Review of Downward Spiral: Collapsing public standards and how to restore them by John Bowers KC
Political systems, in their decline, often become so gummed up by procedure, factions, petty officials and assorted spoonbenders that no one is able to grab the reins and turn things around. Outsiders who try to are combined against and disposed of. There are more laws and rules than ever, but the only real law is that no one is in charge or responsible for anything.
In most cases, such a system develops a kind of gratuitous cynicism about itself. A giggling interior world, with its own lore, rituals and endless, wearisome intrigues. The Forbidden City; the seraglio; Versailles; the Kremlin in the days of Andropov – no one on the inside could justify this state of affairs, or imagine that things could go on like this for much longer, and so there is instead a conscious revelling in dysfunction. A despairing frivolity. Tittering schadenfreude. A perverse glee is taken at dispatching anyone who threatens to disturb this internal equilibrium. The only task becomes to keep this milieu going for as long as possible while the wallpaper peels.
But this kind of rot can be reversed, because it is so visibly self-serving that it cannot inspire any sincere defence. When preposterous rackets like the Janissaries or the Praetorian Guard were rolled up, nobody mourned them, and it was impossible to imagine them being brought back.
The trouble really begins, things really become terminal, when the dysfunction and hopeless diffusion of power starts to evolve a moral argument for itself. All the accumulated barnacles now become, instead, the rule of law, or aristocratic freedoms, or something else.
In his new book, Downward Spiral: Collapsing public standards and how to restore them, John Bowers KC, Master of Brasenose College, sets out modern Britain’s version of this argument, and muses on how it might be codified for good.
Defences of the rule of Whitehall, the arms-length bodies and the courts is a fairly new genre – at most it is about 10 years old. More than anything else it arose as a reaction to Brexit, which seemed to challenge this rule. There was very suddenly a need for some overarching narrative to justify and defend the way in which England had been governed since 1997. It was found in the Nolan Principles, a set of guidelines for holders of public office written up in 1995 in the wake of ministerial scandals, and appreciated primarily as a means to police the actions of elected politicians.
These Principles are listed in full at the beginning of Downward Spiral:
- Selflessness – Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest.
- Integrity – Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends. They must declare and resolve any interests and relationships.
- Objectivity – Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias.
- Accountability – Holders of public office are accountable to the public for their decisions and actions and must submit themselves to the scrutiny necessary to ensure this.
- Openness – Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing.
- Honesty – Holders of public office should be truthful
- Leadership – Holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their own behaviour and treat others with respect. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.
The essential insight of Downward Spiral is that these principles are not always being observed. Bowers has checked the rulebook and has spotted a number of violations, which he now dutifully records. The Nolan Principles echo and reverberate throughout this study. Whenever an issue arises in public life, Bowers gets his bearings by scanning the Principles to see which one it falls under and can be marked against. Luckily, he is always courteous enough to share the correct answer with us. So we are informed at the beginning of chapter four that the “case of Priti Patel” and her poor treatment of staff in fact falls under “the seventh Nolan Principle, which requires office holders to treat each other with respect and challenge poor behaviour”.
So too with the issue of lobbying in Parliament, a question to which there are no easy answers. Is it a way for minority concerns to be heard, or a tool for monied interests? Thankfully, Bowers is there to remind us of what is truly important: “The Nolan Principle this area engages is the fifth, Openness.”
Why abide by these principles and not other ones? Some items on the list seem contestable. ‘Objectivity’, for example. One premise of the Marxist idea of history is that everything about our view of the world is coloured by our class background, that impartiality is not possible and that the essential task of politics is to fight our own class’s corner, come what may. The Labour Party, in its infancy, was designed as a sectional faction for Britain’s trade union movement; it did not pretend to impartiality.
This principle, then, does not seem like a sound basis for liberal institutions, which are supposed to admit people of any cause and persuasion. Can politicians really be ‘impartial’, and would we even want them to be? Bowers resolves this and other quandaries early on. The Committee that designed the Nolan Principles in 1995 was in fact an “ethical workshop”, we’re told, to which Professor Ivor Crewe, an “influential political scientist” presented evidence. The findings of the Committee were then compiled in a report, which was written, thankfully, “before the cacophony of social media was even heard of”.
Bowers is not interested in working any of these ideas out. The Committee has spoken. A.V. Dicey and Walter Bagehot, who wrote during an era without ethical workshops, are only engaged glancingly, at the very end of the book.
Bowers is content to take these principles as read. His reverence for them is blinking and mute. This is also the case for many of his contemporaries: in a grotesque aside at the beginning of the book, Baroness Manningham-Buller, former Director-General of MI5, boasts that she can recite them by heart.
According to Bowers, the Nolan Principles are the “key ethical principles” that make the “genuine rule of law” possible, and so as these Principles are breached, then the all-important “trust in politics” declines, and, still worse, “public disrespect for the state presents a real and important threat to it”.
Much of the book is devoted to cataloguing the various breaches that have been going on over the past five years, this downward spiral. All the usual daemonology is here: Boris Johnson wanted to be a “world king” when he was a small boy; Michael Gove thinks people have “had enough of experts”; and so on.
But our author writes a suitable epigraph to his project in the very first pages of the book: “As a lawyer I found this outrageous, although it is not strictly speaking a matter of law.” To people like Bowers, ‘law’ is not a defined procedure, or an instrument of government, or even a body of statutes. It is instead a spiritual signifier: a stand-in for civilised society and morality. Laws exist outside of time and space, entirely separate from the state that creates and enforces them.
