third, the fact that it is advisory inevitably gives rise to the question: who does it advise?

We know Theresa May opposes a second vote on the outcome of our negotiations with our EU partners. We also know that others in the Conservative Party feel differently. Nicky Morgan, who as Education Secretary also publicly contemplated standing for the leadership, says that Parliament must have a say on the final deal. There are wide open spaces between these two positions. One will lead to us leaving the EU: Brexit, after all, means Brexit. The other might not. The difference between them reflects the personal approaches of those two politicians to the outcome of the Referendum. But the electorate has had no chance to speak on which position should prevail. The only choice was one made by Conservative MPs pursuing considerations which included (and I mean no criticism when I say this) parochial ones. To deny Parliament any say on the choice between these positions cannot be right.

Finally, alongside the question, ‘who did the referendum advise’ is the related one, ‘what did it advise’? The binary formulation put to the electorate “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” skates over the many parallel universes offered up during the campaign: lower and not lower immigration, inside and not inside the single market, money spent and not spent on the NHS, retained and not retained regional investment and agricultural subsidies, and so on. These, and the trade-offs between them, are profoundly important questions. But they were not put in the Referendum; they figured in no election manifesto; no politician can claim a democratic mandate to answer them. I say they cannot be for an unelected Prime Minister.

Let me acknowledge this.

Although the argument I am putting forward is a procedural one – should Parliament or the Prime Minister make the decision about triggering Article 50 – I am interested in it because I believe the sovereignty of Parliament is substantively engaged. And I can only say that if I am prepared to contemplate that Parliament might take a different view to the Prime Minister.

But to contemplate this is not to urge Parliament to ignore the outcome of the Referendum. It is to urge Parliament to consider it in the context in which it arose. That context includes a number of assurances – of a points-based immigration system, of £350m extra to spend on the NHS, of VAT cuts on fuel – each of which has already been disavowed by the Prime Minister. Is the falsity of a representation relevant to the quality of the consent it induces? For legal readers of Counsel, there is only one answer. It includes the imprecision of the Referendum question and the competing accounts of Brexit that were given. It includes the fact that Parliament enacted only an advisory Referendum. It includes the enormous importance to our life as a nation of whether we are inside or outside the EU. And it includes the small margin of victory. Each of these factors must be weighed in the balance, alongside the democratic importance of adhering to the outcome of a hard-fought referendum campaign.

This weighing exercise is not one for an unelected Prime Minister. Parliament, with the roving democratic mandate given to its Members, must find a resolution. It should decide what to do with the result of the Referendum. And those who value democracy should hope that the Divisional, and then the Supreme Court, will direct that it does.

It really does have it all, yesterday’s Apple story. But you don’t want to read 5,000 words and I don’t want to write them. So let me focus on the bits I think are interesting or important.

First, the political dimension.

Students of the history of the European Union will know that the European institutions have often acted to protect and enhance the functioning of the single market. As I’ve argued on these pages before, we can’t really have the level playing field on which a functioning single market depends with aggressive tax competition between member states. And the institutions obviously know that.

But the power to make tax law rests by and large with member states.

The inevitable result is a tension between those member states who would seek to tilt the playing field towards them through aggressive tax competition and the institutions who are interested in preserving and advancing the functioning of the single market by keeping it level.

I said a year ago that I believed the Commission had decided to use State Aid law to explore the limits of member states’ power to engage in ‘field tilting’ through the tax code. It had decided, to put it bluntly, to be a little more activist. Whether you think that’s a good thing rather depends on what you think about tax competition. And whether you think the single market’s important. But – and I bear in mind the old saw that you shouldn’t make up your mind until you’ve heard both sides of the argument – I have to say I’m surprised at the emergent consensus that the Commission’s decision amounts to overreaching.

Second, the importance of the Apple decision.

I think it’s really important. Indeed, I think it could be a game changer. If you’re contemplating setting up an unnatural structure for tax avoidance reasons, there’s a number of things you weigh in the balance. There are financial costs to setting up and maintaining that structure; there are reputational costs; the structure can be a green flag for investors attracted by the higher post-tax returns but it can also be a red flag for investors worried about the sustainability of higher post-tax returns that can be wiped out with a stroke of a legislator’s pen; and it can negatively affect your relationship with Government in the jurisdictions those structures are designed to denude of tax revenues.

