The UK Supreme Court Rules

A Good Day for the British

by Terry Field

Yesterday, in a landmark judgment, the British Supreme Court upheld the judgment of the Scottish courts and overturned the English court of Appeal. In landmark cases subject to judgment, Lady Hale, speaking for all eleven justices stated that the Prime Minister had acted to prorogued Parliament with the intention of inhibiting the capacity of Parliament to act and to perform its function. 

Stopping short of stating that Johnston had lied to or misled the Queen, they did go on to say that because his actions were intended to stop proper parliamentary scrutiny, they offended against the relationship between Parliament and the executive, since the former is the senior of the two estates of the realm.

Left, Terry points the way to a better day for Britain!

Parliament was there for not prorogued, the actions of the Prime Minister were void and of no effect. The representatives of the monarch approached Parliament with nothing more than a ‘blank sheet of paper’.

The Speaker has stated that Parliament will reconvene tomorrow at 11.30 Wednesday.

This is a beautiful day for Britain, for the Union, for Parliamentary sovereignty and for a slow return to rational behavior and the evaporation of the psychotic condition that has afflicted so many in Britian when they regard Europe through the bloodshot lenses of the worst rabble rousers.

Readers may here recall I have talked of the power of the fascistic method. Of the way it can, when used by skillful political functionaries possessed of powerful assertive personalities and simple repeated arguments coerce the minds of the disengaged, the previously relaxed and the confused and unaware. You may recall I said it would be applied with more and more force in coming months. We must be aware of its dangers as we see what it does to the relaxed and quite vulnerable institutions that function, routinely, by gentle consensus and group agreement whilst regarding minorities always.

The actions of the referendum political operators has been to try to both remove the representative nature of Parliamentary democracy and replace it with rubber-stamp attendees, whilst continuously working at the extreme margins of the composite constitution Britain has functioned under since the Glorious Revolution of 1688.

This extra-parliamentary activity has in some measure resulted from the perturbations seen in sections of the populations following on the great increase in difficult living conditions for many after the 2008 financial collapse, and the great increase in perceived excess wealth resulting from the economic forces I have discussed at some length before in these blog notes.

All this unhappiness has laid many people open to the blandishments of street rabble rousers.  Open to the suggestions of people selling certain solutions to complex problems, and to those identifying Europe as the causative factor in the trials of the newly and permanently dis-advantaged. The latest data suggests that the concentrations of ‘leave’ voters were NOT found in the centres of poverty. 

They were found in such as Essex (east of London), and in Wales, Cornwall, other English counties. The Welsh people were not of a composite mind to leave, but the vote was ‘swung’ by large numbers of retired, older English voters who has moved to Wales to live where real estate is less expensive, but who were otherwise not financially uncomfortable.

The Welsh, the metropolitan areas, Scotland, Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU. Scotland is quite poor when compared to England. Yet its population voted by a large margin to remain.

Why did this strange split of desires occur?

If it was not the much vaunted ‘poverty factor’ that propelled it, then what was the causative factor or factors?

Of course, in many working-class areas, irrespective of comfort, ease or the lack of it, there is in every country an elevated sense of the value of the ‘local’, of the ‘national’. That in itself does not explain the vote. It explains the tendency to susceptibility to vote leave, but there is another factor. That factor is the fascistic method and demagogic authority with a repeated simple and certain message, that causes those people to vote for something they were previously relatively unconcerned with.

I have lost count of the number of people I have seen on British video media who have stated a strong, indeed burning and yearning desire to ‘leave the EU’ and not one of these people, when challenged could give a cogent, powerful and convincing reason to do so. Why could they not do so?

Because they felt only the need to repeat the strong message the demagogues had rammed into their minds. NONE of them could suggest what they or their country could do which it was prevented from doing whilst being in the EU. I never heard a single cogent reason.

The worst was the repeated message, created by back-office marketing men in the service of the radical leave politicians, that Mrs. May’s deal is the sort of deal a country would agree to ‘if it had been defeated in war’. This was then parroted by people who had no concept of what her agreement contained, had no concept of what ‘defeat in war’ could ever mean. They were in effect the dupes of thought managers. The techniques used on the streets are Goebbels-like in their simple repetitive drumming, laced with conflicted rage at ‘Europe’ and topped with a contempt for Parliament that is ‘frustrating the will of the people’.

The sum of all this is to rip thinking out of the structures upon which parliamentary democracy depends. The street becomes the place where confused people are corralled.

