Category: United States Law and Policy

“I’ve always thought that a free trade deal with the U.S. would be difficult” – and what this Prime Minister’s falsehood tells us about law and policy

23rd September 2021

Once upon a time a Brummie solicitor and pundit averred that a post-Brexit trade deal with the United States was ‘in the bag’.

That Brummie solicitor and pundit was not me – though I did have fun with this boast in a Financial Times piece.

Jones was not the only figure to assume that a post-Brexit trade deal with the United States would be easy.

Almost all Brexiters who had an opinion on the matter assumed that such a trade deal would be a given.

And one such Brexiter was the now prime minister Boris Johnson.

But now he denies he ever said it.

Here, this short video should be watched in full.

*

Shameless stuff.

*

There are at least two issues here.

The first was the readiness of Brexiters to assume international free trade deals were easy – that they would naturally follow from Brexit with the United Kingdom having a fully independent trade policy.

This sentiment may be derived from cod-historical notions about Victorian Britain – where it is imagined that the likes of Richard Cobden would pop across the channel to negotiate a free trade deal and still be home for tea.

In the mundane world of 2021 – as opposed to the giddy biscuit-tin world of nostalgic reenactments – new trade deals are rarely quick or easy, and often may not be worth having at all.

*

The second is that the prime minister knows he can say things that contradict what he said before and that few, if anyone, will care.

And this is despite the internet making it easier to expose such lies and other discrepancies.

Other than for the sake of it as a public good, there is no real point in setting out the falsehoods.

This is one thing that George Orwell perhaps did not correctly anticipate in Nineteen Eighty-four – there would be no need to employ the likes of Winston Smith to go back and change the historical record, as it would make no difference as to whether people believed new false claims.

The future instead turned out to be President Trump and others waving away such inconvenient truths as ‘fake news’.

For as this blog has said many times: exposing lies is not enough when people do not mind the lies.

So we are now in a bubble of faux-historical sentimentality and hyper-partisanship, where the truth of the historical record makes no difference.

You may think the bubble cannot carry on, but yet it does.

It is the paradox of our age: it has never been easier to expose a falsehood, yet the falsehoods continue to have purchase.

And from this many of our current problems in law and policy follow.

**

Please do support this liberal constitutionalist blog about law and policy – and do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent commentary – both for you and others – you can support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

Each post takes time and opportunity cost.

***

You can opt for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

Are President Biden’s comments on ‘the Irish Accords’ a life line for the Human Rights Act?

22nd September 2021

Yesterday United States President Biden spoke about his concern about a possible change to what he called ‘the Irish Accords’.

From the context of the question and answer, Biden meant the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement – though the question was framed in terms of the Northern Irish Protocol of the Brexit withdrawal agreement.

The question and answer are here and you should watch and listen for yourself:

You will see in the tweet above that the estimable Sonya Sceats, the chief executive of Freedom from Torture, avers that the exchange is a life line for the Human Rights Act 1998.

Is she right?

And what is the connection between that exchange and the Human Rights Act 1998?

Here we need to see what the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement says.

In respect of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), the agreement says the following:

‘There will be safeguards to ensure that all sections of the community can participate and work together successfully in the operation of these institutions and that all sections of the community are protected, including […] the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and any Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland supplementing it, which neither the Assembly nor public bodies can infringe, together with a Human Rights Commission [and] arrangements to provide that key decisions and legislation are proofed to ensure that they do not infringe the ECHR and any Bill of Rights for Northern Ireland’

and

‘The British Government will complete incorporation into Northern Ireland law of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), with direct access to the courts, and remedies for breach of the Convention, including power for the courts to overrule Assembly legislation on grounds of inconsistency’.

*

These passages are explicit: the ECHR is a ‘safeguard’ and the ECHR has to be enforceable in the courts of Northern Ireland.

The agreement does not expressly mention the Human Rights Act 1998 – not least because that legislation had not yet been passed at the time of the agreement.

