People -v- Parliament: Round 3

With parliament prorogued today for the rest of the week, at least remain MPs will be unable for a few days to keep digging the hole they're in. Parliament is today held in greater contempt than at any point in my life. The one clear finding of today's Comres poll for the Telegraph is that the nation overwhelmingly blames parliament for the Brexit mess - Boris gets away relatively unscathed;

The public have quite accurately identified their enemies - and any election in the next month or two will irrevocably be coloured by the contest between people and parliament. I can tell you in advance that parliament will lose.

The privileged elite, having captured all the institutions of the State, naively assumed that they could do away with the will of the people, could dispense with democracy. MPs became deluded to the point of imagining that they were important as individuals, that their personal opinions on this matter were more important than the people to whom they had lied in 2017 to win their seats.

All they have done is to ensure that constitutional reform is now inevitable. Everything starts with the elector. Universal suffrage, the secret ballot and the right to associate and form and subscribe to political parties are fundamental to the security of every single citizen in our isles - leavers, remainers and those who don't care. If the elite try to subvert our system of representative democracy, we will constrain our representatives. If the Speaker abuses the privileges of the Chair, we will constrain the powers of the Speaker. If the Supreme Court starts to play politics, we will make its composition a political matter. Power in this nation is delivered via the ballot box, and votes are won not by threat, violence, closing the streets or silly stunts but by reason and argument, by establishing and maintaining a narrative that chimes with the lives and experiences of the electors. People -v- Parliament has lodged in the people's mind and cannot now easily be dislodged.

If you haven't yet seen it, I commend the 27 minute video in the post below. Just ordinary electors, real people, you and me, talking calmly to the camera. The elite will no doubt find it astonishing that we common folk value our democracy so highly.  

Boris fighting for a democratic Britain

The illiberals and anti-democrats have had it their way for so long that they still can't accept that the will of the people, the democratic mandate, can override their wealth, power and privilege. Beaten at the ballot box, they have resorted to the millionaire's cudgel of lawfare; ejected from the leadership and membership of the Conservative party they continue to use power, influence and media to frustrate the will of the British people. A few eminent citizens are so far in the pockets of the Brussels mafia - Blair, Major and their dags - that they directly betray the interests of their own country for their corrupt ideology, their own interest. Their collaboration with those who wish us ill befouls our nation and stains our public institutions.

Macron is an énarque, isolated and shielded from the people by a wall of bureaucracy. The thick windows of the Élysée keep the enraged cries of the people, the fumes of the tear gas and the burning streets from his Lillipution nostrils, a triple line of balaclavered black-clad armed riot police keeps the people from the gates of his palace. No wonder he believes Blair and Grieve more than he does Boris - and they are promising him that they will sabotage democracy from inside the country whilst he acts to damage the UK from without. They are urging him to hold out against a deal, to pin Britain against the ropes. And they are wrong.

We are leaving. One way or another, we are leaving. We will not allow the dismemberment of the Union, not permit the EU to remain as Britain's overlord, not tolerate subjugation as a Satrap state under the heel of the unelected Brussels cabal. M. Macron had better start to believe Boris rather than Blair and the other weasels.

This week the Prime Minister embarks on a series of meetings to tell them this face-to-face. He is bolstered by a whole series of polls that show that his party has a commanding lead, that voters are turning against the illiberals in droves, that two-thirds of voters want Brexit done, now. The sabotage-delays engendered by the establishment elite, the ruling privileged class, are about as popular as a cup of cold sick with voters.

We are Leaving.

French police, exhausted from months of street combat with the Gilets Jaunes, are invited to change sides

Addendum
========
This from Spiked - calm, rational and reasonable. Just people who believe in a Fair Go. I commend. 

The UK - Pour encourager les autres?

One sometimes starts to wonder whether the entire mess, blunder and deep divisions of the past three years have not been contrived for the benefit of the EU, as a lesson and warning to the remaining 27 of what will happen to them should they dare to challenge the rule of the EU. Such musing is not discouraged today by Der Spiegel, normally the most illiberal and anti-Brexit of organs -

The EU Must Soften Its Approach

As such, the EU should take a step back -- it's in its own interest -- to meet the British at the halfway point. The EU no longer needs to fear that Brexit will find imitators if Brussels shows itself to be too yielding. The picture Britain has painted over the past three years -- the crises in government and parliament and the threat of the United Kingdom disintegrating -- should have a sufficiently deterrent effect. After more than two years of negotiations and considerable struggle, Brexit has become inevitable. It would be good for the process to finally be completed. Separating in a positive manner is the prerequisite for a reasonable relationship in the future.

