EU Referendum

The Myth Of Post-Factual Politics

Samuel Hooper8 Comments

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The term “post-truth politics” is starting to become an emotional comfort blanket for those people unwilling to examine the reason for legitimate electoral failure

In these interesting times, a lot is being made of the idea that we live in a supposedly “post-truth” or “post-factual” society, where political debates take place and elections are swung not on the basis of evidence and rationality but rather on the basis of bluster and superstition.

Even those of us who supported either Brexit or the election of Donald Trump (this blog was strongly in favour of the former but against the latter) should acknowledge that there is a degree of truth to this criticism of the modern media landscape. As this Buzzfeed article makes clear, when there is a whole industry comprised of people producing inflammatory, fake pro-Trump news articles to earn ad revenue from the clicks of credulous partisans eager to have their existing biases confirmed, something is clearly awry.

But it is also true that dismissing electoral losses as the result of dumb people being duped in a lamentably post-factual world – just as some Trump supporters prepared for defeat by insisting that losing to Hillary Clinton could only be the result of a shadowy conspiracy – is an emotional comfort blanket too easily seized by people who don’t want to do the hard work of understanding why their own ideas were rejected by the public.

I recently attended the debate marking the launch of the 2017 Orwell Prize in London, where the panel – including Polly Toynbee and the excellent Christopher Snowdon – debated the role of the media and of “experts” in the recent EU referendum. Snowdon gives an excellent summary of his own remarks here, and concluded his speech:

Lying may be more morally objectionable, but bullshit is more common and it is just as damaging to public understanding of the world we live in. My argument is not that we are living in a truthful age. On the contrary, there is bullshit everywhere but deliberate political lies make up a very small portion of it – and that portion is not growing.

As long as people have an appetite for having their biases confirmed, newspapers will continue printing bullshit. As long as people think they can get away with it, they’re going to mislead the public. I don’t think we live in the post-truth era because I don’t think there was ever an era of truth. We are still in the pre-truth era and probably always will be.

As the other panellists – Toynbee most forcefully, of course – lamented the way in which the Evil Murdoch Press had supposedly manipulated its uniquely gullible readership with lies and disinformation while Evil politicians like Michael Gove encouraged people to ignore the pro-Remain advice of self-described “experts”, thus causing Brexit, I felt the need to take a stand. So at the appropriate time I seized the microphone and pointed out that wheeling out expert after expert to repeat the establishment line that Brexit would ruin the British economy (as though none of these experts didn’t let their personal biases and preferences colour their opinions) made all other aspects of the decision secondary considerations.

Sky News and the BBC had an endless parade of self-described experts talking about the theoretical economic consequences of Brexit, yet hardly any time was given to experts on governance, democracy, history or constitutional matters. At some point a decision was made that this debate would be All About Economics, and nothing else. One can dispute the dismal predictions of the Remain campaign’s economic “experts” – this blog certainly did – but at least we discussed economics. There was barely a proper discussion about democracy or the constitutional implications of staying or leaving the EU.

This was unfortunately taken by the debate’s moderator to mean that “feelings matter too”, which is not what I was saying at all. My point was that qualitative facts are every bit as important as quantitative ones, and often even more so. I would have expected more sympathy for my viewpoint – among the trendy-lefty, pro-Corbyn crowd at the event were countless people who clearly spend much of their time railing against free markets and capitalism, yet who seem to unquestioningly believe that the slightest potential threat to future GDP growth would make seceding from the European Union in pursuit of democratic renewal a calamitous idea.

When it comes to British membership of the EU, the Remain campaign’s Project Fear spoke only about numbers (and skewed ones at that), with only the occasional bit of fluff about “friendship ‘n cooperation” thrown in as a rhetorical garnish. My point was that in voting for Brexit, it is not that the British people disregarded the numeric facts entirely, but rather that they cared more about other, qualitative facts. Facts to which the Remain campaign never sought to acknowledge, let alone tackle.

The facts vs emotion reduction which met my contribution to the Orwell debate and which now colours nearly all of the media coverage of our supposedly “post-truth society” is therefore a bit too simplistic. There are quantitative facts but there are also qualitative facts – truths which are not based on emotion or hunch or prejudice, but which nonetheless cannot be added up in an Excel spreadsheet, slapped on an infographic and shared on social media.

