For some the victory of Emmanuel Macron in France is not enough.
The victory over his illiberal opponent was not sufficiently crushing.
He is not an especially liberal politician himself.
And his illiberal opponents may do well in elections to come.
But.
An implicit assumption of those holding such views is perhaps that a ‘once-and-for-all’ blow could somehow be struck, knocking out the illiberals.
Unfortunately, like the poor, the illiberals will always be there.
The horrors of mid-twentieth century authoritarianism was not the only manifestation of illiberalism.
Nazism and Fascism were not the classic form of such illiberalism, but how it formed in certain places at certain times.
The price of liberalism, like that of liberty, is eternal vigilance.
And so: when there are wins, like there was in France – and Slovenia – yesterday, there is nothing wrong with cherishing and celebrating such victories.
But such elations and rejoicing are necessarily short-lived, for pretty soon liberalism is going to have to politically defend itself all over again.
And again, and again.
For if liberals – and progressives – become complacent, and think that history has ended with the right side winning, then you next get resurgent illiberalism – as in the United States and elsewhere.
The contest of liberalism and illiberalism is a struggle without end.
So after the claps and cheers, we return to the position of brace, brace, and we do what we can to avoid the crashes to come.
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And so this blog returns to the unhappy local council at Handforth.
(It is now a town council and no longer a parish council, which is a bit of a shame.)
You will recall the viral (but edited) video of that Zoom council meeting.
And you will recall the now-immortal exchange:
‘You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver, no authority at all!’
[Silence]
‘She’s just kicked him out.’
[…]
‘Read the standing orders, read them and understand them!’
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A published analysis of the meeting concluded the following:
“on the face of the Standing Orders, Jackie Weaver did not seem to have the authority”
“Weaver did not have authority as ‘Proper Officer’”
“Weaver did not appear to have the formal power to exclude the disruptive councillors”
Those were, however, not the conclusions that were published and widely reported yesterday – but the conclusions of this blog at the time of the viral video.
That is what you can find when you – ahem – read the standing orders.
When you read them and understand them.
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What has returned Handforth council to the news is that Cheshire East Council has now published (with redactions) six reports in respect of allegations of bullying.
These reports were requested in a freedom of information request – and although that request was refused – the refusal was on the basis that the reports would be published as part of a publication scheme.
The reports are not pleasant reading – and they reveal an ugly culture of confrontation and bullying in local government that is perhaps not as widely known about as it should be.
In the reports there is – almost as an aside – a view taken as to whether Weaver did have the authority.
But that view is not the primary purpose of the reports – the reports are instead about the conduct of the councillors, and so it is interesting to see how this view on Weaver’s authority is taken in context:
That is quite a list of words for what Weaver faced: “aggressive… threatening… menacing… unnecessarily confrontational and disrespectful”.
The report avers: “Faced with what were unusual and difficult circumstances, and the deep-seated issues underpinning those circumstances, we can understand why [Weaver] acted as she did […]”
*
My blogpost last year took a relaxed view of what Weaver did in the circumstances.
She did not have the (formal) authority – but in the remarkable and unfortunate practical situation she was placed in, where a meeting should be going ahead but some councillors wanted to make sure it did not, the conduct of some of those councillors seemed to mean there was little choice for Weaver at the time of the meeting.
This blog also averred last year that the action by Weaver to place councillors in the Zoom waiting room seemed to have been subsequently ratified and affirmed by other councillors, though the published reports don’t take a view on that.
Weaver maintains that the “jury was still out” on whether she was able to move the councillors to the waiting-room, and she is reported as saying the following:
“We were still very vague about how virtual council meetings worked and I did not actually remove them from the meeting, in my opinion, I moved them to the waiting room.
“A little later in the meeting the remaining councillors voted to remove them.
“So I welcome the findings of the report but am deeply saddened that it took so long and cost so much to get there.”
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The six published reports are not investigations into Weaver.
They are instead investigations into serious complaints in respect of others – in which a view is taken on whether she had the authority.
And, as this blog concluded at the time, Weaver did not have the authority.
But the reports show the wider problem.
The wider problem is that others were not acting within the rules.
It was an almost-impossible position for Weaver or anyone else in her position, and it is not obvious whether, in the circumstances, a less-bad route was practically available at that meeting so as to ensure that the meeting continued.