Apart from a tacit admission that May's ineffective bodgers had previously been beaten into a wholly unequal deal by Brussels, it is also a plea for Germany not to be burdened with a hostile and belligerent Britain when she has just herself fallen into the most difficult of recessions.

My own view is that we will emerge stronger, renewed and reformed from the Brexit debacle - with some much-needed constitutional cleansing once we have a decent working majority in Commons and Lords, some democratic house-cleaning and electoral repairs. One reform must be to limit lawfare - the ability of the very wealthy to undermine democracy through the courts - and to restate the limits on the power of the courts. We are not the EU, and have no wish to surrender our democratic freedom to the corrupt rule of lawyers and the very rich. 

The Democracy Deniers, puce-faced and spittle-flecked with rage

The anti-democrats in Brussels (including their dag in Dublin Castle) acted exactly as one expected yesterday. One of about fifty unelected EU 'vice presidents' had the front to appear on Iain Dale's show and condemn the plan as unworkable although it quickly became clear she hadn't seen the detailed plan and hadn't even read the seven page heads-of-terms released to the press and public. Verhofstadt had seen the precis document and waved it about on his mobile phone before ranting that the Empire would never let go of the United Kingdom. Varadkar was the comic turn, saving his petulant flouncing until mid-afternoon with a declaration that the people of the UK had changed their minds and Brexit should be cancelled (in fact polls give a solid 65% who think that whatever the rights or wrongs of Brexit, we should respect the vote and leave).

It was, in short, as dispiriting a display of jejune tantrums as one would expect from the crooked cabal in the Berlaymont. What it wasn't was any indication that any of them possess a scruple of statesmanship. They were like excited children. And so in the Commons.

Corbyn, now a very elderly man who with his equally elderly comrade McDonnell dreams of Marxist power before he dies, was provoked into a spittle-flecked fury of invective by the calm reasonableness of the Prime Minister's statement. I feared his heart was about to go at any second - an event that would provoke a high-fatality crush on the opposition front bench as half the Labour Party would lunge to take his place at the dispatch box, his twitching corpse kicked beneath the bench. He had earlier threatened the most severe measures against the score or more of Labour MPs who were favourably impressed by the Prime Minister's proposals enough to vote for them.

All in all, yesterday brought out into clear view the demented and almost incoherent anger of the democracy-deniers, the illiberals and the anti-democrats. Such people are not only enemies of Brexit but enemies of democracy - a threat to us all, leavers or remainers. If they cannot accept the most fundamental way in which democracy works, there is no place for any of them in public life.

Not yet triumph, but the tide has turned and the wind has backed

The government's double whammy yesterday of the Prime Minister's conference speech and the release of his final offer to the EU has changed the whole feel of Brexit. Overnight the front foot and the moral advantage have passed to the United Kingdom. No more are we a vacillating, wobbly amateur bunch of bricoleurs with the letters falling-off the wall behind us. Inept, confused and mistaken advisors such as Nick Timothy and his ilk have been cleared out of Downing Street and the PM for once has a professional team behind him. What a difference a year makes.

The cabal in the Berlaymont would be mad not to accept Britain's offer.

I wrote on Tuesday that I doubted Boris could get the three green ticks he needed to get a deal through. Today it looks as though two of those ticks are tentatively there. The Telegraph reports that the ERG, the Tory turncoats and about 25 Labour rebels could vote for the deal in the Commons. Whatever Farage is saying isn't being heard by the media. Germany is in recession and the Eurozone faces a series of economic bodyblows that will be exacerbated by a clean Brexit; they will grasp at the offer. That just leaves Brussels.

I've always pushed strongly for a clean Brexit, and like many have problems with some of the other baggage apart from the backstop in the draft Treaty. So why do I find myself this morning ready to shrug my shoulders and support Boris if he gets agreement for this deal? I'm not sure. But there it is.

Boris has effectively isolated the EU zealots in Brussels and Varadkar's fatuous posturing. Britain's mature, sensible offer and our reasonableness and statecraft are now on view to the world, released in those documents. The EU's every petulant instinct must be to reject the UK's offer - but do they dare?

Kit cars - now outlawed in much of the EU - will be saved for the UK

The world turned upside down

An empty-nester in Bavaria, the acquaintance of a friend, sold the large house in which she had brought up her kids and undergone a divorce but had no choice but to commit herself to another large mortgage on a new property. Financial downsizing was not an option. "Why?" I demanded. Because. The Germans are incurable savers, and without harsh government measures to ensure they keep borrowing and spending the economy would be hit. So the German tax system effectively prevents homes being used as pension pots.