What the Commission decision does is add a really important factor to that list.

The assumption you might once have made – that you will get those higher post-tax returns – you now can’t make. You might incur all the costs – all the negatives – and only discover years later that you didn’t get what you were banking on. The mere fact of the decision – irrespective of whether it is successfully appealed against – adds risk. And there will be many cases in which that will tilt the scales against unnatural avoidance.

Third, looked at in the round, the sort of practice imperiled by this decision is bad and so challenging it is good.

If you read the Irish press you’ll see the debate about whether to appeal against the decision couched in purely parochial terms: should we keep the windfall? or should we act to protect the advantages that come from tilting the playing field in our direction?

But if you look beyond those parochial concerns you’ll see that what Ireland has been doing is giving a subsidy to Apple’s shareholders with other people’s money – and keeping a touch for itself.

The subsidy to the shareholders comes in the form of higher post-tax returns than they would otherwise have enjoyed. As the Commission Press Release noted:

In fact, the tax treatment in Ireland enabled Apple to avoid taxation on almost all profits generated by sales of Apple products in the entire EU Single Market.

The ‘other people’s money’ is the taxes that would have been paid elsewhere in the single market – including in the UK – and in the US too if Ireland hadn’t issued the rulings the subject of the complaint.

The ‘touch for itself’ is Ireland’s tiny slice – from 1 per cent falling to 0.005 per cent – of tax on Apple’s European profits together with the economic activity in Ireland associated with diverting those European wide taxable profits to Ireland.

If you look at the question whether to appeal or keep the cash purely through an Irish lens I’m perfectly content to accept there are sensible arguments both ways. But this shouldn’t blind us to the reality that Ireland’s modest benefit are at the expense of its European partners. And that the real winner is Apple which ends up paying materially no tax at all on its European profits. Not in the US, and not in the EU either.

Finally, the EU dimension.

If you agree with the proposition that it’s a good thing for big multinational companies to pay tax on their profits then you should be interested in how this result came about.

It wasn’t Ireland, or Germany, or France, or the UK that delivered it. It was the European Commission. The reality is that the smaller you are, the more difficult it is for you to generate tax receipts. You’re less important a market. And you’re less able to absorb the risks attached to widening your tax base or increasing your tax rates. Or to face down threats of retaliation. On the other hand, the bigger the market you are, the greater the heft you have.

As I argued before the referendum, writing then about State Aid rules, leaving weakens our bargaining position on tax matters. It puts us on the road to tax haven UK. And if you want an NHS, or free education, or decent pensions, or a social safety net, that’s not a good thing.

In Les Amants, Jeanne Moreau is married to a newspaper magnate with little time for his younger wife. One day her car breaks down and she accepts a lift from a younger man…

The 1958 film won for its director the Special Jury Prize in Cannes. To the rest of us it gave a splendid tagline: “This was her moment! And nothing else mattered” and a rather less glorious definition of “hardcore pornography” as a result of its risqué scenes.

Here’s Supreme Court Judge Potter Stewart in Jacobellis v Ohio, a case that arose when the state of Ohio tried (and ultimately failed) to ban Les Amants on the grounds that it was obscene:

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description. And perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it.”

Tax avoidance is a bit like hardcore pornography. To ban it you first have to overcome a tough definitional problem: what is it?

Of course, it’s not all bad. Some behaviour that resembles tax avoidance can serve a useful purpose. We use tax breaks to encourage ‘good’ behaviour, like saving for our old age. Pension saving reduces our tax bill but it isn’t tax avoidance in any meaningful sense.
But move outside this narrow category and things get very thorny very quickly.

Take the Cameron family inheritance tax planning.

UK tax law says you can pass anything to your spouse free of inheritance tax. Gifts on death to almost anyone else and with a value higher than £325,000 would incur tax. But gifts made whilst you’re still alive, which you outlive by seven years, are free of tax.

When Ian Cameron died, David Cameron received £300,000 in his father’s will. The rest went to his mother tax free. She then gifted the then Prime Minister a further £200,000.

Was this tax avoidance?

Before answering that question, let’s take a look at another piece of purported avoidance much discussed in recent weeks.

The best way to think about charitable tax relief is a kind of matched giving scheme under which the State adds a bonus to gifts made by taxpayers to charities. But only gifts in cash: there’s a rule that says gifts of goods don’t attract the bonus.