I voted for Brexit because I believe that the EU actively harms and undermines the democracies of its member states, by deliberate design. I marshalled many facts to back up this position during the campaign – from primary and secondary historical sources, the stated positions of current EU leaders and various other proofs. Just because they are not quantifiable and I could not declare (for example) that leaving the EU will make Britain 11.2% more democratic and give the people 8.4% more control over the decision makers does not make the facts on which I argued my case untrue. And reducing those qualitative facts about democratic control, accountability and the known history and trajectory of the EU as mere “emotion” unfairly diminishes those facts.

When Brexiteers present quotes from EU “founding fathers” speaking of their vision for a federal Europe and tie them to quotes and draft bills from contemporary EU politicians pushing towards the same goals, these are facts. They are not quantifiable, but they are solid facts, much more than mere emotion. And they deserved to be considered and engaged with, yet by and large they were not during the campaign.

Modern politics has become excessively numbers driven. But when the Overton Window is so narrow, the range of policy options so constrained and politics largely reduced to the technocratic management of our public services then that probably becomes inevitable. And we must counter this trend by giving more of a focus to narratives and general principles again. That will lead to greater political engagement.

At present there is far too much self-satisfied criticism of “post-factual politics” in which defeated pro-EU supporters express alarm that people supposedly ignored the only facts available to them and made irrational decisions against their own self interest, and this is not so. There were other, unquantifiable facts which moved people to vote for Brexit. And these pivotal criteria deserve to be acknowledged as legitimate facts, not dismissed as mere emotions.

It is easy and comforting to believe that one’s own side thinks and acts according to reason, logic and evidence while one’s opponents are moved by base emotion, superstition or prejudice. But the divide is very rarely so clear.

And if the “post-truth politics” crowd do not soon realise this and practice some humility, that emotional comfort blanket could all too quickly become a funeral shroud when they next face the electorate.

 

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Oh, So Now You’re A Liberal?

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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The vote for Brexit and Donald Trump’s presidential election victory seems to have wrongly convinced an entire army of snarling, leftist authoritarians that they are actually the virtuous defenders of liberalism

Is anybody else getting mighty sick of the constant parade of left-wing, Big Government-supporting authoritarians suddenly rushing to cloak themselves in the veil of “liberalism” as they struggle to process what they see as successive defeats in the EU referendum and the US presidential election?

I can’t think of a word that has been more overused by pundits since everybody got together a couple of years ago and decided that the related N-word (neoliberalism) was this season’s hottest fashion statement, and started accusing everybody whose views they dislike of being an Evil Neoliberal, as though it were some devastatingly intellectual insult.

Here’s the FT, weeping into their cornflakes about the supposed death-throes of liberalism:

Mr Trump’s victory, coming after the Brexit referendum vote in Britain, looks like another grievous blow to the liberal international order. Mr Trump must decide, by his actions and words, whether he intends to contribute to the great unravelling, at incalculable cost to the west.

And the Independent:

Democracy is changing, and not for the better, but those who believe in liberal values, tolerance and protecting the environment can learn from this setback and fight back.

The Independent, of course, promotes liberal tolerance through its courteous and magnanimous treatment of those who dare to dissent from its positions on social issues, climate change and global governance.

Here’s the Spectator:

In her concession speech, Clinton said her goal had been ‘breaking down all the barriers that hold any American back from achieving their dreams‘. This is the dream of liberalism, which seeks freedom from any social or economic constraint. Elites like Clinton feel confident that they can navigate a deregulated society in which class, gender, and race are all fluid. They support deregulated markets as well, confident that free trade and open borders will serve their own interests in the near term and the whole country’s in the longer term.

Freedom from any social constraint? Only if one happens to agree with the elite.

And the Spectator again, covering itself in even more glory:

The challenge to liberalism is still seen as an argument to be won rather than an irreversible sea-change. But, if anything, the scale of the problem has been understated. The core tenets of liberalism are freedom and equality, ideas that are under siege.

Oh, and let’s not forget the prime minister herself, Theresa May, speaking at the Lord Mayor’s banquet on Monday evening:

Change is in the air. And when people demand change, it is the job of politicians to respond.

But it’s also the job of all those in positions of influence and power – politicians, business leaders and others – to understand the drivers of that demand too.

And I think that if we take a step back and look at the world around us, one of the most important drivers becomes clear – the forces of liberalism and globalisation which have held sway in Britain, America and across the Western world for years have left too many people behind.