But one of the things that the act does in respect of Northern Ireland – as well as for the rest of the United Kingdom – is to make the ECHR enforceable directly in the courts.

This is instead of requiring a party seeking to rely on the ECHR to petition the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, as was the position before the act took effect.

Of course: you do not – strictly – need the Human Rights Act 1998 to be in place to fulfil the express requirements of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, as long as the ECHR remains enforceable locally in Northern Ireland.

But if the Act were to be repealed – which is a long-term goal of the new lord chancellor and justice secretary Dominic Raab – then there would need to be replacement legislation in place the very day the repeal took effect for ECHR rights to remain directly enforceable in the courts of Northern Ireland.

*

So does this mean the Human Rights Act 1998 is safe?

I am not so sure.

I averred on this blog when Raab was appointed (and I am sorry to quote myself):

‘And one would not be surprised that one stipulation made by Raab in accepting the position as lord chancellor is that he get another crack at repealing the human rights act.

‘If so, then the act will probably be repealed – though there will no doubt be a less strikingly (and provocatively) entitled ‘European Convention on Human Rights (Interpretation and Incorporation of Articles) and Related Purposes Act’ in its stead – not least because the Good Friday Agreement provides that the convention has to be enforceable in Northern Ireland.’

Having seen the exchange with Biden, I am now wondering if my (dismal) view is correct.

A wise government of the United Kingdom will be anxious not to give the slightest indication that anything related to the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was up for any change – and continuing local enforcement of the ECHR is an express provision of that agreement.

A wise government, concerned about its relations with the United States, would thereby not touch the repeal of the Human Rights Act 1998 with a barge pole.

It would just take one credible complaint that the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement was at risk, and there would be an international problem.

Repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 would not be worth these risks – especially as it would have to be replaced immediately with legislation having the identical effect in respect of Northern Ireland.

But we do not have a wise government – we have a silly government.

And given the long-term obsession of the new lord chancellor with repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 – and that this may even be a reason for why he accepted his political demotion – one can see the repeal (and its immediate replacement) still going ahead in symbolic form – even if not in much substance.

*

But the politics of symbolism does not just have one direction.

Against Raab’s fixation with the symbolism of repealing the Human Rights Act 1998 is the transatlantic symbolism of doing anything that could remotely affect the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement.

So it may be that Sceats’ view is correct – and the Human Rights Act 1998 is safer than before.

But, on any view, repeal seems an unwise political path to take, given how much politically – and how little legally – is at stake.

**

Hello there –  if you value this daily, free-to-read and independent commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

Please do support this sceptical liberal constitutionalist blog – and do not assume it can keep going without your support.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

9/11 x 20

11th September 2021

The general lot of law and policy in the last twenty years has not been a happy one.

Torture used and regularised; an invasion and occupation that not only had no legal basis but also greatly discredited politics itself; the growth of the surveillance state; and the general illiberal turn to nationalistic populist authoritarianism.

All this followed the terrorist attack twenty years ago today.

That these things followed that attack cannot be disputed, as a matter of chronology.

*

But what about causation?

Did 9/11 cause the illiberal turn?

Anyone with an interest in the subject will have a view.

But I am afraid I think the illiberal turn would have happened anyway.

There was never any rational connection between 9/11 and the Iraq invasion – and so there would have just been another pretext instead of the ‘war on terror’.

Those with power will torture if they can get away with it – and how the United Kingdom so readily participated in torture would not surprise anyone with knowledge of what the British did in Kenya and Northern Ireland in the post-war period alone.

Those with power did not need a reason to use and regularise torture: they just need an excuse.

And the developments in computer and communications technology since 2001 would have meant the state seeking more surveillance powers, regardless of the attack on the twin towers.

So in essence: it is plausible that all the bad things in law and policy that have happened since 9/11 would have happened anyway.