In a world in which negative interest rates are normal, in which central banks are printing monopoly money used only to inflate the asset values of the wealthy in a huge shimmering vulnerable bubble and lenders are drowning in cash to lend (I must check whether personal lease plans have been extended to powerboats and ride-on mowers ... there is no better way of parting a man from his wealth than ownership of a prestige planing vessel kept in a marina; and no, my old displacement fishing boats lived on a half-tide mud berth up an open creek). The Guardian is at least honest about Europe's problem -

Yet as one economist perceptively put it, the problem for the eurozone is that “weak credit growth is driven by the lack of demand from creditworthy borrowers rather than the supply cost of finance”. This can be solved in part by governments stepping up to boost demand in the eurozone.

That's it; the right people don't want to borrow. Lenders are desperate to lend. I wonder if we can look back to some point in history, say the oughties, to see what happened before ....

Have PLPs been extended to adult toys?

The final countdown

There is really nothing useful to be done for the next day or two. Nothing to analyse, nothing upon which to opine. We are waiting for Boris.

The Prime Ministers' proposals, whatever they are, face three hurdles. The first is the Irish and the EU, still not ready to relinquish the opportunity to subject the UK to a punishment beating. Second are Brexiteers - the ERG within our own party and TBP without - who need to see much of the other dangerous stuff in the draft Robbins-Selmayr Treaty go. And finally is the Remain Alliance, now fully out in the open in declaring that they don't give a fig for democracy and will use their final days in parliament, before we voters evict them, to do everything they can to block Brexit.

My own feeling is that there are no proposals on earth that would allow a deal to get a green tick from all three.

One must therefore suppose that the PM's proposals are for the world outside Europe and for posterity. In international statecraft terms, leaving without a deal is akin to the British ambassador waving his todger about and pissing from the embassy balcony. So if it happens, apportioning the blame for it is critical. Submitting a perfectly reasonable, workable plan to the EU to have it rejected with their usual amateur jejune petulance puts the blame on Brussels.

Likewise it sucks the wind from the sails of any remaining shred of pretence from the bent Speaker, Bercow, and his corrupt parliamentary cabal that they are genuinely concerned about no deal.

And Boris' refusal to countenance any deal with TBP says to me that he is very confident that we will be out in 30 days - deal or no deal. If he pulls it off and keeps his job, it will be the greatest political triumph since MT re-took the Falklands. We have a month to wait and see.     

A Fair Go

There is somewhere in the anglophone world ingrained, sometimes deeply, sometimes more superficially, a peculiar sense of fairness. The post title is of course Australian vernacular - a phrase that even finds a place in the citizenship handbook, defined as "what someone achieves in life should be a result of their hard work and talents, rather than their wealth or background". It's a pretty good example of how the English language can take several meanings; 'A Fair Go' means equality of opportunity, not equality of outcomes. Outcomes should be dependent neither on inherited privilege nor on protected status.

This idea of fairness  is redefining our political landscape. It's powerful. Douglas Murray points out in the Telegraph that even the BBC, normally impervious to accusations of unfairness, has had to admonish two presenters, Emily Maitlis and Naga Munchetty, for being so blatantly unfair on-air that it was an embarrassment to the broadcasting behemoth. Murray writes

The idea of impartiality in news has always been something of a misnomer. The choice of which story to cover owes something to the preconceived ideas of whoever makes that decision. What we are now seeing is the line between commentary and reporting becoming increasingly blurred.

As partiality in its different forms becomes ever more flagrant, the idea that broadcasters are at least making an honest attempt at being unbiased is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. All this raises the prospect of British media following the example of that in the US, where nobody expects anything but partisan coverage.

The point about the BBC is that everyone has to pay for it; one can choose whether or not to buy the Sun or the Mirror, but not the BBC. As I have written previously, if the BBC has passed the point of balance between Leave and Remain, it has forfeited the right to the Charter - due for renewal in 2027.

The Speaker, too, has failed to chair a chamber in a way that embodies fairness. His petulant holiday tantrum in which he promised to the media to block the government, his dodgy egoistic partial judgements from the chair, his bullying and bias all mean he has lost utterly the respect of the nation.

The current turmoil is a battle on many levels - but most fundamentally it is a battle for fairness, between a crude alliance between those with inherited privilege and those with protected status on the one hand, and the mass of the people on the other. The former have, in the words of Betz and Smith, captured the State;

With the rise of the new political classes, a different political dynamic is emerging. Drawn from similar backgrounds (often middle-class, university educated, with little prior career experience outside politics itself), members of parliament increasingly sound alike, think alike and act alike. The evolution of a monochrome political establishment is producing a radical disconnect, which the Brexit denouement is throwing into stark relief. What we appear to be witnessing is the corrupt mutation of the notion of the representation of the people in parliament, into the substitution of the will of the people by the interests of the political class. We are entering the realms, no less, of state capture. What happens when sectional interests capture the political institutions of the state? This is a question we will get to, but first it is worth reiterating that in many senses this has been a long time coming, and to emphasise, in the British case has little or nothing intrinsically to do with Brexit.

