Boris Coup: Day 19

Nineteen days into the Boris coup. It struck me that this was the time for a tribute to that seminal experience that made BoJo the man he is today. Him and one of his successor, David Cameron.

Boris ‘The Law's for You’ Johnson and 
David ‘It's not my fault’ Cameron

I speak, of course, of the Bullingdon Club in Oxford. This, for anyone not familiar with that fine institution, is a club for the wealthiest students of the university. They engage in activities as charming as they are entertaining, such as trashing the rooms of new members, booking whole restaurants where they get uproariously drunk over an expensive meal and then wreck everything, or throwing potted plants through the windows of an Indian restaurant on their way home.

Ah, boys will be boys, won’t they? Of course, if their parents didn’t rally round and settle all the damages, if indeed they were from deprived backgrounds, respectable Tory voters would be up in arms. 

“To jail with them, and throw away the key,” they’d say.

But when it’s the sons of the wealthy causing criminal damage, Tories don’t want them chucked in jail, they want them to lead their Party. And, indeed, become Prime Minister. Which both Cameron and Johnson have done.

You have to have some sympathy with the poor lads. Well, poor rich lads. With that kind of background, how could they possibly be anything other than what they are? Taught from the earliest age that they are entitled to anything they want, and then having it proved to them by being given it, how can they possibly think themselves subject to the same standards as the rest of us?

David Cameron has been giving interviews to try to boost the sales of his newly published memoirs, which by all accounts they badly need. He’s happy to denounce Boris and his sidekick Michael Gove for the lying campaign they ran for the referendum, and the way they’re trashing the UK Constitution and undermining its democracy today.

But what is beyond him is to admit that he was in any way responsible for this mess. And yet there was no need to call the referendum. Once called, an intelligent cross-party campaign could have been run to prevent a vote for Brexit. He, instead, called it to try to mollify his far right (and look how that’s worked out for him) and then ran a dismal campaign, which was defeated.

According to him, none of that is his fault. How could it be? He lives in a world in which you can trash a restaurant and not be held to account for it. Taking responsibility for things that go wrong just isn’t something he’s been trained to do.

BoJo’s gone still further. He knows that the law simply doesn’t apply to him.

He started his coup by flouting convention and suspending Parliament for an inordinately long time, so that he wouldn’t be subject to any kind of scrutiny or opposition as he prepared for a hard Brexit. We’re now into that period of suspension when he’s working in the shadows where we can’t see him.

Anyone who’s been a parent will remember calling to kids they couldn’t see, “whatever you’re up to, stop it”.

That would be the thing to say to BoJo right now. Except that he’d ignore us. We’re in the extraordinary position of having to ask whether the Prime Minister will obey the law. This may seem odd, since he’s promising us a new law and order initiative in the near future. It seems that’s law and order for us, but not for him.

Look at where we stand these days. Just before it was suspended, Parliament passed legislation obliging the Prime Minister to extend the Brexit process if he didn’t have a deal in place by 19 October, and couldn’t get Parliamentary support for a hard Brexit.

He’s repeatedly said he won’t ask for an extension.

So is he going to break the law?

No one knows. All that we know is that, as another unfortunate whose life was blighted by the Bullingdon Club, all his training tells him that he’s above all that kind of thing. Breaking the law? He makes it, he doesn’t have to follow it. He knows what’s best, and if that means acting illegally, so be it. That makes him a champion of the people, not a common criminal.

After all, at Oxford no one held him to account for failing to respect the law. Why should he now?

So sad. Poor Cameron and Johnson. Ruined by their upbringing. Although, it won’t be them that pays the price, it’ll be us.

Just as in the Bullingdon Club, someone else always pays.

Boris Coup: Day 15

Day 15 of the coup and, it has to be said, it still isn’t all going Boris’s way.

At least, he’s finally got his prorogation of Parliament in place. On Monday evening. Just as soon as he possibly could. On the way, in the small hours of Tuesday morning, he did have to lose one more vote – maintaining his 100% record of six votes lost out of six votes held – when the House of Commons failed to agree his second demand for a snap general election.

But at any he’s got those irritating parliamentarians out of his hair for the next few weeks. Just like Charles I did when he got fed up with them. Though, to be fair, that didn’t work out all that well for Charles, the only king literally to have lost his head.

In any case, day 15 saw the announcement that the highest court in Scotland decided that the prorogation was illegal and declared it null and void. They didn’t actually order that Parliament be recalled, leaving it to the Supreme Court in London to confirm or deny its judgement and decide whether to issue the order.

