The internet and modern communications technology mean that it has never been easier to to mass shame those with political power.
Only twenty-five or so years ago it was virtually impossible for any person to publish anything critical about politicians without going through a traditional ‘gate keeper’ – you could write a letter to a newspaper, send a manuscript to a publishing house, or telephone a radio or television show.
But it was almost always a decision of somebody else if your critical views got wider circulation.
Determined people could, of course, publish their own pamphlets, or publish a book through a ‘vanity press’, or start their own pirate radio station in the English channel.
Such eccentricity, however, was relatively rare.
Now anyone with everyday electronic devices can publish their views to the world.
It has been an extraordinary development in the history of communications, akin in its significance to the developments of writing and then of printing.
(And a development the implications of which have perhaps not been fully worked through socially, culturally, or legally.)
But.
Alongside this development seems to have been an opposite and equal political reaction.
For, although it has never been easier to mass-shame those with political power, it appears that those with political power have never been so shameless.
As long as their (minority) political blocs are mobilised and committed, various populist politicians – from Trump and Bannon in the United States to Johnson, Farage and Cummings in the United Kingdom, and others elsewhere – do not care that there is mass online criticism of their positions.
Indeed, the loud ‘liberal’ reaction is taken to validate and enhance their political appeals to their bases.
And it may be that this shamelessness is affecting constitutional practice.
Until fairly recently constitutional practice in the United Kingdom and the United States, and perhaps elsewhere, rested on constitutional conventions.
Such conventions do not have the force of law and so cannot be litigated.
Instead, the conventions were followed partly because their overall utility was considered obvious (any government minister who might have flouted a convention would realise she or he may be in opposition again one day).
But conventions were also followed because a failure to do so would lead to significant political disapproval.
Others would ‘tut’.
And in a small self-contained political world, such tuttery mattered.
But now, when there is constant appeals to political bases, such tuttery does not matter at all.
The Bannons and the Cummings of the political worlds do not care about disapproval of political elites.
Nor do the Trumps and the Johnsons.
And so we have one paradox of modern politics: never have politicians been more accountable on an everyday basis for their actions, and never have they seemed so indifferent to accountability.
This, one hopes, may be a short-term thing: the opportunism of a certain group of political charlatans at a particular time.
Perhaps constitutionalism and respect for constitutional norms will reassert itself after this rush of heady populism.
Perhaps things may get back to normal.
Perhaps.
But, if not, we need to work out better ways of enforcing constitutionalism and the respect for constitutional norms than tutting.
For even with the amplification of internet and modern communications technology, mere mass-tuttery will not be sufficient.
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Yesterday Sir Alex Allan, the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on the Ministerial Code, resigned.
His statement was succinct to the point of curtness:
“I recognise that it is for the Prime Minister to make a judgement on whether actions by a Minister amount to a breach of the Ministerial Code. But I feel that it is right that I should now resign from my position as the Prime Minister’s independent adviser on the Code.”
The first sentence is dressed-up, but it is nothing more than a statement of fact; only the second sentence has any import.
The real reason for the resignation is that the Prime Minister disregarded the view of Allan that the Home Secretary was in breach of the Ministerial Code.
The resignation of Jones was also because of a breach, in that case that the United Kingdom government was deliberately intending to break the law.
And that resignation, in turn, followed the curious incident in 2019 where no government official was willing to sign a witness statement, on pain of perjury, as to the government’s true reasons for the five week prorogation of parliament.
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These incidents are accumulating.
Each example is, in its own way, significant – in that it signifies a particular breakdown of the machinery of government.
And taken together they indicate a trend – a government that is indifferent to constitutional norms and conventions and which sees self-restraints as mere inconveniences to dismiss.
Alongside these examples, of course, we have the government threatening both the independence of the judiciary and the efficacy of judicial review.
This is a government that wants to be free of an impartial civil service and independent judiciary and seeks to legislate as much as possible by decree.
This is what I called the ‘Executive Power Project’ (in gentle mockery of the ‘Judicial Power Project’ – a group who, quite seriously, contend that judicial power is the real problem of our age).
So the Allan resignation shows us nothing new, but is a further illustration of what can already be seen as a wider problem.
The government has collapsed into hyper-partisanship, and it is ready to negate every conventional principle and even to break the law, and wants to remove anything that can say ‘no’.
This, of course, is the politics of hubris.