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

Why the Michigan election law judgment is a Judgment for the Ages

27th August 2021

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.

The flavour of the judgment can be gained in this outstanding Twitter thread:

Click on and read the judgment here – and (if it is the right word) enjoy.

**

Hello there – please do support this liberal and constitutionalist blog – and do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

The thin threads of power – politics and policy in an age of impotence

17th August 2021

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.

*

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.

*

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:

The phrase “no one saw this coming” could be the motto of the United Kingdom government since at least 2016.

And here is Susie Dent, the subtle genius who no doubt will be regarded by future historians as the best political commentator of our age:

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.

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.’

*

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.

**

Thank you for reading.

Please support this liberal and constitutionalist blog – and please do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

Whatever happened to ‘regime change’?

16th August 2021

Once upon a time geopolitics seemed so much easier.

As Christopher Hitchens commented back in 2001, after 9/11:

‘The Taliban will soon be history. Al-Qaida will take longer. There will be other mutants to fight. But if, as the peaceniks like to moan, more Bin Ladens will spring up to take his place, I can offer this assurance: should that be the case, there are many many more who will also spring up to kill him all over again.’

*

I was one of those who nodded-along with Hitchens at the time, but I quickly realised the reality of ‘regime change’ did not correspond to what was said in sterling newspaper columns and comment pieces.

And by the time of the Iraq invasion (with which I did not nod-along) it was plain that no actual thought was going into what happened next in any of these adventures.

Now, twenty years after the invasion of Afghanistan, the west are retreating in circumstances which show that there was never any practical, sustainable plan for ‘regime change’.

Indeed, instead of a changed regime in Afghanistan, we have a regime resumed.

And the full resumption only took a day, after some twenty years of occupation.

*

Back in 2017, at the Financial Times, I put the 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:

*

I remember as a United Kingdom government lawyer around 2003/4 being asked to help on a commercial procurement matter involving the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq.

I did not have much idea what I was doing, though I did my best – and it was soon obvious that nobody at the Coalition Provisional Authority knew what they were doing.

I remember thinking at the time that it is one thing to clap and cheer at ‘regime change’ but for it to happen in reality was quite different.

*

This is not to argue absolutely against military interventions – either ‘liberal’ or otherwise.

What it is an argument against, however, is the notion that ‘regime changes’ are easy, or even effective.

Interventions are not political exorcisms, where the demons are expelled forever.

Instead, the notion of ‘regime change’ is a form of magical thinking.

And it always was.

**

Thank you for reading.

Please support this liberal and constitutionalist blog – and please do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

The last surviving transatlantic slaves and what their lives tell us about the law

11th August 2021

As part of my research into slavery and the law, I want to ascertain the chronological parameters of the transatlantic slave trade.

At one end, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there is the emergence of the trade in the days when the legal system(s) were very different to now – with rights of action and forms of property with which many modern lawyers would not now be familiar.

But what of at the end?

Of course, we all know that the trade had (supposedly) ended by the early to mid nineteenth century.

But in fact the last victims of the trade were alive until modern times.

The last (known) living victim did not die until 1940 – within the lifetime of four currently serving United Senators

And if one looks at the lives of the last three of those who are known to have survived, you get some interesting insights into the role of (relatively) recent law in respect of transatlantic slavery.

The survivors names were Oluale Kossola (also known as Cudjo Lewis), Redohsi, and Matilda McCrear – see here, here and here.

The ‘legal’ insights one gets are:

– how transactions were still being made in Africa, and how the supply of slaves was still organised so as to meet demand;

– how the traders deftly evaded justice – by procedural delays, as well as destroying evidence and hiding the human evidence – and also by jury verdicts;

– how survivors did not have the automatic benefit of American citizenship after emancipation because they were born abroad; and

– how one of the survivors even sought compensation (presumably in the 1920s or 1930s) but the claim was dismissed.

