10th December 2021
This is a daily law and policy blog – indeed, there has now been a post daily for well over a year.
And being a daily blog, it sometimes difficult to step back and appreciate just how weird our government and politics are at the moment.
For example, we have the situation where if the Prime Minister has lied to his advisor on standards, then it will be the advisor who is expected to resign.
We also have the government’s ‘crime week’ that started with the Prime Minister dressing up as a police officer, and ended with the governing party being fined by the Electoral Commission.
There has been a row about a Christmas party that has now dominated politics for two weeks.
And in the meantime the government is pushing forward legislation that will enable its officials to kill people without legal consequences, that will prohibit meaningful protest, and that will summarily remove citizenship from you because of where your family is from.
Strange days, dark days.
And it is difficult to keep up, let alone try and make sense of any of as a law and policy commentator.
The main (but not only) cause of this is Brexit.
Brexit, in effect, has thrown a great deal of what was settled in British politics up into the air, and it still has not landed.
And government departments – free from any leadership and real accountability – are taking the opportunity to get away with as much illiberal legislation as they can.
The only ‘civil liberties’ complaints from many politicians will be about wearing masks and encouraging vaccines.
The antics of the current Prime Minister, unfit on any political view to hold that office, are possible only because of Brexit and its aftermath.
Will things ever get settled again?
Will there ever be a return to ‘normal’ politics?
The current weirdness may now be a routine commonplace.
But it should never be considered as normal.
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Gosh. Really? “the government is pushing forward legislation that will enable its officials to kill people without legal consequences” Is this so they can shoot down a person suspected of being a terrorists or threat to community, carrying a bomb or a weapon or acid spray?
& is it not right? That they also have made it law that they can enter any house and remove people from their house without any questions.
This Government is tearing up the previously accepted norms without a mandate to do so. The country is being held hostage by a group who have been elected to “get Brexit done”. Brexit having been such an ill-defined concept has enabled this regime to take things much further than most people expected or intended. The harm being caused to the UK is massive and unprecedented. Who knows where or how this will be ended.
“Brexit, in effect, has thrown a great deal of what was settled in British politics up into the air, and it still has not landed.”
I would say that THE CHINA VIRUS, “in effect, has thrown a great deal of ” everything “up into the air, and it still has not” shown any signs of going back to normal life.
Hello Clare,
My country is breaking in two.
It may not exist for very much longer.
One can never go back and though a remainer, I can see enough of our people were so dissatisfied that we cannot go back.
But the leavers never set out just where they wanted to get to. So us remainers are left guessing and so our country remains in limbo.
You English need to decide what you want. It is not petulance.
I fear maybe yous think that yous did not want to be considered Europeans- yuk! As yous are better than that.
Tell me it ain’t so.
To be honest, in all countrys Covid has put a glaring spotlight on the functioning or not functioning of the health, social, political and economical sytems of all those countrys affected and how society and solidarity is viewed and practised in each of those countrys.
Brexit has had kind of the same effects but only for the UK and NI. Allmost like a catalyst.
Imho calling it the China Virus is telling, do you also think the Spanish Flue started in spain or do you know why it is called the Spanish Flue. A little hint it has something to do wiht the News but nothing to do with Fake News. And no i am not a chinese apologist but i prefer provable facts to alternative facts from social Media.
Are you playing to the gallery or are you interested in persuading people? Using the phrase “the China virus” – not to mention rendering it in capital letters – undermines your credibility.
And what about the party that never was and the blind trust that really never was?
Our current state of the country is, in historical terms, one of peril. An oppressive and unaccountable government, that parades it’s contempt to the proletariat, tends to invoke a counter to it’s actions. Should the public stir itself into action, there can be no knowing which direction it will take.
The sooner a government of capability and fairness can come to power, the less the damage and loss of life there will be, assuming such a government in waiting exists.
In the meantime only mass and persistent protest is available to bring about any change.
What ever back bench Tory MPs think of Johnson, they will cling on to power at any cost.
This is what happens to a post colonial imperator. It considered itself the “mother of Parliaments” but it is now an unreformed member of the anti representative FPTP system. All these empires ; Venice, Portugal, Spain etc went through this: unrestrained corruption; denial; entitlement; and ultimately some reality. They and we will eventually find our new place in the world.
Well, lets hope so!