On this level, what the dominant class are given to sneering at as 'populism' is actually a protest from a vast mass of people, who thought they were living in a democracy, that the entire system had become unfair - advantaging the political elite and their supporters at the expense of the mass of the people.

In that light, watching hereditary Labour millionaires such as the younger Kinnocks, Straws, Benns, Sawars, Soames and Millibands pontificating about anything at all 'for the many not the few' becomes farcical. Watching Owen Jones working himself up into a mouth-frothing fury in defence of globalist corporations and gay-murdering factions is free entertainment and listening to anything said at all by Shami Chakrabarti on people misusing their power and privilege is pure comedy. Even Labour MPs who took advantage of the Brighton conference to take their kids out of the dorms for a weekend exeat from their £30,000 a year public schools ('but keep clear of the press when you're out ..') whilst promising to abolish such schools on the platform provided exemplars of a depth of hypocrisy rarely seen in public politics. A Fair Go is not for them. For any of them.

Boris - The People's Champion

Every citizen in the land who supports democracy over disempowerment, who supports the rule of law but not rule by lawyers, will have cheered the people's Prime Minister for his bravura performance in the Commons yesterday. Boris is the people's champion, and he rode to the lists fueled by righteous indignation and with millions upon millions of electors behind him in demanding the cowering, frightened illiberals on the benches opposite go to the people.

Of course they don't want to go. Most of them will lose their jobs. That's why they're trying to force a surrender to the EU - yes, let's use that word; they ARE collaborators and Quislings as complicit as Petain, Laval and Darlan in selling their nation in order to cram their mouths with Euro gold. Surrender is right.

Never before in the history of this nation have a tiny, unrepresentative cabal of saboteurs of democracy, who lied to their electors in 2017, denied the ballot box to our forty-five million voters. Never before have these wreckers, these selfish, entitled arses, this political elite, felt so emboldened in denying democracy to the masses of the British people. 

They're Frit, scared of the ballot box, frightened of the verdict of the voters, afraid of democracy itself. Of course they love the EU - whose anti-democratic, corrupt and crooked regime requires no elections at all to win and hoard power - oh how the opponents of democracy in our own Parliament must long for that!

But even a bent Speaker, a dishonest BBC and MSM in thrall to the enemies of democracy cannot hide the anger starting to build in the country, from a proud nation being denied access to the ballot box in order that we can sort out the mess this Quisling political class have created. WE DEMAND AN ELECTION. Hear us.

When even the Daily Remain reports polling that suggests that 64% of those who voted Labour in 2017 want an election, you know the time is nigh.

GENERAL ELECTION NOW

It's time to clear the shit from this stable.

Yes, let the people decide. I suspect the HoL SC  may just have won an electoral landslide for the Brexit parties. It's People vs Parliament - and they may delay it, but we will win.

I must apologise for not penning a longer post. We're waiting for the government to speak, to give leadership, direction and reassurance to the nation. No one knows what happens next. The elite may conspire to postpone an election even further, the government may pull a rabbit out of the hat.

However, yesterday's ruling has changed our democracy for ever. An open conflict between the people and the political establishment may be fought on the battlefield of Brexit but we're fighting for power - they to retain the State they've captured by stealth, we to regain the democracy that is our birthright. This conflict will not end until one side is defeated and the other victorious.

And we demand an election.

& H/T Mark for this -

Dumbstruck

I'm dumbstruck. Just dumbstruck.

Well, we live in a democracy ruled by law and the judgement was delivered by our own highest court. It was unanimous. Therefore Boris screwed up.

I think I may have just seen the death of the Conservative Party - I can't imagine us even getting the 9% we sunk to in the EP elections. I can also understand if the entire Conservative vote goes to TBP in the inevitable GE.

However, before this is all final, we must wait and see what the Prime Minister has to say.

But let's be clear what the judgement was about - it was about the legality of the government's action. The Brexit vote, and the need for us to leave the EU still stands.

And By God when we've got a majority in both houses, there will be a tsunami of legislation to come to ensure that this can never happen again..

Addendum
========
I've just put my finger on the moment in the past I felt exactly like this - it was the announcement that HMS Sheffield had been sunk.

All that did was to fill us with a terrible resolve that we must win.

