I venture to disagree with the view expressed on LabourList by Claude Moraes MEP that there are significant lessons to be learned from the horrific mass murders committed, by his own admission, by Anders Behring Breivik in Norway. I see no useful or practical lessons whatever to be learned from these events. They tell us absolutely nothing that we didn’t already know.
Mr Moraes argues that
… far-right violence is more commonplace in the form of racist attacks and intimidation than is reported, and it is … on the increase… such violence is seen as unpalatable but often carried out by thugs and loners, and is too often subtly excused ‘as a cry for help’… far-right extremism is so accepted in some European countries, that the extremes incited by elected politicians no longer attract surprise or condemnation… governments, police and intelligence services must also take far-right hate sites much more seriously… we should be aware that in the past two years there have been compelling international intelligence warnings of potential far-right atrocities…
concluding that
It is essential that Europe learns lessons as a result of this tragedy. It will be a mistake simply to see this as the act of an ‘insane fundamentalist loner’. Instead, far-right extremism, including the growth of violent organisations like the EDL here in the UK, has a disproportionate effect on many European societies, in Scandinavia, Western, Central and Eastern Europe alike. And it is likely the assorted groups on the extreme right in Europe will condemn this atrocity. It is up to us to understand how violence, on whatever scale, is at the heart of these far-right groups.
I have offered the following comment in reply:
I’m afraid that I don’t agree. I don’t believe that there are any useful or practical lessons to be learned from the Norwegian tragedy. The murderer is pretty clearly unhinged and out of touch with reality. It’s really nothing to do with his right-wing political views, whatever he might say to the contrary. He might just as well have excused his violent behaviour by reference to his membership of some left-wing Maoist revolutionary group. If the murders had turned out to be the work of a crazed Muslim fundamentalist from Bangladesh, would Claude Moraes now be writing that we should treat the episode as a wake-up call and a warning to take the threat of violence by Muslims far more seriously? I take leave to doubt it.
In any case, what precisely is the lesson that Mr Moraes thinks we should learn from the actions of Anders Behring Breivik? We already know about the violent proclivities of far right groups, without the need for Mr Breivik to tell us about them. Our security services already monitor them, to the extent that resources allow, for signs of criminal behaviour. Are we to ban these groups, or criminalise the expression of unpalatable political opinions? Advocating or practising violence is already a crime. The legacy of New Labour’s record on anti-terrorism legislation is already a threat to our civil liberties, urgently in need of radical revision and reduction. We should not be stampeded by the actions of a lone madman in Norway into making yet more inroads into our freedoms of expression and association.
In the end there’s no way to provide 100% protection against the risk of a deranged individual running amok with a gun or a bomb. The Norwegians may decide to tighten up their gun control laws, but ours are already pretty tight. The security services can’t keep a 24-hour watch on every eccentric or weirdo with barmy political views who might quite possibly snap one day and go out and murder a few dozen school-children. It’s just one of numerous risks we simply have to live with.
Brian
Dear D.I.D.: Here are some reactions to your ideas about a federal system for the UK, as seen from your viewpoint in Canada (itself of course a federation). I appreciate your kind remarks about this blog and the many interesting ideas and suggestions in your excellent post for a federated UK, many of which I support, while inevitably having reservations about some of the others.
For example, I predict that splitting England into regions, even if only for the purpose of equal representation in the federal upper house, would be fiercely resisted, to the point where any such proposal would probably wreck the federal project for good. The predominance of England is a reason for equal representation of the four UK nations in the federal Senate, not an obstacle to it. The object would be to prevent English representatives at the federal level being able to ram legislation through parliament against the opposition of any two of the other UK nations, a necessary safeguard against the domination of the federation by England. (In the American federal Senate, little Rhode Island has the same number of Senators as California or New York State, for the same reasons.) Remember that the only legislative subjects that would be affected by this would be the limited range of subjects, such as foreign affairs and defence, that would be assigned under the constitution to the federal level, and that very few of these would directly impinge on the ordinary lives of UK citizens — and that in addition, the powers of the Senate to amend or delay legislation coming to it from the federal House of Commons would anyway be very limited.
Once again I would stress the need to give adequate recognition to the reality that the UK is already a semi-federation, with actively functioning legislatures and governments in three of the four nations, all three with extensive powers. The parliament at Westminster already functions for much of the time as a federal legislature for the whole UK, just as the Westminster government functions as a federal government most of the time. It is the absurd and unsustainable paradox that both also have to function simultaneously as the legislature and government of England, with theoretically unlimited powers in England only, that makes it essential to move eventually to a full federal system, including an English parliament and government separate from those at Westminster.
The idea of an English Grand Committee of those House of Commons MPs who have been elected in England acting as a substitute for an English parliament, suggested in an earlier comment on your blog (and official Conservative Party policy!), is a non-starter, for many reasons, not the least of which is that such a ‘parliament’ could not function in a recognisably democratic manner unless accompanied by a separate English government. It would perpetuate, instead of solving, the existing problem of dual-purpose MPs. Moreover almost all legislation by the Westminster parliament on behalf of the whole UK inevitably impinges on England’s interests: how would a conflict between the policies of the English Grand Committee and those of the whole House of Commons be resolved?
