The estimable David McGrogan has done much for bringing an understanding of law to the pages of the Daily Sceptic. In an era in which everyone talks about science, it is very important that there will be some of us who keep talking about law — and literature — and politics.
McGrogan’s latest essay argued — it was a complicated piece and worth summarising — that Lord Diplock, a renowned old horse-rider of a lawyer, told the House of Lords in 1985 that he could see no reason why the lawyers shouldn’t be able to subject prerogative powers to judicial review. (McGrogan is very funny on the trickiness of the bland phrase, “I see no reason”.) This was part of the thing Jonathan Sumption has written about in his recent non-historical books: the tendency of lawyers to turn political convention into legal regulation: that is, more simply, the tendency of law lords to go after power. But the broader point is about the civil service. McGrogan argues that Government should be able to do what it wants with the civil service, free of any constraint: where constraint might come from judicial review, or from trade unionisation. Anyhow, one way or another, it is necessary to have a bonfire of the bureaucrats.
This is a useful suggestion. Some of us have tended to exaggerate the political causes, or, at a deeper level, the cultural and theoretical causes, of what has gone on since 2020, ignoring bureaucratic and legal causes. And it is quite possible that at some dim and clotted level the reality is that the Circumlocution Office (as depicted in Dickens’s Little Dorrit) has been in control all along, and that it is not, as it was in the 19th century, a hindrance to justice, progress and care, but is, in the 21st century, a hindrance to common sense and good order. For those of you who have not read Little Dorrit, the point of the Circumlocution Office — see chapter X, ‘Containing the whole science of Government’ — is how not to do it: how not to do Brexit, how not to do Covid, how not to do Immigration, how not to do Education, how not to do Civilisation.
In order to add to McGrogan’s vision of what is wrong, let me say something about two things, coup d’état and the universal class.
Firstly, the universal class. In his Philosophy of Right Hegel used this phrase, in German of course — der allgemeine Stand — to refer to the civil service. In every society, he suggested, we have classes or estates and we have individuals, all of whom are pursuing their own interests. But there is one class that is not serving its own interest, because it is serving the public interest. This is the universal class. For Hegel, this meant bureaucrats.
There are two things to say about this. The first is that Marx, in the course of inverting Hegel, decided that the universal class was not the bureaucracy but the proletariat. Clever. And, indeed, this is still a favoured alternative. (Consider Graeber, Occupy, Momentum, UKIP etc.) Even McGrogan has to fall back on it, saying that if we think that the Government has been unfair to the civil servants then we can always appeal to the electorate for justice. Perhaps the only other serious candidate for a universal class is the academic-fantastical one of the intellectuals and experts: the people who know how to do it. You know, the COVID-19, Net Zero, Diversity brigade.
The second thing to say is that any member of the universal class, whatever it is, is likely to be extremely conceited. “You are serving your interest, but I am serving the public interest.” Lofty expression; grave voice; large pension. And the problem with our entire education system at the moment, from school upwards, is that it seems to encourage people to opine and emote and genuflect in ways which involve ostentatious and positively Pecksniffian displays of concern for the greater good, the common weal, the public interest: though expressed not in Shakespearian or High Victorian manner but in the friendly and caring style of the CBeebies.
Of our three great candidates for a universal class it has to be said that the proletariat is out of favour. It is derided by academics and journalists — and sometimes both (Cas Mudde and Jan-Werner Müller keep popping up in the Guardian) — as ‘populist’. A dread word, ‘populist’: it brings to the mind of the average onion-emoting and lemon-opining educated liberal citizen a horrific Bosch vision of Donald Trump, Nigel Farage, Geert Wilders, Victor Orban and massed AFD types, indeed, everyone on the ‘far Right’ or ‘hard Right’, all making a merry hell of the world. So this leaves the other two candidates for a universal class: the intellectuals on the one hand, and the bureaucrats on the other. Those of us who get easily bored focus on the bright intellectuals; but McGrogan says that we should overcome our scruples, turn on the night vision goggles and focus on the dim bureaucrats instead: since it is their inertia and sense that they are right and their absolute inability to justify how they are right that forms the ‘immovable obstacle’ that is fatberging the sewer of the modern state. They make the intellectuals look like leaves in a windy autumn, easily dissipated.
