Commemorations and mythologies

National myths matter. They define, or perhaps more accurately they express, national character.

One of the most memorable conversations I had was with a Mexican friend explaining to me how important, to a Mexican, was the story of the ‘Malinche’. She was the native woman who became the mistress of the conquistador Cortés. She is the mother of the nation, formed as it is from the mixture of Spanish and native bloods; she is also the woman who betrayed her people to become the mistress of the man who led a bloody and deadly conquest of her land.

By the same token, Cortés is the father of that people. And yet he was also the murderer of thousands of its ancestors. That erotic but treacherous, intimate but murderous relationship is at the root of Mexican mythological history. And it’s as complex and fluid as Mexican life itself.

The United States has its mythical past too. And like most mythologies, what it owes to historical fact is pretty limited.

Celebration of the myth:
Mayflower pilgrims bring godliness and love of freedom to North America

American mythology starts with a bunch of pilgrims landing at what is now Plymouth rock in Massachusetts, seeking religious freedom. It then picks up the current of representative government, of the notion that the people are the true sovereign power in a state. It culminates in the emergence of democratic rule, at a time when in old Europe democracy was still a dirty word, though it would ultimately become the aspiration of so many countries.

Much of this is true. In the nineteenth century, the torch of democracy was held almost exclusively by the Americans. When Abraham Lincoln talked about the American Civil War as a conflict fought to ensure that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the earth, he was voicing an important truth. And yet, the United States was no democracy when he spoke it: no blacks and no women enjoyed the rights of white men. Even Catholics were far from enjoying the same rights as Protestants.

Those contradictions can be traced right back to the historical roots of the myth.

The Mayflower pilgrims weren’t concerned with religious freedom in general, only with their own religious freedom. As their descendants would show, most dramatically in the Salem witch trials, they were fully capable of being as vicious in their persecution of others as those they fled back in England.

In addition, they weren’t even the first to land in North America. They got there in 1620. A full twelve years earlier, the first permanent European settlement had been set up in Virginia. And a year before the pilgrims landed, two events occurred in Virginia whose fourth centennials have been celebrated in the last few weeks.

Back in July, it was the launching of representative government. Trump attended that commemoration. And this weekend, it was the arrival of the first slaves from West Africa. Trump stayed well away.

At the weekend, today's African Americans commemorated
the first arrival of African slaves in North America
A year before the Mayflower Pilgrims

Back in August 1619, the British privateer White Lion arrived near what is now the town of Hampton in Virgina and landed “20 and odd Negroes” whom he traded for food. The principle that humans could be bought and sold had been established. Slavery had begun its grisly existence on the North American continent and would not end for nearly two and a half centuries. Only in 1865, with the adoption of the thirteenth amendment to the US constitution, would slavery finally and for all time be abolished in the US.

Its consequences would not die so soon, however. When Trump tells black Congresswomen to go back where they came from, he is expressing an attitude that underlay slavery and still hasn’t been driven out of US culture: that people of African ancestry are not fully members of American society.

That the attitude still persists is not a truth with which all Americans are at ease. Which is why the foundation myth of the country is much more concerned with the Mayflower pilgrims, misrepresented as champions of religious liberty. And with the birth of representative government, an event in which it’s easier to take pride than in the first arrival of slaves.

Which is why Trump went to the first commemoration. About representative government. Not to the other one. The one about slavery.

But it’s much more important that the second one happened.

The first victim of Brexit was the Truth. Swiftly followed by Good Judgement

It’s become a commonplace to say that the campaign which led to Britain choosing to leave the European Union was riddled with lies.

It’s a cliché, but clichés aren't necessarily untrue. Both sides spouted a lot of rubish, making it one of the least edifying campaigns I’ve ever seen. Sadly, the flow of misleading claims hasn’t stopped and, indeed, looks likely to sweep us all the way to the Brexit door.

