Brexit is about usurping democracy, not supporting it

Some things need repeating, and this is one of them.


Brexit is not about glorious ideal of standing up for democracy or the rights and will of the people.

It is not about championing the downtrodden masses or standing up to an out-of-touch elite.

It is not about the establishment going up against the people.

It is not about making society fairer and it certainly isn't about making the country more prosperous.

Brexit is about the exact opposite of those things. It's about enriching a tiny elite - some of them establishment, some not - at the expense of the masses. It's about ensuring that their power and their ideologies win out and all others are swept into obscurity.

The economic case against Brexit is so solid that I scarcely need mention it; the economic case against Brexiteers themselves is also damning. The rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer ? It was ever thus. As for "rich Remainers", that is a patently ludicrous allegation clearly designed as a bullshiting comment whose only goal is a momentary distraction. I shall say no more about it.

But the notion that Brexit is actually about the will of the people triumphing over some oppressive, out-of-touch elected Parliament is one that's so pervasive and so dangerously wrong-headed that it needs to be attacked with the utmost ferocity. It employs a classic tactic of telling people that they're being attacked for the sole purpose of stoking fear, and thereby avoid rational, sensible inquiry.

It's a claim given particular persuasive force in this instance because the "enemy" is not wholly imaginary or without blame. Not even the most devout Parliamentarian ought to claim the institution is a bastion of moral fortitude or rigorous devotion to its legislative duty. The idea that every MP is blameless is clearly laughable - they are all too human. And yet, it would be a much bigger mistake to suppose that they are all untrustworthy, self-serving snakes. There are in fact very good reasons why Parliament is so often dysfunctional, and highly plausible ways to reform it.

What should disturb us most in the case of politicians is a case of "there but for the grace of God go I". We despise politicians not so much because they're especially awful people, but because - deep down - we know that they're not that much different from normal people. If we can't admit our own faults (and many of us are largely blameless, as it happens), then we at least know plenty of other horrible people close to us. Imagine them in a politician's situation - a truly weird combination of power and impotence, pressure and privilege - and it becomes almost frighteningly easy to see how the system is vulnerable.

Yet the claims of the fringe right go far beyond any legitimate criticism of individuals or even the institution of Parliament. Instead, they attack the very ideology of democracy, and to find examples we need only turn on the news for scarcely a few minutes.

We have Jacob Rees-Mogg calling the Supreme Court's ruling that proroguing Parliament was illegal a "constitutional coup". That's the leader of the House of Commons trashing the judicial system. And in the most absurd way too, as though merely resuming Parliament could possibly constitute a "coup". No, Jacob, it's quite obvious that removing accountability from the executive is the behaviour of one engaging in a coup - giving Parliament the power to scrutinise legislation is the exact opposite of autocratic rule.

Then there was a Leave campaigner saying that it was unhelpful and divisive for Remainers to use words like "dictator", as though frustrating Parliament wasn't an act of tyranny. Words should be chosen carefully, but when the government unlawfully removes its accountability from the democratically elected representatives, just what else are we supposed to call it ? The hard right love to proclaim themselves as champions of free speech who stand up against political correctness, but when anyone dares call them out for what they are, they're suddenly a lot less keen on their professed ideals.

Or how about a Brexit Party MEP saying they believe sovereignty lies with the people ? Well, it's fine enough to say that you think it should rest with the people, but legally it doesn't. It belongs to Parliament, who hold it on the sufferance of the people. To wilfully discard the law is directly equivalent to saying that you don't believe in civilisation and that everyone may as well do as they please. That's not democracy. That's mob rule. Mob rule isn't democracy - it isn't even any sort of government at all.

And then we come to last night's sick and ghastly perversion of a debate in the House of Commons. We had the Attorney General repeatedly trying to outdo himself in a competition to become Parliament's biggest arsehole. He began with the ludicrous claim that the Supreme Court had made a new law, something which is fundamentally impossible. He said that "constitutional coup" was merely a phrase used in the heat of anger and "poetic license." He then went on to say that Parliament was "dead" and that MPs "had no right to sit on the green benches". When questioned by fellow Tory Amber Rudd, he said that he was "driven" to using such language because of the untenable situation.

With a truly contemptible lack of irony, he proclaimed that "nobody has worked harder than I did for compromise" and that it would "be a good thing if we could resume calmer waters." Did it not occur to him that accusing the Opposition of cowardice and lack of morals would, perhaps, not be the best way to find those calmer waters ? He treated the serious concerns of the Opposition about the Prime Minister acting unlawfully with sanctimonious levity, dismissing them as "inflamed, inflated nonsense". This is the behaviour of a brute, not that of a responsible democrat. What true democrat would describe Parliament as "dead" because it won't allow the government to threaten the country ? How can it be democratic to simply expel MPs rather than compromising with them ?

Things got no better with the emergence of that childish hellspawn Michael Gove, who refused to apologise for the government acting unlawfully. That is an absurd and preposterous omission. Apologies don't make you more or less guilty, or even admit prior knowledge. Now there are many cases where the law deserves questioning and reform, but for government ministers not to apologise for breaking the law is for them to treat it with contempt. Those empowered to make the law must be the ones most keen to defend it : yes, one might conceivably violate it accidentally, but to offer no apology is to trample wantonly on a key foundation of government.

To the shock of all but the surprise of none, Boris Johnson himself behaved most despicably of the lot. The harsh language he used was inciting violence and death threats ? "Humbug", he said. Like the attorney general, he lamented Parliament's inability to compromise whilst openly dismissing the thing as a farce. He forgot utterly that it was his own actions that led to the loss of a Tory majority, because compromise is not on his agenda. If it was, he'd take the most uncompromising path of all - a No Deal Brexit - off the table immediately : threatening to cut one's wrists is not a sane negotiating strategy. And if he really wanted to make Parliament functional, he wouldn't have acted like the Incredible Sulk in the first place. Rather, his deliberately antagonistic behaviour is the very reason for his own failures, but of course, he simply blames everyone else for not jumping on the Boris bandwagon.

Brexiteers are like Flat Earthers claiming to have found rational proof of the edge of the world. Sure, they may like to claim the prestigious mantle of science, but their insincerity is staggering. Brexiteers like to claim that they're upholding the will of 17.4 million people, but they don't even try to compromise with the 48% who voted Remain. Instead they just insult them, treating the referendum as a mandate to do whatever they happen to think is the best course of action, regardless of the highly limited information on the ballot paper.

Let's not forget that Johnson previously played a general election as an option of last resort, but then decided it was a good idea to attack and insult his own MPs rather than finding common ground. Consequently he's begging for an election because he's in a trap of his own making. A second referendum ? No, that would be undemocratic (!), but a general election would be jolly nice, thanks. This is beyond ridiculous. He patently wants an election not because he wants to champion democracy, but merely as a pretence to claiming the mantle of democracy as his only viable route to power. Sure, all aspiring Prime Ministers have to seek office in this way. But few seek an election simply because they've lost a majority through their own incompetence (or possibly malice, it remains to be seen) and are trying to evade the law.

Attempting to paint this approach as a legitimate tactic to show how determined he is is absolute bullshit, and I say shame on the BBC for going there - and for not spotting the raging hypocrisy when Boris has the audacity to suggest that "tempers need to come down". And Boris is doubly insincere. When his sister says he's not the man she recognises, I believe her. The usually affable Boris does not look at all comfortable playing the honest villain. Indeed, for much of the first hour or so in Parliament he looked like a spent force. He's trying to follow someone else's playbook and he's ill equipped to do it. Amiability, humour, and charm are his natural weapons, not cruel invective and cold disdain.

It's clear that all this is an attempt to drive a wedge between Parliament and the people, but it should be equally clear that this is an incredibly dangerous move regardless of the motive or end goal. That Boris is an insincere villain doesn't change the effect of what he says and does. It doesn't change the damage it does to Parliament's reputation or the fear of MPs who have to endure death threats.

It must be said that this isn't traditional Tory behaviour at all. I'm not, and never will be, a Conservative, but there is a great deal of merit in their professed values of personal responsibility, justice, the rule of law, and personal freedom from undue government meddling. A respect for convention is a very British value, but no-one upholds this better than the traditional moderate Tories. Just how far the party - and the country as a whole - has fallen from its core principles and into the hands of the lunatic, despotic fringe remains to be seen. Thus far there has been shockingly little fightback from any moderate MPs the party still retains.

The silver lining in this dark cloud is, of course, that it's exactly the wrong way for Boris to get whatever he wants. The more he continues to treat his opponents with contempt, the more they will continue to frustrate his every action. The more he flaunts convention, the more unconventional will be their solutions to removing him.

But no-one should be fooled for an instant by these lame attempts by Brexiteers to paint themselves as champions of the people. They are not standing up for the poor oppressed masses. They are playing the masses for fools, perverting their interests only to further their own agenda. As Cicero put it :

There is nothing more disgusting than the sort of monstrosity which fictitiously assumes the name and guise of "the people".

Supreme Court Catch-Up : Thursday

If things went against the government on Wednesday, then they only went from bad to worse on the final day of the proceedings. In fairness, it was a case of one (Lord Keen) against five, so the day was naturally unbalanced. Still, by the end I couldn't help but feeling the government doesn't have a leg to stand on.


