Common law looks as tho’ it is no longer sufficient for domocracy

The principle of subsidiarity is a European idea – and not just in Catholic Europe, but also in the local parish council. It is basically the idea that decisions should be made as locally as possible.

Now, for Catholocism, I think the idea has long been honoured more in the breach than the observance, (though my great hope, ‘Distributism‘, certainly has Victorian and Catholic origins). But so also is, since the Urban District of Clay Cross (now part of North East Derbyshire), which refused to increase its council house rents in line with a Conservative ‘Papal’ government directive. So that is the Parish (Local) council battered into submission. There is seemingly now no local power anywhere.

Of course this power comes down to that inability to produce money, where the Tories have discovered that as the central government, they have complete control and can effectively follow the advice of their funders, creating money only for those they favour.

Remarkably even that rather ‘conventional’ economist and ex civil servant, Simon Wren Lewis has come to a similar conclusion in the last paragraph of his recent piece ‘Starve a kid to save a quid‘:

Sunak, like Osborne, only pretends to misunderstand the nature of government debt. I used to say this deficit deceit was really a pretext to reduce the size of the state, but I think we need to be more precise in the current climate. Many Conservative MPs today seem quite happy about the state paying too much money out to corporations who have previously or will subsequently give Conservative politicians seats on the board, and/or have given the party financial support. What they fear is government money going to the wrong people, people who are not their friends, donors or the very rich, and who are unlikely to vote for them.

So money is power. If each of us know how and why it is created, we stand at least a chance of holding that power to account.

Equally remarkable is the recent referendum in Chile, a country at the unfortunate fascist forefront of the neoliberal experiment, which has, after about a year of agitation, voted with a c.75% majority for change, and now been granted a further referendum where it can vote how to revise its constitution by voting for suitable candidates so to do…

Britain is a long way from any of this and I fear and regret that failed (or perhaps, so far just semi-failed) state Britain is well behind the curve…

Mind you at least Chile has a written to constitution to know and argue against. Although it seems a government favoured church has been torched – the overwhelmingly Catholic population of Chile are likely to be aware, at least of the subsidiarity concept. Voting people, it seems, are in charge. Britain’s supposedly ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘convention’ orientated constitution is, we have, now discovered, based on nothing at all – without that ‘gentlemanly’ and ‘conventional’ goodwill.

I fear we shall have simply to rely on the common law system to uphold it.

Let us hope our common law ‘enemies of the people’ judges are philosophically ready.

Because otherwise the first experiment in neoliberalism will be overturned only to demonstrate how instead it kills off what is (alledgedly at least) the world’s oldest Parliamentary democracy….

Comments

  1. B. Gray -

    I think we in the U.S had a long held belief that our written constitution made us “exceptional”. Donald Trump and the republican led U.S Senate have basically shown that a written constitution is not worth the paper it is printed on if the executive treats it with disdain (except for the gun part), and the institutions established to uphold the constitution fail to hold that executive to account. U.S. Constitution notwithstanding, it seems the U.S. has demonstrated it has the capability to become something far less than “exceptional”.

    1. Peter May -

      You make a valid point, but Britain is potentially worse off because the Head of State has no power (The Queen). So Parliament is supreme and the executive including the Prime Minister is part of that same legislature. when they have a big majority as Johnson does now, without ‘gentlemanly’ conduct we have an elected dictatorship. The only check on that is (when they are legally able) the judiciary.
      That’s it. The US still has more separation of powers than the UK…

  2. Graham -

    One other factor regarding the US is the way the President can pack the Supreme Court with justices who will reflect and confirm his political biases.

    I can see the same thing happening here if Johnson/Cummings isn’t got rid of.

    1. Peter May -

      Hope not!

Comments are closed.