Brexit as a subject does not matter in itself. Any number of other matters could have been propelled to become an obsession. The thing that matters is that the fascistic method has such immense power and can destabilise so comprehensively. It is the choice of the autocrat. It is now employed not just on the street, but within the heart of the executive. That is entirely new.

As to the Brexit matter, well, one might as well ask people what they think the colour pink looks like and to hold up a card with their version painted on it. There would be 67 million different cards. The matter at hand is that a set of deeply self-interested private individuals have said  ‘this colour of pink is the right one! Follow me and ALL of you can have MY LOVELY PINK COLOUR!!!.

Statistics being what they are, and the bell curve being normally distributed, the effect of the demagogue is to skew the curve in automatic favour of the offered, ’official’ pink colour. The addition of the worst and continuous excesses of ‘social media’ accentuates the need to form ‘tribes’ and leave the common political space.

Thus, in a ‘western’ world that is quickly retreating from the ordered discipline that wise government backed by and scrutinized by a fully functioning representative parliament, the Supreme Court gave Britain two wonderful gifts today.

One with a direct effect; and one with an indirect effect we should act upon if we are wise and love our lives as our ancestors have lived them. The first gift was that Parliament will sit today and the executive has been again been confirmed as being the junior partner of the Parliament Assembled. That was argued by Lord Pannick QC for the appellant and was confirmed in the judgment. A most important re-affirmation of the supremacy of Parliament Assembled.

The second gift is to calm our fever, to remove us from the sweaty clutches of the political violence of the demagogue street-vendors. This gift can make decent people look at their support for this shameful lying destructive weak little man Johnston who acts to look like and behaves like an anti-democratic South-American-style autocrat in thrall to the extra-parliamentary  political grouping.  That is in effect removing the governing party entirely from both parliament and people, in order to try to recover the voting block they fear Nigel Farage’s party holds in his grasp.

The Supreme Court can and should, in its judgment, make honest British people abandon a government whose Prime Minister has acted in a way not seen before and which must never be seen again. Reflection as to what is decent, and to what is indecent is a requirement of the electorate if it is to benefit from the continuation of the vigour and authority of its Parliament. The Supreme Court has offered us all a way back to where we were. It is up to all of us to grasp it. We are not a rich and powerful country; we are beset by problems and dangers. Yet we can be a great and enduring democratic society. All we need to do it to want that, and act upon our best instincts. Our democracy is an inheritance beyond price. It eclipses all else. We need to rediscover the awe our ancestors felt for it.

Of course, today is about the constitution, but the battering ram applied was the demagogue and the Brexit fantasy.

The bubble of mania and psychosis against the European Union will NOT be lanced, however, if the street offers liars a chance to lie unchallenged to the gullible in a second referendum should it be offered.

Since we now live with the politics of the street, as a result of the actions of the weak Prime Minster Cameron who was rightly described by President Obama as being ‘a lightweight’, then there needs to be introduced into law serious penalties for being shown to lie to the people in order to procure their vote. Alternatively, the referendum vote should take place with no permitted comment from the time the vote is announced outside of Parliament or by Members of Parliament during the canvassing period. Accountability should be framed in terms of parliament and it should exclude all others. That way, the second referendum could only be the servant of and the advisory statement directed to Parliament, where authority must lie.

Parliament must reassert its authority. The actions of the street should be crushed where it subverts political conversation on the matter at hand. Failure to do this is a liars’ indeed a fraudsters’ charter.

It is hard to do. But it must be done.

Finally, it is wonderful to see that, given Britian functions via its unwritten constitution, which amongst other things regards common law, precedent, statutory authority and established procedure as key elements in cementing proper behavior, which in turn facilitates the effective functioning of the branches of government, the Supreme Court has acted with unprecedented vigour and unanimity, from eleven Justices, in asserting with certainly and clarity that the structures that protect Parliament, and which in turn guarantee the people a full response from power to their representatives are to be jealously guarded and protected.

All in all, a good day to be British.

Social Disorder Possible in the UK?

by Glenn N. Holliman

Our regular corespondent, Terry Field, takes to the keyboard to express further dismay of the unraveling, in his eyes, of political discourse and social conventions in his homeland. - GNH

An Accurate Representation of Reality in Britain

by Terry Field

The retired judge from the British Supreme court very recently suggested that British institutions and political conditions had degraded to the point where violence and social disorder could be the next stage.

This sounds to some outside the country as an extreme observation, but for the writer it seems to be an accurate representation of the local reality.