There wasn't actually that much new material, save in regard to technical details and the particulars of previous relevant cases. The Lord Advocate James Wolffe argued that claims that prorogation doesn't impact individual rights is essentially irrelevant, as protecting the constitution is equally important. He accepted that there was a need, when forming a judgement, for comparable existing legal elements with counterparts - and said that they have those here, with the principle of accountability being essential. The period of prorogation is important given the context, he said, and the judges should consider the effect of the decision irrespective of the possible motive. Such effects demand rigorous justification, which have not been provided. He says that there is in fact so much precedent for the principle of accountability that applying it here is a straightforward matter that uses nothing more than perfectly orthodox tools. All of this we've heard before in different forms, albeit stated more boldly here.

He had one extremely important new point though, regarding the claim that dissolution of Parliament was regarded as non-justiciable as it was a political matter. In that case, he said, dissolution was almost always used for calling a general election. This hands power back to the electorate, whereas prorogation maintains the government in power. That is a fundamental difference. Even so, he said that even dissolution could potentially be justiciable in certain extreme cases; the current case is prorogation under extreme conditions, and that such circumstances are what you use to test justiciability. In principle, the government could use prorogation for even more undemocratic purposes.


Next we had Northern Ireland victims campaigner Mr Raymond McCord, who had by far the worst time of anyone in court. He's deeply concerned about how Brexit could threaten the NI peace process, as indeed he should be as a victims campaigner (we in the rest of the UK have often subconsciously dropped the "process" part of the peace process term, probably prematurely). I felt he was right to raise this point, that the ruling here has potentially life-threatening consequences. At the same time, he dwelt on it excessively, almost neglecting the legality of prorogation - which is, after all, the point of the hearing, so it made sense that this annoyed the judges. I had the impression that they would have been happy with a few sentences explaining that the scrutinising of Brexit is being impeded by prorogation, with possible important consequences of that, but more than that doesn't add anything useful to the case here.

He did manage to say, though, that the prorogation is impeding very basic functions in NI though, including the operation of bus services (!) and the courts. He also said that prorogation is ordinarily mundane but in this case it clearly isn't, albeit because of the Brexit context. The legal question should recognise, in his view, the possible impact on Northern Ireland in particular.


We then had Counsel General for Wales Mr Mike Fordham. His contribution was the most technical, focusing on exactly how one could apply well-established constitutional principles in this case. He cited previous cases as precedent. He maintained that the law does indeed extend more broadly than written statutes : it applies equally to new, untested cases, were it must be applied on the basis of principle. But there's nothing strange about this in the British legal system, and he gave concrete examples in support of this as well as concessions by the government's lawyers that prorogation is justiciable in certain circumstances.


John Major's lawyer Lord Garnier didn't offer much that Lord Pannick et al. hadn't said already, except to add the undoubted persuasive force that comes from a former Tory Prime Minister criticising another. He emphasised Wolffe's point that prorogation takes power away from Parliament whereas dissolution puts it back to the people. Dissolution, he said, was not previously justiciable only by happenstance that it had been used in a respectful way that did not provoke a need for legal challenges. In effect, it was a historical hangover, with the British constitution being a series of fudges - as one legal loophole is found, the law intervenes to close it, but no-one ever acts to create a fully self-consistent overarching document. Thus this current ruling would be entirely consistent with the historical approach.

Garnier also noted that regarding the time available to Parliament, it's well-known that laws passed in a hurry tend to be bad laws. Parliament needs time to act and act well, not just a few days for emergency sessions. A No Confidence motion would have wasted even more time so was not the best option available to MPs for them to maintain scrutiny (of course, politically this is much more complex than that, and somewhat misleading in terms of motivation, though the basic statement is correct). He mentioned some interesting ways that prorogation could be used, in principle, under even more extreme conditions, such as avoiding No Confidence votes or disbanding the armed forces (!). He finished by noting that it was plain the government's documents were neither true nor the whole truth but actively trying to mislead, with examples of some ministers actually having been misled.


At last Lord Keen had a chance to respond, but he had little if anything substance to say. He repeated his line that Parliament could prevent itself from prorogation by legislation. He argued that the differences claimed between prorogation and dissolution were more apparent than they were real, though he gave no convincing reasons as to why. He conceded that dissolution leads to a general election, and that this can in principle be misused, but tried to argue that this means a No Confidence vote is therefore an adequate check against the unilateral power of prorogation. That's plainly stupid : No Confidence doesn't automatically lead to an election (it can simply replace the government), and the present conditions mean that an election is not necessarily a way to avoid scrutiny anyway.

Perhaps his only halfway-decent point was that the yesterday's O'Neill's fire-drenched rhetoric betrayed a bias in his interpretation of the government's reasons for prorogation; if one takes them at face value, one reaches a different interpretation. That is true, but implicitly concedes that there is scope for different interpretations and undermines his point that there's no need for an affidavit attesting to their validity. He section ended with some discussion on whether prorogation would remain legal if the advice on which it was granted was declared illegal; no-one seemed convinced that this was the case. It wouldn't be the Queen's fault - constitutionally she doesn't scrutinise legal advice - but the prorogation would nevertheless be illegal.


The day ended with Lord Pannick. He re-iterated his major points : that Parliament could have chosen to avoid a lengthy recess but prorogation denies them that option, that Parliament would still have been in session and (to some extent) accountable during recess, and that the government had not at all explained their reasons for the chosen prorogation dates. He also repeated that a junior partner cannot unilaterally decide to remove their senior oversight, and that there is no reason to suppose that advice from the Prime Minister cannot be subject to the same legal forces as anything else. The circumstances may be extraordinary, but the principle of court intervention in these scenarios is absolutely normal. He said that even if we follow Lord Keen's recommendation of taking the government's documents at face value, then the statements about showing "MPs earning their crust" patently show how misleading they are, since there were plenty of bills that required debate - it is clearly not true that MPs just want to "look busy" when they actually are very busy indeed.

He finished largely answering judges questions as to what they should recommend if they found in favour. These were quite protracted, so at the very least this indicates they are taking the prospect extremely seriously. His recommendation was for the court to absolutely minimise its involvement in politics. It should make a declaration that the prorogation is unlawful, and after that they can - most likely - wash their hands of it, as it will be for Parliament to decide how it responds. It is of course possible that more court action could be required, but with any reasonable Parliamentary response this will not be necessary.

Whether the government will actually act in a reasonable way is, of course, dubious. I say that if they do not recall Parliament despite the court's order, or simply prorogue again, then this is nothing less than abject tyranny. But that is a future matter.


Regardless, on what grounds could the court now rule in the government's favour ? I find it hard to see any. The basic principle that the court can intervene in constitutional matters seems beyond doubt. That the court acts to protect Parliamentary sovereignty also seems inescapable : there must always be some mechanism of accountability. And that the government's advice is misleading, that prorogation was implemented to avoid that precious accountability seems as plain as the big ugly nose on my face. I, for one, cannot see how any sensible constitutional court could possibly decide that this is a power the government should be able to legally exercise.

Supreme Court catch-up : Wednesday

Tuesday's Supreme Court case on prorogation looked to be evenly balanced. On Wednesday, it looks like things may have swung against the government.

Defending the government, Sir James Eadie appeared to concede that prerogative powers (i.e. ones that can be exercised with discretion and not according to statutory rules) are justiciable, at least in principle. He also conceded that it was for the courts to decide on the limits of executive powers. But he said, quite reasonably, that justiciability depends on the subject matter, and not all such executive prerogative powers are automatically justiciable. Where that runs into difficulty in the current case is that prorogation is very clearly a political power, and matters of "high politics" aren't justiciable... but prorogation is also a constitutional matter, in that it prevents Parliamentary scrutiny. He fully conceded this latter point, saying that prorogation "is what is is" and that it has the effect of preventing scrutiny by design. He doesn't find anything wrong with this, simply that this is a political reality and there are no laws about how to use prorogation - hence in his view it's entirely a political matter. He said that if prorogation did breach statutory powers then the courts could intervene, but not in any other cases; that prorogation could be justiciable in some special instances does not mean that this is true in general.

He felt most successful when defending prorogation on strictly legal grounds. He likened it to dissolution, which was recognised as an executive, prerogative power and was widely recognised as therefore not justiciable.

But he fell into terrible difficulties when it came to prorogation as a constitutional matter. He accepted that there have to be checks and balances on all forms of power, but his claim that Parliament already had sufficient powers to check prorogation does not feel credible. Yes, in principle it could legislate against it, but it wasn't expecting this to happen without warning - it had limited time, and for it to change constitutional procedures is hardly something it does on a whim. His claim that there could be a check on prorogation after it happens feels weak too; yes, Parliament has the option of a No Confidence motion, but the fundamental point is that prorogation removes Parliamentary scrutiny in a way that it can't do anything about. Bills can be dropped entirely or delayed, which is, the judges noted, obviously not great in a time sensitive situation - even changing the government wouldn't help with that. That Parliament can and does sometimes act very quickly doesn't mean that they don't need more time; one of the judges noted that time isn't infinitely expandable. Eadie maintains that there will still be enough time for Parliament to properly scrutinise the Brexit bills. but this seemed very implausible when he noted that the usual time to debate the Queen's Speech is five days !

Eadie noted that Lord Pannick does not say prorogation is a problem in general, only this specific use of prorogation. His response to this was that any use of prorogation is a proper use of prorogation, and therefore it couldn't be used improperly ! This felt downright ridiculous. Similarly, when asked whether prorogation could give a political advantage, he admitted that it did, but in this case that was an entirely incidental outcome. He had no answer as to why the government should have preferred prorogation (which is at their discretion) to recess (which Parliament votes on). Even admitting that the government gets to use prorogation however they like, this doesn't answer why they've chosen to use it here when there were alternatives.