For a time, the new Prime Minister, Theresa May, wouldn’t say what kind of Brexit she favoured. The broad options are:

• soft Brexit: Britain remains in the European Single Market. That would minimise the negative impact of departure on the economy, but it would mean continuing to contribute to the EU budget and accepting EU regulation, including freedom of movement of EU citizens into this country, without having any further say in the matter
• hard Brexit: where Britain leaves the Single Market and accepts the cost, but takes back control over its legislation and its borders

Recently, May has begun to lean towards the hard Brexit option. She told the recent Conservative Party conference, “let’s state one thing loud and clear: we are not leaving the European Union only to give up control of immigration all over again.”

That was a rare moment of honesty in the Brexit debate. It confirmed the glaring fact that a lot of those who voted for Brexit were actually interested in only one thing: how do we get Johnny Foreigner out of our green and pleasant land?

Apart from that glimpse of truth, the continuing debate seems mostly drowned in falsehood or ignorance.

The most glaring deficiency of the vote was that it answered only one question: should we stay in the EU or leave? It’s one thing to vote to leave, but there was no way of specifying what kind of Brexit you wanted. Hard or soft? No one said because there was nowhere to say it.

To call for a second referendum once we know the actual terms proposed is, however, to be considered a traitor to the democratic will of the electorate. It can lead to accusations on Twitter of refusing to accept the verdict of the “massive majority” in favour of Brexit. That was one explicit charge made against me, as part of an indictment of my allegedly anti-democratic views. 

A 52%–48% split? A massive majority?

Even to call for a parliamentary vote on the matter leads to virulent denunciation. And that’s quite curious, because it usually comes from people who clearly view themselves as patriots. And yet denying Parliament a vote strikes me as a fundamentally anti-British stance.

Our constitution doesn’t place sovereignty in the hands of the people. Unlike the US, we don’t have a founding document that opens with the words “we, the people.” In fact, we don’t have a document at all. We have an unwritten constitution which evolves, sometimes dramatically – votes for women, for instance – but mostly in a slow, barely noticeable way.

Sovereignty in Britain doesn’t reside with the people but with the Sovereign in Parliament. That’s why an essentially silly ritual continues to matter so much.

At the beginning of each parliamentary session, a man in tights – he holds the title ‘Black Rod’ – approaches the doors to the House of Commons, which are ritually slammed in his face. That underlines the principle that the Commons is under no obligation to admit the monarch or her representative. He then hammers on the door. My wife and I visited the place just a few days ago and were shown by our able guide and local Member of Parliament, the place where the wood has been worn away by the hammering.

Black rod hammers on the doors of the Commons

The members of the House of Commons then emerge and troop along the corridor to the House of Lords. There the Queen delivers a speech – wittily entitled “the Queen’s Speech” – in which she outlines her legislative plans for the coming session.

Thus it has been for centuries.

However, though the forms endure, the substance alters. The monarch now performs an essentially ceremonial role. Her speech is written for her by Ministers, in particular by the Prime Minister. She appoints the Prime Minister, but no one can hold that office who does not command a majority in the House of Commons. Indeed, Lord Salisbury who left office in 1902, was the last Prime Minister to have led a government from the House of Lords. These days, though some ministers may sit in the Lords, the great offices are held by members of the Commons.

That means that sovereignty, while apparently unchanged, is in face exercised by the elected representatives of the people. There are still some matters of royal prerogative, but even there the sovereign’s supreme authority is actually exercised by her ministers acting in her name. In any case, their scope is being constantly reduced. For instance, after the debacle in Iraq, Parliament took to itself the authority to decide whether the nation should go to war, previously exercised by Ministers in the name of the Queen.

The evolution doesn’t stop. It feels to me that there is a big step coming, perhaps in a still relatively remote future: the replacement of the House of Lords by an elected chamber. It’s been in the air for so long that I think it will inevitably occur. 

Eventually. As is the British way.

You may like or dislike this way of doing things, but it is the British way. Power flows from the Sovereign in Parliament, but the powers of the Sovereign are now exercised by Ministers, who are themselves Parliamentarians. So political authority belongs to Parliament in creative tension with those of its members who also happen to be members of the government.

There is no provision in this arrangement for a referendum. If one is held, it takes place by Act of Parliament. Its result has no binding force on Parliament. The only obligation on MPs to follow it is the moral consideration that to ignore it would probably be career-limiting. But they and they alone have the authority to decide how they react to it.