One of the reports even concluded that bullying took place at the meeting:
While another councillor was not found to have bullied at the meeting was also found to have breached the code by their conduct:
Not bullying – but “unnecessarily confrontational and disrespectful […] There was no need […] to make comments that sought to discredit and question [Weaver]’s experience and professional integrity.”
*
Of course – it is understandable why the media are focusing on whether or not Weaver had the authority.
You cannot argue with a meme.
But that should be a starting-point, not a finishing-point.
The now-published reports indicate a troubling situation in local government: the confrontational, threatening and (in one case) bullying behaviour of councillors.
The lack of “authority” in all this is therefore a lot wider than any one person.
**
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While we wait for the Sue Gray report, here is something said by the Leader of the House of Commons Jacob Rees-Mogg:
Jacob Rees-Mogg says on @BBCNewsnight that "a change of leader requires a general election". Says UK is now effectively a "presidential system" and "the mandate is personal rather than entirely party"
Rees-Mogg, of course, is the government minister who gave the Queen the unlawful advice on prorogation.
You would think that him now promoting a presidential system would be a further discourtesy to the Queen in her platinum jubilee year.
But even on the substance of the contention, it is historically and constitutionally illiterate.
In the last fifty years only Heath (1974), Callaghan (1979), Major (1997) and Brown (2010) have ceased to be Prime Minister by reason of a general election.
In contrast: Wilson (1976), Thatcher (1990), Blair (2007), Cameron (2016) and May (2019) were all replaced as Prime Minister without any general election.
This is because we have a parliamentary system and, given our uncodified constitution, there are many ways by which a Prime Minister can be replaced without a general election.
Going further back, one can also look at the stark examples of Asquith (1916), Chamberlain (1940) and Eden (1957) – who all were replaced after their respective military misadventures without any immediate general elections.
Rees-Mogg is correct that, in terms of political-media culture, Boris Johnson projects a presidential style.
But this should not be confused with the constitutional position.
There is nothing to prevent there being a new Prime Minister without a general election.
And, indeed, until and unless the Fixed-term Parliaments Act is repealed, any more immediate general election would in any case require a majority in the House of Commons to support it.
The most concerning thing about this, of course, is the authoritarian implications of Rees-Mogg’s contention – for it undermines parliamentary democracy.
And this authoritarianism, and subversion of parliamentary democracy, is part of a worrying trend.
Brace, brace.
******
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North Shropshire is about as Brexity and un-woke a place as you can imagine.
(Older readers will note that its member of parliament was once John Biffen.)
At the last general election – only two years ago – 35,444 voters in North Shropshire voted for the governing party candidate, Owen Paterson.
Yesterday, in the by-election caused by Paterson’s resignation, only 12,032 voters did so.
That is – on balance – 23,412 people who decided to not to vote again for the governing party in just two years.
(Of course, there are deaths and new voters – but there will not be that much churn in just two years.)
Two years ago, the pro-EU Liberal Democrat party could only get 5,643 people to vote for them in North Shropshire – and they did not even get into second place.
Yesterday in the by-election, an additional 12,314 voters did so.
I put these numbers in terms of actual voters as – for me – percentages and swings always seem a bit abstract (though, of course, they are important).
I am more interested in the numbers of actual people making actual voting decisions.
The effect of this shift is that a governing party majority of 22,949 (and of 29,801 over the then third-place Liberal Democrats) has flipped to a Liberal Democrat majority of 5,925).
That is one hell of a shift in actual people making actual voting decisions – especially in a place like North Shropshire.
And such a shift must be significant.
But significant of what? What is being signified?
Here, any commentator has to be careful.
It is the easiest thing in the world for a commentator who did not predict a thing to then confidently explain the meaning of that thing once it has happened.
What I aver the result signifies primarily is that the ‘spell’ of Brexit may be ended – or close to an end.
By which I mean that, even in places like North Shropshire it is not enough for the governing party – and its political and media supporters – to incant ‘get Brexit done’ so as to protect and promote their electoral position.
It just isn’t working any more.
It did not mobilise the – on balance – 23,412 former governing party voters of 2019 who did not vote the same way again in 2021.
And it did not dissuade the – again on balance – additional 12,314 who voted for the Liberal Democrats who did not do so in 2019.