If you’re a charity operating a string of shops re-selling donated goods that limitation is unhelpful. It reduces the value of those donations by the value of the bonus. But what if the taxpayer appoints you, the charity, as her agent to sell the goods for her and then makes a gift to you of the proceeds? Then the gift is in cash.

A number of charities operate this arrangement. One of them is Oxfam, which has been very vocal in campaigning against tax avoidance. Because of its campaigning position, Oxfam’s arrangements have understandably drawn comment from the likes of the Institute for Economic Affairs, a right-wing think tank.

But is it tax avoidance?

Oxfam’s defence, in essence, is that its arrangements work. But that arrangements “work” isn’t the sword to slice through the Gordian Knot. At a technical level, all tax avoidance works. If it didn’t work, it wouldn’t avoid tax. And nor does it help that HMRC agrees that it works. Again, either explicitly or tacitly, every transaction that successfully avoids tax is agreed by HMRC to work.

So what is the touchstone?

Like “hardcore pornography” the problem we’re trying to resolve is, ultimately, a definitional one. What is the class of transaction we want to ban?

Typically we try to resolve this question by looking at the language the draftsman of the statutory provision has used. “He’s imposed a low tax charge on this thing,” we reason, “but did he really mean to?” The problem with this approach is that it involves an attempt to derive from his language an intention that can’t really be found in it. If the intention was clearly expressed, the scheme wouldn’t succeed in avoiding the charge to tax.

But Oxfam and David Cameron stories suggest an alternative. Start with the facts: what’s the real transaction? Does it attract a higher tax charge?

In the case of Oxfam, the answer is straightforward. Oxfam doesn’t market itself as a broker of second hand clothes. And few who have clothes to sell go to Oxfam to resell their clothes. (Not least because Oxfam pays you in nectar points: 2 points per £1 of clothing sold or about 1% of what you should get as principal.)

Oxfam have taken the real transaction – a donation of clothing – and done the charity shop equivalent of a Double Irish. To get from A to D in a tax efficient manner they’ve walked round three sides of a square. That looks to me like tax avoidance.

But what about David Cameron: what’s the real transaction? Here the analysis is less straightforward.

And it boils down to this. What do we mean when we say a transaction is “tax avoidance”?

If we’re attempting a moral judgment, we look into the minds of the actors. Was the £200,000 gift deliberately routed via the Prime Minister’s mother in order to avoid £80,000 that would otherwise have been payable? If, on the other hand, we’re attempting a technical description of a class of transaction that avoids tax it might be sufficient for us to ask whether the real source of the £200,000 was his father’s estate.

It’s a bold tax lawyer who passes moral judgments. But on the technical question, I was struck at the time, by Number 10’s description of the £200,000 as a payment to “equalise” that which had passed from Ian Cameron to his children. That description seemed to me to source the money to the estate of father. If that were right, the real transaction would not only include the £300,000 the then Prime Minister received in the will but also the £200,000 gifted by his mother.

And, to go back to Potter Stewart’s language, you might have the beginning of an intelligible definition of a tax avoidance transaction: one where the natural transaction attracts a higher charge to tax.

(This post was originally published as a Financial Times’ Alphaville blog. I republish it here to make it easier for non-FT subscribers to read it).

Yesterday the Government published a Consultation Document which took two big steps to tackle two different, but related, problems.

The first addresses misbehaviour by taxpayers who tend to hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest.

Assume you’re a taxpayer and you have a dodgy tax adviser who tells you that if you engage in a piece of tax planning you can declare your tax liability to be 10 when it would otherwise be 100.

Of course you want to believe him – and so you don’t take the care you should to check whether he’s telling you the truth. What he is telling you is convenient for him to tell you (he charges a fee) and it’s convenient for you to hear it (it reduces your tax liability).

As things stand, if the tax planning doesn’t get challenged, you save 90. If it is challenged successfully you are back where you started, owing 100.  This penalty regime is designed to ensure that you ask the questions you should before you put 10 rather than 100 on your return; to give you reason to exercise caution when confronted by a tax adviser whispering sweet nothings into your ear. If the Government’s proposals are adopted, you might end up paying 190 rather than saving 90.

The second regime tackles that dodgy tax adviser. And those he takes advice from. And those he relies on to execute his scheme. Banks, accountants, solicitors, advisors, IFAs, trustees, and even barristers. The Consultation Document describes these as “enablers” of tax avoiders.