Yet the hubris of this government never seems to meet its nemesis.
The government still appears popular and there is no reason to believe another general election would return a different result to that of just under a year ago.
The government is even getting its excuses in early for the effect of the Brexit transition period ending on 31 December 2020, whether there is a deal or not.
The Allan resignation signifies what is wrong about this government and its attitude to constitutional propriety – but we already have a number of such signifiers.
And so the Allan resignation also signifies that the government believes it can keep on getting away with these constitutional trespasses – and the worrying thing is that the government is probably right.
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The United Kingdom government is currently making it (even) more difficult to prosecute its armed services for historic war crimes.
On this I did a video essay for the Financial Times (written and presented by me, produced by the estimable Tom Hannen).
The United Kingdom and war crimes (and torture in particular) is a depressing subject – from Kenya and Northern Ireland to Iraq and Afghanistan, there are cover-ups and other attempts to avoid scrutiny.
But there are other, more refreshing approaches to official accountability.
The Australian government has now published a report into war crimes in Afghanistan by its own special forces.
Australia has today released a report into war crimes by its own special forces.
The report finds evidence of dozens of murders of Afghan civilians.
The report of by Paul Brereton, the Inspector-General of the Australian Defence Force Afghanistan Inquiry Report is an extraordinary and highly important document.
War crimes happen, torture happens – and war crimes and torture can be committed by all sides, not just the ‘baddies’.
This is the nasty truth about conflict and human nature.
The question is about what to do about it when it happens.
One approach comprises official cover-ups, deflections, and smearing those seeking justice and accountability.
This is a misguided, short-term approach.
It means there is a sense of getting away with it, of permissiveness – and, in time, it means the armed services will lose valuable legitimacy when dealing with local populations.
The Australian approach is far harder, but a far better one.
The United Kingdom – as it did with torture in Kenya and Northern Ireland – would much prefer to pretend that these things never happen here.
Or, if there is acceptance that war crimes and torture took place, then there is then a shruggy ‘well, what is wrong with this?’ and ‘so what?’ and this dismissive attitude will get easy nods from political and media supporters.
Yet everything is wrong with war crimes and torture, and high standards matter and make a difference.
And the Australians seem to realise this, but the United Kingdom does not.
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Dominic Cummings is a genius at politics but was a failure in government about policy.
And this is because politics and policy are fundamentally different.
For example, politics can be linear while (good) policy will tend to be complex.
The approach of Cummings to the 2016 referendum and the 2019 general election was to be focused and unfussed about niceties and conventions and indeed the truth.
‘Take Back Control’
‘Get Brexit Done’
And so on, and many other statements, including those written on the side of a bus.
There are many things that one can and should object to in this electoral ruthlessness but it worked – twice.
Policy, on the other hand, is not (easily) amenable to such rush jobs.
Cummings believes, wrongly, that grand projects were easy, as long as you approached them with the right attitude.
On his blog, for example, he wrote about “the history of the classified programme to build ICBMs and the way in which George Mueller turned the failing NASA bureaucracy into an organisation that could put man on the moon. The heart of the paper is about the principles behind effective management of complex projects. These principles are relevant to Government, politics, and campaigns.” (Emphasis in original.)
Such stuff must have been interesting and exciting to write.
But the examples he used were not transferrable, even if those examples were accurately understood to begin with.
And when faced with two immense policy challenges in government: the departure of United Kingdom from the European Union and the coronavirus pandemic, the heady precedents of the Manhattan Project and putting men on the moon turned out not to be that useful.
Successful policy making is hard and it can rarely (if ever) be done just by making strident demands from the centre and upsetting (in both senses of the word) all those on who you depend to implement policy.
And, as Cummings has said many times, the current planning and public procurement regimes may be cumbersome and problematic – but disregarding them so as to make decisions and award contracts with no safeguards against abuse is no solution to those problems.
The news yesterday is that Cummings has left government, though it is not clear the extent to which he will carry on ‘working from home’.
He had everything a policy blogger could have ever have wanted credibility (after those two electoral victories), a place in the centre, direct access to the prime minister, and a large majority.
He even had immense policy challenges in Brexit and Covid to which he could apply and show off his policy prowess.
But it did not work out, and his substantive policy achievements were such that they could fit in a cardboard box.
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Once upon a time there was a controversial government adviser in Downing Street.