Intermission II

Whilst we wait for the judgement, I've been re-acquainting myself with Somerville and Ross' The Irish RM. The problem that Brussels completely fails to understand in relation to any Brexit border is the character of the Irish themselves. For many years, before the pre-2008 development boom destroyed much of what was valuable, I made an annual early Summer pilgrimage to a cottage near Oughterard on the shores of Loch Corrib for the trout fishing. The fish went into feeding frenzy during the mayfly season, and the technique was to 'dap' a live fly on a thin floating line. Local kids sold boxes of live flies to fishermen, and the sport was so easy that even an Englishman could not fail to land a couple of 3lb fish before the 'Boat' opened. So here (with apols to Messrs Somerville and Ross) we have ... The Irish MEP

A Horse! A Horse!
In which Flurry dyes a hunter and smuggles it across the border as a 'ringer' for the favourite in the point-to-point, evading EC78/245 'Movement of equine livestock (marking, tagging and chipping) cross-border trade Directive'

The Dispensary Doctor
When Finn is caught with a poached salmon by the Gardai he protests that as the fish had swum from Northern Ireland it was an alien species that had violated EU phytosanitary controls by failing to claim asylum status at the border. Whilst the case was referred to the authorities in Brussels the fish was eaten by Dr O'Rourke, to whom it had been passed for retention as evidence by the Gardai.

Oweneen the Sprat
A car from the north has an accident near Galway - but is not fitted with Winter tyres in accordance with Directive EC 86/294. It damages a tractor being used by Oweneen the Sprat but he refuses to exchange insurance details as the land he was working was being claimed as set-aside under the CAP. Instead he demands that Sergeant O'Connor lock the motorists up until they pay in cash - but he is wary of their Article 8 Human Rights

The Muse in Skebawn

zzzz OK that's enough whimsy

Loch Corrib

Intermission ..

With great sympathy for the staff and customers of Thomas Cook this morning, I fear this is as much a casualty of the High Street squeeze and the decline of the Catalogue Culture as of the obvious overcapacity in the budget flight and travel markets. The firm's competitors will now fight like jackals over landing slots, but I wouldn't put much interest in those High Street travel shops.

Whilst we await the main news event of the day (if it comes) I leave you with a photo of a charming young girl no doubt forced by peer and parental pressure into a cult youth group, the BDM or League of German Girls back in the 1930s.

Update 14.40
==========
The Supreme Court ruling is due at 10.30 tomorrow. I'll post following.

BRACE BRACE BRACE

Issued by Conservative Press Office at 08.30 today, Sunday

"In the difficult days ahead I hope all MPs recognise that we are servants of the people, they have spoken, and we must keep faith with their democratic verdict"

Ten lessons for young climate activists

1. More layers
Don't keep turning the thermostat up when wearing just a tee shirt. We're saving the planet at that 18° setting. Put on more layers.

2. Plastics
Look for well-made clothes fashioned from linen, wool, cotton or even hemp. The other stuff - stretchy, spangly, fleecy, non-crease - is made from plastics or oil-derived synthetics. Don't keep buying new cheap throw-way stuff from Asos and suchlike - you're either serious about the planet or about Instagram. And learn to darn your socks and sew buttons - if your grandfather can do it so can you

3. Lights
When you leave a room, turn the light off. When you leave a room unoccupied for any length of time, turn the radiator off or down to the lowest setting. Don't leave stuff on 'standby'. Dont leave chargers on all the time.

4. Shoes
Cheap glued Chinese and Asian shoes and trainers made from plastics, synthetic rubbers and oil-derived fabrics that last only a few months are killing the planet and choking landfill. Invest in well-made long-lasting footwear from UK makers - leather for preference.

5. Coffee
We know you don't like Starbucks any more, but Costa and the fake-brand 'artisan' chains owned by big-name global corporates are just as bad. Make your coffee at home, take a thermos and donate £9 a day to a climate change charity instead

6. Reuse and recycle
This doesn't mean just chucking stuff into the right bin but not chucking stuff away at all. Why does everything have to be new? What's wrong with your old phone that we need to poison the world with rare-earth cyanides and enslave children in Asian factories just so you can have a new one every year?

7. Walk and take the bus
Your parents are not free Uber. Maybe if you didn't keep treating them like it they wouldn't need that huge SUV in the drive. Walk. Take the bus. Lose a few pounds.

8. Help with the vegetable patch
A little help tilling and weeding the veg patch wouldn't come amiss. You're missing just how much growing our own French beans for the freezer saves the planet. And ditch avocados. Where do you imagine they come from? Somerset? Learn to love courgettes.