Still, however the Supreme Court decides, it was good to see one set of judges saying that it was unconstitutional to suspend Parliament, just because it was annoying the Prime Minister. Most of us would feel the same. Well, most of us who think that Parliamentary Democracy isn’t just an empty phrase.

Tom Watson: only Deputy Leader of Labour
But showing a lot more leadership than his nominal boss

Meanwhile, on the other side of the now-suspended House of Commons, Tom Watson, Deputy Leader of the Labour Party is due to speak out for a clear decision by the Party that it demands a new referendum even before an election – Watson reckons that an election can’t decide the Brexit issue – and that it explicitly backs remaining in the EU in that referendum.

An excellent plan. We’ve had three years of trying to find a Brexit formula that will please a majority of the people, and have been unable to come up with one. Doesn’t rather suggest that the problem isn’t about one deal rather than another, but about Brexit itself? There simply is no Brexit deal that will leave us better off.

So why not oppose Brexit altogether?

And Labour, committed as it is to protecting the interests of the many, should surely be opposing a measure that would leave the many less well of than today.

It’s good to see leadership from the Labour Party. Though disheartening that it has, once more, to come from someone other than the nominal leader.

That leader, Jeremy Corbyn himself, is sticking firmly on the fence on Brexit, and keeps insisting that he wants to see a general election soon. Though not quite as soon as he was demanding a while back. It must suit him to have the excuse of wanting to get a no-deal Brexit firmly off the table first, since he must have worked out that with the polls as bad for Labour as they now are, he would be unlikely to win a majority just now.

The interesting thing is that the Tories, too, are doing badly. Theresa May must be getting some consolation for having been driven out of office by the ghastly BoJo when she sees what a mess he’s in. She must be splitting her sides.

In fact, one of the eye-openers of the first 15 days of the coup is what it has revealed about Boris. Yes, he’s just as unpleasant, narcissistic and authoritarian as most of us imagined. But, and this has certainly come as a surprise to me, he’s proved himself a far less effective politician than I thought.

My fear has been that all his car crashes of the last few days might just make his supporters stronger in their backing, seeing him as the victim of the vile tricks of those wicked Parliamentarians. But the last two polls have his lead down in the low single figures, from the low double figures. Still a lead – no good news for Corbyn there – but far less than before the coup.

So it looks like he may be a significantly less redoubtable figure than I had feared.

For that relief, at least, let’s be profoundly grateful…

Boris Coup: Day 5

Day 5 of the Boris coup coincides with the eightieth anniversary of the day German tanks rolled across the Polish border, on 1 September 1939, and the Second World War broke out in Europe.

It’s perhaps appropriate since the battle lines within Britain have also hardened.

Stop the Coup protestors

Tens of thousands of protestors yesterday gathered in towns and cities across Britain and, indeed, onto continental Europe where Brits demonstrated outside their embassies. They gave voice to the growing demand to stop the coup. And, at last, Jeremy Corbyn, the official leader of the official opposition, joined in. Not from in front, sadly, where the leader should be, but at least he made an appearance in a crowd in Glasgow.

It’s surprising that a man who claims to be a radical of the left took so long to recognise a popular movement resisting the far right. A radical worthy of the name wouldn’t simply be joining it, he’d be taking the leadership. Indeed, he might have been in the leadership from the outside.

That, however, isn’t Corbyn’s style. The Guardian inadvertently expressed it well: it wrote that Corbyn was putting his weight “behind the movement”. That struck me as fully summing up his approach to leadership: from behind.

Corbyn (in a pale blue suit) makes an appearance
at a Stop the Coup rally in Glasgow

Meanwhile, on the other side the ranks are closing too. Within the junta, not a word is being spoken in opposition.

Sajid Javid who, as I mentioned yesterday, had been the target of a thoroughly despicable move by the real power in Downing Street, Dominic Cummings, has since described his relationship with BoJo as excellent.

Nicky Morgan, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, who said on 6 June that “proroguing parliament is clearly a mad suggestion”, now has nothing to say against it.

Matt Hancock, Health Secretary who, also on 6 June, said “prorogation would mean the end of the Conservative Party”, has equally dropped all objections.

And why?

The Conservative Party isn’t like a party of the left. It doesn’t exist in order to achieve any particular societal or economic goal, like redistribution of wealth, collectivisation of industry or social justice. It exists for one and only one reason: to win and hold power.

Millions of voters have decided that, far from being an illustration of how a representative body divides over a question that divides society, parliament’s inability to decide on Brexit is a failure of that body. More specifically, it is a failure of the supposedly corrupt and self-serving politicians who form it. Those voters have a strictly limited grasp of democratic notions. Essentially, they believine that what they want is what should happen, since they speak for all of the people. They therefore see a Prime Minister confronting parliament as a champion of their rights and beliefs.