The controversy was not just about clashes of personalities, though that was certainly also present.
The controversy was in respect of competing visions of the UK and its place within the (then) European Economic Community.
On one hand the adviser, and the prime minister whom he was directly advising, believed that both economics and common sense meant that the United Kingdom should not participate in the exchange rate mechanism (ERM).
Sterling should float freely so as to find its own level, as one could not ‘buck the market’.
On the other hand the Treasury, headed by a chancellor who later (and ironically) was to become a Brexiter, wanted the United Kingdom to be part of the ERM – even though it was plain that the ERM was (and was intended to be) a prelude to monetary union.
(If memory serves, the proposed name of the new currency was still then ecu– the European Currency unit – rather than euro.)
And so what was on one level a clash of personalities – which was lapped up like milk by the newspapers of the time – was supercharged by it also being about a fundamental disagreement about UK and its place in the EEC (now European Union) project.
It was this split and row that, more than the then prime minster’s famous Bruges speech (which was actually quite mild in content) that perhaps marked the start of the divisions in the Conservative party that continued for another thirty years, up to and beyond Brexit.
The adviser was, of course, Sir Alan Walters, and the prime minister and chancellor were Margaret Thatcher and Nigel Lawson respectively; and the date was 1989.
Walters was forced to resign, as did Lawson, and – in a sequence of events which flowed from those two resignations, Thatcher herself resigned the following year.
At about this time United Kingdom also entered the ERM, despite the misgivings of Thatcher and her supporters.
And when, with Black Wednesday in 1992, those sceptical of the ERM believed themselves vindicated when the United Kingdom abruptly had to leave the mechanism.
That sense of vindication then fortified and informed what was then called ‘Euro-scepticism’ at each stage of the development of the EEC into the EU and beyond.
Here it was significant that the Maastricht treaty was negotiated, signed and ratified around the same time.
And so those who sought to ‘push’ UK into the ERM were seen by Euro-sceptics as the same as those who promoted the integration of EU more generally, and so Black Wednesday was seen as discrediting the wider European project.
Thatcher and Walters were seen by ‘Euro-sceptics’ as having been ‘proved right about Europe’.
(I recall all this, as I was a Euro-sceptic at the time too.)
Now, as I type this, there is another row in Downing Street about an adviser, which is in part about a clash of personalities and in part also about the basis of the United Kingdom’s relationship with the EEC/EU.
It may well be that the current drama will be inconsequential, but such dramas – as in 1989 – can also be momentous in their consequences and implications.
And this especially may be the case as the United Kingdom is only days away from ending the Brexit transition period with or without a deal and in the midst of a pandemic emergency.
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The current government of the United Kingdom has a distinctive approach to politics, and it has a distinctive approach to policy.
In both cases the approach is associated with the government’s senior adviser Dominic Cummings and, to a lesser extent, the prime minister Boris Johnson.
The approach to politics has as a feature a disregard for the settled norms and practices of conventional politics: elections and referendums are there to be won, and it matters little about how that is done.
It is a focused and, in terms of both the 2016 referendum and the 2019 general election, a successful approach.
And because of this approach, they have power and their critics, however justified do not.
The approach to policy is similar, and can also be characterised as moving fast and breaking things.
There is no need for formal consultation exercises or procurement procedures, it is enough for there to just be central direction and directives.
And any policy will be formulated and implemented not by the traditional civil service in its traditional way, but by external hires and special advisers.
It is an approach which is not so much contrarian but indifferent to how policy was made and done previously.
But the lack of structure and the constant sense of rush comes at a cost, and because of that cost such an approach may be unsustainable in the medium to longer term.
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There are currently news reports about a resignation of a Downing Street adviser and of general dysfunction around the prime minister.
And this would be bad at any time.
It would be very bad if the United Kingdom faced just one major challenge – either a pandemic or the imminent departure from the European Union in practice (though technically the departure was back in January), with or without a deal.
But for this disarray to happen in the midst of a resurgent pandemic (and a second lockdown, that in an of itself will be widely devastating), and days away from the end of the Brexit transition period, is about as bad as politics and policy can be in peacetime.
At the base of the current predicament is a lack of seriousness about policy.
Whether it be the self-inflicted problem of Brexit or the force majeure of a pandemic, the government at its most senior level has not taken policy making and implementation seriously.