Let’s be clear: those forces have had – and continue to have – an overwhelmingly positive impact on our world.

It really has come to something quite strange when Theresa May – a flinty eyed authoritarian who gives me pause any time I check a book out of the library, lest her government use my borrowing history as a pretext for throwing me in jail next week – seeks to wrap herself in the mantle of small-L liberalism.

But now everyone seems to be at it, suddenly claiming that they are terribly “liberal” while the people they dislike are not. Politicians and pundits who only months ago could be found calling for people to be banned from entering the country due to their political beliefs are now rending their garments at the election of a man who suggested that people should be banned because of their religious ones. And in so doing, they declare themselves to be the defenders of liberalism, while utterly oblivious to the irony of it all.

People who wanted to usher in national ID cards, strengthen the surveillance state, extend pre-charge detention, ban UKIP voters from fostering or adopting children, throw people in jail for their Facebook and Twitter posts, arrest people for singing the wrong songs at a football match, ban advertisements for being offensive, hike taxes even higher on cigarettes or alcohol or ban them altogether, levy regressive taxes on soft drinks, erect safe spaces on university campuses, slap trigger warnings on academic syllabuses, shame or punish people for the Halloween costumes that they choose to wear, get people fired from their jobs for holding or expressing the wrong opinion, strangle religious freedom and force people to violate their faiths by positively affirming the actions and lifestyle choices of others – these people are suddenly all over the airwaves, lamenting that it is actually those Evil Brexiteers and Donald Trump supporters who have supposedly brought our previously-idyllic liberal age crashing down in flames.

Well sorry, but this pious, self-aggrandising argument is complete baloney. I can’t speak for Donald Trump supporters, not being one myself, but I am very adamant that my vote for Brexit was a liberal vote for strong, globally-engaged nation state democracy. I and millions of others voted to leave the European Union because it sought to impose a degree of supranational government upon us which far outweighs the limited extent to which most Britons consider themselves European and consent to such governance. I did so because I judged that my inalienable rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are to this day best defended by a strong nation state with a reinvigorated national democracy, and not a remote supranational union with some of the superficial trappings – but none of the spirit – of democratic accountability. Voting for Brexit was perhaps the most profoundly liberal thing I have done on my thirty-three years on this good Earth.

And yet now I am supposed to sit back while every two-bit authoritarian with a newspaper column publishes tedious identikit dirges alleging that I, a staunch libertarian conservative, am supposedly at the vanguard of a dystopian new illiberal movement sweeping across the world and shrouding humanity in darkness and uncertainty? Hell no.

If liberalism is so great – and by and large, it is – then it would be nice if some of liberalism’s new fair-weather friends tried to remember the ideology’s core principles once they have finished weeping about Trump and Brexit and turned their attention back to more mundane political events. Perhaps they might care to remember the term they so glibly appropriated next time they call for something they disagree with to be banned, or for somebody who offends them to be punished by the criminal justice system. What do you think are the chances that this will happen?

After a week of this incessant, tedious refrain about the “death of liberalism” from the commentariat, I have just about had enough of my liberalism being culturally appropriated by the snarlingly authoritarian Regressive Left. It is only in the reflection of Donald Trump or Nigel Farage’s wildest rhetoric that their own paternalistic, control-freakish, coercive instincts can be even semi-plausibly pitched as being remotely liberal, and those of us with long memories and functioning brains know these pearl-clutchers for what they really are – persistent, deadly enemies to true liberalism.

 

Postscript: In this excellent piece, Pete North slaps down the idea that the West is somehow turning its back on liberalism, drawing a crucial distinction between genuine small-L liberalism which is as popular as ever and its decadent, identity politics and victimhood culture-infused cousin which has indeed been rejected by the electorate.

Money quote:

In a liberal society we appreciate that we all have our distinctions and limitations and we recognise that nobody should endure discrimination or punishment for those facets which cannot be changed. Gender, sexual preference, skin colour. But it goes further than that. We try to open doors for people os that people can break out of predetermined roles and destinies. That to me is social progress, where nobody is limited by class and physical attributes.

But when liberals begin to attack the very foundation of our morality and our values and seek to replace them with an ultra-permissive, anything goes morality we lose any kind of cohesion and moral authority. Moral relativism takes hold to such an extent that we can no longer defend those things we value.