These examples touch on modern legal issues – the existence of illegal markets, criminal prohibition and its avoidance (both in substance and by gaming procedure and evidence), rights of citizenship, and rights to compensation.

The story of the transatlantic slave trade lasted some five hundred years.

The story goes from the legal days of actions in trover and assumpsit to the laws that exist today.

It was far more extensive both in scope and duration than many would realise.

In a way, the story of the slave trade is the story of modern commercial law.

**

Thank you for reading.

Please support this liberal and constitutionalist blog – and please do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

Laws and systems – what connects slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality and so on

7th August 2021

This is a depressing post about law and policy, but it is one which is triggered by work I am doing on a particular project.

One of the things that I am researching and writing is about how lawyers made possible slavery and the slave trade – a topic that I wrote about at Prospect magazine, as well as in previous posts on this blog and on Twitter (see here and here).

*

Of course: human beings are capable of being cruel to other human beings without laws or lawyers.

An individual person can coerce another person, can torture another person, can expropriate the possessions of another person – and so on – without any legal system or advisers in place.

That, unfortunately, appears to be the nature of our species – at least given the archaeological and historical record.

*

For enslavement, torture, expropriation – and so on – to exist in any organised society (that is, say, a human grouping larger than Dunbar’s Number) requires the help of norms and rules.

Either such practices will not be prohibited or such practices will be positively facilitated.

In other words: slavery, torture and imperialism in any society depend on systems of rules being in place that enable them.

And in such modern societies, where the practice of law is usually a distinct profession, this in turn means that such practices are facilitated by lawyers.

Lawyers draft the relevant legal instruments, and lawyers then advise those who seek to rely on legal rights as set out in those instruments and otherwise.

And many of these lawyers did so (and some still do, for example, with the torture memoranda in the United States) with absolute moral neutrality – they are not here to gainsay the law, but to advise on what one can get away with under the law.

A similar legal infrastructure exists still in respect of defending the police and other state actors in respect of coercion and lethal force against civilians.

None of this – from slavery to systemic police brutality – none of this would be possible, but for laws and those who make those laws work.

Of course: the saving grace is that there are laws which (supposedly) prohibit each of these things, and there are lawyers who will challenge such laws and defend those affected.

And such liberal and progressive laws and lawyers should be celebrated.

But.

It has to be laws and lawyers which take on slavery, torture, imperialism, police brutality – and so on.

And this is because such things only exist in any organised society because of laws – and often lawyers – in the first place.

All that liberal and progressive  laws and lawyers are taking away are what other laws and lawyers provided in the first place.

**

Thank you for reading.

Please support this liberal and constitutionalist blog – and please do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

Lord Reed’s signal: the politics of the Supreme Court (continued)

5th August 2021

Over at Prospect there is a wise and informative article on the supreme court of the United Kingdom.

The piece is by the law professor and former adviser to house of lords committee Alexander Horne.

It makes the point well that the supreme court is taking a more conservative, restrictive approach to public law cases – those are the cases that concern the legality of actions by public bodies – especially when those concern policy.

If so, then there will – in turn – be less need for the current government to ‘reform’ judicial review, the usual means by which the courts deal with public law cases.

If so, this may be significant – at least in its effects.

*

The supreme court in the United Kingdom – unlike its American counterpart – does not hear many judicial review cases.

This is not least because there is no codified constitution against which the courts can assess the legality of the actions of state actors.

This in turn means that there is not really a small-c conservative, small-l liberal division in the politics of the supreme court.

Almost all the cases heard by the supreme court do not concern judicial review.

That said, the cases which the court selects to hear and then give emphatic judgments will usually have a powerful effect on the courts below – well beyond the force of any binding legal precedent.

This is a signal that will be understood by – and probably influence – the judges whose day-to-day work involves public law cases and judicial reviews.

It will also be noted by the lawyers who specialise in bringing (or not bringing) certain cases.