This is because policy is just regarded as politics as other means.
And, in turn, this comes down to populism – which can be described as the promotion of easy answers in exchange for electoral support.
Populism can succeed in elections and referendums, and it has recently done so, but it cannot deal with hard policy.
And therein is the contradiction forcing the current political chaos: what works in obtaining power can often be the very reason why being in power then goes so badly.
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In any human community larger than about 120 to 150 – Dunbar’s number – it becomes increasingly difficult to govern on the basis of sheer personality alone.
And so instead of face-to-face encounters of dominance and appeasement you have rules and commands: things that bind you – oral or in writing – because of the legitimate nature of the rule or command.
In modern societies these rules and commands are divided between the normative and the positive, and the usual word for the latter is ‘law’.
As I set out briefly over at Prospect – in a modern society a government is creature of law, and so without law it is ultimately nothing.
Even a gang of thugs with official titles will find it hard to govern a medium to large society for long on the sole basis of a series of in-your-face confrontations.
But in addition to this basic requirement for government to take law seriously for government to exist at all, there is a key additional benefit of a government promoting compliance with the law.
If the government complies with the law then it is more credible for the government to insist on the governed to comply with the law as well.
This is, of course, an argument based on convenience.
But when a government itself does not itself appear to take law seriously it undermines the legitimacy of law.
And this is the problem the government of the United Kingdom now finds itself.
The problem of legality and illegality.
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There are two events which illustrate this problem.
This appeared to be a casual breach of the applicable law, and one that he seemed to shrug off as unimportant because, by implication, laws were for other people and not for him.
In fact, this impression is to an extent unfair.
The police did investigate and they decided that, in the circumstances, there would be no further action and, even if he had been stopped on the day, he would have only got words of advice.
And so that was not law and due process averted but followed; it is just that law and due process did not get very far.
But what lingered was not the decision by the police (which was for the adviser a fortunate but not inevitable outcome) but the nonchalant indifference as to to whether the law was broken before the breach was was revealed.
And what many will remember is that neither the adviser nor the prime minister did take responsibility for the breach: nobody was sacked, and nobody resigned.
The only apology given was the adviser turning up late to the press conference to justify his actions.
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Now, months after the trip to and from Barnard Castle, we have the second event illustrating the government’s problem with legality and illegality.
The government has proposed that legislation be passed that would enable it to deliberately break the law.
This proposal has been supported by the House of Commons in principle at ‘second reading’.
It may well be that this proposal is soon dropped or defeated during its parliamentary passage.
But the damage has already been done.
The government itself is now on its very own journey to and from Barnard Castle.
A grand ‘away day’ from the rule of law.
Some supporters of the government have attempted to justify this proposal, but even few of them are convinced.
And the underlying policy issue – state aid on the island of Ireland after the transition agreement ends – is not connected to the proposal in any logical way.
There is no good reason – perhaps no reason at all – for the government’s proposed illegality.
And so the impression is again given that laws are for other people, and not the government.
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This weekend’s press has told us that the government is now considering ‘tough’ penalties for those who break self-isolation during the ongoing pandemic.
The figure mentioned for the fine is £10,000.
On what basis can the government now insist that others comply with the law?
Of course, there is the resort to coercion: the use of police and the courts.
A government should not, however, have to rely on brute force (or the threat of brute force) to get people to comply with a law, especially in the context of public health and public safety.
The government may have the brute power to seek to make the governed comply with the law but not the legitimacy to insist.
That is quite a loss for any government.
And that is what was thrown out of the car window on that journey back from Barnard Castle.
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For the current constitutional drama to have got as far as it has means that various ‘gatekeepers’ have either failed to perform their proper function or have been impotent.
By way of recap, the government of the United Kingdom is proposing to enact legislation that is deliberately intended to make it possible for ministers to make regulations that would break international and domestic law.
That the legislation is before Parliament means that the process is fairly well advanced – for presenting a Bill to Parliament is about stage seven of a process, not stage one.
The first gatekeeper would have been the head of the government legal service – the Treasury Solicitor – and we know that this is the issue over which the Treasury Solicitor has resigned.
But that resignation has made no difference: the process has continued anyway.
A second gatekeeper would have been the Cabinet Secretary, who is the guardian of the Ministerial and Civil Service Codes.