What the left have done is to identify all social norms as inherently evil – which has given rise to the cult of the self which in turn has spawned the now toxic brand of feminism we see on the internet and the perverse social justice movement which processes everything through the prism of identity. It centres around a certain narcissism whereby individual rights become entitlements on the basis of one’s sense of victimhood. From this is born the right not to be offended or triggered – and with that goes the death of free speech. Opposition is inherently oppression it seems.

And this is why the culture war of the last decade goes so heavily with what is happening on a more visible level in politics. In what is now seen as a backlash against political correctness, there is something more seismic happening.

And North’s conclusion:

But then this tyranny of what is laughingly known as progressivism is on borrowed time. It always was a moral and intellectual perversion and it was always a minority view. How it came to be one of the most powerful ideas of a century is for the historians but now it seems the majority have finally lost patience and stood up to the left. In this we are not turning our backs on liberalism. We are merely putting an end to the gradual erosion of those, dare I say it, traditional values on which our modern and open society is built. I think this is what makes Theresa May, herself a church and shires Conservative, the right lady at the right time.

The sad part of this is that there will inevitably be a tiny minority who think we are going back to the old days where rampant and open homophobia is acceptable and we will no doubt see an unfortunate spike in racist incidents. But it is a typical left wing lie to say that mainstream society has suddenly become intolerant and racist. That trick might have worked for the last twenty years but the election of Trump tells you that the majority no longer care what you call them. The more offensive to the left the better.

And it is so telling that across the USA we now see the left spitting venom. We now see the true face of the “tolerant” left in all its bile. We can see that it was never about advancing a better society for all. It was about the minority wielding power over the majority – to impose a twisted morality on society without its consent – from the United Nations to the local primary school.

I repeat: genuine, small-L liberalism has not been rejected by the people, and is only under marginally more serious threat from ignorant authoritarians like Donald Trump than it has been over the past decades from highly learned progressives who sought to impose their “progressive” worldview on an uncertain population while actively criminalising dissent.

Those weeping most loudly today about the supposed death of liberalism have often themselves done as much as anyone to damage liberalism themselves through their decidedly illiberal and intolerant past behaviour.

 

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Left-Wing Brexit Acceptance Award

Samuel Hooper1 Comment

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Finally, a prominent left-wing voice that accepts the result of the EU referendum and does not drip with contempt for democracy and the people’s choice to leave the EU

In his latest piece for the Independent, John Rentoul gives us that rarest of things from the political Left – a gracious and measured acceptance of Brexit.

Right off the bat, Rentoul declares:

There are two common views among people who wanted to stay in the EU that I think are mistaken. One is that David Cameron made a foolish and unforgivable mistake in promising the referendum. The other is that the result was obtained by a campaign of lies.

My contentions are that Cameron was forced to promise a referendum by the very democratic pressure that produced the vote to Leave, and that the referendum was about as fair as the rough and tumble of democracy usually is.

And Rentoul is quite right, I think, to state that with the rise of UKIP, never-ending power grabs from an increasingly tone-deaf EU and the systematic crises (euro, migration) facing the union, a referendum was ultimately coming, one way or another, regardless of whatever David Cameron did:

Cameron knew that if he didn’t promise a referendum, his party would become even harder to manage and it would lose votes to Ukip. As it turned out, he had a choice between cutting his throat and slitting his wrist: he could lose the election in 2015 and be thrown out of office or he could lose the referendum a year later and be thrown out of office. Being a politician – that is to say, human – he chose to maximise his chance of winning in 2015 and hoped that winning in 2016 would take care of itself.

Rentoul accurately notes that euroscepticism is hardly a new phenomenon in Britain. While we may not have been asked our opinion on the matter since the 1975 referendum, there has always been a significant chunk of the population opposed to our EU membership, even before mass immigration from eastern Europe or the euro crisis  were factors:

It may be objected that polls did not find that the EU was a priority for voters, and that support for leaving became significant only after the 2008 banking crisis. But there has been a majority in the British public for leaving or for reducing the EU’s powers since 1996, according to the British Election Study (page 6), and immigration has been named as one of the three most important issues facing Britain since 2001, according to Ipsos MORI.

But even more encouraging (from a Brexiteer’s perspective) is Rentoul’s refusal to fall back on lazy Remainer self-delusions that the Leave campaign had a monopoly on lies and misinformation, and that it was this uniquely one-sided dishonesty which somehow tricked a gullible population and swung the referendum:

The second complaint by many Remainers is that the people voted to Leave on the basis of disinformation. There is an implication that journalists failed in their duty to fact-check the post-truth politics – a criticism that must sound familiar in America.