Finally, one judge was not at all impressed with the lack of witness statements as to the veracity of the documents. He said they were just "floating around" and seemed skeptical that they were complete and accurate. Eadie had no real answer to this, saying that it wasn't convention for ministers to give such statements. The judge was similarly overt in saying that there was no higher institution to act as a check on the executive than this court, the clearest instance by far that the judges do perceive the matter as justiciable and possibly - by implication - even unlawful. Why else make the statement if there's no need for the court to exercise its role in this case ? Eadie finished rather lamely (although convivially) with, "One day, my Lord, I shall persuade you of something !"


Then there was Mr Aidan O'Neill, defending the Scottish ruling that prorogation is illegal. His was an entirely different style of oratory of all of the others. He began with a 20 minute sermon on the importance of the constitution, the Union, the rule of law, and the joys of bonnie Scotland. His whole speech was littered with references to Braveheart, Macbeth, and moral principles. He mentioned the Scottish MPs singing in the House after prorogation was declared; he sharply criticised Boris' disastrous Facebook PMQs as a way to circumvent Parliamentary scrutiny. In some ways it felt good to put the whole situation into its proper constitutional context, and to hear someone say outright that Boris Johnson was a lying scumbag (he didn't quite use those words, but he came awfully close) was extremely heartening. On the other hand, I felt it would have been better to stick to the facts, and I'm not sure how well using emotive rhetoric rather than cold logic will play with professional judges whose whole job is to be impartial and objective. Whether Boris' wider actions can be considered as evidence of his motivation in this case, in a strict legal sense, I don't know.

When he finally finished being incredibly Scottish (honestly I wondered if he was half-drunk), he did make some good points. He maintains, as Lord Pannick did, that there is no need for the judges to rule on every single aspect of prorogation, as Eadie insisted. The case is not about carefully defining the exact conditions and permissible usage of prorogation : it's about examining whether it's been applied correctly in this instance, in these conditions, and whether this usage is proper. There is no need to examine the exact number of days because the point is to examine the intent and the effect. In principle a delay of a single day of Parliamentary scrutiny could be critical. This can be judged by examining the effect, which is something that can be done objectively. The debate is not "academic" as some have claimed, as prorogation is actually happening and having consequences. He also noted that the government have prorogued every single day the law (due to other constraints) allows them to.

O'Neill questioned the statements from the governments. He essentially said that "methinks they doth protest too much" with regards to there being so much emphasis on reassuring people that prorogation was not about Brexit. There was no affidavit to verify the witness statements, which he said was not conventional at all, contrary to Eadie's claims. He said they could not be taken on face value given the government's track record. The judge agreed that the statements the government provided are an excuse for prorogation, not actually an explanation for why it's being used in this way. O'Neill added that the amount of time prorogation removes means that there will be hardly sufficient time to adequately scrutinise the Brexit legislation, and that the PM has admitted the EU may try and hold out for Parliament to delay or block Brexit.

While he did cover some technical details of other relevant cases, his main points were almost all constitutional. He noted that Jacob Rees Mogg had previously suggested using prorogation for just this purpose. He notes that prerogative powers aren't "magic", and must be accountable by being narrowly and strictly constrained, and justified. For them to be completely above accountability violates the most fundamental principle of the British constitution : the supremacy of Parliament. He re-iterated Lord Pannick's statement that although prorogation has never been legally challenged before, the principle of accountability is absolutely established, and the case can be judged on that basis. That Parliament hadn't passed an Act to restrict prorogation does not imply its consent, he said, because they simply do not have infinite time. And once prorogation is invoked, the only way to hold the government to account is through the court. Surely, it cannot be allowed to simply revoke its accountability so unilaterally. This situation, said O'Neill, is a case in extremis, and thus he's not asking for more general rulings on prorogation, but only as to whether this one is lawful. Since it violates the principle of accountability, that is enough, he thinks, to declare this instance unlawful, without needing to define the entire parameter space of acceptable and/or illegitimate uses of prorogation.


My impression is that if the Court decides to rule on strictly legal principles, they will find in favour of the government. This would be reasonable. It's important to separate political and legislative powers - the Court should decide if the law has been upheld, not what the law actually is. Making law is Parliament's job. Though it does have a duty to make the law clear, where no laws exist, how should anyone else presume to say what's legal and proper ?

But, if they decide that their role is constitutional - and there's every indication that they might - then they cannot but find against the government. The use of prorogation is a flagrant abuse of the constitutional power of accountability. They would be deciding not on what the law is, only how it should be applied. The choice, therefore, is a simple one : should they uphold the spirit or the letter of the law ? The latter is easier, the former infinitely more important. Not having a written constitution might just yet be a huge advantage in upholding justice.

Supreme Court Catch-Up : Tuesday

For whatever it’s worth, I watched a fair chunk of today’s Supreme Court proceedings (about half of Lord Pannick (yes that’s really his name), lawyer for Gina Miller who claims that the current prorogation of Parliament is illegal, and all of the government defence by Lord Keen). I’d love them to find in favour of Miller, but I have to admit that both sides have compelling arguments. My opinion counts for precisely jack shit, obviously, because I’m not a lawyer, but ah well.

I agree with Lord Pannick that the courts do have rights to intervene in certain political matters; there’s plenty of precedent for that. He made the point that enough other, broadly similar cases of accountability have been made to establish the principle on which to judge this one, even though prorogation itself has never been challenged in the courts before. I also agree that the government’s stated reasons for prorogation are not their actual reasons, and that it was done in order to prevent Parliamentary scrutiny at a time when it’s urgently required. I think his approach of arguing that the case is not about the Court having to set sensible limits on prorogation, but only to determine if it was done for a proper purpose, is a good one. The Court shouldn’t have that much influence over Parliamentary business, but it does seem reasonable to say that if Parliament was prorogued improperly then there could be legal consequences. And as he says, since the government is subservient to Parliament, the government should not have the power to affect its superior in this way.

However, Lord Keel made the point that Parliament has been prorogued for explicitly political purposes before, albeit under different circumstances. Thus if this prorogation is improper, the court needs to find a very good reason to justify that. Without a clearly stated legal purpose, this is difficult. I don’t agree that the government has provided adequate justification for the reasons for the length of the suspension. Nor was I convinced that Parliament could have voted to change the rules about prorogation - it wasn’t expecting this to happen so had no time to enact the necessary legislation. He made the point that recess and proroguing do have different effects; Parliament is not suspended entirely during recess as some committees do continue to meet, and thus some scrutiny remains. It was unclear from his responses why the government therefore chose proroguing over the ordinary recess procedure. His most damning point is that recess, contrary to recent claims, does not give Parliament the ability to recall itself, so in effect prorogation has not drastically reduced the amount of available time. But against this, a key difference of prorogation compared to recess is that Parliament has to vote to go into recess, whereas prorogation happens solely due to government decree. Had the government declared a recess instead, this might have been avoided.

The central issue is whether the government requires, legally, a specific reason to prorogue Parliament, and whether it’s acceptable to mislead the head of state. Although it seems obvious that the answers should be “yes” and “no” respectively, Lord Keel provided several precedents and Acts that indicate that the first answer may well actually be “no”. As to the second point, that remains unaddressed.

Bercow on Parliament

Bercow's recent lecture is understandably getting a lot of press coverage because of his Brexit comments. While it's probably true that the man is a Remainer, I don't think recent accusations of partiality hold up. This isn't about Brexit, it's about a Prime Minister toying with the notion of breaking the law. And it should be the duty of any Speaker to stand up for the rule of law. Those opposed to the Speaker quote William Lenthall but entirely miss the point :

May it please your majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak, in this place, but as the house is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here; and I humbly ask pardon that I cannot give any other answer to what your majesty is pleased to demand of me.

Which is the clearest possible example not of a Speaker doing what they're told, but standing up to the abuse of power by the executive and for the rights of the House, not the government. How much clearer an example can there be than a speaker refusing the demands of Charles I ?

But anyway, fun though it is to point out obvious bullshit, Bercow had more important and interesting things to say. He himself has played no small role in reinvigorating the sovereignty or Parliament, and it must be said that he is not unconscious of this. Its indecisiveness has become a perverse sort of strength as it struggles against a reckless buffoon. Perhaps in time, with further developments of cross-party cooperation, we'll see a system emerge that's more proactive and less reactive, more in command of the situation and able to make real choices rather than just avoid bad ones. Perhaps we're at an important moment when Parliament undergoes a major reform. Or perhaps it will all come to nothing.

Anyway, here's how Bercow thinks Parliament has rescued itself from irrelevance.


A decade or so ago, the House of Commons was not in a very good place. A series of governments with very large majorities, and governments manifestly of both political persuasions, right and left, had treated it with ever diminishing respect. It seemed to have lost its appetite to contest, to scrutinise, to hold to account ministers of the crown. It had damaged itself immensely, courtesy of the expenses scandal. It was not an entity in which the British people appeared to have much pride.

That transformation could not have been triggered by Brexit alone, nor indeed by the simple arithmetic that the 2017 general election did not produce a majority for any single party. At the
time of dissolution in April 2017 Theresa May had a working majority of 14 seats. As the withdrawal agreement that she negotiated with the EU has been defeated on three occasions, and by 230 votes, 149 votes, and 58 votes respectively, she would barely have been better off if she had not made the
fateful decision to seek her own mandate on June the 8th 2017. This is about far more than a minority status, so let me take you through would have been the decisive factors in my judgement.