In other words, to them the coup is a blow for freedom. Only when it is complete, and their freedom has gone, will they at last dimly understand that they may not have been acting in their best interest.

But for now, it means prorogation is a vote winner. And that’s why so many leading Conservatives are rallying round BoJo. They seem in him, at last, the chance of re-election which had spectacularly evaporated under May.

Sadly, they’re probably right.

The Boris coup: day 3

Boris has announced that he’s now going flat out to get a deal with the EU.

Why now particularly?

Because now he’s doing away with the interference of those pesky members of parliament. Of whom he happens to be one. And by no means the least pesky (ask Theresa May).

If anyone was in any doubt of the plans of the Downing Street junta, a source from inside the bunker cleared them up on Thursday, as Heather Stewart tells us in the Guardian:

We’ve been very clear before that we will deliver Brexit by any means necessary and that remains the case.

Any means that they deem necessary. If that means trampling mere constitutional niceties, say by removing the only means of democratic oversight of government that Britain has, well, you can’t make brain soup without breaking heads.

Citizens out in the streets to resist the coup
And where was the Leader of the Opposition? Nowhere to be seen

Boris Johnson, we have come to learn down the years, may not always be entirely truthful in his public pronouncements. Few can have been naïve enough to believe him when he announced he was proroguing parliament to give himself time to refine his domestic agenda. If they were that innocent, there was a lovely hot-mike moment, also on Thursday, when, as Heather Stewart also points out, the defence secretary Ben Wallace was caught saying:

”Parliament has been very good at saying what it doesn’t want. It has been awful at saying what it wants. That’s the reality. So eventually any leader has to, you know, try.”

He continued: “Our system is a winner-takes-all system. If you win a parliamentary majority, you control everything, you control the timetable. There’s no written separation, so … you pretty much are in command of the whole thing. And we’ve suddenly found ourselves with no majority and a coalition and that’s not easy for our system.”

Ah, yes. He belongs to the lazy right that believes things should be easy. 

In a democracy, when parliament can’t decide what it wants, you wait until at last a majority emerges for one solution or another. A system where one man decides he can do without a majority, and does away with parliament to impose the decision himself, is called an autocracy.

But Boris can dress up what he’s doing as democratic because there is widespread voter support for him. And that shouldn’t surprise anyone either: whenever an autocrat takes power, he does so with a large minority, or even a majority, backing him among the people. Right now, the Tories enjoy a lead over Labour in the low double figures, small but enough to encourage him down the road he’s taken. Indeed, add in the Brexit Party vote, which he would get if Farage’s party chose not to stand candidates against Tories, and he’d be sitting on 45%, a dream level of support for an autocrat.

Also enough to win him a sizeable majority in parliament if he decided to go back to ruling through it. Which, as Ben Wallace indicated, he would probably do if he had the majority that gave him the control he wants.

His strong position isn’t only down to Boris. It equally depends on the sad weakness of the official opposition to him. It’s interesting watching all these developments from abroad, in Spain. One of the better Spanish papers, El País, had this to say about developments in Britain:

A triple offensive, with appeals to the courts to overturn the prorogation, calls to citizens to block the streets and a final attempt in Parliament to prohibit by law a disorderly exit from the EU, are laying the groundwork for a decisive week in the history of the country.

Well, the appeals to the courts have started badly, with a Scottish judge refusing an interim order reversing the prorogation. Still, the efforts proceed, under the leadership among others of the doughty, impressive Gina Miller.

Citizens have been taking to the streets to try to block BoJo’s coup. Now here’s where one might expect a radical left-winger to prove his credentials. A man from that political tendency would, one might imagine, be a strong proponent of direct extra-parliamentary action by the population, to reinforce any action in parliament.

In other words, the protest action called ‘stop the coup’ gave Jeremy Corbyn, the official Leader of the Opposition, the opportunity to prove his worth. Sadly, it has proved exactly that. His is a business-as-usual approach, and instead of joining the protestors, he preferred to go campaigning in a Scottish constituency.

Most of us already knew this about him, but his failure to pick up the baton offered him by ‘stop the coup’ proves it: he’s a Leader of the Opposition who can’t lead, and who doesn’t even oppose much.

No wonder BoJo is opening up a commanding lead in the polls.

That leaves Corbyn with only the legislative route open. To push a bill – or help push someone else’s bill, since there are real leaders in the House of Commons – through Parliament, in the brief time it’s allowed to meet before it’s prorogued.

