Letter to Private Eye on Rees-Mogg 6/11/7

Sir,

I'm interested in your article "What a Burke" in HP Sauce of Eye 1456. You and your reader Peter Roberts take Jacob Rees-Mogg to task for muddying the waters by making an false equivalence between his holding privately Catholic views on same-sex marriage and abortion, in spite of his NE Somerset constituents' views (in the way that Edmund Burke described) and his insistence that MPs should not seek to ignore the views of the electorate on Brexit expressed in the referendum. The problem is that these two things are not equivalents so, perhaps, it is you and Peter who are muddying the waters. 

Rees-Mogg says "Parliament should be the servant, not the master of the people." "The people" as incarnated in the result of a national referendum designed to give a mandate for executive action and, therefore, demanding of recognition and authority by Parliament (which is what Rees-Mogg is insisting on) is not the same as "the people" who might have differing views on abortion to Rees-Mogg incarnated in the constituents of NE Somerset. The latter are just views and have no legal power or force which Rees-Mogg is obliged to act on and this is exactly what Burke was insisting on. The conflict which you suggest exists does not, therefore, exist and I'm surprised you should go so far out of your way to prove that it does in order to discount Rees-Mogg's credibility. One wonders what imperative requires this. The spuriousness of the assertion may explain why Rees-Mogg has not replied to Peter's letters, perhaps seeing them as merely mischievous.

This also means, by the way, that, in expressing these opinions about Brexit, he is not insisting that Remainer MPs give up their Remainer views. They can be legitimately held and expressed just as his views on abortion and gay marriage can be held and expressed by him as personal views. He is simply insisting that Parliament should not seek to undermine the legal force of the will of the people as expressed in the referendum which would have been pointless had it not had such weight. I am a Remain voter who feels the enactment of Brexit to be now an obligation and so embody this distinction in myself.

I hope I don't have to write to you as many times as Peter Roberts did to Rees-Mogg to get a reply.

GUY WALKER