Of course, there were other issues – some local, some national.
Some may point to the Christmas party scandal, or to the coronavirus restrictions.
Some may even say that the by-election can be seen as a referendum on ‘lawyers from Birmingham’ – though that may be harsh.
Almost everyone with political opinions will find that emerging events – including unexpected ones – will affirm the political opinions they already hold.
But whatever the other things that the by-election may signify to you and to others – the one thing that can be said is that in one of the most Brexity parts of the countries, twenty-three thousand people did not vote again for the party that ‘got Brexit done’.
And twelve thousand people voted for the least Brexity party who did not do so last time.
If the hyper-partisan spell of Brexit was still hard and fast then that would not and could not have happened.
And so, to that extent, the spell of Brexit is broken.
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The current government makes much of its manifesto promise that it will build ‘forty new hospitals’.
But at prime minister’s questions today, the opposition leader referred to the following guidance for public officials (or ‘playbook’ as it is formally described):
Those 40 new hospitals. Labour now circulating a leaked NHS document which says a ‘major refurbishment & alteration of all but the building frame or main structure’ pic.twitter.com/iwO2n5B4yB
Regulation 5 of the consumer regulations provides that an unfair commercial practice includes when a practice ‘in its overall presentation in any way deceives or is likely to deceive the average consumer in relation to…the quantity of the product’.
That reference to ‘overall presentation’ means that something hiding in the small print is not good enough as a legal escape.
If a business made such claims to a consumer then the law would regard this as ‘a misleading commercial practice’ and in breach of consumer protection rights.
Even without consumer law, claims that a major thing would be ‘new’ when it would either be merely an addition or a refurbishment would be likely – under general contract principles – to be either a misrepresentation that would mean the contract would be put aside or a material breach of a contract.
Indeed, some would go further and say such knowingly misleading statements in would even constitute fraud.
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The reason why these false claims are to be made so that it will appear that the governing party has met its own political manifesto commitment – and note how the manifesto itself distinguishes between upgrades and new hospitals:
‘Everyone in the UK should have the peace of mind and confidence that come from world-class health care – and so this new One Nation Conservative Government is giving the NHS its biggest ever cash boost, with 20 hospital upgrades and 40 new hospitals […]’
‘[…] have begun work on building 40 new hospitals across the country , as well as investing in hospital upgrades […]’
‘We will build and fund 40 new hospitals over the next 10 years. This is on top of the 20 hospital upgrades announced in the summer […]’.
Three times the promise is explicitly made in the manifesto.
*
Of course, law is not politics, and political language is not to be held to legal(istic) standards.
But.
It is rare to have official guidance – even if called a ‘playbook’ – which sets out how public officials are to describe something falsely as a new hospital when it is not a new hospital.
Not only are ministers lying to us, but ministers are now requiring public officials to lie too.
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This government is abandoning manifesto commitment after manifesto commitment.
This is notwithstanding that, in a representative parliamentary democracy, it is only by manifestos that we have anything that approximates to mandates for a majority party returned in a general election.
Such manifesto commitments are not, it seems, binding commitments on the government.
But.
Elsewhere in government, the ‘will of the people’ is being invoked – and perhaps in the mist sordid and disgusting way imaginable to any any sensible and humane person:
No.10 Confirms New ‘Turnaround Tactics’ For Channel Migrant Boats: 'It's what the public want'https://t.co/09k1ohBgFc
Because of this policy, fellow human beings will die.
There will be those who will be dead tomorrow who otherwise would not be dead but for this policy.
This policy is not in any manifesto.
The invocation of ‘it is what people want’ is nothing more compelling than speculation.
But it is enough.
Because ‘it is what people want’ then other people will die.
This is a ‘pick and choose’ approach to representative democracy.
Things that had been explicit in a manifesto on which people people had actually voted are casually discarded.
And by reason of the slogan ‘it is what people want’ lives of fellow human beings will be just as casually discarded.
The common feature is executive arrogance.
Ministers believe they can do as they wish to anyone, regardless of actual mandates.
This does not mean well for our democracy.
Brace brace.
**
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Long ago, before 2016, ‘mandates’ were not taken that serious in the politics of the United Kingdom.