Then hope for the best against the odds, since BoJo has already shown his readiness to ignore Parliament.

Oh, well. As El País says, it’s a historic moment for Britain. And, given the quality of the leadership on display, a pretty dire one.

The Boris coup: day 2

It’s day 2 of the Boris coup.

Boris Johnson now rules without parliamentary limits or even oversight on his power. And why? Because the British constitution, unwritten and dependent on politicians following convention, allows him too. A lesson for us all, if and when BoJo’s autocracy ends, that we have to stop regarding the unwritten constitution as a charming tradition, but at as a constant threat to democracy which we have to replace with something enforceable in law.

So where do we stand on day 2?

“Parliament will consider this” petition against its prorogation 
While it’s prorogued?  

As of this morning, the petition against the proroguing of parliament has passed the 1.2 million signature mark, one of them my own. I signed because it seemed important, though I signed with little hope of its doing any good. After all, if BoJo can ignore the elected representatives of the people, why should he pay any attention to the people themselves?

Besides, the petition is to parliament. I’m not wholly clear how parliament can react to it while it’s prorogued. Aren’t we asking parliament to reverse a prorogation which it can’t until that prorogation ends?

In any case, BoJo won’t give a damn about the opposition he’s getting. He has plenty of support. Naturally, the right-wing press, the Telegraph, the Sun and the Mail prominent among them. Interestingly, they back the prorogation as a way to ensure that the will of the people is respected. In other words, that the Brexit referendum decision is carried out, even though no one voted for a hard Brexit and very few voters back one.

The usual suspects support BoJo's assault on parliamentary democracy
In the name of respecting a democratic decision, of course

But isn’t the right wing’s position gloriously ironic? They see the proroguing of parliament as a necessary step to enforce a democratic decision.

We suspend the central institution of our democracy in order to protect democratic rule? Only an autocrat and his supporters could come up with a paradox that bizarre.

Or that ugly.

BoJo's British coup

Let’s be absolutely clear: the decision to prorogue parliament was taken by Boris Johnson, but it was issued in the name of the Queen. Why? Because Johnson was exercising a royal prerogative.

You thought the British monarchy was just a matter of pageantry and ceremonial? Think again. It is no longer the monarch who rules, but many of the powers of monarchs persist and are exercised by the government. That allows ministers, in particular the Prime Minister, to rule almost arbitrarily at times, and to dismiss any kind of scrutiny by elected representatives.

In a fuller democracy, such behaviour by the executive would not be tolerated. It would be thwarted by a powerful judiciary. By the equivalent of Parliament, in fact. But in monarchical Britain, Parliament can still be overruled, and that’s what Johnson has done. He’s issued a diktat – well, strictly, got the queen to issue a diktat for him – and anyone we actually voted for is out of the picture, apart from those, handpicked by him, who are in his government.

Boris Johnson: author of a very British coup

There’s nothing unusual about this, historically. A man – it almost always is a man – who wants power untrammelled by constitutional niceties, starts on his road to autocracy by a coup d’état against a parliamentary body he finds vexatious.

Julius Caesar took on the Roman Senate. He came unstuck personally, murdered by a group of aristocratic senators, but in the civil war that followed, his successors won the imperial power in Rome that had eluded him.

In Britain, Charles I was no more successful than Caesar in breaking the power of parliament, and he too paid with his life, but again at the cost of a civil war.

Napoleon came to power in a France drained by tyranny, misgovernment and war, and secured his own rule by emasculating parliamentary authority. That meant he could exercise arbitrary and unconstrained power. The consequence was even more deaths in war leading to ultimate crushing defeat.

When Hitler managed to get MPs elected to the Germany parliament, they infamously showed their contempt for the institution of which they were members by turning their backs on the speaker. In short order, the Nazis had reduced parliament to a speaking shop only, wholly docile to Hitler’s rule.

Why do they get support when these would-be autocrats go down that road? After all, the people suffered terribly in every one of the cases I’ve mentioned and, as a general rule, things ended pretty badly, above all for them.

There is a naïve belief among many citizens, even in a democracy, that elected representatives are all lying, corrupt, power-hungry and ineffective. They look instead to a strong man who will sweep all these timeservers and timewasters out of the way and get things done. The things that everyone – by which they mean everyone who thinks like them – know to be necessary and which are being held up by the corrupt opportunists who occupy parliamentary seats.

That, after all, is exactly what has happened with Boris Johnson. Parliament has been unable to legislate Brexit. It hasn’t been able to do so because it is divided within itself, but that is a true reflection of the state of the nation. However, for some voters, the failure of parliament to reach a decision is a simply a failure of parliaments, and it’s time to move on, to find the man free of the corruption and personal ambition which parliamentarians serve, and have him deliver the Brexit the people voted for.