But I don’t think the argument holds up. One of the surprising things about the referendum was that we didn’t hear that much about Eurosceptic press barons dominating the debate. This may be because they didn’t. The media landscape in Britain has been utterly transformed by the internet – as I know well, working for the first national newspaper to go online-only.

If you look at the readership of British newspapers, print and online, not only does The Independent have more readers than The Sun – not many people know that – but the total readerships of newspapers advocating Leave and Remain were about the same (of the 13 weekday newspapers, the Mail, Telegraph, Express, Star and Sun advocated Leave, with 95m monthly readers; the Guardian, Mirror, Independent, Standard, Times, Daily Recordand Scotsman advocated Remain, with 97m monthly readers; the Metro had no position). There are other new news sources online, Buzzfeed and other rivals of The Independent that I won’t mention, but overall I think the media was fairly evenly balanced.

As Rentoul points out, the Evil Murdoch Press doesn’t have quite the vice-like grip over the minds of the British people as many a Corbynite (or even a New Labour centrist) likes to believe. People consume their news from a variety of sources, and exist in social media bubbles of all kinds – pro-EU as much as eurosceptic.

More:

All the same, there were claims made in the campaign that were – I prefer not to call them lies – not absolutely evidence-based. The most prominent was the claim by the Leave campaign that the UK sends £350m a week to the EU. We don’t. It’s about half that. The Leave people justified it by saying it would be £350m if we didn’t have the rebate negotiated by Margaret Thatcher in 1985. Their argument is that politicians will be tempted to negotiate the rebate away in future – Tony Blair, for example, allowed it to be diluted when new countries joined the EU in 2004.

Most journalists reported that it wasn’t true. The trouble is that saying, “It’s not £350m a week it’s £180m a week,” didn’t really help the Remainers. It drove them mad because the Leavers kept on using the £350m, and the Remainers kept saying it wasn’t true, drawing attention to it, and reminding voters that we send a sum of money too big to be understood to the EU every week.

Besides, the Remain campaign was putting out leaflets claiming that for every pound we put into the EU we got £10 back. I wouldn’t describe that as absolutely evidence-based either.

Many of us – this blog included – campaigned long and hard and angrily about Vote Leave’s disingenuous “£350 million for the NHS” pledge, pointing out that it was false and that it served as a greater propaganda tool for the Remain campaign with which to attack Brexiteers than as an argument for leaving the EU. But Rentoul is quite right – the true figure of c. £180 million is just as impactful, and quantitative scaremongering claims by the Remain campaign were no less manipulative and deceitful.

This blog has been busy handing out awards for grotesque Brexit catastrophisation with some relish, so it is only fair to acknowledge times when those from the political Left exceed the low expectations which have too often been set by politicians and the media class. Rentoul’s overall assessment is quite right – the EU referendum campaign was cacophonous and messy, but it was in no way tilted in favour of the underdog, insurgent Leave campaign, and would never have succeeded if it had not ignited already-latest anti-EU feelings among entire swathes of the British people.

So credit where credit is due: John Rentoul is one of vanishingly few prominent left-wing commentators to broadly accept the result of the EU referendum with no ifs, buts or asterisks. If only other left-wing politicians and commentators found it within themselves to do the same, their political movement might not now be facing unprecedented unpopularity and rejection by the British people.

 

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Donald Trump Victory Reaction: Matthew Parris Doesn’t Get It

Samuel Hooper5 Comments

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Self-described elitists like Matthew Parris tolerate democracy only so long as they get to narrowly define the range of possible outcomes before the public are invited to have their say

The outcome of a democratic election in the greatest democracy on earth has caused Matthew Parris to lose faith in democracy itself. Go figure.

Self-confessed elitist Parris has a piece in The Spectator today in which he makes it clear just how very disappointed he is in We the People (now apparently downgraded in his estimation from being a “crowd” to a “mob”) following the EU referendum result in Britain and now the election of Donald Trump in America:

The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States may have signalled the death of the closest thing we have to a religion in politics. On both sides of the Atlantic, democracy risks being knocked from the high altar as an unmitigated and unquestioned good.

The man’s obviously a fool and a nasty fool too. The contest should have been a walkover for Hillary Clinton. But it wasn’t. What happened? Can we be sure any longer that democracy works? Is it really the reliable bulwark against political madness that we always supposed?

