David Pratt: This is a coup d'etat – and there may yet be violence

Then there really was blood on the streets, as the corpses piled up while shadowy players both inside and outside this small, impoverished Caribbean country orchestrated a takeover of power.

That’s the thing about coups, you see – they don’t just happen. In Haiti’s case there was no shortage of power-hungry, opportunistic and completely irresponsible individuals ready to exploit existing deficits in democracy and make things even worse.

In Haiti, too, where the military at that time had been disbanded for years, it wasn’t possible for soldiers to simply emerge from the bush or from across neighbouring borders; they had to have been organised, retrained and resupplied.

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And, of course, for something to be organised, someone has to organise it. In Haiti’s case, many still point the finger at the US for the coup that toppled Aristide. Whatever truth lay behind the circumstances back then in Haiti, as the old saying goes, “the die is cast”.

Come to think of it, weren’t those the words Julius Caesar is supposed to have uttered as he defied the State of Rome and crossed the Rubicon in 49 BC precipitating the Roman Civil War? What followed ultimately led to Caesar becoming dictator and the rise of the imperial era of Rome.

Julius Caesar was a guy who knew a thing of two about what makes a good coup d’etat and the process of replacing democracy with autocracy. Perhaps the ancient Roman leader has been on Boris Johnson’s mind of late, given that for the UK Prime Minister, it appears “the die is cast” for him when it comes to Brexit.

After all, Johnson did study Roman and Greek classics while at Oxford, and has shown a real penchant of late for overriding the democratic legitimacy of the country.

After all, it’s not often you hear the word “coup” bandied around in relation to UK politics.

But for that very fact alone this week Johnson will be infamously remembered even before his “do or die” October 31 deadline for Britain to leave the EU bears down.

Just as it often is for those behind coups, “Take back control” was one of the main slogans of the Brexit campaign three years ago.

Few at that time could have imagined how that might mean handing over absolute power to Boris Johnson. There was simply no mention back then that an unelected prime minister would determine the fate of Brexit, and thus the entire country, almost on his own.

It surely cannot be right that the UK now finds itself in the grip of what amounts to a constitutional coup at the hands of an unelected leader who is only in the post because of fewer than 100,000 or so registered members of the Tory Party.

Boris Johnson has been accused of carrying out a 'coup d'etat'

As the author George Eccles wryly observed on Twitter yesterday, “we now have a PM who nobody elected, meeting an aging monarch who nobody elected, jointly deciding to shut down everybody who was elected, in order to force a course of action nobody was invited to vote on”.

Lacking the legitimacy of the ballot box, or any public endorsement, Johnson now seeks to thwart the will of the House of Commons by simply shutting it down to try to stop elected MPs from doing the job they were elected to do. It’s a move worthy of the likes of Russian president Vladimir Putin.

The European Parliament’s Brexit chief, Guy Verhofstadt, is absolutely right when he says that “taking back control” and Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament amounts to being “sinister”.

In trying to suppress debate about the UK’s future, Johnson displays all the traits of those equally sinister political leaders I’ve watched create the conditions for coups across the world.

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You know how bad things have become in the UK when an old Tory-like former prime minister, John Major, calls Johnson out for selling out the party and breaching parliamentary principles.

“I cannot imagine, Mr Disraeli, Mr Gladstone, Mr Churchill or Mrs Thatcher even in their most difficult moments saying ‘let us put Parliament aside while I carry through this difficult policy that a part of my party disagrees with’,” Major said this week.

That Johnson’s latest move also smacks of Donald’s Trump’s playbook only adds to how malign the situation has become. There’s no doubt that Johnson is setting himself up to run on a “Make Britain Great Again” campaign along the lines of Trump’s divisive and chauvinist platform.

As Barbara Wesel, the senior European correspondent at Germany’s Deutsche Welle broadcaster, said this week, what Johnson has created is havoc almost on a par with that wreaked by Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. “These new ravagers are only interested in power for themselves, and their financiers among the ranks of the super-rich. To them, democratic procedures and institutional controls are simply tiresome accessories,” observed Wesel in a no-holds-barred article online.

In effect, Johnson is just the latest addition to those political leaders at the heart of the new world disorder currently gripping some Western-style democracies.

Not all coups d’etat are like those I witnessed in Haiti years ago. Not all result in blood or tanks on the streets, but still remain a cause for concern and threaten the wellbeing of many. As Vanessa Baird, co-editor of New Internationalist magazine, noted this week, it’s the things going on under the surface, that are not being addressed, that we really have to worry about.

“The foreign interference from East and West, the dark money behind election campaigns, the lobbyists, the think-tanks, the special interest groups,” it’s these that are also the deepest threat to our democracy, insisted Baird.

Let’s make no mistake about it – Johnson’s coup is part of that threat. It might be a bloodless coup so far, but perhaps most worrying of all is that it might not stay that way on the streets of the UK for long.