The irony is that the strong man in this particular instance is the most corrupt and lying of them all. But so were Hitler or Caesar. What BoJo’s supporters are looking for is strength, and none of the rest really matters. BoJo provides the strong smack of authority they crave.

The other irony is that in reality, no one voted for a hard Brexit. It wasn’t an option on the ballot paper. And the people who are clamouring most loudly for it will be among the hardest hit by it. But again, none of this concerns them. They see stalemate now, they see action from the strong man, and that’s what they admire.

People will tell me that BoJo’s nothing like the historical characters I mentioned. Certainly, unlike Napoleon or Hitler, he’s not making a bid for indefinite and unlimited power. But make no mistake about it, what he has done today is a coup d’état. He has seized personal power, monarchical power, for himself by eliminating the possibility of parliamentary scrutiny of his actions or opposition to them.

The coup d’état is temporary. It’s due to end on 14 October when parliament will be allowed, by grace of Boris, to convene again. And should take immediate action to cut back on the royal prerogative powers the executive exercises.

Or will it reconvene? Another lesson of history is that once autocrats have tasted such power, they find it hard to give up. And Brexit is going to lead to difficult times ahead, in which a strong man is going to be seen as still more necessary.

Will normal service resume on 14 October? I hope so. But do I think it’s guaranteed? I most certainly don’t.

Centenary of a revolution. Or coup d'état

November the seventh. The centenary of the October Revolution.

Yes, yes, I know. October. On 7 November because the Russians were a bit late switching from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar.

Lenin addressing a revolutionary crowd

When I first became interested in that portentous event, it had not long before celebrated its fiftieth anniversary. At the time, I accepted its description as a “revolution” and also believed that it had represented the seizure of power by a whole class, the working class of Russia, laying the groundwork for the introduction of socialism. Things had gone astray since but there was still hope that the course could be corrected and the promise of 1917 realised.

Nearly half a century on, I’ve had time to review my early impressions, correct some fairly crucial errors of perception, and fundamentally revise my opinion.

First of all, it was no revolution. That implies a fundamental change in society; in reality, Russia went from an autocracy oppressively run by a self-serving hereditary elite, to an autocracy oppressively run by a self-serving self-selecting elite.

Secondly, it was no revolution. This was not an uprising of the working class against oppression. Lenin never commanded a majority of the working class, but he had a wonderful theory to get around that problem: he proposed that though it was the revolutionary class, not everyone in it was as revolutionary as all the others. Instead, in his world view, there was a vanguard of the proletariat that understood the true working of history (which was to put Lenin and his pals in power) and would lead the rest of the working class to understand that truth. Finding a majority among the vanguard was easy, since the vanguard was by definition made up of those enlightened elements who’d realised that the Bolsheviks and Lenin were the best friends they’d ever had. That kind of sleight of hand is still popular, in groups of left and right alike, when they lack majority support outside their own narrow confines.

Thirdly, it was no revolution. Lacking mass support, what Lenin found was a God-given, or in his outlook, historically-inevitable opportunity in the chaotic conditions created by the government of Alexander Kerensky. With a small armed group and in the face of the impotence of the authorities to block him, he seized power in what he called a revolution but anyone else would call a coup d’état.

There was far more continuity than change across the dividing line Lenin and the Bolsheviks drew in 1917. Change came later, but it was one of degree, not of kind: the Bolshevik autocracy descended into bloodier oppression than ever previously seen in the long and blood course of Russian history. As many as 60 million Russians may have been put to death under the regime that followed Lenin’s, when Stalin mounted his own coup against the leaders of the first. Lenin died too soon to see it, which may have been fortunate: he might well have ended his life in gaol had he survived: he would have meant a constant embarrassment to Stalin, a reminder that he didn’t lead the uprising.

For if the October “revolution” was led by Lenin and his pals, it didn’t only include pals of his. Stalin, whose name meant man of steel, was a friend of no one but Jughashvili (his real name). It’s likely that his regime killed more people than the Nazis though, to be fair, it did have considerably longer.

Among his victims were leaders of the “revolution” that put him in power.

Bolshevik leaders
Indluded are Rykov, Radek, Zinoviev, Kamenev and Trotsky,
all put to death by Stalin – who’s nowhere to be seen

Not, then, an event to be celebrated with unmitigated cheer. I shall, I’m sure, raise a glass tonight, since I shall be with colleagues. But it’ll be to their health and mine, not to mark the centenary.

Of the October coup d’état.