So when Brexiters proclaim their enthusiasm for returning control to our own institutions from Brussels, what they’re calling for is the return of power to Parliament. How, in simple consistency, can they then deny Parliament a say over that process?

The alternative is simply to leave it up to the government itself, free of parliamentary scrutiny – the kind of arrangement, now abandoned, that led to the Iraq invasion. Not terribly British, is it, to go back on the process of extending the power of elected representatives and return it to an Executive answerable to no one? I suspect a lot of Brexiters would reject the very idea as the kind of misguided thinking generally associated with that pitiable figure, Johnny Foreigner.

Trouble is, if truth was the first casualty of Brexit, good judgement was close behind.

Donald Trump and the Establishment's Ides of March

The Ides of March are here. Over two millennia ago, on this day, Julius Caesar was struck down in the forum of Rome by his inveterate enemies.

Well, it was fairly clear they weren’t fans. Stabbing knives are a bit of a giveaway.

Since that time, commentators have tended to see the event in one of two ways. There are those to whom the assassins were making a last-gasp stand in defence of the republican virtues and time-honoured freedoms of Rome against a would-be military dictator. Others instead see the conspirators as reactionaries trying to defend an old and outdated dispensation that needed a hero to overthrow it.

My own view is of the “plague on both your houses” variety. Brutus, Cassius and their mates were aristocrats of the old elite that had run, and indeed owned, Rome for centuries. They weren’t there to defend ancient liberties, or at least ancient liberties for anyone but themselves and their class. The common man? He was of interest to them only insofar as he could further or resist their plans for themselves.

As for Caesar, he was a megalomaniac with all sorts of weird delusions – I mean, what kind of man writes his autobiography in the third person? An aristocrat himself, he won an enviable reputation – for those who envy military reputations – by waging bloodthirsty war on the inhabitants of Gaul, who’d done him no harm at all but provided him with a good ladder towards power.

Then he’d used his military might to seize that power back in Rome.

Isn’t that so like what’s happening on the Ides of March in 2016?

The primary elections in the US today are pretty much the last gasp for the old American elite – the people we tend to refer to as the Republican Establishment – to try to block the road to power of a megalomaniac who, like Caesar, is convinced that only he can save his nation from itself. Unlike Caesar, Donald Trump is no military leader. On the other hand, to be a military leader Caesar had to raise millions to fund his legions; Trump too has raised colossal financial power to fund his legions of foot soldiers. Not all that different.

Are the Republicans heading off into a long dark night?
And will they drag the rest of us with them?

Caesar’s violence was of a different order. But Trump’s movement is dipping that way now, with increasing violence at his rallies. And isn’t it interesting that they are rallies? These aren’t forums for debate, they are mass adoration sessions where the providential man tells his followers what to believe, and they reward him with their worship in return.

A major difference is that the freedoms at stake aren’t merely those of an elite. One of the most striking, and admirable, characteristics of the United States is that it has a remarkable Constitution. A mere 7000 words long, it laid the foundation for a system in which no one could exert excessive power, because another body would counterbalance theirs and keep it under control.

I’m not aware of any time in history where that admirable state of affairs has ever been under greater threat than today. Sam Brownback, who is to the state of Kansas what Trump is to the entire nation (but with the additional flaw of actually being in office), has signed into effect legislation that would allow him to impeach any judge that struck down a law that he favoured. The chances are that such a step, which denies the possibility of an independent judiciary, would be thrown out by the Supreme Court in any government led by a president committed to upholding the Constitution; but would even the Supreme Court be able to resist the bullying of a President Trump, with his contempt for the Constitution?

You don’t believe he has contempt for the Constitution? Look at what he has been saying about the media. He hates journalists, he says. If elected, he claims, he will bring in legislation that would make it considerably easier to sue media outlets for libel. In other words, this keen supporter of the Second Amendment, which guarantees the right to bear arms, wants to circumscribe the effects of the First, which upholds the right to freedom of speech.