In effect: because of the signal from Lord Reed’s supreme court, fewer judicial reviews involving policy will be brought – and of those brought, fewer are likely to succeed.

There will, of course, be hardy lawyers and even judges that will still seek to apply anxious scrutiny to cases involving policy questions.

But those judges and lawyers will soon be in the minority.

And this effect will have a practical impact far greater than could be achieved by bill before parliament.

The days of any expansive approach to dealing with the legality of policies in judicial review cases are coming to an end.

The supreme court seems to be signalling the retreat.

**

Thank you for reading.

Please support this liberal and constitutionalist blog – and please do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.

 

 

 

 

The best of questions and the worst of speeches – a practical example of the accountability gap in UK policy-making

15th July 2021

When the question came, it was superb.

Take a moment to listen to this question to the prime minister from the Sky political editor Beth Rigby – and hold on to hear her follow-up.

As a question from a political journalist to a prime minister, the question could not be bettered – in form, content, or delivery.

Superb – but not exceptional.

The fact is that there are some outstanding journalists – in the United Kingdom and the United States – capable of asking excellent questions.

In the United States even before the election of Donald Trump as president in 2016, many of his material and manifest lies, faults and failures were already in the public domain – thanks in part to diligent investigative journalism.

But it did not matter.

A sufficient number of voters clapped and cheered for Trump anyway for him to win the electoral college, if not the popular vote.

Similarly, sufficient number of voters clapped and cheered for Boris Johnson and his governing party to win the general election in 2019, if not the popular vote.

And Johnson’s material and manifest lies, faults and failures were also in the public domain.

It did not matter.

It is a public good – that is a good that does not need any further justification – that journalists as brilliant as Rigby and others ask these questions.

But it is not enough.

*

How do politicians get away with it?

Here we must turn to the speech that the prime minister gave before the press conference.

The speech was a policy speech – not a political speech to a party conference or a rally.

The speech was also a formal speech as prime minister, with the text formally published on the government’s official website.

And it was perhaps the worst formal policy speech ever given by a prime minister.

Look at the state of this:

Here is just one sentence:

There are prisoners in Belmarsh with shorter sentences.

The speech is gibberish, for sentence-after-sentence and paragraph-after-paragraph.

And even if you want to give the benefit of the doubt – as not even lawyers and legal commentators speak as precisely as they write – this is not an unofficial transcript but the version approved for formal publication on the official government website.

And regardless of form, there is not a single concrete policy proposal in the speech.

Just words, words, words.

How does he get away with it?

*

We have a juxtaposition, a tension – if not a contradiction – in our political and media affairs, and it has implications for all policy-making and law-making.

We may well have first-rate media questions – but we also have low-level political accountability.

Why?

Because politicians with executive power – at least in the United Kingdom – rarely have to be publicly accountable when it can really matter.

A prime minister can brush off a journalist’s question.

A prime minister can brush off the leader of the opposition.

A prime minister with a majority, and ministers generally, are not publicly accountable to anything in any meaningful way for their policy-making and law-making.

Even general elections are not a real check or a balance – as the government reneging on manifesto commitments show.

There is, of course, political accountability to their own back-benchers – but that is rarely in respect of specific policies or laws, and that accountability is informal and often hidden in private meetings and communications.

That is not public accountability.

And so we have the concurrent spectacle of the best of questions and the worst of speeches, and there is little or nothing anybody can do to make the situation any different.

**

Thank you for reading.

Please support this liberal constitutionalist blog – and please do not assume it can keep going without your support.

If you value this daily, free-to-read and independent legal and policy commentary for you and others please do support through the Paypal box above, or become a Patreon subscriber.

***

You can subscribe for each post to be sent by email at the subscription box above (on an internet browser) or on a pulldown list (on mobile).

****

Comments Policy

This blog enjoys a high standard of comments, many of which are better and more interesting than the posts.

Comments are welcome, but they are pre-moderated.

Comments will not be published if irksome.