Without hesitation I plead guilty to the obvious charge: Trump supporters could level it at me, enthusiasts for Brexit do. Spanish enthusiasts for the left-wing populist party of protest, Podemos, and French supporters of Marine Le Pen would tell me the same and they’d be right. The reason I am beginning to question democracy is that it is producing results I profoundly dislike.

Already it should be clear that this is leading nowhere good. More:

But why now? When Richard Nixon was re-elected, did we who had preferred George McGovern despair of democracy? When British Conservative governments fell and socialist governments were elected, did Liberal or Tory democrats develop doubts about democracy itself? Why did we trust the people then, even though they had given the ‘wrong’ answer — but not now? What was it that people like me did believe, when we said we believed in democracy?

Someone urgently needs to introduce Matthew Parris to the concept of the Overton Window.

The reason nobody much cared when “conservative” British governments were voted out and replaced by “socialist” ones in the 50s, 60s and 70s is that they were actually all largely socialist anyway. Party labels at that time were more or less a nostalgic and almost entirely cosmetic sticker slapped on to differentiate two political parties which had both equally swallowed the dogmas of the post-war consensus and the supposed need for a planned, “mixed” economy (in reality an economy in which the government owned and ran vast swathes of industry, from mining, utilities, transport, telecoms and even restaurants and betting shops).

The reason that nobody in Britain “lost faith in democracy” when either shade of socialist Red got itself elected is because it hardly made a difference to their lives. The all-important (and foolish) decision to embrace rather than oppose socialism had been made in smoky back rooms by dusty, frightened old men (and some callow but zealous younger ones). Giving socialism the heave-ho was never on the ballot paper. The only question was whether one preferred Labour or the Conservatives to preside over our national decline.

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When the Overton Window of a country’s politics – the range of political viewpoints considered mainstream, acceptable or permissible – is as desperately narrow as it was in Britain until Thatcher came and rescued us from self-inflicted socialist suicide, people like Matthew Parris would have no cause to lose faith in democracy because it continually serves up the kind of muddled, un-ambitious centre-leftism that they like (whether they admit it or not), and because elections therefore essentially do not matter.

The reason that Matthew Parris is now so upset, first with the Brexit vote in the EU referendum and now with Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton in the US presidential election, is that both of these plebiscites actually mattered – because two markedly different potential outcomes were riding on the result. Or to put it even more bluntly: because the Overton Window has been expanded, and people like Matthew Parris are losing the ability to fix the policy outcome regardless of who wins an election.

The kind of “democracy” that Matthew Parris likes is one in which he and other people like him get together beforehand and decide the future direction of the country in advance, hashing out a deal between themselves before allowing the political parties to tinker around the edges and squabble over branding. Parris doesn’t trust the people to weigh up the important decisions themselves because he can barely tolerate most of the country, as he has himself previously admitted.

So spare a thought for poor Matthew Parris today. Soon Britain will be leaving the European Union, and the range of possible choices – on taxation, social matters, foreign policy, trade and more – over which the British government has greater or total autonomy will increase beyond the ideological guard rails currently imposed by our EU membership.

Worse, with the rise of Jeremy Corbyn, the British public have a real choice between Corbynite post-war consensus socialism and vaguely enthusiastic capitalism for the first time since 1983. And now, with the election of Donald Trump in America, the Overton Window of American politics has expanded so that the old (and often failed) consensus position on a whole range of issues is no longer the only choice available.

And Matthew Parris hates hates hates all of this. Because not-so-secretly, Matthew Parris hates most of us.

 

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Brexit, Public Protest And The Judiciary

Samuel Hooper2 Comments

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No, criticising legal rulings is not fascism

Right now the internet is bubbling with a lot of nonsense about the role of the British judiciary as relates to Brexit, and though I have my head full of US election news ahead of tomorrow night’s Semi-Partisan live blog, there are a couple of pieces of egregious stupidity which need slapping down.

Today, of course, Nigel Farage made headlines by announcing his intention to lead a march of 100,000 people on the Supreme Court in an effort to demonstrate the public’s supposed strength of feeling about ramming Brexit through without any Parliamentary scrutiny.

From the Telegraph:

Nigel Farage is planning to lead a 100,000-strong march to the Supreme Court to coincide with the start of the Government’s attempt to stop peers and MPs delaying Brexit.

