Editor's note: Mike Cormack is a writer, editor and reviewer mostly focusing on China, where he lived 2007-2014. He edited Agenda Beijing and is a regular book reviewer for South China Morning Post. The article reflects the author's opinions, and not necessarily the views of CGTN.

Wars, someone once said, are like weddings: extravagant and unnecessary, but a great stimulus to a convention-bound society. Referenda, I would suggest, serve the same function in politics. Because they usually offer binary choices, they engender two sides of the debate, and thus two political factions – often crossing party lines, and thus breaking traditional political behavior.

The UK 1975 European Economic Community referendum lead to the splintering of the Labour Party and the subsequent founding of the Social Democratic Party in 1981. The 2014 Scottish independence referendum similarly accelerated the collapse of Labour in Scotland, whose politics it had dominated since the 1970s.

The plan for the 2016 EU referendum was for it to settle the question of UK's membership in the EU – so then Prime Minister David Cameron thought. Win the referendum and it would quieten the perennially Europhobic wing of his party. Perhaps so. But Cameron failed to consider, or realize, that with the Tories split on the subject, a referendum would not be a well-mannered, minor excursion with limited effect on the body politic.

Instead, Leavers like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove were emboldened to produce arguments of ever greater unreality. Famously, the "Brexit Bus" said the 350 million British pounds Britain sent to the EU each week would go the NHS instead – forgetting that the UK receives a considerable sum back each week, too. Similarly, the UK would hold "all the cards" in any negotiation with the EU, and "no-one was suggesting" the UK would have to leave the single market if it exited the EU. These were all demonstrably untrue, if you had the slightest knowledge of how the EU actually worked. But lies and untruths now seemed permissible in the mania of Brexit.

Not just lies, either. In trying to get Brexit through Parliament, the Conservative Party – under both Theresa May and Boris Johnson – has shown itself willing to torch every belief and tenet that made it one of the most successful political organizations in the developed world. Its pro-business philosophy? "Fuck business," Johnson famously said, when told of business opposition to a no-deal Brexit. Its role as the stoutest defender of the union of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland? Polls have shown English Conservatives willing to allow Scotland or Northern Ireland to leave the UK if it enables Brexit. Its cherished "law and order" mantle?

Destroyed by Brexiteers suggesting that ignoring parliament or its laws is valid, if it enables Brexit. Its philosophical tradition favoring strong institutions and careful, pragmatic rule? It has shown itself willing to lambast and undermine every other authority in the land, from the independent judiciary to the Church of England to the media in the pursuit of a radical policy opposed by half the nation.

The Conservative Party has thus torched its entire ethical and philosophical tradition in the pursuit of a chimera. It seems run now by political jihadists rather than politicians trying to represent the country. This was epitomized during the Supreme Court hearing against the prorogation of parliament. Never before could you have imagined a previous Conservative prime minister taking one of his or her successors to court.

But there was Sir John Major, amongst others, arguing that the five-week prorogation was anti-democratic and conducted on false pretenses. Major is no great fan of the EU (he gained opt-outs from the Single Currency and the Social Charter in the Maastricht Treaty of 1993), but he is firmly wedded to a traditional sense of rules-based parliamentary conduct – precisely the kind of thing the party now seems to oppose.

The bad faith argument offered for prorogation (that it was required for a Queen's Speech) has had broader constitutional implications. Suspending parliament required the consent of the Queen. Doing so on false pretenses meant that ministers had lied to her. At any other time, this would lead to the prime minister resigning.

The Supreme Court finding, in a unanimous decision, that the government had no justification for prorogation would also normally be cause for resignation. And yet Boris Johnson simply dismissed the notion, saying that he disagreed with the court's decision as though it was merely a political stance rather than a legal indictment of his policy. Here, too, the party seemed to be discarding any ethical constraints. Shamelessness is now a political tool.

British political culture often follows trends from the U.S. Tony Blair remodeled the Labour Party as "New Labour," in the style of Bill Clinton, who ran as a New Democrat in 1992. Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher were famously ideological bosom buddies. But it is truly alarming to see the advent of a Trumpian style in British politics, where facts are irrelevant, arguments are always made in bad faith, misdeeds are brushed aside, and opponents are labeled traitors. Yet here we are.

What political undoers like Johnson and Trump may not realize is that the rule of law is not the natural order. The rule of law is accomplished over time by conscious effort, by conventions and institutional checks and balances, by restraint and control. Without these factors, we return to the political jungle of mob rule and worse. If that happens, chaos and energies outwith anyone's control will follow.

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