The first element, and one in relation to which I hope that I have had a modest influence, is in the use of a quite old and another comparatively new institutional device to scrutinise ministers in real time. The principal machinery here has been the urgent question, or, as it is normally known in shorthand the UQ.

This is an instrument with a lot of history to it; it is provided for in our Standing Orders. it has been there for a considerable time. It allows any Member of Parliament to petition the speaker to present a
question to a minister on some matter which has arisen very recently, is of substantial significance, and would not otherwise be treated of by the House of Commons that day. At but a few hours notice a minister - if the application for the urgent question is granted - will have to respond to that question on the floor of the house. It isn't a single question and a single answer; it is ordinarily a series of exchanges, of a minimum of 20 minutes, but sometimes running to 3,0 40, 50 minutes or even an
hour.

Alas, in common with much else about Parliament, the UQ had rather withered away in the first
decade of this century. In the 12 months before I became speaker only two urgent questions had been heard in the chamber. As those 12 months included the largest global financial crisis since the 1930s, among other events, one might have thought that there was plenty of urgent material out there to discuss. Apparently not. I was determined when I was elected to - and indeed when I stood in competition for the chair - to reverse matters in that regard. As of this week there have been 658 urgent questions during my tenure. They are now an established part of parliamentary life, and I believe that most MPs would consider it very strange and thoroughly regrettable if they did not continue to be a regular supply of them.

The secondary element that I think worth mentioning to you has been a more flexible approach towards emergency debates, which are requested of the Speaker under standing order 24 - and what an individual MP can do with them. This has become the means of securing a substantial debate, of up to three hours, for which provision would not otherwise be made in government or even necessarily in official opposition time... in this instance to debate and to legislate for an act of Parliament in the course of a single day.

Very often, the issue in recent times has been that an application has been made for a debate which has included a request to suspend standing order 14 - which gives the government daily control of the order paper other than on those specified days when it does not enjoy such control. There is controversy about that. My proposition to you is that the standing orders are not the owned possessions of the executive branch. The standing orders are the property of the House, and they are
there for the benefit of the House, and to be used by the House. They are not inviolable, and they can from time to time be changed or indeed suspended if the House wills it.

A crucial aspect of this has been the transformation of the Select Committees of the House over the past decade. Until March the 4th 2010, when the House voted to change its rulebook
wholesale, there was a fundamental inconsistency - an irony which afflicted the Select Committee system. These were committees which were supposed to oversee the executive as it discharged departmental duties, but the chairs of the Select Committees and the membership of them were very largely under the command of the whips, who were themselves the agents of the executive or indeed, so far as the opposition were concerned, of the shadow or aspiring executive.

To put it mildly, ladies and gentlemen, this was not exactly a level playing field. Ministers rarely lived in fear of a Select Committee. To put it very simply, we had a peculiar situation in which those charged with chairing or serving on the committee's deputed to scrutinise the executive were hand-picked by members of that very executive. Now of course that was an arrangement which was entirely congenial to generations of whips of both major parties. People who have power don't rush to give it up. But the question is was that the right arrangement. or was it, as the House decided, time for the House frankly to get off its knees and to take control of its own core functions ?

I think today ministers would not be wise to be too relaxed about appearances before Select Committees. From 2010 the chairs of select committees have been elected by the whole house in secret ballots. Their membership is also determined by election within the various parliamentary parties, once again ordinarily by secret ballot. Candidates are unlikely to endear themselves to their electorates by stressing how little independence of thought they possess, and how enthusiastic they are, simply to help ministers out. These are highly prized places, as the contest to succeed Nicky Morgan as the Treasury Select Committee chair is currently demonstrating.

For many MPs, ladies and gentlemen, those Select Committee chairmanships - all memberships thereof - represent an alternative career path. In other words success in politics isn't just about securing and retaining ministerial office. There are other routes to fulfillment personally and to
effective performance professionally.

An additional factor has come with the creation of the Backbench Business Committee in 2010, what has come to be known by the shorthand BBCOM. This allows considerable influence over the schedule of the House, especially on Thursdays. This committee controls the business of the House, typically a day a week, and accuses for debate and vote matters which would not have been chosen by the government of the day for debate and vote, and which indeed might not be the priorities of Her Majesty's official opposition either, but which are of intense and continuing concern to large numbers of members and, importantly, very often to their constituents.

Indeed it is, if I may say so, probably my biggest single regret as Speaker that the Backbench Business Committee has not been supplemented (as it should have been, and was scheduled to be) by a separate House Business Committee, so that control over parliamentary prime time - that is to say, government time - was not exclusively in the hands of the executive.

I think it's important, ladies and gentlemen, to acknowledge how much has changed at Westminster over the last decade - because it's another reason to believe that the new assertiveness of
the House of Commons is not a passing fad, it is with us to stay. That cultural shift has a number of sources. The first is that the 2010 election produced a House in which 35 percent of members were new. This new blood was thus a clean break from the past. This new blood has not been ground down by the long period of decline that other MPs had endured. It was rather much more willing to ask questions about why the House operated as it did. I know that as early as 2011 (on the whole) pro Brexit side, quite a significant number of new Conservative Members of Parliament several dozen were rebelling against the whip, which was not a common phenomenon in earlier Parliaments. It
was absolutely horrifying as far as the government whips were concerned because they had rather assumed that these people would be good boys and good girls and "behave".

If you believe in a renewed and self-confident accession of Parliamentarism, however, I think that you might feel this is a healthy thing. That new body of colleagues was much more willing to ask questions about why the House operated as it did, as I've said. And in many cases these were questions which were long overdue and for which, put simply, change was the answer.

The blood was however not merely new but different. We've a long way to travel before we'll see a House of Commons which is truly representative of modern Britain, but only the most churlish would fail or refuse to recognise just how much progress has been made in this regard over the last decade, itself a very considerable tribute to the energy, vision and focus of the political parties. There are so many more female MPs, 208, many more who enjoy an ethnic minority heritage - 52 I think now or 8% - and many on both sides of the house who are not heterosexual. There's more variety in the past employment of those who sit on the green benches.

The houses also on the whole a younger place than it used to be, although I think it is extremely important that we do not deny ourselves the talents of those who want to continue as Members of Parliament well beyond the conventional retirement age. In their different ways, the likes of
Ken Clarke and Denis Skinner contribute much to our proceedings.

To conclude this section, then, I think that the Brexit episode and the restoration of parliamentary will should not be seen in isolation. That restoration is about something bigger and better - namely, the willingness of the House to be a much better check and balance on the executive, an ambition which I believe we should all vigorously applaud.

Dear Europe

We find ourselves, once more, at a junction. Britain has a choice to make : should we leave the European Union without a deal, leave with the agreement negotiated by Theresa May, or simply remain as a full member ?

For much of the last three years the journey has been engulfed in confusion, as though we were a drunkard staggering through a dark, foggy night, often tripping over hedgehogs and banging our head on unexpectedly low bridges. The EU has often played the role of a kindly friend (albeit one somewhat estranged due to our own bad behaviour), imploring us to take the right path but never forcing us. It is only thanks to the EU that the journey is continuing at all.

Now something has changed. The fog has lifted, or at least thinned considerably. If we don't yet know the precise details of the route, the main paths and the destinations are at least good enough to make headway. No path is yet fully closed to us, but, by the grace of our European friends, we may before long reach safety. Yet this does depend absolutely on the good nature of the EU as much as it does upon our own choices. Here, then, is why I think that in the current circumstances, our European counterparts should not and will not close the door to us.

Though it is not yet in physical chaos, Britain is in political chaos. But every crisis brings opportunity, and this crisis offers the biggest opportunity of all : a clear way to end the madness and begin to restore our good name. The election of a man with despotic tendencies to the office of Prime Minister has been a serious shock to the system, rallying, at last, opponents to unite behind a common strategy. After freeing themselves from his mastery, they are at liberty to vote with their conscience. It is true that this means the government is now in greater difficulties than before, and that the messages from Britain will seem more confused than previously - if such a thing is possible. It is also true that the Rebel Alliance is a fragile one, and Parliament no more able to make a definitive choice as to the direction than before. Why, then, is this grounds for hope ? Why would it not be better to simply have done with it, to leave us to our own fate and learn from our own mistakes ?

For all the confusion, Parliament has managed to exert one thing with absolute clarity : its own sovereignty over the executive. It is now crystal clear that the option of No Deal must be removed, eliminating one of the three possible destinations. However, Parliament finds itself still partly shackled by the executive elected by a tiny minority of the British public. Such is the way of our constitution; never in the past was it reckoned that even the most devoted members of our political tribes would be prepared to elect someone of such singular ideological incompetence. Although this dreadful, unprecedented event has come to pass, a way to undo this lies before us - one which will finally allow us to make the hitherto impossible choice. For any decision to proceed in accordance with our representative democracy, it is imperative that we have a general election. In order to do that, we must have an extension to EU membership.

Why an election and not (yet) a second referendum ? Because Parliament is not yet united enough to make that choice for itself. The legitimacy of the positions of many MPs are now uncertain. Their recent choices to defect or depart must be validated. With party policies now clear, an election serves, in effect, as a referendum on whether to have a referendum. That and that alone will finally settle the issue.

Of course there is risk in this, but not so much as one might expect, at least in a certain sense. I mean that there is little enough risk that this would prolong the whole process beyond the endurance of Europe. Regardless of the outcome of either vote, no-one is going to have any appetite for another one. The risk of this becoming a series of vote after vote after vote is as small as it can ever be. True, the ideal case would be for Parliament to vote directly, or for a referendum to be arranged immediately. But we are not in an ideal situation. We are compelled to make more awkward choices. Yet those choices are now all but inescapable, and for Europe to deny us this now would be an act of brutal folly. It would snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and stoop to the level of the opponents of democracy we find ourselves pitted against.