Very often these individuals are subject to no regulation. Its remarkable but true that you have to be regulated to be a dental hygienist but you don’t have to be regulated to offer tax advice. So there can be a complete absence of regulatory control of some enablers.

But the real issue is this. A tax advisor gets his fee for telling you that you can declare 10 rather than 100. He’s in the money from the start. And if you should happen to sue him later, he might have wound himself up, or he might shelter behind the advice given by a barrister, or he might point to the small print in the scheme documentation telling you that (despite the fact he’s charging you a fee) you must take your own tax advice.

So he gets handsome reward and very often without any personal accountability for the consequences. This state of affairs can encourage abysmal behaviour by highly paid professionals – some examples of which I set out here.

And for the taxpayers who are led astray – and many young men and women have made fortunes from their abilities as performers or footballers and lost them in consequence of a decision no worse than a poor choice of financial advisor – this asymmetry is both unavoidable and profoundly unfair. And it places huge pressure on HMRC and on tax collection.

So the problems are very real problems.

And the solutions in the Consultation Document are very real solutions. We must await the draft legislation – it can somtimes deliver less than is promised by the publicity grab of the Consultation Document. But my instinct is that, for behaviour within the compass of the Consultation Document, these measures will prove to be a real game-changer. (Indeed, they may well go too far – but that is a point for another day.) So, looked at in the round, I applaud them.

But let me strike a few notes of caution.

First, the measures look to be targeted primarily at individual rather than corporate avoidance. Individual tax avoidance – the data suggests – is yesterday’s problem. But the same cannot be said to be true of corporate avoidance. I’d like to see an extension of the targeted avoidance behaviour to corporate profit shifting.

Second, the proposed legislative solutions are consistent with the overall pattern of behaviour of the Government. That pattern is to ‘resolve’ often quite difficult, and factually nuanced, problems with legislation rather than with feet-on-the-ground resource. Legislation can be a good tool, but it’s also a blunt tool and it can lead to unfair or otherwise poor outcomes. Over time, our tax system suffers. HMRC is profoundly under-resourced – and legislation can go some way towards protecting against the consequences but not all the way.

Finally, Government needs to do much, much more to address the opacity that surrounds its efforts to tackle avoidance. Until we can see that HMRC is tackling avoidance – until we know that Google or Facebook or Uber is paying the ‘right’ amount of tax – people are going to remain sceptical about the efforts that are, or are perceived to be, being made by HMRC. Until Government tackles this issue, however many legislative steps it takes, I am afraid we are going to go on being sceptical about its conduct. I have addressed that issue at length here.

Consistently with my promise that this Crowd Justice funded litigation on Article 50 should be conducted transparently, I post here the (rather disappointing) response received today from the Government.

The initial hearing is at 10.00 am tomorrow.

Here is the letter:

And here is the accompanying ‘Defendant’s Note’:

Dear Friend,

What you feared of Brexit? It looks likely to come true.

Already the signs are there. Of slowing investment, falling employment, increases in inflation, slumping public finances, a falling housing market (hurting house-building), a likely break up of the United Kingdom, diminished tertiary and research sectors, and a rise in racism. Government’s response to date has been to signal tax cuts to benefit large corporations and the wealthy. These will compound the hit to public finances even more and benefit (and not for the first time) the old at the expense of the young and the rich at the expense of the poor. Investment in public services and infrastructure will suffer. Alongside all of these we exit the Union, which emerged from the ashes of two World Wars to deliver 70 years of peace and security to its members, to a world of increasing and terrifying insecurity.

You may, or may not, have a problem with how the Referendum campaign was fought. But one thing is for sure. The choice was flawed. It was between a known world (in the EU) and an unknown world (whatever being outside the EU involves). And it was made poorer still because Leavers presented a slew of unknown worlds: lower and not lower immigration, inside and not inside the single market, money spent and not spent on the NHS, retained and not retained regional investment and agricultural subsidies. The list goes on. No one – least of all the Leave campaigners – could agree on what we were being offered.

And you are voiceless. Not one of our major political parties makes these points. Our MPs, some notable exceptions aside, shelter behind the flawed product of a flawed process. They dare not even point out, of a Referendum that they chose to make discretionary, that its result is not mandatory.