The march, organised by the anti-European Union campaign Leave.EU, will end with a rally in Parliament Square within sight of the court building where judges will be hearing the appeal.

The campaign group is planning to “crowd fund” £100,000 from its supporters to pay for barristers to represent Leave supporters in the court action.

This will mean that the anti-EU supporters will have their own barristers in the legal action, who can challenge claims made by Remain supporters and even the Government.

[..] A spokesman for the organisers said that Mr Farage and Leave.EU millionaire backers Arron Banks and Richard Tice had “secured support from thousands of Leave voters” for the march and legal action.

The march will most likely take place on December 5, which is expected to be the first day of the hearing. The Supreme Court has cleared four days for the hearing which will be streamed live on the internet.

As this blog recently laid out, I am fairly relaxed about the High Court case and the coming appeal to the Supreme Court. If David Cameron’s utterly useless government had a) planned the referendum properly, and b) considered the possibility of Leave winning then all of this might have been spelled out clearly at the time of the referendum, as it should have been.

That being said, MPs are aware of the hellfire which would rightly rain down on them if they seriously attempted to subvert the referendum result; if they now want to give their cosmetic blessing to a high-level instruction to the government to invoke Article 50 then they are welcome to go ahead.

Of course, some people inevitably then take it too far. UKIP leadership candidate Suzanne Evans quickly took to the airwaves making incoherent comments about the need to exercise “democratic controls” (whatever that means) over the judiciary.

From the BBC:

Ms Evans told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme there were likely to be “protests and demonstrations”, but added that these would be peaceful.

She added: “I have a concern that Article 50 is not intended to facilitate nation states leaving the European Union. I think it’s there to frustrate them.”

Ms Evans said she thought the legal process could “water down Brexit”.

She added: “I think it’s amusing that the very same people who say it’s all about parliamentary sovereignty have, for the last 48 years, been trying to undermine parliamentary sovereignty”.

Ms Evans said: “I think there’s a debate to be had about whether or not judges are subject to some kind of democratic control.”

She did not want to undermine “their judicial independence”, but added: “I suppose that in this case, we have had a situation where we have judges committed to stay in the European Union…

“I’m questioning the legitimacy of this particular case. We know that the legal profession threw a collective hissy fit when we voted to leave.”

This is just incoherent garbage. “Democratic controls” could mean anything from moving towards a system where many judges are elected (as in many American states) toward some kind of constitutional fix to prevent judges from ruling to delay or impede the government from carrying out the instructions from this or any future referenda.

At no point does Suzanne Evans articulate what kind of controls she has in mind, which naturally plays into the hands of tremulous Remainers who are lightning-quick to portray any intemperate or ill-considered language from Brexiteers as a sign of the oncoming fascist apocalypse wrought by Brexit.

From the Huffington Post:

Her comments were branded “irresponsible”. by Labour’s shadow Brexit secretary Keir Starmer. “Some of us have worked in countries where judges do as governments tell them and we know that is highly corrosive of the rule of law and democracy,” he told Today.

Starmer said the High Court had simply “upheld the rule of law” by deciding the prime minister did not have the power to trigger Article 50 without a parliamentary vote. “It’s a slippery slope,” he said of Evans’ comments. “Principle is really important here. The rule of law really matters. It underpins this country.”

However Evans said she had not been talking about judges being subject to elections, but instead “pre-appointment and confirmation hearings” and “scrutiny by select committees”.

Typically, hysterical and bitter Remoaners like Coke Zero Conservative Anna Soubry led the way with her cries of “fascism!”:

However, many pro-EU commentators, in their sudden high-minded support for the independence of the judiciary, seem to be suggesting that any form of protest directed at judges or the courts is absolutely unacceptable and fascistic, whatever the reason.

LBC’s notoriously and stridently europhile presenter James O’Brien ripped into the protest, essentially declaring that it is wrong to protest legal decisions and rulings:

Today James gave his reaction to the march and it’s safe to say he wasn’t impressed: “We’re post-truth now…what’s Mr Farage doing? Having a little march to the Supreme Court to complain about British judges enacting British laws in British courts.

“Truly we are down the rabbit hole!”

James continued: “He says to remind people what they voted for. I appreciate your core support is a little bit flaky pal, but I don’t think anyone’s forgotten what they voted for.

“It’s quite incredible. Yet we’re all still standing alongside, going: ‘Oh, I wonder why this is happening.’