Some of the subjects that would normally be allocated to the federal level are already within the competence of the EU, so the new federal government and parliament at Westminster would exercise only very limited functions in respect of them — exactly as is already the case.
Several of the problems that people raise as objections to a fully federal system already exist — most obviously the massive disparity in population size, area and wealth between England and the other three nations — and are arguments in favour of federalism, not obstacles to it. A full federal system would provide safeguards against English dominance over the other nations, mainly by giving the four nations full self-government, thus preventing England from interfering in the internal affairs of the other three nations. At present there are few such safeguards against English dominance apart from those provided by devolution, itself a diluted and still inadequaten form of federalism.
In UK circumstances I envisage that under the constitution the (limited) subjects assigned to the federal level would be listed and defined, whereas everything else (“residual powers”) would rest with the four nations’ parliaments and governments, and these would not need to be specified, apart from a few shared subjects on which the federal organs would prevail in the event of conflict. Thus almost every kind of law affecting the daily lives of citizens, from education and health to crime and local government, would fall within the competence of the Northern Irish, Welsh, Scottish and English parliaments and governments. The main provisions of the federal constitution would be ‘entrenched’, e.g. amendable only by a special majority (perhaps two-thirds) in the federal parliament and with the approval of two-thirds of the members of each of the parliaments of three out of the four nations. Some constitutional changes might also need to be approved in a national referendum or in three out of four separate referendums at the four-nations level.
Much of this would need to be worked out during the process of drawing up the detailed federal constitution following, probably, a Royal Commission, a Constitutional Convention, elections to the new English parliament and government, endorsement by the Westminster and all four devolved parliaments, and at least one national referendum.
All this would have to be preceded by a consensus between all the main UK political parties on the ultimate objective of a full federation. I doubt if this could all be accomplished in less than 20 years. It’s pointless to get into debates now on the details of the new régime when there isn’t even any sign of agreement among the main parties on a full federation as the long-term objective. The first and overriding task is to try to create a national consensus in favour of federalism to which all the major parties could sign up, leaving the small print to be settled after exhaustive debate at all the many later stages. Our present hybrid constitution with all its glaring anomalies (the West Lothian Question being only one of them) is deeply unsatisfactory and almost certainly unsustainable, as the SNP victory in Scotland has demonstrated: we have been warned, although our political leaders seem so far to have ignored the warning. No other remotely defensible solution to our current constitutional problems has ever been proposed. It’s really a case now of federate or bust.
Having written in more detail than I originally intended, I am posting a copy of this piece on my own blog as well as submitting it as a comment to your own admirable blog, at http://did101.wordpress.com/2011/06/11/salmond-cameroon-british-constitution/. Comments in either or both locations will be welcome — except that demands for separate membership of a UK federation for Cornwall may be taken as read, despite it being my favourite English county.
Brian
You’d think we hadn’t noticed, years ago, that scruple-free muck-raking newspapers eavesdrop on phone conversations (forgotten Squidgygate already?), or that squalid media organisations bribe the police for information, or that cowardly politicians of left and right cringe in terror of Rupert Murdoch. Reading this week’s newspapers and watching television, you’d think from their excited, all-consuming obsession with these questions that such unsavoury truths had only last week been exposed by a fearless press.
Meanwhile, serious crises are erupting in the real world out there, almost unnoticed by our media in their preoccupation with the examination of their own and the politicians’ navels. The giant US economy’s recovery is stalling, with almost no progress in reducing the fearsome level of unemployment, while reactionary Republicans in the Congress, demanding yet more growth-stifling cuts in public services, block the belated efforts of Obama and the Democrats to try once again to stimulate demand and resuscitate the recovery on which Americans and much of the rest of the world depend. In another part of the forest, the European Central Bank and the national leaders of the Eurozone countries squabble over how best to disguise the reality that Greece is on the point of defaulting on its mammoth debt, hampered in its efforts to avoid default by the imposition on its ordinary people of extreme measures of austerity, punishment for crimes committed mainly by others. Western economies are the submissive slaves of unaccountable ratings agencies, run by and committed to the interests of the bankers, whose actions and threats of actions to downgrade the credit ratings of sovereign governments determine whether those governments can afford to borrow to keep their economies afloat. Now Italy, with the third biggest economy in the EU, teeters on the brink of insolvency, with the cost of further essential borrowing soaring as bond yields are driven up by the ratings agencies, and a debt mountain too big, according to the FT, to permit an EU bail-out of the kind that might yet rescue Greece, Ireland and Portugal from collapse. (The chief contribution to a resolution of this crisis made by the Italian prime minister, Signor Berlusconi, is apparently to try, unsuccessfully, to insert in the budget a provision that would protect the profits of one of his own companies.)