To the extent that a mandate from a general election made any constitutional difference, it meant that in practice (and by convention) the house of lords would not block anything that had been in a manifesto of the majority house of commons party.
There certainly was not any firm obligation on the government to bring each manifesto commitment to the floor of the house of commons, let alone pass any legislation.
And from time to time – for example, with the poll tax (‘community charge’) endorsed in the 1987 general election – a government will reverse a policy contained in a manifesto within the same parliament.
Because, long ago, mandates were seen as weak things in our representative, parliamentary democracy
And then.
And then came the 2016 referendum on membership of the European Union, which had a small though clear majority in favour.
This result – in a non-binding referendum – became ‘the will of the people’.
The result was a mandate that no person or institution would be allowed to gainsay.
If senior judges said that there needed an act of parliament for the Brexit notification to be made, they were howled at as ‘enemies of the people’.
Members of parliament opposed to the departure were similarly denounced.
An electoral mandate was no longer a weak thing.
The mandate was the strongest thing in politics.
A force so strong that nothing could stand in its way.
And then.
The United Kingdom departed from the European Union.
Now, the same government that insisted that ‘the will of the people’ was absolute is now seeking to renege on its manifesto commitments.
The international aid budget has been cut, and it looks like the ‘triple lock’ commitment and tax commitment are both going, perhaps this week.
The government no longer cares that much about mandates.
The government no longer cares about the will of the people as expressed through a ballot box.
Mandates are weak things again.
It has been a strange few years, politically.
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The primary purpose of a reasoned court judgment is not to be a historical document.
The primary purpose of a reasoned court judgment is for the here-and-now: it is a practical document to explain why the court made a particular order (or did not make an order) or otherwise disposed of the claim or matter before it.
To the extent to which that judgment contains anything of general interest to future generations of historians is (or should be) incidental
Yet.
Every so often there are judgments that you hope will speak to the ages.
Judgments to tell future generations about things in the here-and-now that they may not otherwise understand.
And the judgment handed down recently by Honorable Linda V. Parker of the United States district court for the eastern district of Michigan is such a judgment.
It is a judgment for the ages.
It is a judgment that (one hopes) will tell future generations that the American courts of our time had not gone completely mad.
It is a long judgment – but once you start reading it is compelling, and you are well into it before you realise.
The first paragraph is itself a banger:
And then it gets better, and better.
In essence: it sets out in readable detail how pro-Trump attorneys deceived the court again and again, and it sets out why that was again and again wrong.
Click on and read the judgment here – and (if it is the right word) enjoy.
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A couple of days ago the post on this blog was about Dominic Raab and ministerial resignations.
In that post I averred that this clamour for a ministerial resignation tells us three things: that the minister had enemies within government (else the incriminating material would not be available); that the press was not protecting the minister; and that there was sufficient interest from the public for the issue to be subject of so many news reports.
The one thing the clamour did not tell us – at least directly – was whether the minister had actually done anything wrong.
And ministers get things wrong all the time – it is just that the relevant material is not disclosed and/or the press do not join the attack and/or few outside Westminster would be interested.
Accordingly, a sustained clamour for a ministerial resignation will always tend to tell you more about political weakness rather than policy failure.
In essence: a political scandal is a function of having political or media enemies and not of policy incompetence.
Now, I want to develop this point to say that even when there is a resignation, this is not an especially practical form of accountability.
The failures that may have prompted the resignation will usually still be there – and the catharsis of the resignation may change the political mood, but may not mean any substantial change, still less redress or compensation for those affected.
The minister who has resigned often does not have any long-term adverse effects to their political career – and after a suitable period, they will often resume their senior political roles – sometimes again and again.
In this way, a ministerial resignation is too often not an exercise in accountability – but a substitute for it.
The resignations – which now can have a ritualistic quality – are what the political and media classes do to pretend to themselves and others that there is accountability within our political system.
‘there are calls on [x] to resign’
‘there is increasing pressure on [x] to resign’
‘[x] has resigned’
[…]
‘[x] returns to office’
And nothing else changes.
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More effective accountability would be for [x] to stay in office, and account for failures and the reasons for the failures on the floor of the house of commons and before select committees, to appear before relevant public inquiries, and to co-operate with bodies such as the national audit office.
That is for ministers to own their mistakes and to, well, account for them – for that is the very meaning of that word: accountability.