It is not in Europe's interest to deny us this final choice. After having made it clear that the possibility of an election or referendum would be good grounds for an extension, to deny this now would render them untrustworthy and be unjust and cruel - the very things we are trying to avoid. For all that No Deal would harm Britain more than anyone else, it would also harm Ireland, who never asked for any of this. It is, self-evidently, better to explore every avenue, especially when the chance of averting disaster looks so promising.

Why a delay, when the option of an election was already rejected by Parliament ? If it needs to be stated, it is because Parliament does not trust the Prime Minister, who is regarded as a liar and a crook. Parliament cannot allow him to control the proceedings - there is a very real threat he would set the date so as to force a No Deal and enshrine his own legitimacy.

It is true that we find ourselves in a bizarre situation, in which Parliament and the executive are at odds in such a way that has not been seen since the days of Charles I. Yet European leaders are not ignorant of this; we've learned that the extension was proposed after assurances were given that it would be granted. European leaders are not ignorant of the dangers of empowering a Prime Minister who defies the will of Parliament either. They are also aware that it is Parliament who controls the agenda and Parliament that they will ultimately negotiate with : any attempt to ignore the law would instantly lose a government a vote of confidence, installing a caretaker coalition government who will implement it. They are further aware that it is the Prime Minister who has prorogued Parliament and removed its voice, and how this has all but destroyed his authority. Therefore, they cannot fail to realise that to do his bidding would be to hand victory to the demagogues, to subvert the will of democrats. They will be blamed far more severely for this than they ever would for prolonging our membership.

It is right and proper that Europe should threaten to veto the extension. There must be some incentive to the opposition to implement a real choice in the probable event that they form the next government. Perhaps more stringent criteria can be attached to the extension; perhaps terms of future negotiations can be strictly limited. Obviously we cannot have indefinite extensions, at some point the issue must be forced. If a final cutoff date is required, beyond which we really will leave regardless of other conditions, then I propose January 31st 2021. This gives Britain (and other nations) additional time to prepare as best it can and avoids the chaotic Christmas period, while being short enough that the end is in sight.

Yet to actually use the veto now would be foolish. Threatening the veto conveys strength; implementing it would be a sign of weakness. It is true that Britain has not been a fair player in the Union. But now there is a possibility to rectify that. Helping us to remain would encourage us to participate more sensibly. Ejecting us would deliver the British people to a man would discard the rule of law. To keep the Union together would be a sign of its tremendous strength; ejecting us, at the very moment a path forward has finally emerged from the fog, would look like the height of miscalculation, a sign of insecurity and deceitful trickery. That is precisely the image of Europe the skeptics would have us believe. Surely, for the EU to give victory to the Euroskeptics and defeat to their pro-European British friends would be against the whole principle and purpose of the Union. And to repeat, Europe knows that it is their friends who are really asking for prolongation, not their adversaries.

Therefore I beseech the EU to grant us this extension. I believe they will, though not without difficulty. While it is a shameful thing for us to have fallen so low by the actions of such base despots, having done so, there is no weakness whatsoever in our asking another for assistance. Rather it is a sign of courage on our part to admit that we need help. We did so before when we asked the Dutch to save us from our own king; we must do so again, now, in order to save us from a man who is little better than a lunatic. The weird, unconventional nature of the British constitution gives it tremendous flexibility. We should see that a sign of strength and use it against the very man who would ignore the rule of law.

Lastly, it is no exaggeration to say that lives are at stake. While expatriots such as myself risk mere disruption to their lives, others less fortunate risk shortages of food and medicine, by the government's own admission. Surely only after every other option has been exhausted should this even be considered.

No course is without risk. Success it not guaranteed. It is possible, however unlikely, that an election could result in No Deal or further prevarication. But it is also possible, and considerably more probable, that it could end the whole sorry affair. There is little at risk to the EU by granting an extension, and much to be gained. In the worst case of an extension, EU leaders will experience more unpleasant meetings, while in the worst case of No Deal, people's very lives are at risk. Surely, for the sake of past alliances - for Britain too has saved Europe, on more than one occasion, from despots and villains - it is worth a little more time.

Crisis and opportunity

Okay, a few words about the latest Brexit developments.

Where to begin ? This dangerous tragedy appears to be evolving into a truly hilarious farce. I haven't felt this optimistic in months. We could be on the verge of total victory, or the very least mitigation into something bearable. Of course the risk of utter disaster is still very real, and shouldn't be taken lightly, but nor should it detract from a feeling that we might, just might, make it out of this intact if not unscathed.

Boris decided that it was better to prorogue Parliament than try and persuade them not to delay Brexit. He used the stick instead of the carrot, threatening rebels with suspension. He blamed MPs for making it difficult to negotiate with the EU. Result ? MPs didn't like this. When asked to delay Brexit, 21 MPs rebelled and were suspended. Now the Conservatives are in a substantial minority government with no control over those rogue MPs. He used threats without even trying persuasion, thinking he had the authority to boss people around, that respect would be granted to him by mere virtue of the office he held and in utter defiance of his personal qualities. Did he apologise for his actions afterwards ? Of course he didn't, not a bit of it.

Actually, he'd already lost the wafer-thin majority when the delay bill was called, and suspending grandees the likes of Hammond, Clarke and Soames exposes his political incompetence for all to see. It's almost self-evident that if you suspend Churchill's grandson then you're on the wrong tack. The conclusion, again, is that that Boris has absolutely no feel for when to use the carrot instead of the stick, losing his first four votes with barely a pause for breath. He answered not a single question in his first PMQs, instead making weak jokes and throwing the questions back. He didn't even apologise for being a racist, making poultry jokes but paltry excuses (terrible pun intended). And he was called out multiple times for not answering questions, and for barefaced lies about the EU negotiations - everyone knows nothing's happening there, but he unashamedly claimed they were making good progress. That he lies is unsurprising, but what's heartening is that MPs aren't the least bit fooled by it. His actions don't make him look strong, they reveal him as untrustworthy. The latitude MPs give to ordinary politicians is not forthcoming for a chronic liar like Boris.

Then, after losing his own brother as an MP - he can't even keep his family loyal - he decided to give a speech in front of the police in which he declared that he'd rather end up dead in a ditch than implement the delay law. Yes, he'd previously said he'd abide by the law, but now we get a PM declaring in front of the police that he doesn't want to obey the law - already a choice being criticised by the police. Once again a total lack of compromise when flexibility is an asset rather than a liability : the problem with "do or die" is, of course, that "die" is a very real possibility. Not to mention the revelation that Boris planned to prorogue Parliament months ago. One would think that learning to compromise and be open are the most obvious lessons from the failure of Theresa May, but apparently neither of these are obvious to Boris.

While Boris founders in his own floppy-haired stupidity, the opposition have got their act together. They considered various options and went for legislation rather than electioneering. That's turned out to be entirely the correct choice, because the animosity between the cross-party MPs who voted to delay is very real : unlike Boris, Philip Hammond is not a man who says, "I'd rather boil my head than hand victory to the opposition" lightly. This produced an acceptable compromise to all sides, which is exactly what Parliament is supposed to do. They then maintained that spirit of unity by denying Boris an election, his only escape route left. The suspended MPs are in no hurry to risk their positions, and the whole opposition don't trust the PM as far as they can throw him. Thus they will, if they're sensible, try and force him to ask for the extension he so loathes before allowing an election (and they've just confirmed that this is exactly what they'll do). That massively weakens Boris' political capital, forcing him either to backtrack on his "dead in a ditch" stance : he can either resign, ask for the extension in humiliation, or refuse and face litigation - which the opposition have planned for. Or of course he can always find a ditch and go and die in it.

It's obvious to everyone that he has not a clue how to behave. Does this seem like a man capable of running a political campaign ? He cannot keep his own MPs or even his own brother loyal. He receives scathing criticism from otherwise loyal Tories. His only political tactic is to resort to threats and bullying, and that simply doesn't work. Threats have their place in politics, but they are always supposed to be last resorts, not the first response. You cannot threaten someone who does not already feel some sense of loyalty to you.

All this bodes extremely well for those wanting to prevent Brexit or at least prevent a No Deal Brexit. If Boris can't even keep his own party together, and can't even persuade the House to call an election, what chance does he have in the actual negotiations with the EU ? Zero.

What, though, of Boris' only escape route - a general election ? The current delay is purely for political expedience - it's all but certain that an election will happen in the near future. Therein we must temper our optimism, a move the opposition have, fortunately, recognised. There are grounds for optimism here too, but also concerns.

Optimistically, none of the above bodes well for Boris. He's gone on a deranged mission to insult just about everyone, much as he's always done. The police, the opposition, the EU, minorities of all stripes, Parliament itself, his own brother, his own party... is there anyone left he hasn't insulted ? His list of allies grows thin indeed. Expelling MPs en masse is unlikely to be something the Tory party machinery is going to reward come campaigning season. And his singular approach of bully and bluster is fine for preaching for the choir - that's why he won the PM election with the Tory faithful - but useless for winning hearts and minds, which is vital for winning back Tory control of the House. Hell, he's gone off to Scotland - Scotland ! - to rally support, the very part of the UK that probably hates him the most. Boris' persona of an affable clown may be a carefully cultivated image, but his political decisions betray that deep down, he is in fact a complete fool.