Sadly, aligned against him are only the tired old figures of the Republican establishment, as weirdly Conservative as he is. They are unlikely to succeed tonight in defeating Trump. In that respect, they are once more not unlike the conspirators against Caesar: although they did assassinate him, the act only rebounded on them, as Caesar’s party rallied its forces and crushed the assassins in war, thus ending the Republic anyway and ushering in the autocratic rule of the Roman Empire.

When it comes to Trump, there really is only one hope left of stopping him. A diminutive, not particularly trustworthy or popular woman, Hillary Clinton. An unlikely and uninspiring figure to be the last best hope of American liberty.

But, hey, we don’t always choose the weapons to defend ourselves. We just have to reach for the best we can find when we’re up against an urgent threat. That’s likely to be Hillary, and boy do we need her. 

Because being Trumped is about as threatening, and as urgent, as it gets.

Trump: what he got right in calling for a ban on Muslims

There’s something special about Donald Trump, isn’t there?

He’s now come up with yet another in his series of cunning plans to solve the world’s problems. This one is to ban all Muslims from entering the United States. That suggests that the entire world Muslim community, a billion strong, has to be suspected of being hostile to the United States. Would that include, I wonder, the ones serving in the US army and risking their lives to fight the nation’s enemies?

He has the right to put his life on the line in a US uniform but,
if Trump gets his way, not to return to the US

Godwin’s Law states that any internet discussion that goes on long enough will eventually lead to someone being compared to Hitler. I try to avoid falling into that trap. But it has to be said that the most striking example of such targeting of an entire faith community in the past has to be the Nazi hatred against the Jews. Trump previously recommended registering Muslims, just as Hitler registered Jews. He has now said that he doesn’t know whether he might have supported Roosevelt’s internment of Japanese – including Japanese Americans – during World War 2, so the magic word “internment” has now been put out there. 

A register. A ban. Possibly internment. Where will this end?

The curious thing about Trump is that he’s extremely keen on the US Constitution. Well, on bits of it. Does he perhaps have trouble reading the rest? For instance, he’s keen on the Second Amendment, though only on some of the words: “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon. Period,” he tells us, leaving out that annoying qualification at the beginning about “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,” which somewhat limits the scope of the right.

Incidentally, there’s no “upon” at the end of the amendment. I guess if you’re quoting from memory…

Trump explains that the reason he’s keen on the amendment is that criminality in the US is rampant. He knows who to blame, too: “The Obama administration’s record on that is abysmal. Violent crime in cities like Baltimore, Chicago and many others is out of control.”

He presumably hasn’t managed to get as far as the tenth amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” It’s odd, isn’t it? Usually right-wing politicians are really keen on limiting Federal powers, but it looks as though Trump would like to federalise law enforcement. Unfortunately – for him – the Constitution he likes so much doesn’t allow it. It does not assign that power to the Federal government so, as specified by the tenth amendment, it remains the responsibility of the states or the people. In Baltimore, for instance, the police Commissioner is nominated by the Mayor and confirmed by the Council.

Then again, Trump may not have noticed that Obama is President of the United States and not Mayor of Baltimore (or, indeed, Chicago though curiously that position is held by a former collaborator of Obama’s, Rahm Emmanuel. I mention only for amusement that Emmanuel is the model or Josh Lyman in The West Wing, a series which does appeal to the intellect as well as the emotions, so Trump may not have seen it).

But if Trump hasn’t managed to get from the second amendment to the tenth, it’s possible that he skipped over the first as well. Among other things, it denies Congress the power to prohibit the free exercise of religion. To avoid any kind of debate on technicalities, I should say that the Supreme Court has ruled that the provisions of the fourteenth amendment also mean that State governments can’t take action to prevent free religious practice either.

Most interestingly, in the case of Wisconsin v. Yoder, the Supreme Court extended the definition of “prohibition” in this context. It now includes any regulation which, though on the face of it neutral, “unduly burdens the free exercise of religion.” It may just be me, but I can’t help feeling that the practice of Islam is unduly burdened if the faithful are prevented from returning to the US if they ever go abroad.

Still, Trump may not have got as far as thinking through those implications yet. I offer up these musings to him, so that he can repair that omission as soon as possible. I can imagine just how urgent that task will seem to him.