The fractures in British society are represented by unshakably held extreme positions on the matter of Brexit. When one hears people describe their attitude to the European Union, often expressed using the language of conflict, often explicitly invoking the remembrance of war between the nations, such is usually spiced with an attendant arrogant loathing and hatred that is dissociated from the reality of Europe. Many of the people expressing such hatred have never or almost never visited Europe. Were they asked in any sort of detail why their hatred was so profound, they would – and when they are asked do – flounder, bluster and repeat the slogans other political manipulators have put into their blanc-paper minds.

In every social collapse, every revolution, every war, hate dissociated from experience, becomes the common currency underpinning sequences of increasingly deranged, violent and inhumane actions. - Terry Field, pictured left

It is not a given that such a trajectory must be repeated in Britian, but it has become far more probable. The ‘left’ has worked to stop the actions of the Johnston government to prosecute a no deal exit from Europe whilst pretending it is not doing any such thing. The moderate wing (often with 35 or more years as party members and Members of Parliament) of the Conservative Party has been cut off like a gangrenous limb, and the remaining element that constitutes the Conservative Party has emerged as a radically different hard-as nails thing and one not seen in Britian in the last full 119 years.

Now we have a party of government that has created a condition it knows can drive the Celtic fringe of Scotland Northern Ireland and even pacific Wales out of the union and out of conquered province status, to join the EU again after the impeding rupture.

The Corbyn left postures and wishes to fill the streets with objectors. The usual marshmallow-soft virtue signalling that the left never seems to understand is entirely ineffective and barren.

The left is not the primary danger here for the moment. But only for the moment. It wishes for electoral power, but is as soft as butter whilst not directing the levers of state control. The British government as directed by the new nationalist zealots treat Europe as an unstable weak entity to be dictated to, and particularly Ireland as a wayward colony to be shaken into compliance. They seriously consider Europe to be so weak as to be readily intimidated by Britain threatening to withdraw its military protection offering security to Europe.

An outsider would simply laugh at the propositions contained here. They would not believe a country could be so captured by such Ruritanian lunacy, but with England, there is a class of people who have always thought like this; they have always lived the desired continuity of the nationalist/imperialist reality. For them there is a presumption of the magnificence and exceptionalism of the British – and particularly the English – state. For them, the hard reality of their power-imperative derives from a semi-mystical perception of what it is to be English/British.

They now have, after the referendum, smashed the parliament they see as incorporating degeneration and ineffectiveness, replaced with a focused certainty that they will not be stopped from leaving Europe, constructing a distinct and naturally aggressive English nation state, and gathering the rebellious Celts to their feet in supplication since for them the idea that the EU is a viable alternative for Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland is something they both loathe and entirely reject.

So far so unpleasant, but nothing more.

Far more radical, dangerous and unprecedented in England is the changed attitude of much of the hard right, and the hard left, to the sovereignty relevance and desirability of the Westminster parliament. Many in the hard Brexit group see their function as the replacement of the sovereignty of parliament with the ‘sovereignty of the people’, This was explicitly stated by the leader of the house, Rees-Mogg, where he stated Parliament gains its legitimacy from the people, and thus the referendum of the people trumps and replaces parliamentary legitimacy and freedom of maneuver other than to deliver the ‘decision to leave Europe’. Note that Mr Rees-Mogg and his colleagues ‘understand’ the meaning of the referendum vote. They and not others are empowered to ‘achieve’ Brexit, and all those in Parliament unwilling to offer a hard Brexit or the style of exit designed by this regime are ‘betraying the people’.

Well, there it is. They appeal to the sovereignty of ‘the people’, and they know what the ‘people’ wanted and vilify all others who would dare to defy their divine comprehension. I recall this from The Caudillo, from Hitler, from Mussolini, from Stalin. Every dictator invokes ‘the will of the people’. Always the same.

‘The people are held in my heart, I know their needs, I will deliver what I know they want and need, I will protect them from their enemies’. In this case, Parliament Assembled if it has a will of its own.

Accordingly, anyone who stands against this within the Conservative Party are to be purged, removed, expelled. Made nothing in the political firmament of the righteous. Thus the will of the people will be met.'

All this in Britain.

The world sees it.

Why am I not surprised? Well, unlike foreigners who look on and think inevitably of the England of the past, a state of Churchill, Atlee, brave wartime, resistance, post war gentle chaos and benign eccentricity, the kindness of a sophisticated people, I have seen a much darker reality over the last half a century or so, and one that has expanded like Styrofoam in the post war period.