This all sounds rosy, but roses do have thorns. The strength in the opposition lies not in itself but in the weakness of Boris. The rebel alliance really is fragile, held together only by Boris' ludicrous intransigence and cross-party animosity. While things don't look good for Boris come election time, we should remember that he's largely untested in such a campaign - even fools have a few strengths. Given the first past the post electoral system, it is still credible that, if the pro-Remain parties don't tread carefully, we could end up with a Tory majority. And with many of the rogue Tories not standing at the next election, there's an opportunity for Boris to replace them with loyalists lunatics. How well that would play remains entirely to be seen, especially given that Brexit opinion polls are still narrow - the public still are not reliably convinced of the full problems of a No Deal scenario.

Is it credible that someone who starts their term of office this badly could make a success of it in the long wrong ? Not likely. But things which can't go on forever can go on for much longer than you think, and Boris still has opportunities to exploit. It's hard, at the moment, to see a No Deal happening at the end of October, and credible to suggest that we might have an even softer version of May's deal or even a second referendum. But fortune's wheel is ever turning, and the very fluidity of the situation warns us that any mistakes could be very costly.

I choose to look at this optimistically. Boris and his hideous gang of craven cronies can be beaten, so long as we refuse to play his game and don't make the mistake of fighting him on his terms. Get that Brexit extension. Humiliate him. Continue to pile on the pressure and expose him for what he is. Attack Boris personally and we may yet be swiftly rid of this gibbering idiot. But only then does the real challenge lie before us. Only then can we start to bring the conversation back to the moderate voices of reason and compromise. Only then will we have any chance of addressing the actual problems we face, rather than the personal politics that's incapacitated the entire British establishment.

For you cannot compromise with a lunatic like Boris. But it's vital, when the dust begins to settle, that we, as reasonable men and women, begin to compromise with each other. Politicians failed to do this last time, but came tantalisingly close to agreeing a solution. We need to make this a European style process of compromise and negotiation, offering us, at the very least, a solution that won't chop our own economic legs off. Politicians wasted most of the time given to them at the last extension, but there is hope that, having seen the risks of failure incarnate in a man such as Boris, they will not make the same mistake again. Such a failure would carry with it the risk of opening the door to far worse extremists than Boris - and that would be more than the country could bear.

Making no assumptions is daft

I don't know why it's apparently such a problem for some people to accept a very simple and obvious truth :

When asked why he viewed animal behavior in terms of human experience, given that his more standard approach was to trace how humans are like other animals, Darwin responded by saying that it was “more cheerful,” and “less off-putting,” to think of the animals in human terms than to treat humans as having “beastial” qualities.

Humans and animals share certain properties and can therefore be said to be similar. If you prick them, do they not bleed ? Well, vertebrates do. If you wrong them, shall they not revenge ? Well, it might not be revenge exactly, but they sure as hell won't like it and will often retaliate. When it comes to the characteristics they have in common, it makes no difference to see humans as animals as it does to view animals as having human characteristics. No-one would dispute this for blood circulation or lung capacity or whatever. And yet :

Jane Goodall states, as a matter of fact, that “animals feel pleasure and sadness, excitement and resentment, depression, fear and pain." She “knows” what animals experience because she has seen signifiers of these emotions in their behavior. But if all we had to do to link conscious states like feelings to behavior was to observe behavior, we wouldn’t need arduous scientific research. Mere observation is not sufficient.

The scientific question in an experiment on humans or animals is not whether the organism has the capacity for consciousness in some general sense, but whether consciousness specifically accounts for the behavior that was studied. If this is not tested, the statement that consciousness was involved is not warranted scientifically.

Right then, prove I'm conscious. Go on, you. Prove that I specifically am conscious. You can't, can you ? How would you ever know ? If you wouldn't accept my behaviour as evidence, then you could, I suppose, monitor my brain activity and see that my brain behaves in a similar way to yours. And you presumably accept that you're conscious, so you could safely conclude that I'm conscious. Right ? The author of this piece bizarrely disagrees :

The philosophical “problem of other minds”is sometimes used to justify the conclusion that, since we only have access to our own mind, we don’t really know what is on the minds of other humans. Therefore, the argument goes, claims about animal consciousness are just as justified as claims about human consciousness. But this is not the case.

In human research, methods are available for distinguishing conscious control of behavior from non-conscious control. For example, visual stimuli can be presented in such a way as to allow or prevent conscious awareness (consciousness is prevented by briefly flashing the stimulus and following it with a longer-lasting stimulus that “masks” the first one).20 In such studies, humans cannot verbally report on the identity of the stimulus (they deny seeing anything). Nevertheless, non-verbal behavioral responses (pointing or pressing buttons) or changes in physiological responses (sweating, pupil dilation, or heart rate) can indicate that the stimulus was meaningfully processed. Because verbal responses (in the sense of a sincere, intentional report, as opposed to an automatically elicited exclamation) can only be given about things that one is aware of, verbal report is the gold standard in human consciousness research.

I call bullshit. The author is saying the behavioural responses are not enough to justify a claim of consciousness and then saying the exact opposite ! This is absurd. Who would claim that an illiterate mute human isn't conscious ? Nobody at all, that would be highly offensive. In the strictest sense, each of us can only ever know for certain that we ourselves are conscious. Consciousness is by definition a non-physical experience, there are no fields or particles of consciousness we can measure. Behaviour is really all we've got to go on. Even knowing the EM field in our brain won't tell us what someone is experiencing, not really - not in the strictest sense demanded here.

I agree that it's difficult to decide which behaviour is due to conscious thought and which isn't (and animals may well have different sorts of conscious and emotional experiences to us). But this is true of humans too ! If we apply the standards the author is suggesting here, that is, to make no assumptions whatsoever, we will all of us go around thinking that our inner mental realms are absolutely unique and everyone else is just a sort of squishy automaton; that other people fart in response to eating too many beans with the same degree of agency as when they write poetry in response to horrible tragedies. Come on, this is not a sensible way of doing science. Yes, in the strictest possible sense we can't know whether cats or whales or politicians are really conscious, but if we demand evidence that strict, to throw out common, basic assumptions about the way the world works, we will be essentially saying that we know nothing at all. And that's silly.

The Tricky Problem with Other Minds - Issue 75: Story - Nautilus

Human "exceptionalism" is for many people an unquestioned assumption. For the religious, it is a God-given fact; for humanists, it is a celebration of our unique mental capacities. No other species has created music, art, literature, or built skyscrapers, or imagined going to the moon and figured out how to go there and how to get back.

Cromwell, a warning from history

Or at least a warning from the movie version of history (I'm not going to consider its inaccuracies here). With Parliament suffering abuses that are unprecedented in centuries, and even the Daily Mail recognising the problems of the executive going against Parliament, this movie from 1970 is ultra topical.

For some reason this movie was panned by critics, though I can only assume due to idiocy. One review on Rotten Tomatoes seems to be especially confused as to why Cromwell is here portrayed as a fanatic instead of a hero : because he was, and because reality is rarely about heroes and villains. Charles I acted with villainous tyranny, but he wasn't opposed by a hero but just a different sort of lunatic. Sure, Cromwell had ideals which, it must be said, ultimately brought about the end of absolute monarchy - and he is to be applauded for that. But his methods were flawed, even allowing that the civil war was instigated by the king, and his principles confused. He acts both with ruthlessness, compassion, naivety and determination. He is a complex character who occasionally achieves heroic things but is ultimately a deeply flawed human being.

Charles I is always going to be portrayed as a villain, and rightly so (he started the problems and deserves the bulk of the blame), but this movie comes as close as possible to rehabilitating him. But what is it that Cromwell actually wants ? We never really find out, because he himself doesn't actually know. Supposedly it's a more democratic form of government. Yet Parliament itself is clearly shown to be no more or less competent than Cromwell or the King. All three protagonists - Parliament itself being an entity of sorts - are capable of moments of greatness, yet all are equally capable of squandering opportunities, of squabbling, of catastrophic misjudgements and naked greed. In short, while it's not perfectly historically accurate, it's astonishingly realistic.

I've been reading the Penguin Classics selection of Cicero's speeches entitled "On Government" recently (more on that in a future post). Cromwell is a lot like the tragic fall of the Roman Republic in reverse : Caesar rose to dictatorship through military struggle, whereas Cromwell instigated democracy through a civil war. Both struggles feature eloquent, impassioned speeches from their main protagonists : history indeed doesn't repeat, but sometimes it rhymes.

Except, of course, ultimately, Cromwell doesn't end well. It doesn't end with England becoming democratic and free. Instead, a devoted democrat turns tyrant when he discovers that the Parliament he fought for doesn't function as he thinks it should (I imagine the stage directions to Richard Harris consisted solely of, "Look expasterated. No no, more exasperated"). The situation is an omnishambles with no good clear choices; the three main entities are all, to an extent, a victim of circumstance. None of them really fully understand the problems of the system well enough to implement sensible reforms. Consequently, we don't get a happy ending - we get a tragic failure, brief enough in the grand scheme of things but protracted enough for those living through it. In the end, yes, the country did pull itself back together, but that interlude between monarchies was something it endured more than enjoyed. The mere progration of Parliament doesn't even begin to describe just how damn topical this film is right now.

Urrrgh, breeders !

Well now I mean the world can be a pretty crappy place, but bad enough to want the species to go extinct ? Hmmm...