Secondly, I wanted to talk about coup d’état. Everyone thinks they know what a coup d’état is. Surely it is an insurrection, an attempt to snatch power away from those who hold it? Surely it is the October Revolution of 1917? Surely it is January 6th? Well, it can be these. But it is actually something much more interesting than mere insurrection. For, as originally defined by the remarkable French writer of the early 17th century, Gabriel Naudé, it is not something which is done to a state, but something done by a state. A coup d’état, he wrote, is a coup inflicted by the state on the people. He said it was like the act of a god, a thunderbolt, a raining down of disaster, an Old Testament plague, a sudden blow.
I submit that COVID-19 was a coup d’état.
So was accession to the EEC.
Modern politics could be considered death by a thousand coups.
Since I am littering this essay with capitalised concepts, let me reflect on two more. Thirdly, let us mention conspiracy theories again. If we suppose that Plato is right, and the state is founded on a ‘noble lie’; if we suppose Machiavelli is right, and politicians need to employ all the arts of force and fraud — lion and fox — in order to maintain their own state; and if we suppose that Naudé is right, and the state acts most decisively and mysteriously when it acts like a capricious god: then conspiracy theories are not the works of madmen but what Anthony Fauci would call “just common sense”. The modern academic and journalistic habit of deriding conspiracy theories is just one more way of concealing the arcana imperii by which our order is alchemised, cabalised and witch-doctored by our overlords.
Fourthly, it is perhaps worth saying something about Michael Gove’s recent redefinition of extremism. ‘Extremes’ are feared by those who think they are in the middle. The ones who think most pompously that they are in the middle — serving the public interest and not their own miscellaneous interests — are the members of the universal class. Any definition of extremism is an attempt to shore up a sandbank in a rising tide. Gove, whose speeches sound as if they come from someone whose onions and lemons have been helped down with great quantities of roast pork, madeira wine and linen napkin, tells us that Britain is stronger through diversity. That is a lie, obviously. The universal class is petrified, not only by the off-message ruminations of the many immigrants who have come in, but also by the off-message ruminations of the ‘populists’ who think that Britain’s natural and easy diversity of the last century or more is being displaced by an ironclad Orwellian discourse of diversity which is, in fact, anything but diverse.
The ‘deep state’, the ‘blob’, the ‘universal class’, whatever you want to call it, is trying to define something arbitrarily in the hope that it can hold the leaking sides of the ship of state together. But definitions are for schools, not for politicians. Gove’s redefinition is yet another gesture towards defending ‘British values’ which no one has ever believed in. Churchill didn’t believe in them; nor did Gladstone; nor Pitt; nor Walpole; nor Clarendon; nor Cromwell; nor Burghley; nor Warwick the Kingmaker; nor Montfort; nor Becket; nor Bede. British values are bogus. ‘Extremism’ is just an admission that the British state let the cats out of the bag in the last few generations, and is trying to find a few stray cats to rebag and drown in order to suggest that all is well in the world. It is yet one more coup d’état, even if only a relatively titchy one, by the universal class.
Dr. James Alexander is a Professor in the Department of Political Science at Bilkent University in Turkey.
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“Governments don’t stay in power if they make people cold and poor”. They do if there is no coherent opposition to vote for.
And even if they don’t stay in power and get replaced, the next lot just carry on in the same way, so it makes no difference.
And they are rewarded with gongs for failure.
Which confirms what I keep repeating on here – our governments are NOT running the country.
Pitchforks.
Petrol bombs while we still have access to it.
All the petrol pumps have been damaged by climate zealots.
Pointing out the costs and suffering won’t put an end to insane climate policies.
The policies stem from the idea that burning fossil fuels leads to climate catastrophe and destruction.