9. Forget Festivals
Don't even think about Glastonbury. It's not the fact that you throw away 80,000 plastic tents each year and create 5,000 tonnes of unrecyclable landfill waste but your travel carbon costs are killing the planet - fan travel costs make up 80% - 90% and performer travel costs the balance. And we're talking 10,000 tonnes of CO2 in total for Glasto.

10. Copy your grandparents
 Remember, your grandparents were saving the planet long before you were born. Brewing their own beer, making and mending their own clothes, keeping hens, growing food, making jam and cycling and trips in their old 2CV. You may be surprised that they regard you as an insufferable self-absorbed eco-lout trashing finite resources who talks the talk but doesn't walk the walk. 

Avocados are not grown here

Schrödinger's Weekend

The HoL Supreme Court will keep us on tenterhooks until Monday (I think) for the prorogation ruling so enjoy the next three days. I always regarded this time, between the conclusion of submissions and the finding of the adjudicator in construction disputes, as a Schrödinger's Holiday; you don't know whether you've won or lost, so both states exist, you can do nothing more, there are no more deadlines, no more lengthy case conferences, so you might as well chill and do some leisure.

It seems Dave's gob has ended any hopes that Sam Cam may have nurtured at ever becoming Lady Cameron. Silly chump. However, Fraser Nelson  in the Telegraph reckons that Dave's Brussels experiences should have made him a Leaver anyway -

Once inside its inner circle, he was exposed to the horrors. The directives, the stitch-ups, the knives always out for the City of London. He found Silvio Berlusconi advising a table of EU leaders to take a mistress in Brussels, because it was the only way to survive the late-night summits. The purpose of these meetings, he discovered, was to grind everyone into submission. Including, eventually, him.

He found the EU to be "peacenik" on security, unable to respond to threats on its doorstep. He vetoed one of the eurozone bailout packages that threatened to suck in Britain, only to see the rules changed so the UK veto would not count. When the UK tried to go its own way, it "wasn’t simply a disagreement with the others, it was a heresy against the scripture".

We were early here in blogging about the deep need for democratic housekeeping in the UK and certainly over the months and years posts about reform and renewal, legal and electoral systems generate deeply felt and high quality participation. I'm wondering whether constitutional reform could be another Europe - let me explain.

Before the referendum, the political wisdom was that no-cared about the EU except a small and vocal group of fanatics. June 2016 brought a Damascene revelation - suddenly the entire nation was galvanised into passionate interest. Who knew? Well, today the political wisdom is that an election can be fought on the old ground of education, law and order, the NHS. To suggest that local government or constitutional reform might be a manifesto issue seems as absurd as suggesting in 2010 that the nation would polarise over the EU.

Democratic reform and renewal

This follows on from the previous post. Today we have the prospect of the cerebrally inadequate John Major making an appearance in court - though not speaking - for his 12.10 to 12.30 slot. One hopes Lord Garnier, who represents this most mediocre of intellects, has made some substance of his simple-minded bigotry or we will be bored to tears.

European nations as we know them are, constitutionally, mostly infants. As I have written before, by the end of the 14th century in England (and I mean England and not the UK) serfdom had almost practically ceased to exist, the wage labourer having emerged from the Black Death. By the end of the 16th we had an independent and prosperous middle class and were developing systems of law and democracy from which we would emerge through the turmoil of the 17th to the era termed by historians 'early modern'. In contrast, serfdom and feudalism survived in Europe until the mid-19th century, and Europe's birth-pangs took a century or more of war and chaos before democracy (of a sort) emerged. Yes, they have written constitutions - but in English terms, are barely out of nappies;

Date of Constitution
Sweden	1974
Denmark	1953
France	1958
Germany	1949
Italy	1947
Spain	1978
Portugal	1976

For most of Europe, the Maastrict and Lisbon treaties - in effect the EU constitution - are just a natural progression from what are already new systems of governance.

Not so for the UK, though as commenters made clear yesterday, Brexit has exposed major faults in our system which now needs some fixing. The Lords and the Speaker are the most obvious. Allister Heath in the Telegraph does a decent job this morning of setting out the Heads of Terms -

.... the next government will have to legislate to prevent MPs from ever “seizing control” again and then repeal the Fixed-term Parliaments Act. The power to conduct international treaty negotiations must be left solely to the executive; at the same time, the ability to prorogue needs to be codified, alongside much else.

The governance of the Commons must change radically, with the Speaker bound by clear rules. Any MP who wants to change party should be forced to call a by-election.* The House of Lords will have to be scrapped or, preferably, comprehensively reformed, with a debate about who should belong to it and what proportion should be elected and how. An English Parliament is long overdue, with tax and spend genuinely devolved to a properly federalised United Kingdom.