By now you may be wondering why the title of this piece suggests that Trump may have got something right in his speech announcing the policy of banning Muslims. So I’d better explain. I was thinking of this passage:

“…people are fed up – they are fed up with incompetence, they are fed up with stupid leaders, they are fed up with stupid people.”

That struck me as true. I know a lot of us are fed up with stupid people trying to position themselves as leaders.

Sadly, however, on reflection I suspect Trump may be wrong on this score too. I suspect there are a lot of people out there who, far from being fed up with stupid leaders, are only too keen to rally behind one. I hope they’re not a majority, but who can tell?

I also suspect that Trump knows that. Indeed, he must be counting on it. After all, unless he believes that enough people want another stupid leader, why would he ever run for office?

Ah, this modern world, how far it is from realising its ideals

Have you ever given any thought to when “modern” started? Have we been living our modern lives a couple of years? A generation? Perhaps even longer?

Think of all those museums of modern art we have. When I was a kid, we’d never have included the impressionists in a modern art exhibition. But when I first began to be interested in art, the impressionist Renoir’s Bal du moulin de la Galette was under a century old, and today Picasso’s modernist Demoiselles d’Avignon is over a century old.

Renoir. Modern Art? Don't be silly

So when will modern art stop being modern?

Picasso. Modern art.
From 1907? Seriously?

We even have the notion of “post-modernism”, one of the more ludicrous we’ve come up with. After all, what comes after modernity? Surely it’s the future, isn’t it? So unless we have a time machine, how on earth can we know what “post-modern” looks like?

At the moment, I’m reading a book by Elizabeth Badinter, a leading French philosopher and feminist, who adds to her range of talents a profound understanding, and knowledge, of eighteenth-century history of thought. The book confirms a feeling I’ve had for some time, that the “modern period” started in the middle of that century. She traces two remarkable women of the time, Emile du Châtelet and Louise d’Epinay. They were contemporaries for a while, but du Châtelet died in 1749, and Epinay’s writing dates from the 1750s onwards.

Badinter shows that there is a real watershed between them. Du Châtelet was a leading physicist and philosopher, the first major French woman scientist, and the last before Marie Curie. Epinay wrote principally about education, in an environment where the natural sciences were beginning to lose their popularity in favour of the social sciences and moral philosophy. This trend led to the emergence of a notion of Man as opposed to classes, which would later in the century inform such ideas as “the rights of Man”, applying to all men or women, regardless of their station in life.

In Badinter’s words, “increasingly, the idea of humanity took hold in minds, previously more used to distinguishing men by their station than to bringing them together within a single concept.”

The changing view is illustrated by a story told by a certain Longchamp, a former manservant of du Châtelet’s, who claimed in his memoirs that she would undress without any kind of modesty in front of him; on one occasion, she called him to bring hot water for her bath; she opened her legs wide so that he could pour the water between them and, when he averted his eyes, she told him to watch what he was doing so that he didn’t scald her (I suppose she scolded him to avoid being scalded).

Now du Châtelet would never have behaved that way with anyone she felt she had to treat as a man, in other words, someone of her own aristocratic caste. But Longchamp was a servant; he didn’t count.

That was the kind of thinking that began to change around 1750, so that in 1776 the nascent United States could declare that they were acting on the principle that all men are created equal. To them, there is a community of man, to which we all belong, and from which are derived certain inalienable rights. A world-changing concept after 1750, it held little sway before.

Since that’s a fundamental idea of our time, I like to date the modern from then.

And yet. No changes in human mentalities is sudden. The old ideas cling on long after the new ones have begun to emerge and supplant them. Even the framers of that great Declaration of Independence were in many cases slave-owners: equality of humanity clearly didn’t extend to involuntary African immigrants to America.

Nor are we out of the woods yet. You probably saw the pair of demonstrators from the States, one white and carrying a placard asking “is my life worth more than his?”, the other black and with a placard asking “is his life worth more than mine?”

Sadly, our societies don't (yet) value them equally

The founding fathers of the United States framed a constitution in which a black man’s life was officially valued at 3/5 of a white’s. The idea should have been buried by the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments, but was it? Judging by the apparent right for whites, inside or outside the police, to shoot with impunity young black men in the States, one would have to say we’re not there yet.