Brexit is a cul de sac and nothing good can come of it. It happened largely because governments (Labour and Tory) were happy to claim any EU advantages as their own (e.g. ending roaming charges), but blaming “Brussels” for anything that they agreed to but knew would be unpopular. Now HMG can hardly claim any success for EU initiatives it (has to) follows, but all the painful decisions lie with Bojo and the clowns. The economic downside can’t be ignored forever and the loss of influence on the European and global stage is all too evident. Bojo and the Tories are nailed to the cross of Brexit and can’t campaign to reverse/soften or change it (even Article 16 action will swiftly be seen as a own goal), so they will lose the next election. I think the incomming administration will seek a more rational relationship with Europe and will move to repeal much of the right wing, illiberal bills now being slated – it is possible that “rank and file” Tory MPs will discover a backbone and vote such changes down themselves, but the saner, one nation Tories, were slaughtered in a night of the long knives last year, of course.
When the tide turns as it inevitably will one day, will the Tory party reach for a sensible path and slowly row back from Brexit?
In my mind the only question is when and my money is on sooner rather than later.
There are signs that the government are rowing back form the article 16 nonsense and accepting the role of the EU Court in NI (suitably disguised in diplomatic language). Queues are building up at channel ports and customs declarations will be fiendishly complex. Trade figures don’t look good and GDP growth is virtually stagnant.
How many crises can Johnson handle in one go? Three at the same time must be his limit.
The interesting one for me is this dressing up as police thing. Seems to be a trend in the UK. I’m now French (thankfully) and I asked my wife what she would think if a French politician dressed up as a ‘flic’. Mostly her response was ‘why?’. I still haven’t come up with a good answer.
As I see it we have a system of government that is too interesting, too much news to see. I certainly want to know what they are up to – but I want to be bored by it. Lots of well constructed detailed plans and perfectly interlocking strategies. Operating like a Swiss watch, predictable and dull.
What we have is an upper layer that is more like a Love Island show, too much glitter and flim flam, too much personality and front. Snag is government at the upper layer was always liable to be corrupt and dominated by personalities and vested interests. Almost as if we British have returned to our monkey origins – ever seeking the best banana trees and the prettiest boy and girl monkeys. Too much of a media circus.
Boris or his replacement is left with a great big legislative and administrative machine that dare not do anything good or sensible. Because doing good sensible things would upset too many vested interests. That can only lead to stasis or more bad things. We are in a Micawber situation hoping something nice will turn up. Like a shilling in my Christmas pud.
The clock ticks on and 2024 will roll round soon enough. Many interesting things may happen by the end of 2024.
Getting the cart and the horse in the right order these days is difficult, or at least determining which is the normal order is fraught with difficulty. Of course, if we apply reason to the problem it is fairly simple to work out in which order they ought to come, but as someone very famous once said, you cannot derive an ought from an is, and it is the case that the PM’s advisor is now expected to resign because the PM lied to him, (allegedly) even though I suspect most rational people would think it ought to be the other way around. Similarly with Brexit a great many people (the exact number runs to millions) thought that we were leaving the EU so we could be free from the tutelage of Brussels, so that we could determine our direction of travel in the world, so that we could be sovereign masters of our own universe. And whilst NI and those pesky French fishermen have demonstrated we aren’t completely sovereign to do what we want , in the case of NI ship whatever goods we want whenever want to NI without any of these EU checks – even though we agreed voluntarily to sign a legally binding agreement to allow these checks to be done, we don’t want them anymore so they must go. Similarly with the French fishermen, why can’t they just fish in French waters? That’s what they are for. Sadly as with NI, the UK government will lose the licencing row because it would be within the EU’s orbit of retaliation to stop UK fish from being exported into the EU. At which point the extra British fish caught as a result of denying French fishermen licences are pretty close to, well, worthless as there will be no market for a lot of what is caught. So it is that Brexit rumbles on, it has to rumble on and it has to be about national sovereignty, since that is clearly what motivates voters. But the reality is much closer to home, as David avers, this most illiberal of government is hell bent on tearing up and burning, on a large bonfire, every liberal right it can get its hands on. That was always the underlying and mostly hidden agenda of Brexit. As long as the headlines relate to NI and French fishermen, this government have a chance of taking a substantial proportion of the population with them – that’s why, those are the stories in the headlines.