The civil service is in desperate need of an overhaul: ministers should become CEOs, with staff working directly for them. In a world where special advisers have become so important, we ought to discuss whether more ministers should be directly appointed, or belong to the upper rather than lower chamber.

The next government must take to heart Lord Sumption’s Reith Lecture, perhaps the best political analysis of the year, and row back on the "rights culture". There has been too much mission creep, and too many decisions have been taken by the courts, rather than left to democratically elected politicians. This doesn’t mean that we mustn’t continue to protect rights: on the contrary, I would argue that we need a robust British Bill of Rights to replace our membership of the ECHR.

Add a general power of recall with a threshold high enough to prevent vexatious abuse and an overhaul of local government and electoral health measures and there you have a legislative agenda for the greatest reforming Parliament for over 150 years.

I hope and believe we can do all this without a written constitution. Just as statute law sits happily alongside common law and precedent, we can achieve change without throwing out the baby with the bathwater. As Blair found to his frustration and chagrin, you cannot abolish the Lord Chancellor.

It's really no longer just about Brexit. It's about re-forging our nation for the benefit of future generations, a legacy of love. 

*Allister is thoroughly wrong about this particular point; MPs represent their constituents, not their parties. It's the constituents who should have the right to force a by-election, not the judges. A power of recall would cover this.  

In praise of our non-constitution

The interest with which the HoL Supreme Court has captured an unimagined video audience yesterday strained the government's servers. One could actually detect additional servers kicking in like generators on the national grid coming online, and the government's very recent upgrades of IT capacity to meet the heavy demands generated by the 'we're Leaving' ad campaign look now like a sound investment made in good time. The EU nomenklature and apparatchiks tuning into Middlesex Guildhall, used to the rehearsed and pre-determined theatrics of their own political court must have been deeply confused. They must have thought our eleven law lords were doing a brilliant job of pretending not to know the outcome of the case - surely they could never imagine, based on their own experience, that in the UK cases are not actually decided before they come to court? Let's hope for more bundle-fun today - the joy of an entire bench of QCs each charging Mrs Miller £2k an hour for losing their files in public is a pleasure not to be missed.

Back to Lord Sumption's Reith lectures and this:-

For quite a few years now, these calls have taken the form of proposals for a written constitution. I have been concerned in these lectures with our persistent habit of looking for legal solutions to what are really political problems. Calls for a written constitution mark the extreme point of that tendency. Theoretically, we could have a written constitution without expanding the constitutional role of the judiciary. The constitution of the French fifth republic, in its original form of 1958, came pretty close to that, but, in practise, every scheme of constitutional reform suggested for Britain in recent years has sought to limit the powers of Parliament and government and to increase those of judges.

This is not an accident. A written constitution is, by definition, a supreme source of law. It prevails over Parliamentary legislation. Any supreme law which sets out to regulate relations between the citizen and the state must necessarily put some rights beyond the reach of the elected legislature. But the power which the legislature loses under such schemes does not simply disappear, it passes to judges. Judges recognise, interpret and sometimes create constitutional rights. Judges decide when these rights may be trumped by other interests.

And it really does come down to how we want our democracy to operate - with, as David Starkey explained, the People sovereign or the People ruled by a caste of lawyers, a political class alien to the masses, a political class that holds us in contempt? The question hardly needs asking.

Wellington, after Waterloo, compared his own command of the armies to a bridle made of rope - that of the French to a bridle made of stitched leather. Theirs may look more elegant, more perfectly designed but it was vulnerable. Wellington said that if his bridle broke, he simply knotted it back together and carried on. If the French leather bridle came apart, it was finished and could not be rescued. And at the Duke's hands the French bridle frequently came apart. Our non-constitution is similarly - to use the jargon of the management consultant - agile. Sumption again;

If our existing constitution was intolerable, we might have to put up with the disruption and instability involved in jettisoning it. But, in fact, it has brought us real advantages. Because it remains essentially a political and not a legal constitution, it is capable of significant incremental development without any formal process of amendment. This has enabled the British state to adapt to major changes in our national life which would have overwhelmed much more formal arrangements, the onset of industrialisation and mass democracy, the existential crises of two world wars, the creation and then loss of a worldwide empire, the rise of powerful nationalisms in Ireland, Scotland and Wales.

All of this has been accommodated politically without changing the basic constitutional framework. Take devolution, not just because we are gathered here in the capital of a politically reborn Wales, but because it is probably the outstanding modern example of the advantages of constitutional flexibility. Devolution has radically altered the internal workings of the United Kingdom, but it was achieved politically by ordinary legislation after a general election in which it was part of the successful party's manifesto.