No-one in Europe should feel any self-satisfaction with respect to the US either. If you’re Muslim, or black, or simply a foreigner, there’s a view in most of Europe today that you’re a lesser being. Your rights can be denied. If you’re attempting to enter Europe illegally and your boat sinks, you should be left to drown. Behind such thoughts is the notion that other people are inferior, not fully entitled to human rights, perhaps not entirely human.

Not caring whether such a person sees you naked may be a little degrading, but it does no more ham than that. Thinking such a person may be gunned down in the street for no offence, or doesn’t deserve to be rescued from a watery grave in the Med, is much more serious. When we reach a point where our societies no longer find it acceptable to shoot young blacks or abandon drowning migrants, we shall at last have realised the ideals that began to emerge in the eighteenth century.

So my view? The modern period did indeed start around 1750. When will it end? Oh, it has a long way to run yet...

If the people don't, who'll defend rights against government abuse?

A pincer movement is a much more effective form of attack than a simple frontal assault.

That no doubt is the reason we’re facing a two-pronged movement against civil rights in Britain at the moment.

One prong is being run by the government and takes the form of legal moves to introduce secret trials, held in private and with the defence denied access to the prosecution evidence.

The other prong is still more insidious in that it is based on whipping up a popular movement. Spearheaded by the right wing of the Conservative Party and its sniping opponents even further to the right in UKIP (United Kingdom Independence Party), it takes the form of a campaign against the Human Rights Act. A measure of its relative success is that it has managed to make ‘human rights’ sound like a bad thing – an extraordinary piece of doublespeak, fully worthy of Orwell’s 1984.

The pressure for closed trials is ostensibly based on the need to keep certain types of evidence hidden from certain types of defendant, mainly evidence obtained by the intelligence services, used against presumed terrorists. Just how serious the issue is was made clear by the former Labour Cabinet Minister Jack Straw. In a debate on the bill on 4 March, he told the House of Commons that in certain circumstances certain types of information have to remain concealed, in order to protect secret sources. If secrecy could not be guaranteed, the evidence could not be used and a terrorist might walk free and offend again. Straw went on:

‘If we had explained how we had ended up in such a situation by saying that information had to be provided in its entirety in open court in all circumstances, people would have said, “Thanks very much, but my relative, wife or child has just died.” That is the dilemma and it is not abstract—it is absolutely real.’

That immediately reminds me of Benjamin Franklin: ‘those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.’ Britain at its best decided to put certain freedoms above protecting life – if not, it would not have fought on against Nazi Germany in June 1940, at a time when many even in government favoured surrender, in a war that in the end cost nearly half a million British lives.

Jack Straw
Once a radical, now keen on secret trials

That however isn’t the most shameful aspect of Straw’s statement. The truth, as Henry Porter pointed out in the Observer this weekend, is that the effect of revealing evidence in open court in terrorist cases has not been to free terrorists, but to embarrass the government and force it to pay damages for having behaved illegally. No wonder government wants to conceal this kind of information. 

Porter reminds us that Straw told parliament in 2005 that Britain had not been involved in rendition and torture of terror suspects; in 2009, his successor David Miliband had to admit that the statement was untrue and apologise for it. 

That’s what secret courts are about: not so much to protect us from terrorists but to protect government from embarrassing disclosures of its own bungling or criminal acts.

Which brings me to second prong of the attack, against the Human Rights Act. The popular movement against it points to the criminals who hide behind its provisions, and many do – but then criminals have always been good at abusing rights. That doesn’t mean we should do without them.

Article 6 of the Act guarantees that ‘everyone is entitled to a fair and public hearing within a reasonable time by an independent and impartial tribunal established by law’ (my emphasis). Later, it specifies that a person accused of a crime is entitled ‘to be informed promptly, in a language which he understands and in detail, of the nature and cause of the accusation against him’ and equally ‘to examine or have examined witnesses against him’

The US constitution is remarkable for its conciseness, its ability to express fundamental rights much more succinctly than most such legislation. Coincidentally, as it is Article 6 of the Human Rights Act, it is the Sixth Amendment of the US Constitution that deals with the right to a fair a trial:

‘In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.