There’s additional bad news. When the EU’s overall recovery from recession is threatened by the spreading contagion of sovereign defaults, with private sector demand failing disastrously to replace the collapse of demand generated by the public sector (precipitated by swingeing cuts in public borrowing and spending), the ECB’s response is actually to raise interest rates, thus further throttling overall demand, as if the main threat to EU economies was inflation caused by excess demand and excessive wage rises when the precise opposite is the case.
If all these impending calamities – the end of the US, Greek and Italian governments’ ability to borrow so as to sustain even minimal levels of demand and economic activity – materialise, perhaps almost simultaneously and within a few weeks, we may see the collapse of the Eurozone, a threat to the future of the EU, and a world banking crisis that will dwarf that of 2008. Worse still, western governments no longer have the resources to save the world banking system in the way they were able to do in 2008, thanks in large part to the economic and political skills of Gordon Brown (remember him?). Which of our leaders has begun to prepare us for the day when the shops will no longer accept credit cards or cheques, satisfied only by cash, and when cash is no longer available from the bank counter or the hole in the wall?
On the domestic front, a brilliantly led separatist party wins an overall majority in the latest election to the Scottish parliament, and promises a referendum on Scottish secession from the United Kingdom within the next three to four years. Not one all-UK political party has come up with any proposals for saving our country from disintegration, perhaps within the lifetime of the present semi-federal parliament at Westminster. The UK’s own economy shows little sign of vigorous recovery in demand and spending that would lead to renewed investment and economic activity, or revival in availability of jobs, almost certainly the only sure path to recovery from recession and steady reduction in the budget deficit. Instead, our ideology-driven Tory-led government actually increases VAT, continues to cut benefits for the poorest and most vulnerable, and stands idly by while the bankers and financiers cheerfully resume the bad practices which brought us to the verge of ruin – grotesque salaries and bonuses, dodgy loans, bad debts bundled up in opaque derivatives that are then sold on in a steadily expanding bubble. Banks saved from collapse by taxpayers’ money and by inescapable public borrowing are being sold back to the private sector as if nothing had happened that might call for reform. Libraries, theatre companies and orchestras, Sure Start, the NHS and state education – all are being laid waste by the most doctrinaire and reactionary government in living memory, under cover of the need to cut the deficit in a wholly unrealistic time-frame. Macmillan, Butler, Home, Heath, even Churchill must be revolving in their graves like gyros.
Yet amid the doom and gloom, all we read about or view in the media is acres and hours of excited, obsessive debate about whether Rebekah Brooks knew or should have known about industrial-scale phone hacking by her minions and if so whether she should resign: whether the mighty powers of Mr Murdoch snr. have really been definitively skewered beyond recovery; who authorised News Corp’s massive payments to its hacking victims to keep them quiet; and which coppers pocketed equally large sums of Murdoch devil’s gold in return for illicit information. None of these questions is unimportant. All of them deserve and need scrutiny and remedial action – especially the corruption of our politics by the self-serving, blackmailing, bullying and favour-dispensing culture of the Murdoch empire and its politician toadies. Better late than never!
But we deceive ourselves if we think that all this is going to change overnight, just because of the popular revulsion at the discovery that a nasty newspaper hacked into poor murdered Milly Dowler’s mobile. There’s too much mutual interest in the relationship between politicians and the media moguls for it ever to be wholly free from corruption. The impossibility and undesirability of the state assuming direct control over the media in an even partially free democracy preclude completely effective prevention of media excess and misbehaviour in pursuit of advertising, circulation, profit and power, the price we pay for “a free press”. Even the Sun is better than the old Pravda. The prurient appetite of a sizeable number of our fellow-citizens for celebrity gossip and dirt, for information about the sex-lives of the famous, the infamous and the insignificant, will always be fed by those who see profit and power in feeding it. Old Mr Murdoch will be succeeded by equally unsavoury young Mr Murdochs and their strange, dead-eyed favourites.
As the judge-led, police, and other inquiries drag on and economic crises remorselessly succeed one another, how much of today’s attention to the details of phone hacking and the News of the World will survive in, say, a year’s time? The brutal closure of the News of the Screws will doubtless achieve its main purpose, namely preventing the police and the judges from digging up too many five-year-old skeletons in the NewsCorp garden. The inquiries will be denounced for failing to come up with definitive durable solutions to inherently insoluble problems. Far more ordinary people’s lives will be far more directly affected by continuing or rising unemployment, ejection from their homes, and the steady erosion of their living standards, perhaps even by the collapse of the banking system and the disintegration of the United Kingdom, than by the disappearance of a squalid scandal sheet from the newsagents on Sundays. Of course the phone hacking affair raises important questions that require attention and action. But let’s try to preserve some sense of proportion. Far more important and threatening things are going on in the world around us than the future of Rebekah Brooks’s job.
Brian