Theresa May has said that Brexit means Brexit. That may be so – but it leaves unanswered the question what does Brexit mean? Jeremy Corbyn, quite remarkably, trumped the demands of even the most vigorous Leave campaigners and demanded we trigger the exit mechanism immediately. The SNP has half an eye to a second independence referendum. The Liberal Democrats remain, for the time being, irrelevant.

And huge choices remain about the future shape of our relationship with Europe. Those choices were not put to the public in the Referendum. But this appears not to trouble the Government. These choices, it says, do not require the approval of our elected Parliament. instead they are purely personal decisions for the Prime Minister. A Prime Minister not selected by the electorate. Not even selected by the hundred thousand plus members of her own Party. Effectively selected by the Chair of the Conservative Parliamentary Party who, in breach (as I read them) of Conservative Party rules, crowned her Prime Minister following Andrea Leadsom’s decision to withdraw.

If that’s democracy, I’m a banana.

Who stands in the way of this extravagant assertion of personal power?

Not Her Majesty’s Opposition. The Labour Party is in crisis. Jeremy Corbyn barely pretends to lead a Parliamentary party. Carried aloft on the shoulders of his supporters – numbering perhaps half a percent of our population – he has almost entirely absented himself from the important business of holding the Government to account.

And whatever you think of Theresa May – and there is much to like about her Centre-Left program – good policy is unlikely to emerge from a process denuded of proper challenge. Our system of democracy was designed for two political parties. Not one.

None of this is good. Indeed, if your concern lies, as mine does, in proper Government it is very bad indeed. Open a newspaper. These are not the days to beta-test the hypothesis that our constitution will function fine without an Opposition.

To change it, two things must happen.

The Labour Party must return to the business of vigorous, challenging, healthy Opposition. And there must be a mainstream political voice demanding a democratic mandate – not merely that of the Prime Minister appointed by personal fiat of the Chair of the Conservative 1922 Committee – for whatever emerges from our negotiations with our European partners. ‘That deal – or the status quo?’: this is question that must be put before Parliament or the electorate. Anything less is to thumb our nose at the idea we are governed by democracy.

These are the things that must happen. And you can deliver them. You can bring them about.

There is a Labour leadership election.

One of the candidates, Owen Smith MP, who will likely go forward to challenge Jeremy Corbyn, has promised that a Labour Party he leads will offer the electorate a referendum on the terms of the deal we negotiate with our European partners. Once the shape of that deal is know, he says, the British people should choose between that deal and our present relationship. This will remove the taint of personal fiat from what is likely to be the most important decision concerning the future of the United Kingdom that any of us will see in our lifetimes.

And there is every reason to believe he will be in a position to offer that prospect to the British people in a General Election.

Leave aside the prospect of a snap election. Even were the formal process to start today, Philip Hammond has suggested the Brexit process will take six years to conclude. And, following discussions with Nicola Sturgeon, Theresa May has said the process will not even be started until there is a UK approach to negotiations. And the assessment, of course, is a political one but I think our European partners will be happy for the British people to be given a choice between the status quo and a revised deal. That, after all, is what has happened with second referendums in the past.

So, a Labour Party, led by Owen Smith, offering to the British Electorate in a general election a choice. A choice between a new deal – whatever shape that deal takes – and sticking with what we have.

If you have been (for longer than six months) a member of the Labour Party or an affiliated supporter then I urge you to vote for Owen Smith. But even if you are not, you can still vote. To do so you must become a registered supporter. And the window for doing so will open here on Monday at 5pm. For £25 you can vote in the Leadership Election. That money, if you can afford it, will be well spent. The race is very tight indeed so your vote will count. You can also register here to receive prompts and notifications to register and vote. Please, take that step too.

I do not urge this action because it helps the Labour Party, although it does. I do not urge the action because I support Owen Smith, although it will help him. I urge it for two reasons. It stands the best chance of restoring functioning Parliamentary democracy and it stands the best chance of delivering to the British people a choice about Brexit that democracy demands that they have.

So Friend, please: if you care about these things, I ask you to register as a supporter. And to recruit others to do the same. These are matters too important to be ignored as parochial Labour Party concerns. They are central to the financial and cultural and political health of your country. The vote is likely to be close. And these are actions you can take. You can act to restore and preserve that health.

Please do share this post. Please share it on email, on Facebook, on Twitter, and orally too. Reach out. Smile. You can help.

Thank you for reading.

Jolyon

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