Yet, somewhat irrationally and inexplicably, the Cabinet Secretary has determined that what the Treasury Solicitor has described as breaches of law are permissible under the Codes.
So much for the civil servant gatekeepers.
Now for the politicians.
The Attorney General, who is nominally the government’s chief legal adviser, is enthusiastic about this law-breaking.
The Lord Chancellor, whose oath of office contains a commitment to the Rule of Law, has said that there are breaches of law that are ‘unacceptable’ over which he would resign, but this is not (yet) one of them.
And on the floor of the House of Commons, the Northern Ireland Secretary spoke of ‘limited and specific’ breaches of law being permissible.
So the gatekeepers of the Attorney General, the Lord Chancellor and the Cabinet generally have also permitted the the process to continue.
These gatekeepers are all checks and balances within the executive, and they usually should stand in the way of any attempt by ministers to abuse or misuse the law.
And all have failed.
So we now move on to the formal legislative process of Parliament and, if the provisions are enacted, the Courts.
And it may well be that the legislature and the judiciary are able to restrain this rogue legislation making it possible for ministers to break the law by regulations (that is, by decree).
If so, that would be an example of a working constitution.
But for this proposal to have even got to this stage, parts of the constitution have not worked.
The constitution of the United Kingdom is not codified and is reliant on checks and balances in practice that have little force other than by convention.
Only at the margins should constitutional tensions be resolved by litigation.
But what happens when the conventions do not work or are flouted?
The current constitutional drama may ultimately show, through Parliament or the courts, how the constitution works – but so far it has also show how the constitution does not work.
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In that post, there were two extraordinary facts stated that went to the current constitutional drama being serious and also novel.
The first was that a cabinet minister said to the House of Commons that the deliberate intention of the government was to break the law.
The second was that the government’s senior legal official – the Treasury Solicitor – had resigned on this issue.
These two facts indicated – perhaps demonstrated – that the current situation was significantly different from previous threats from the government to disregard the law, which have often only been briefed to the weekend media.
There were third and fourth facts which also should have been listed.
The third fact is that the government has published a Bill with the explicit power of making regulations that would break international and domestic law.
And today there is a fifth fact: the Lord Chancellor suggesting on television that a distinction can be made between ‘acceptable’ and ‘unacceptable’ breaches of the law.
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None of this – yet – constitutes a constitutional crisis.
The crisis would occur if such intended law-breaking survived parliamentary scrutiny and judicial supervision.
If such intended law-breaking did not survive parliamentary scrutiny and judicial supervision that would be checks and balances working as they should in a constitution.
But that said, this is a very different type of constitutional drama to what has gone before in Brexit, and one perhaps has to go back to the unionist threats to disregard the law before 1914 to find a historical parallel.
Of course, all this may just be politics – and there is some planned (or hoped for) political manoeuvre that the government is to execute under cover of this drama.
Such a political game does not, however, justify direct threats by the government to break the law.
Perhaps this is just a passing row, and the government u-turns this week on this proposal.
But that the government risked a constitutional crisis (as well as self-trashing its reputation as a reliable party to international agreements) will linger.
There will be an impact.
And so even if this extraordinary situation is now brought quickly to a halt, what this has created cannot end well.
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This has been an eventful week for law and policy – and for breaches of law and for a lack of a policy.
The highlight – something so extraordinary and constitutionally spectacular that its implications are still sinking in – was a cabinet minister telling the House of Commons that the government of the United Kingdom was deliberately intending to break the law.
This was not a slip of the tongue.
Nor was it a rattle of a sabre, some insincere appeal to some political or media constituency.
No: law-breaking was now a considered government policy.
It was a quite remarkable moment.
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That this was now a formal government position was then demonstrated by two other events.
First, the government’s senior legal official – the Treasury Solicitor – resigned on this issue (and my Financial Times post on this significant resignation is here).
Second, the government published a Bill which explicitly provides for a power for ministers to make regulations that would breach international and domestic law.
These two events show that the government’s proposal for law-breaking is not a sudden or improvised development.
A lot of time, effort and resources has gone into this.
The resignation of the Treasury Solicitor appears to have been after a number of Whitehall exchanges involving ministers, officials and government lawyers, as well as external counsel.
Draft legislation also does not appear from nowhere, and a published Bill is itself the result of a detailed and lengthy internal process, before it is ever presented to Parliament.
This proposal has been a long time in the making.