But we get none of this, and we get cosmetic personnel changes instead.
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Much the same as the above can also be said for ministerial sackings.
Again, this is often political theatre – even soap opera.
Little if anything actually changes with a sacking, little is accounted for.
Some political drama, perhaps, that is forgotten in a day or two.
*
Dismissals and resignations are, of course, part of any system of accountability – as resorts and sanctions.
But they are not the entirety of any meaningful form of political accountability.
For meaningful political accountability is the last thing any politician actually wants.
**
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When I was at school in the 1980s, the well-meaning progressive teachers showed us the film Threads.
The purpose, no doubt, was to make us pupils think critically about the cold war and the (then) nuclear arms race.
The primary impact it had on me was, however, different – and this was because of how the film portrayed the telephones in the bunker.
The film gave me a life-long fascination about the nature of practical political authority and control.
Here on YouTube some helpful person has put together the bunker scenes from the film:
If you watch these scenes with special regard to the telephones, you will see the telephones going from an active means of communication, to an inactive means, to being discarded, and then to finally damaged beyond repair.
And this matches the collapsing political authority of those in the bunker.
To begin with there are other people at the end of the telephone, and then there is nobody, and then ultimately nobody cares – or knows.
The political authority of those in the bunker, like the communications, is cut off.
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The lesson I learned from this as a pupil was it was not enough to have people who want to be in control and to believe themselves to be in control – there also had to be infrastructure, and for there to be people to accept that control.
Without such infrastructure and deference, those ‘in control’ are akin to the motorist wriggling a gear stick or pressing the brakes when both have been disconnected.
Those ‘in control’ may as well be playing with some grand political simulator.
And so I became interested in processes and transmissions and logistics and policies and rules and laws, and less interested in personalities and partisanship.
To answer the question: just what happens when the telephone rings out but it is not answered?
I suspect that this not the intention of the film makers, or the teachers.
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I mention this because of the impotence many in the West now feel about the fall of Kabul.
There is a general sense that something should have been done.
Here is our current foreign secretary:
Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab says "no one saw this coming, we would have taken action if we had" regarding Taliban takeover of Afghanistan
All true: but even if we had the foresight, what could have been done?
Of course: the execution of the final departures could have been better.
But beyond the arrangements for the final exit, it is difficult to see what further control the West could have had.
I'm as depressed as anybody about what is happening at the moment in Kabul. I certainly think Biden could have handled it a lot better. But I do not have the confidence others seem to have that the Taliban could have been kept at bay indefinitely.
European leaders are right to see the collapse of Afghanistan as another blow to the credibility of the West. However, not a single one of them would lift (or did lift) a finger to prevent it.https://t.co/My68DeorAB
And part of the problem for the United Kingdom is that not only do we have no control, we also have no meaningful policy for what we could do.
Here, there are some hard truths on the lack of any meaningful United Kingdom policy in this RUSI post:
‘This week’s ignominy may be set instead against some of the blithe statements made just six months ago in the Integrated Review: that the UK will be ‘a problem-solving and burden-sharing nation’; that it already demonstrates a ‘willingness to confront serious challenges and the ability to turn the dial on international issues of consequence’; that the UK will embody ‘a sharper and more dynamic focus in order to adapt to a more competitive and fluid international environment’; and that it will ‘shape the international order of the future’.
‘The UK’s Afghanistan experience demonstrates none of this.
‘Instead, it speaks to a generation of political leaders who have too easily fooled themselves that being Washington’s most reliable military ally constitutes in itself an effective national strategy.
‘Such a relationship may be one element of an effective strategy, but it cannot simply be the strategy.’
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Yesterday this blog looked back to a 2017 Financial Times post where I put the old calls for ‘regime change’ together with other simple notions from the first part of this century, as part of a general politics of easy answers:
Since 2017, with the ongoing experience of Brexit but also with Covid and many other things, we still see the politics of easy answers.
The sense that all that needs to be done when something must be done is for politicians to want it to be done.
The hard and complicated work of policy and (meaningful) strategy is often not even an afterthought.
We have politicians in their modern-day bunkers, thinking that having telephones to hand will be enough for their will to be done.
But political power hangs on, well, threads.
And those threads snap easily, if they exist at all.
**
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And then it gets better, and better.