"Wouldn't it just be better to blow a hole in the side of the earth and just have done with everything?"Thomas, 29, lives in the east of England, and although his idea of blowing up the world is something of a thought experiment, he is certain about one thing - humans should not have babies, and our species should gradually go extinct.

Thomas's idea of blowing a hole in the side of the earth - he imagines a big red button that would end human life and says he'd "press that in an instant" - is actually highly controversial because of a key anti-natalist principle: consent. Put simply, it's the idea that creating or destroying life requires the consent of the person who will be born or die.

Which I find immediately to be fundamentally and irredeemably stupid. You can't give consent unless you already exist.

Kirk lives in San Antonio, Texas. He says he recalls a conversation with his mother when he was just four years old. She told him that having children was a choice. "This doesn't make any sense to me, to voluntarily put someone who has no needs or wants prior to their conception into this world to suffer and die," he says.

Kirk, you're an idiot. Yes you are. I don't care much about how you've reached that conclusion, it's bloody stupid. It gets more sinister :

Posters frequently share experiences of their own mental health, and occasionally condemn those with mental health problems for having children. 

Among the intense philosophical and ethical debates going on anti-natalist groups, there's a darker and less edifying undercurrent. Some routinely insult parents - calling them "breeders". Other slurs are directed at children. "Whenever I see a pregnant woman, disgust is the first feeling." wrote one user next to a picture that said: "I hate baby bump".

In some anti-natalist groups, users allude to the notion that babies shouldn't be born in war zones, if there is a high chance of disability, or even to low-income parents. 

Yes, because eugenics and disgust at other human beings has always worked out ever so well in the past. See, I see nothing wrong with encouraging people to have fewer children for environmental reasons, but to insist that the species goes extinct is a truly perversely pointless kind of defeatist nihilism. It doesn't make any sense to me at all.

The people who want you to stop having babies

They believe humans shouldn't have children. Who are the anti-natalists - and how far are they willing to push their ideas? "Wouldn't it just be better to blow a hole in the side of the earth and just have done with everything?"

The needs of the few

More on information spreading. And why not ? Surely in this age when we abandon reason for madness this is one of the most important topics of our time. Playing tactical games to avoid having lunatics in charge is not good enough. Here's an agent-based model that aims to explain polarisation if the participants are acting rationally but with fallible memories :

“These agents were assigned an opinion, but could change their opinion after interacting with other agents,” says Jiin Jung, co-author of the paper and researcher at Claremont Graduate University in California, US. If they were all acting rationally, you would expect them to share their opinions and sometimes to alter their views if they found that others’ arguments were stronger than their own. The agents were made to behave rationally or irrationally by manipulating their memory. Some of the agents were given perfect recall, while others were given a more fallible memory.

“Those with unlimited memory could remember any type of argument from any perspective,” says Jung. “Those who could forget were split into some who randomly forgot and others who forgot weak arguments or old arguments.” 

“Agents with unlimited memory did not become polarised,” says Jung. But no human has a perfectly infallible memory. What is more interesting is what happens when we account for the fact that our attention spans, memories and energy to debate can change. “If we are rational with a limited memory span, that causes the bipolarisation of opinion in a group,” says Jung. “Even though we are completely rational, our society can become polarised because we forget the arguments of others.”

I would imagine that this uses the classic agent-based modelling trick of reducing things like assessing arguments down to simple parameters, rather than any complex model of how an agent should evaluate an argument. But I'm not sure this is telling us anything new or interesting. It's already well-known that if we hear totally new information on a topic, we're like as not to believe it. Only if it noticeably contradicts our existing beliefs do things get more complicated. All this boils down to, I think, is saying that misinformation leads us astray. We don't have an objective standard of truth, so biasing towards the first thing we hear makes as much sense as anything. I don't think that finite memory really adds anything new here. And :

When we meet someone who holds a different belief, we should try not to dismiss it as irrational. Instead of thinking that we need to “correct” their thinking or re-educate them, we could reflect on what might be affecting their judgement.

Yeah, but from this TED talk :

The first thing we usually do when someone disagrees with us is we just assume they're ignorant. When that doesn't work, when it turns out those people have all the same facts that we do and they still disagree with us, then we move on to a second assumption, which is that they're idiots. And when that doesn't work, when it turns out that people who disagree with us have all the same facts we do and are actually pretty smart, then we move on to a third assumption: they know the truth, and they are deliberately distorting it for their own malevolent purposes. 

We assume people are simply misinformed by default anyway. Which isn't so bad, since it's the most pleasant assumption of all, under an intrinsic belief that we ourselves must be right. The much harder thing to do is to ask ourselves whether we are right. Because, if we're not, we then have to apply those three possibilities to ourselves. It's not too difficult to admit we were misinformed, because that's not our fault, but it's much harder to admit that we were being stupid - and nigh-on impossible to admit we were acting malevolently, which we'll only do in exceptional circumstances.

To be fair, if you do this too much, existence becomes extremely uncomfortable - even if only resorting to the misinformation explanation. So the difficult trick is to manage a degree of flexibility under which any of our beliefs can change, but not all at once - permanently doubting everything leads to uselessly believing in nothing and dribbling everywhere. It's a sensible thing to assume you're right and then question differing information, so long as your opinion can change based on the responses you get.

And yet... we're only too willing to resort to these more difficult explanations when it comes to other people. Plato had it that no-one deliberately commits injustice, and Epictetus (more on him in future posts) added that people were only mistaken about what was right and wrong, not whether they themselves were behaving fairly or not. Maybe. But when I see people openly admitting that they're only acting so as to annoy other people, with a reckless disregard for collateral damage along the way, I have to wonder how far this is true.

Anyway, there's no foolproof guide for working out how to deal with people we (initially) disagree with, so back to the BBC. Perhaps more interesting than the problem of faulty memories, though not entirely unexpected :

Research shows that by associating with extreme minorities your opinions can change in surprising ways. Gaffney’s research builds on work conducted by William Crano, who established that a clear message, even if you do not agree with it, can be enough to move you on other topics. In one of his studies, Crano observed minority groups of students who advocated against allowing gay people to serve in the military. The majority of students did not align themselves with the policy, but they became more conservative on other issues like gun control reform.

Crano suggests extreme opinions put pressure on your entire belief system. You might not immediately change your attitude, but it weakens your other beliefs, meaning they might change later.

Makes sense. It would be a rare individual who would come away from prolonged encounters with any social group without adopting any of their attitudes.

Being small can be very useful. When groups are small they are more distinctive compared to large groups. Small groups might have one, clear message, where larger groups contain multiple voices sharing different messages. This distinctiveness makes smaller groups more influential, particularly if they are very consistent in their views. Likewise, the more uncertainty there is in a population, the more influential a minority group becomes.

This all ties in quite nicely with other, quite different studies. For example this one on how you only need to affect about 10% of a population to radically affect the rest, or this one saying that if only 10-15% of a population are diehards then the rest will fall into line. The BBC article goes on to mention how this is used by both authoritarians and civil rights activists; a more common example, I suggest, are scientists - we may be small but we're hugely, disproportionately influential.

How the views of a few can determine a country's fate

Do you get the feeling that political debate is increasingly polarised? Certainly in the country where I live, the UK, politics appears to be at an impasse. The impression I have is that the same factions seem to be stubbornly rehashing the same debates with little compromise.

Curdle your enthusiasm

We have a tendency to want to pin blame on individual objects, but you would never do that in the physics world. There’s no bad molecule that causes water to boil. It’s a collective effect. And so, we wondered if a lot of the social problems that we face are actually better looked at through that lens.

Or would we ? After all, the spark that ignites the gas that causes the water to boil can be traced directly to the action of individual atoms and electrons. An individual molecule doesn't have a temperature, it just has motion, and that motion derives from the influence of other molecules. On the other hand, motion due to an EM field is a bit different. Still, I don't see that such a model fundamentally changes anything : the end result in an agent-based, network approach is still highly dependent on the structure and number of agents conveying particular information. So :

If you have milk in the fridge, gradually, one day that milk suddenly curdles. That is because microscopically, you’re getting this aggregation of objects into communities. And the math of that works perfectly well for the aggregation of people into communities. Now, the typical reaction is: “Oh, but I’m an individual, I don’t behave like a molecule of milk.” Yeah, but collectively we do, because we’re constrained by the others. So there’s only a certain number of things that we can actually do, and we tend to do them again and again and again.

To continue quibbling over the analogy, you could still model the curdling of milk through the interactions of individual atoms. But it might be a lot simpler to model temperature as a field, so in that sense the analogy could be better. More interestingly though :

We found there’s a closed network of about 1,000 clusters, worldwide, online, across all platforms, propagating global hate of all flavors. Now, if there’s about 1,000 people in each of those (it’s actually between 10 and maybe up to 100,000, so let’s just say 1,000 on average) you’ve got 1,000 clusters of 1,000 people – that’s a million people. And that’s our very, very crude first estimate of the number of people online involved with this.
Q : That’s a startlingly manageable number – 1,000 networks.
Not if you’re trying to find that among seven billion. But they’ve already done the job for you. They’ve already grouped themselves into community.

Again I re-iterate : sometimes things spread more rapidly underground, but sometimes their spread demands exposure. It's going to be a lot harder to build significant networks on direct messaging apps than on open, public, social media platforms. The conclusions of this "curdling" analogy are strikingly similar to what one gets in an agent-based approach, albeit with interesting and important subtleties :

The first proposal] is to go after the smaller bubbles. Smaller bubbles are weaker, have less money, less powerful people, and will grow into those big ones. So eliminating small ones – and we showed this mathematically – rapidly decreases the ecology. It cuts off the supply.