In most peoples’ minds, a bit of suffering is better than catastrophe and destruction.
Years and years of brainwashing need to be undone.
But that isn’t going to happen without telling everyone that the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax.
Too many people who try to argue against climate policy on the basis of the unacceptable costs don’t dare to challenge the broader narrative and that’s a big problem.
I think this is true for the Guardian readers I know, but I also talk to quite a few people much more grounded in reality and I am sure they would be more than happy to forget about the climate crisis if their bills went down.
People are saying that “the whole CO2 climate catastrophe story is a giant hoax” but they do not try to prove it. Probably they do not know enough to be able to.
The UN and WEF will be delighted that their planned destruction of the UK …. at the hands of the British Establishment and puppeticians is going so well.
Only a small percentage of the Earth’s surface has direct temperature reading instruments of varying accuracy and from which these averages of averages are calculated.
The result is numbers, not data.
Net-zero common sense for decades. And all because the earth has supposedly warmed 0.8 deg C since 1860 when records began at the low point after a little ice age.
To physicists, that’s an increase of 0.3% from 288 to 288.8 degrees Kelvin. Meanwhile the difference in average temperature between London and Manchester is 1.2 deg C. Go figure.
A simpleton’s yarn debunked over a decade ago by a Nobel Physics Laureate…
https://mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/recordings/31259/the-strange-case-of-global-warming-2012
“…In this talk I will explain why I became concerned about the climate, and terrified by the one-sided propaganda in the media, In particular I am worried about all the money wasted on alternate energies, when so many children in the world go hungry to bed.”
Twelve years on, the Climate Theatre of the Absurd just runs and runs.
Thanks for the link.
Climate activists are average people
No, I think most of us would consider them below average retards if there answer to a lack of wind generation is just to build more of it. 1 + 1 still only equals 1 when it is the percentage of output from your windmills.
Energy, supply and demand.
The article covers comprehensively the supply end, or lack of it, but leaves out the zooming demand. According to the (fake) statistics, the population of Greater London in 2024 was 9,748,000, 1% more than 2023. Nevertheless, going by measurements of water consumption and sewage production, the real figure is close to 12m. And this is the curious thing. The NetZeroist fanatics also support enthusiastically open borders, ignoring the fact that increasing population levels lead to huge greenhouse gas emissions.
Friends of the Earth’s Tony Bosworth said, “We have an abundance of natural resources like wind and solar,” he says. “They’ll go on forever, and we won’t be reliant on expensive gas and oil.”
Bosworth ought to be sent, along with the Just Stop Oil filth who have just desecrated the grave of Charles Darwin, to Texas, to be instructed by the Texans about what happened to their wind & solar during the terrible “Polar Vortex” Blizzards in 2021. The wind turbines froze solid, the solar panels were covered with snow, and the people froze to death.
“The Texas Winter Storm And Power Outages Killed Hundreds More People Than The State Says”
“A BuzzFeed News analysis shows the catastrophic failure of Texas’s power grid in February killed hundreds of medically vulnerable people.”
“The true number of people killed by the disastrous winter storm and power outages that devastated Texas in February is likely four or five times what the state has acknowledged so far. A BuzzFeed News data analysis reveals the hidden scale of a catastrophe that trapped millions of people in freezing darkness, cut off access to running water, and overwhelmed emergency services for days.”
“The state’s tally currently stands at 151 deaths. But by looking at how many more people died during and immediately after the storm than would have been expected — an established method that has been used to count the full toll of other disasters — we estimate that 700 people were killed by the storm during the week with the worst power outages.”
“This astonishing toll exposes the full consequence of officials’ neglect in preventing the power grid’s collapse despite repeated warnings of its vulnerability to cold weather, as well as the state’s failure to reckon with the magnitude of the crisis that followed.”
Texas’s Winter Storm Killed Hundreds More Than Reported
Until the mainstream media stop repeating the net zero lies, it will remain difficult to get the honest message such as this article, through.