The key here is economic failure together with profound social fracturing that has profoundly hurt the poorly educated, and the vulnerable poor. Britain is fragmented, rich and arrogant on the one side, vast numbers of the all-but dispossessed and ignored on the other. The easy comfort of a declined ex-Empire that offered the people a dreaming of dreams after the 1939-45 catastrophe has given way to a ratcheting up of poverty, misery, anger, and hopelessness, particularly with the 2008 evacuation of wealth, and all the while the very rich getting much richer.

At the same time, the society has inverted all its values, financial and social, from a structured conservative (small-c) serious-minded monoculture to a free-flowing multicultural ethnography, living in all reality in mini-ghettos,and accepting sexual variation in a way never before considered even slightly tolerable.

Mass deindustrialization has replaced self-respect and good incomes with suppressed eternal sadness, poverty, mass drug-taking and hellish depression in the council estates and worse. In the country at large now, there is an explosion of severe violence, damaging and killing large numbers. Gangland violence completely unknown a lifetime ago are expanding across the counties outside the old worn-out inner cities.

Fear, uncertainly, political coercion and un-natural enforced compliance with the new values   This further reinforces the sense of anomie. The country is described as being one of the most toxic in the advanced- and indeed in much of the developing world – for children to live in.

There is a developed crisis in housing that shows every sign of becoming even more corrosive. The healthcare system is pathetically inadequate – only a week ago, it is reported that the state monopoly healthcare non-provider has failed to diagnose hundreds of thousands of people with cancers in anything like the time needed to benefit from effective treatment. I accent here the dread reality. The NHS is a soviet-style monopoly provider. Without it working effectively, for the vast bulk of the people there is NO alternative. Their choice, if they are treated too late, or otherwise ineffectively is a simple one, and it is simply to die.

The multi-faceted failures are of such a degree as to ensure that people know well that their lives are directly threatened as to quality of life and even longevity.

Such failure is endured. The British can be kicked hard in the guts, and all they do is stand up and take it.

Not now they do not. They are utterly enraged.

The hate fest against Europe is pure displacement. They do not even know why they hate as they now do. I hear local, ill-educated folk rail against the EU. I doubt they have been to Europe short of a week on a beach, I bet my fortune that they know absolutely relevant or significant nothing about Europe, it’s history or the functions of the EU and its relationship to the European nation states. 

It is a striking feature of these highly manipulated, hate-filled people that their hate is dissociated. Of course it is! They have been programmed by radical clever right-wing people recently (and by left wing radicals over the last forty years) that the EU is the centre of all evil. They know not why. They have no knowledge, less awareness, and parrot slogans to a degree that I am reminded of Mao and the little Red Book, and the hordes in Germany raging against alien groups to assuage their pitiable condition after their state collapsed in 1918.

We are right back to the world of the early 20^th century, and it is expressed most forcibly in England. A once-immense power, now a husk, but with a cold, determined, super-arrogant would-be ruling autocracy who see the present circumstance as their golden chance to do so.

The world sees all this.

It now disinvests. It removes more and more of the timezone City-of-London functions to Paris, Germany, Holland and Ireland. The car plants and so much more will leave fast even though the Japanese have invested 165 billions to pump their cars into Europe. To have to trade on WTO terms -with the EU, compounded with the EU /Japan trade deal, absolutely kills their UK viability and need to be in Britain. The same applies to pharma, aviation technology and so much else. So much dislocation. More severe, more caustic, more dreadful, a deep-seated cultural rupture. English people are isolated from Europe at the emotional and aspirational-cultural level, to a degree that recalls the periods of the wars that so destroyed social intercourse from the 18^th century until 1945 with short breaks of fractured rationality.

The sinister reality – the Tory right embraces all this as they hope fervently to leave on their or no terms. For them, this is a matter of recovering the New Jerusalem. It feels like a John Bull version of zealous Zionism. The sacred wonder of the free nation-state shrink-wrapped and newly virginal after escaping the Ghoul of the EU will usher in an Age of Gold.

To get this, I doubt that the British Parliament would survive for five minutes if it really got in their way. Johnston is their creature; an emotional, absurd Mussolini-style comedic yet vicious figure.

I believe that we are FAR closer to violent failure and irrecoverable marginalization from the world than most people understand.

 If you doubt that, look at what waits in the wings. Trotskyism.

The fat has been burned. The body scrawny and lean. Imagine what can follow. - Terry Field