“I’m not wondering why this is happening. I know why this is happening. Same reason it’s happened throughout history. You take angry people who feel like they’re not getting a fair deal, give them a false target for their fury and just sit back and watch the whole place burn down.”

Presumably O’Brien feels similarly sickened when crowds of people assemble in front of the United States Supreme Court to protest in favour of socially progressive outcomes, like striking down the Defence of Marriage Act (DOMA). Except we all know that O’Brien would have no problem with such protests. Demonstrating about legal cases is abhorrent and intimidating when Nasty Brexiteers do it, with their thuggish and populist ways, but absolutely fine when the people march under a rainbow flag or advocate for a progressive cause.

But some of the most thin-skinned people of all are those within the legal profession, who apparently feel under assault by Brexiteers and parts of the media in the wake of the High Court decision.

From the Guardian:

The justice secretary, Liz Truss, is embroiled in an extraordinary row with the country’s barristers, after she was accused by the Bar Council of not fulfilling her role as “the conscience of the government”.

Truss has failed to condemn vitriolic attacks on the three judges who last week ruled that parliament must be given a vote before Britain triggers article 50, launching the Brexit process.

Chantal-Aimée Doerries QC, the chairman of the Bar, the representative body for barristers in England and Wales, told the Observer that the cabinet minister had a duty to uphold the rule of law. “[Her job] is sometimes called the conscience of the government and one would expect her to speak out on something like this,” she said.

The high court ruling on Thursday, which the government has said it will appeal, unleashed a torrent of personal abuse directed at the judiciary, with one prominent cabinet member claiming the judges’ decision was “unacceptable”.

Under huge pressure to defend the independence of Britain’s judges, Truss – who is also lord chancellor – issued a terse statement on Saturday, observing: “The independence of the judiciary is the foundation upon which our rule of law is built and our judiciary is rightly respected the world over for its independence and impartiality.”

What more do these wobbly-lipped victims want? The High Court made a decision, and various citizens together with certain press outlets exercised their free speech rights to criticise that decision in loud and forceful terms. Did anybody attempt to physically or mentally coerce the judges who made the ruling? No. Has anybody hatched a plan to neuter the judiciary’s ability to rule in future such cases? No. So what, exactly, does the Bar Council want? Apparently they want to be exempt from criticism. And to elevate the judiciary into such an exalted position would be truly frightening and totalitarian.

If the Bar Council, assorted other members of the judiciary and a coterie of Remainers expect Liz Truss to stop the Big Bad Scary Media from uttering opinions about the validity of legal decisions or the motivations of the people who make them then they really have taken leave of their senses, as well as any conception of the role of a free press in a democracy.

All in all, many Remainers seem to be taking leave of their senses. Those people who never gave the judiciary a second thought but who are now lionising it simply because they delivered a verdict which seems to frustrate some Brexiteers need to realise that the judiciary is not always high-minded and impartial.

The BBC reports that Lord Judge, the former Lord Chief Justice, opined that the Supreme Court should not overturn the High Court’s ruling because to do so might be *perceived* as a victory for the demonstrators:

The justice system could be undermined if a ruling that only Parliament can trigger Brexit is overturned, a former lord chief justice has said.

Lord Judge said it would be seen as a victory for pro-Brexit demonstrators should the Supreme Court reverse last week’s controversial High Court ruling.

[..] Lord Judge, who was the most senior judge in England and Wales between 2008 and 2013 and who is now a crossbench peer, told BBC Newsnight that people were entitled to protest but he was concerned about the impact the case might have on the legal system.

“People can march as much as they like,” he said.

“I don’t think it makes any difference to the judicial decision but it does make a difference to public order.

“Let’s say for the sake of argument the Supreme Court decides the High Court was wrong, it will undoubtedly be conveyed as a victory for the demonstrators.

“It won’t be but that’s what will be conveyed. And if that is conveyed, you’ve undermined the administration of justice.”

In other words, the head of the judiciary from 2008 to 2013 thinks that the Supreme Court should make a decision not based on the law, but rather on a desire to signal to unruly Brexiteers that judges cannot be pushed around. Even if there are found to be legal grounds for overturning the lower court’s decision, Lord Judge believes that the Supreme Court should allow error to go uncorrected in order to put the people in their proper place.

And yet criticising these people or displaying the slightest scepticism about their motivations and objectivity is apparently tantamount to fascism.

Give me a break.

 

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