In 1885 influential jurist Albert Venn Dicey (1889: 38) defined Britain’s parliamentary sovereignty as “the right to make or unmake any law whatever”. For Dicey, the strength of this sovereignty was such that no person or group could “override or set aside the legislation of Parliament”. Parliament’s sovereignty was ill-disposed towards the sentiments of the “people” entering the halls of Westminster in an unmediated fashion. Rather, the people’s representatives had to exercise independent reason in deliberation and decision making. For right or wrong, parliamentary sovereignty has always demanded representative rather than direct democracy. Except that when, in June 2016, the British public voted by 51.9 per cent to leave the EU, influential politicians and pundits claimed that the non-binding referendum result was a direct, unmediated expression of the “popular will”. The government, they argued, was bound to legislate on this will.

In the months following the referendum, it became routine for politicians and pundits to claim that the will of “the people” was paramount, even over parliamentary sovereignty. In the first Conservative Party conference following the referendum, Theresa May (2016b) commanded her government to “respect what the people told us on the 23rd of June – and take Britain out of the European Union”. When, in November, the Supreme Court of Justice ruled that parliament had to legislate on Brexit, the Daily Mail newspaper accused the judiciary of being “enemies of the people” (Phipps 2016). The justice secretary, Liz Truss, was noticeably slow to defend the judges. Meanwhile, Nigel Farage of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) warned that a 100,000 strong “people’s army” might march on the Supreme Court to ensure that the popular will was enacted (Payton 2016).

But who is morally worthy to count as “the people”? Pouring scorn on the European Parliament just days after the referendum, Farage (2016) argued that Brexit was the will of the “little people”.