The fact that the same rights are guaranteed on both sides of the Atlantic does rather suggest that they’re regarded as fundamental generally in democratic societies.

So why do so many citizens in Britain oppose the Human Rights Act? Especially when the government is busily trying to bring in legislation that undermines one of its most significant articles. Have some of my compatriots suddenly decided that they don’t need protection from government misdeeds and that the two-pronged attack therefore deserves to succeed?

Odd. They don’t usually show such touching confidence in the good faith of their rulers.

Newtown and free speech

Much of the debate since the Newtown shootings, as after every other such tragic incident in the States, has focused on the Second Amendment to the Constitution. Nothing surprising about that, because this is the amendment guaranteeing the right to bear guns.
The fundamental problem may however lie not so much in this amendment as in the First, which guarantees freedom of speech, belief and assembly. It’s a powerful illustration of how something that on the face of it seems entirely good, can produce terrible effects in certain circumstances.

The ten amendments to the US Constitution form the Bill of Rights

Kierkegaard got it right when he said ‘people demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use’. All the same, most of us would probably agree that free speech is an important right. Certainly, I regard it as crucial whenever I want to exercise it, though I have to say I wish I could occasionally selectively suspend it for certain other people.


Desirable though it may be, however, the right to free speech can’t be open-ended. The classic counter-example is that there’s no right to shout ‘fire’ needlessly in a crowded theatre. Civilised societies also prohibit libel, incitement or conspiracy, thought these are also constraints on free speech.

There are other, more subtle aberrations in the application of this right. The First Amendment was the basis on which the US supreme court chose to allow the so-called super PACs to operate. These are organisations that can channel unlimited sums of money into political activity, allowing them to make or unmake politicians.

It is also the first amendment that guarantees that politicians can continue to back their campaigns with TV advertising. Funding the astronomic expenditure that involves makes them more than ever dependent on donors.

Those two effects create circumstances in which political lobbies flourish. And here we are back with the problem of guns and tragedies such as Newtown’s: no political lobby is as well organised, and few are as well funded, as the NRA, the main pro-gun lobby.

It is currently following its usual tactics, of saying very little in the immediate post-massacre period. It can see the writing on the wall, and the head of steam generated by Newtown is such that the writing is powerful: there seems a real chance of some significant steps towards tighter gun control this time.
So watch the NRA, once the dust has settled. It is going to give a master-class in the use of lobby muscle in a political system more prone to it than any other in the world.

At which points its opponents will need to ponder the effect of abuse of not only the Second Amendment to the Constitution, but the First as well.

If you can't say it short, it's probably best not to say it at all

If this is a short post, that’s by design and not accident. 

Pascal once wrote ‘I'm sorry to have written you such a long letter; I didn't have time to write a short one’. Writing well, but short, is my driving aspiration, however mixed my success in achieving it.

Some epochal documents have, after all, been strikingly concise. The Constitution of the United States has been the rock foundation of a system of government now into its third century and which, for all its failings, has prospered and guaranteed a surprising measure of freedom. 

The Consitution is 7000 words long and took four and half months to draft.

It drew much of its inspiration from another text nearly six centuries older, Magna Carta. The Charter remains the foundation document of many legal systems around the world, not because its provisions have survived, but because it sustains the principle of the rule of law itself. 

Magna Carta is 3000 words long and took less than five days to draft.

Magna Carta: concise and to the point and it resonates down the ages

So it’s curious that the present British government has taken 22 months to enact its Health and Social Care Bill. It is 16,500 words long. It is confused and potentially extremely damaging to the NHS. The vast majority of clinicians and healthcare managers find it toxic, as do their professional associations. The groundswell in the electorate against the measure is only likely to grow as the consequences of its adoption this week become clear.

The moral of this story? If it takes you a long time to find the right words, you’re probably saying the wrong thing.

And for the rest of us? When the government starts pouring out the verbiage, take cover. The bullshit’s about to turn into a torrent, and what comes behind is likely to be a lot worse.