I suppose the only potential difference I would be curious about here is the effect of social prominence conveying authority and therefore trust and belief. That is, famous sources (news outlets or individuals) tend to be more readily believed than anonymous random strangers. But I think this still reduces down to my analogy of seeds in a field : you can either attack the resulting trees and prevent future generations from propagating, or attack the soil itself and kill everything at once. It depends on which factor is dominant - the fertile trees or the soil itself encouraging their growth. If there are already many seeds in the field (that is, if people are reaching a particular conclusion naturally), then attacking the soil is your only option. If, on the other hand, it's coming from just a few big, prominent trees, then attacking them is a necessity.

Number two is that instead of banning individuals, because of the interconnectedness of this whole system, we showed that you actually only have to remove about 10% of the accounts to make a huge difference in terms of the cohesiveness of the network. If you remove randomly 10% of the members globally, this thing will begin to fall apart. 

Which again falls out of agent-based approaches. But the next two are less obvious :

[Third proposal] You get [the hate clusters] engaged in a skirmish, basically, and they think that that’s a kind of supreme battle. It slows them down in terms of recruiting; it just engages them in something that actually isn’t that important... fighting with trolls online is actually worth your time... but do it as a group, do it as a cluster. Don’t do it individually. It will break you. 

[The fourth proposal] is my favorite because it it really exploits the weakness that comes from the multidimensional flavors of hate. There are two neo-Nazi groups, both in the UK, both ostensibly wanting the same thing. But they don’t – one wants a unified Europe, the other wants to break everything apart and obliterate the rest of the countries. So introduce a cluster that draws out the differences. I see it as a way to wear individuals in hate clusters out. In the end, they’ll just get fed up. It’s not that it goes away. It’s just that now they’re actually hating the traffic more than they hate the Jews. It shifts the focus.

Those are not at all obvious from any analogy, but unique to the phenomenon itself. People spreading ideologies are desperate for engagement (perhaps more than they are for actually persuading anyone). It's also a natural tendency to love a good argument for the sake of an argument. If we can't persuade people to argue in a better, more productive way, then getting them to use their talents to stifle the spread of the crazies may be a good second best option. On the other hand, debate engenders legitimacy even when not endorsing the ideas, and even more so if it attracts a large crowd, so I'd be wary of this first proposal (but if there are sufficient numbers with opposing views, wouldn't it be even better to try and persuade the trolls rather than fighting them ?). Setting up a group that exists only to get the haters to fight each other is much more appealing, though I still don't see why the milk analogy is relevant to any of this.

The physics professor who says online extremists act like curdled milk

Lone wolves. Terrorist cells. Bad apples. Viral infections. The language we use to discuss violent extremism is rife with metaphors from the natural world. As we seek to understand why some humans behave so utterly inhumanely, we rely on comparisons to biology, ecology and medicine.

Make America Welsh Again

An interesting article on how the Welsh discovered America and therefore all your base are belong to us, as the old saying goes. Clearly we own America now, so y'all better get ready to switch from ham to lamburgers, start playing the harp, stop saying y'all (seriously, the ll sound is pretty horrible in Welsh) and start singing in male voice choirs. Oh, and expect a swift return to coal mining. And I'm pretty sure I'd heard of a different Welsh claim to America than this one, so our double claim clearly trumps (if you will) everyone else's.

Actually, we don't really want America - it is a silly place. We think your politics is shite but we don't care about own own, so we'd be no good at it anyway. Come to think of it, I didn't hear of Welsh claims to America until about a decade ago, so it's not as if every Welsh schoolchild grows up dreaming of their lost birthright.

But just what are these claims, anyway ? We need not dwell on them as they're obviously daft, but they should be mentioned.

The story goes something like this. In 1170, Owain, ruler of the Kingdom of Gwynedd, in what is now north Wales, died. His sons quickly set about contesting the succession and plunged the country into civil war.

It should be noted that the Welsh had a very egalitarian but ultimately stupid policy when it came to inheritance : all property was divided equally among the sons, not given preferentially to the eldest. This meant that in a power struggle they were all on essentially equal rooting, making chaos all but inevitable. And Gwynedd, though then its own country, was very much "in what is now north Wales" back in 1170 - it hasn't gone anywhere.

One of Owain's youngest sons, Madog, was disgusted by the fighting and set off in search of something better. As Humphrey Llwyd put it in his 1584 history, "Cronica Walliae," Madog "left the land in contention betwixt his brethren, and prepared certaine ships with men and munition, and sought adventures by seas, sailing West, and leaving the coast of Ireland so far north, that he came to a land unknowen, where he saw manie strange things." Finding the land lush and plentiful, Madog reportedly left a small number of his crew there to build a settlement and returned to Wales, where he gathered more followers and ships and set off west again, never to return.

Which is fine as legends go. Nothing wrong with that in itself, but the legend was taken apparently seriously in the worst possible way.

Jones' account reignited interest in a more than half-a-century-old story popular on both sides of the Atlantic that Christopher Columbus had been beaten to the Americas by almost 300 years by a Welsh prince, and that therefore the New World belonged not to the Spanish crown but to the English. The rights of indigenous people who had been there for millennia not deemed worth considering.

Except that the conquest of Wales by the English took place more than a century after Madog died, so any "claim" by the English to own it is immediately bunk on that score, even ignoring the natives (whose claim was much better than anyone else's). It would be a literal case of "all your base are belong to us" : we conquered you, therefore we own everything you own, even if someone else owns it now. And let's not forget that since the Spanish got there "first", even this claim could never be anything more than a lame pretext and/or justification for military conflict.

I think we can skip over how the Welsh lost America legends were disproven. More importantly :

"There is extensive literature on travellers discovering American Indians who were fluent in some European or Asiatic language," Samuel Eliot Morison wrote in in his history of European settlement of North America. "Uneducated travellers were apt to regard every Indian language as gibberish, and so compared it with some known language such as Welsh, Basque, Hebrew, or Finnish, that was also gibberish to them."

Which underlies an anti-Welsh racism as well, of course : the English being happy to replace one set of unfamiliar barbarians with the more traditional variety.

Traipsing through the deep Amazon jungle in the early 1900s in search an advanced civilisation he called Z, British explorer Percy Fawcett was sure he would find evidence of Indians who had descended from Western civilisation. "Fawcett could never take the final leap of a modern anthropologist and accept that complex civilisations were capable of springing up independently of each other," according to his biographer David Grann.

Writing that he had discovered a number of White Indians in the jungles of Panama who spoke "a language related to ancient Sanskrit," explorer Richard Marsh said they offered hints into "how white men evolved from the primeval brown race" and evidence of "at least two great white-influenced civilisations" in central and south America.

But here's the thing : racism is normal. It's practically a psychological universal. For one thing, Dunbar's number (a.k.a. the monkeysphere) suggests that we automatically dehumanise anyone we don't actually know personally, to different degrees. For another, we're rational enough to try and imitate those we admire, but unfortunately not clever enough to figure out which attributes are the important ones so we try everything. The converse of this is that any undesirable properties we find in someone of a different race lead to racial prejudice.

Racism has been with us throughout all of history. It isn't a modern phenomena, and it's certainly not peculiar to white people : it's a flaw in our very nature. It is true that no-one is born racist, and even more true that no-one is born automatically hating those of another race. Those things have to be learned - but not necessarily taught. It seems too prevalent that we should blame it all on history. More likely, this way of thinking is perfectly natural and a perilously easy trap to fall into.

But there is course a difference between casual racism and the sort that leads to atrocities. I doubt that many of the people I heard in school making racist jokes would decide it would be fun to go lynching every evening, or that Jeremy Clarkson (or even Nigel Farage) actually want to go around beating up dark-skinned people. That's why racism is a very common allegation : because it is a common phenomenon, a quite everyday sort of fallacy. It's harmful, yes, but harm is a matter of degree. The kind of racism that leads to genocide, however, is much rarer and more complex. I think it does us little good to chastise people guilty of the former as though they were as bad as the latter, but, nevertheless, the reason that "racism" is such a common allegation is simply because it is a very common fault. Jeremy Clarkson, Boris Johnson and Nigel Farage are all big fat racists, but in reality it's strongly a matter of degree, whereas the term used to be practically synonymous with "Nazi".

Would we do better if we treated racism as a fallacy, the kind of faulted logic that we're all guilty of from time to time ? I don't know, but I do think we should view racism as more of a natural outgrowth of human stupidity and less of a choice made only be evil people. Such people do exist, and such ideologies do stem in part from this flawed thinking. But not every thoughtless joke belies a propensity for hatred, nor even does every act of discrimination indicate that we are all hopelessly lost. Overcoming racism in its entirely is probably impossible. Overcoming the ideologies of hatred, however... well, we have to believe that's possible, or what's the point ?

Part of the attraction of the Madog myth was the romance inherent in setting off on an amazing journey and settling a new land. But a group of people did do this, and a long time before a mythical 12th century Welsh prince was even born, crossing into North America from Siberia over the Bering Strait. Their descendants spread out across the entire continent, building towns and cities and creating complex societies. They thrived for thousands of years before European invaders, and their infectious diseases, brought widespread death to the Americas, forever shaping their future.

The racist origins of the myth a Welsh prince beat Columbus to America

Morgan Jones was close to starving. It was 1660 and he and his boat crew had been stranded at Oyster Point, in modern-day South Carolina, for almost eight months, running low on food with no hope of rescue.