This Supreme Court case is seminal not just for the issue of the Brexit prorogation before their Lordships. Its outcome will also be a landmark in our constitutional history; either the affirmation of our unique democratic advantages, or the start of a descent into slavery under the heel of the political class and an end to the longevity and stability of our system of governance. 

Bettel nuts

The images cannot be unremembered; a hysterical hairy little man in a cheap suit, looking more like Ricky Gervaise than the Prime Minister of a European nation (albeit a very small one) ranting about how much he hates Brexit. And this after he had tried unsuccessfully to set Boris up in a trap to be caught by a hostile crowd of establishment British ex-pats (mostly EU civil servants and their dags, I'll bet) yelling and chanting just yards away. Herr Bettel was nuts.

You can understand Herr Bettel's pain. Luxembourg is a handout State; 5% of the country's GNI, some €1.8bn a year, comes from the pockets of other European taxpayers. Brexit may mean a lower handout for the coddled citizens, coupled with a competitive UK that will be attracting overseas investment  at a time when Luxembourg's crooked corporate tax arrangements (set up by one Herr Juncker - whose criminal conviction hasn't stopped him reaching capo di capi of the EU) are being brought to an end.

However, this was an appalling display of boorish incivility not just towards Boris but towards Britain. Our Head of Government was there representing us, our nation, and this calculated insult from a little Nazi-friendly joke of a nation (they didn't exactly welcome Liberation) that has sponged on our taxes for too long is unforgivable. It was a major lapse in Statecraft.

The vacuous gurning fool who we are told is Luxembourg's PM

Finally, many thanks for the pointers to Brendan O'Neill's superb hour with David Starkey. rarely have I enjoyed a podcast more - and for anyone who hasn't yet heard it I commend it. HERE on the spiked! site. Worth it alone for the vehemence with which he calls Dominic Grieve a shit.

The three day hearing of the prorogation judicial review starts today in the Supreme Court with the appellants' arguments, government respondents tomorrow and 'interventions' on behalf of various concerned citizens (one John Major and others) on Thursday. Ho hum.

Rogue Parliament - Rogue Speaker

When I was a youngster there was a dinosaur factoid about the time it would take a nerve impulse to travel from the tip of a Diplodocus' tail to its minuscule brain. I've still no idea whether it was true or not for dinosaurs, but it's a convenient metaphor for the lag between a change in public mood and the realisation of that change by our MPs. At times the message doesn't get through at all, as in the case of status and expenses. Contrary to every single snapshot of public opinion, MPs, like the models in the cosmetics adverts, believe they're worth it. They really do imagine that they're special.

Yet over the weekend another poll appeared that confirmed once more that our MPs are utterly mistaken in their high opinion of themselves. The ComRes poll for the Express hasn't at time of writing appeared on the ComRes site so I must rely on the paper's published excerpts.

- 73% of Remain voters think Parliament is in desperate need of reform
- 85% of Leave voters think Parliament is in desperate need of reform

- 73% of all voters think Parliament does not attract the brightest and the best

One MP in Parliament thinks he is even more special than anyone else - the vile and meretricious Speaker Bercow, the sanctimonious dwarf who has, more than any other MP, trashed our democratic nexus. He is defending nothing but his own tattered reputation, standing for nothing greater than his personal notoriety, committed to nothing but his own egoistic fantasies. And the British public are united in their view of his disastrous time in the chair - he has helped destroy confidence in Parliament.

My hope is that our only saving grace is the venality, cupidity and self-interest of MPs themselves. Faced with this crisis of confidence, they will agree to sacrifice the Lords to save themselves. It may be too little too late. Janet Daley writes in the Telegraph -

... even if the Leave case wins through, the damage that has been done to British political life is horrendous. We seem to have imported two of the worst features of the American tradition. First there is gridlock. In the US this occurs when one party has the presidency and the other controls Congress, thus making government inoperable. This should not be possible in the British system since the executive is comprised of the majority, or a functioning minority, in parliament. But the Speaker and Continuity Remain have found a way to abolish the principle of democratic consent which once accepted this arrangement.

Then there is the US predilection for a losing side to try to sue its way to victory with continuous vexatious litigation. This is alien not only to our customs but to our national understanding of the role of politics and the function of the law.

My own view is that the system, the configuration, is robust. It has been corrupted by a Rogue Parliament and a Rogue Speaker, a man who should never in a million years have been elevated to the chair. I just hope we can cull them, throw them from the place, eject them and reclaim OUR Parliament and OUR democracy free from these vulgar weasels.

An excellent graphic from the Daily Express