The Supreme Court's ruling that Johnson's "prorogation" (i.e. suspension) of Parliament until October 14th was illegal was predictable.
His claim that this suspension had nothing to do with protecting his Brexit policy, was just not credible. In fact, everyone knew that this was another of his lies. The only question mark that remained, was whether he should be allowed to get away with this new lie or not.
In the end, he will not be allowed to get away with it - or, at least, not for the time being. But the eleven Supreme Court judges who made this ruling did not do it because of the implications of Johnson's reckless policies. They did not object to the way these policies will undermine the jobs and standards of living of the working class.
No, this ruling was merely the judges' response to the way in which Johnson and his Tory sidekicks in government boasted that, at some point, they might choose to break the law, if this could serve their political agenda. The judges responded with a warning to these politicians that they cannot have their cake and eat it. With only a mild slap on the wrist (after all, Johnson won't even get fined for having broken the law), they were reminded that they cannot both rely on the law and the courts to enforce their social and political order while, at the same time, acting as if they were, themselves, above the law and the courts.
Another "democratic" fudge
The Supreme Court ruling was certainly not a "conspiracy of the elite against the will of the people", as Johnson’s fan club of bigots now claims. But nor should it be hailed as a "victory for democracy", as so many commentators - and most of Johnson's opponents - now do.
The ruling may have foiled Johnson's bid to get rid of any parliamentary opposition to his Brexit plans. But what do we, workers, really gain from the restoration of Parliament to its normal function?
Has Parliament ever protected us from the politicians' reckless follies or from the greed of their masters in the City? Of course not!
How can we ever forget that we owe the emergence of Brexit as an issue in the 2016 referendum, to the fears of Tory MPs who were terrified of losing their seats to UKIP and other far-right rivals? Or that we owe the subsequent three years of Brexit pantomime and chaos, to the bitter in-fighting and overbidding between rival factions taking place among Tory MPs? In fact, how can we ever forget that it is to this parliament that we owe the rise of Johnson himself, the liar in chief, to the top of the political institutions?
No, there is nothing intrinsically "democratic" in the parliamentary institutions. Or, rather, they are only "democratic" for MPs themselves - and, even then, only within the limits of their own version of the law of the jungle, as anyone watching full-scale Commons' debates, like Prime Minister’s Questions on TV can witness.
For workers' control over society!
So, no, the working class cannot see this Supreme Court ruling as a "victory for democracy".
But nor can we see the implementation of Brexit, together with the way it divides our ranks and isolates our class from the rest of the world, as a way to fulfil the "will of the people". This was definitely not the will expressed by the 63% of the electorate who did not vote Leave in 2016. But neither did most of the 37% who voted Leave at the time, ever imagine that Brexit would come at such a high cost.
And yet, which party or MP even dares to state openly that this referendum was a fake, because it offered no real choice and gave voters no idea of what was really at stake; that they were lied to from beginning to end; that, at the time, there was no majority among the electorate as a whole for either of the two options; and that, after three years of Brexit chaos, using the 2016 votes as a measure of anything is just a fraud.
But, of course, this is in keeping with the way the system works. Presenting the ballot box as a way for workers to choose our representatives is the capitalists' tried and tested method of concealing reality - the fact that, in addition to owning the economy, it also controls the state and political institutions, whose top civil servants and generals come from its own ranks. The so-called "democratic" political institutions are only there as a buffer, to hide the dictatorship of big capital.
There is only one way out of this increasingly gigantic capitalist mess, of which Brexit is just one nasty facet. It requires that this hidden dictatorship is ended. And that the working class, which produces all wealth, takes over control of this wealth and decides how it is used across the whole of society.