There's a famous aphorism in the Hunzi, which is a third century BC philosophical tract, which is the king is a boat.

The people are the water. The water can hold up the boat or it can sink the boat.

The people can sink the king.

So that's a statement about participation.

And now the good fight with Yasha Monk.

For the last episode I did the foolhardy thing of talking about

Italian politics a few days before everything inevitably changed.

So now I'll do the foolhardy thing of talking about

British politics before everything inevitably changes. But forget about the

minutia of the fights going on at the moment important for

there. I think what's interesting from the perspective of populism and the fight

against it is to step back a little bit and understand the basic political clash that's going on at the moment as one that's

representative of what populist due to political systems everywhere. It is a clash between parliamentary sovereignty, between

religionacy of representative democratic institutions,

and popular sovereignty.

The importance of the will of the people as interpreted by its supposed spokesman.

So Britain for a very long time has had the doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty, the idea that it is

parliament, the elected representatives of the people who interpret what people want and

try and come up with the best solutions and pass the laws.

Because the referendum in 2016 created two options, one of which gave a clear mandate for what would happen next,

namely to remain in the European Union, and another to leave, which didn't create a very clear mandate,

because there's all kinds of ways of leaving the European Union

...