We all only got to know about it this week.
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Any constitutional crisis – potential or otherwise – exists on two planes.
The first is the plane of high constitutional principle.
Here the most relevant constitutional principle is that of the Rule of Law.
Put simply the principle here can be articulated as: the government is not above or beyond the law.
The government’s proposal may also raise (or will soon raise) constitutional issues such as the relationship between the two Houses of Parliament (if it is voted down by the Lords), the Irish border and the position of Northern Ireland, and the situation of the devolved administrations.
These constitutional matters are broad and could be relevant regardless of the detail of the proposals – whether the policy in question was about terrorism or agriculture.
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The second plane is that of policy.
What is the policy objective that the government is seeking to achieve that, in turn, raises such constitutional concerns?
Here something does not make a great deal of obvious sense.
The purported concern is about the state aid regime on the island of Ireland after the end of the Brexit transition period on 31st December 2020.
I explain some of the detail of this purported concern on this video for the Financial Times.
There are two reasons why this being the cause of this potential constitutional crisis does not add up.
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First, there are other ways the government could address their apparent concerns about state aid and Ireland following Brexit.
For example, the government could have a post-Brexit state aid policy that it could discuss with the European Union in a sensible and mature manner, and both sides could then agree how to deal with any conflicts with the withdrawal agreement and the Irish Protocol it contains.
So whatever the ultimate cause of this potential constitutional crisis, it is not (and cannot be) any concrete policy differences on state aid and Ireland – because the United Kingdom government does not (yet) have a concrete policy on state aid and Ireland.
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Second, the provision in the withdrawal agreement which the government asserts is the problem – Article 10 of the Irish Protocol – is something this very government negotiated and agreed to itself.
The government would have known the effect of what it was agreeing to – before signature the government legal service would have explained to ministers all the provisions in the withdrawal agreement.
And not only did the current government agree the withdrawal agreement, it campaigned at the December 2019 general election on the basis of putting this ‘oven-ready’ agreement into effect.
And the withdrawal agreement was indeed swiftly passed into law by an Act in the days before the United Kingdom formally left the European Union on 31 January 2020.
In essence: the withdrawal agreement was something this government negotiated, signed, boasted of, campaigned on, received a mandate for, and passed into domestic law.
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And now the same government wants to break that same withdrawal agreement, less than a year after it was agreed and signed.
The problems with this are, for anyone other than the most partisan supporters of the government, stark and serious.
No other country will take the United Kingdom seriously in any international agreements again.
No other country will care if the United Kingdom ever avers that international laws are breached.
It is a stunning self-trashing of the United Kingdom’s place in the world.
And domestically the predicament is much the same.
Who will take seriously the government’s insistence on abiding by the law if the government itself openly has law-breaking as public policy?
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I love and enjoy watching and commenting on any constitutional drama
But usually the constitutional drama makes some sort of sense.
Here there seems a deep mismatch – a disconnect – between the potential constitutional crisis and the underlying policy problem.
The United Kingdom does not (yet) have a post-Brexit state aid policy, and with open eyes it agreed to the Irish Protocol less than a year ago.
The problems, if any, with state aid in Ireland after 1 January 2021 do not require the United Kingdom government to propose and legislate for, in September 2020, a deliberate policy of law-breaking.
There is no rational explanation for what the government is doing.
And if there is no rational explanation then that leaves fanaticism, cynicism, conspiracy and/or idiocy.
Each of these are possible – either alone or in combination – but the lack of any genuine policy basis for risking a constitutional crisis, let alone forcing one, makes this a very strange constitutional drama.
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This, however, is not yet a constitutional crisis.
There is every likelihood that the tensions here will be resolved by the government u-turning or being defeated during the Bill’s passage through Parliament.
If enacted, then the Courts may find a legal basis for limiting the use of the regulations made under the Act.
That would be the constitution working.
We are not at the ugly stage where a government minister is actually making a regulation that would break the law and there was no way of stopping this.
That would certainly be a crisis, by which I mean as serious and unpredictable situation where there is no obvious resolution – a constitutional contradiction rather than a tension.
A government deliberately breaking the law would create such a situation – and nobody can know what would happen next.
So this is still a potential constitutional crisis, not an actual one.
But it is an extraordinary and spectacular potential constitutional crisis.
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ps Title amended to add ‘Part I’ on 13 September 2020
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