Many European countries treat the orderly application of the law as a kind of credo, the Rechtstaat. But that is not what is going on here. Bowers and his contemporaries have an idea of law that is manifestly cruder, in which even the pettiest of public sector HR disputes are treated as high constitutional questions.
In Britain, which has a sovereign parliament, the rule of law means nothing more than the enforcement of Westminster’s own acts and statutes. It is impossible by definition for the Crown-in-Parliament to ‘undermine’ the rule of law; as the sovereign, it makes direct interventions in the legal system as a normal event. Most recently, it declared the sub-postmasters innocent and that Rwanda was in fact a safe place to send illegal migrants. To this day, it retains the right to simply declare any individual or group of individuals guilty of a crime through a Bill of Attainder.
But because the law simply means ‘morality’ to people like Bowers, it so follows that every issue, every act in public life, now becomes a matter for the law. So we learn that Boris Johnson’s refusal to heed the results of an internal investigation on workplace bullying, or the failure to appoint Mary Beard to her preferred post at the British Museum, are in fact affronts to the rule of law itself.
And the converse is also true: for Bowers, his own personal views about wrongdoing in public life are always a matter for the police. Bowers darkly hints that Evgeny Lebedev is Russian, a friend of Boris Johnson, and that “one might think” that the consequences of Brexit “were broadly helpful to long-term Russian interests”, and so a police investigation into his elevation to the House of Lords probably should have been carried out. For Bowers, the word ‘Trumpian’ is a magical spell that can automatically hocus pocus anything into a sort of legal grey area. The “combative” Paul Dacre used to be the Editor of the Daily Mail, “public enemy number one of the BBC”, and so his having the cheek to apply for its Directorship in late 2021 with Downing Street’s support was in all likelihood a breach of the process and unlawful.
Every government limits the scope of legal actions that can be taken against it: both to allow the business of the executive to be carried on, and, still more, because there exists in every system a final court of appeal whose decisions are unarguable. You cannot sue Charles III, as, being the sovereign, he has the power to instantly pardon himself of any crime. Even countries with a formal separation of powers like the United States recognise the primacy of politics over law in these affairs. The impeachment of a President is a strictly political act; it happens at the discretion of Congress and no one else.
Bowers does not appreciate this or pretends not to. We are, instead, fobbed off with the sub-Montesquieu bromide that “no one is above the law”. Time and again, whether in the case of Partygate, or Priti Patel’s bullying, the elected government is accused of being its own “judge and jury”. But this is almost necessarily the case; the executive is, after all, a cipher for the royal power, and possesses the confidence of Parliament, the sovereign legal authority. To give a standards regulator formal powers to police the actions of the Crown-in-Parliament would simply create a new sovereign – though one that is totally unaccountable to anyone.
In liberal democracies, a mandate from the people is in some way sacred and should be meddled with only in extremis. Politicians, then, simply cannot be judged by the standards of ordinary employees. This idea means little to Bowers, who, wearyingly, wants these people kept on a very short leash. By way of response to Partygate and similar episodes, Bowers calls for any Minister found to be in breach of the Ministerial Code to be barred from future office and to lose his or her pension. Such a system would, amazingly, leave the people’s representatives with far fewer protections than those in the private sector.
What is held as sacred throughout Downward Spiral is a completely infantile idea of impartiality, objectivity and merit in public life. Bowers defends the large and growing powers of the arms-length bodies, but is scandalised that anyone might deem this power to be in any way political. Kwasi Kwarteng’s decision not to name Jonathan Michie OBE as Executive Chair of the Economic and Social Science Research Council (ESSRC) for ideological reasons, was, we learn, “probably unlawful”, as Jonathan “had an impressive CV and a good background” .
So too with the Chair of the Charity Commission, which lay vacant in 2021. This is a body which is responsible for regulating a £70 billion sector that includes multi-million pound advocacy concerns like the Barrow Cadbury Trust and Migrant Help. Might it have been in some way justified, then, for the elected Government to take an interest in who fills this spot? Given its powers, it is not reasonable to treat this post as simply the due right of whatever stately windbag Bowers can produce for us. True to form, our author grunts that this is all an example of a “culture war agenda”, and moves on.
This learned constitutional theory of ‘Ban Bad Things For Being Bad’ is also applied to Gavin Williamson, Education Secretary from 2019-21. Bowers claims that Boris Johnson’s failure to fire Williamson for the A-level “fiasco” of summer 2020 was a breach of convention. There is of course no objective definition of failure or fiasco; this is an idea with no constitutional meaning. It was perfectly possible to defend the use of algorithms to assign grades as a way to introduce a measure of common standards to an exam system that had completely collapsed because of lockdown. As it happened, the policy was reversed and the students at the private schools duly got their teacher-assessed three A*s.
But even this is to miss the point. What is true? What is good? What is meritorious? These things are up for debate, and are decided by the British electorate at the ballot box. To demand an objective standard of merit in public life is, in a very real sense, to jilt the whole idea of liberal institutions. Bowers imagines himself as a defender of norms and conventions, but he is entirely a product of a public sphere so hollowed out that the most basic notions of liberal pluralism have been abandoned. The clash of creeds, of ideas, of classes; the cut-and-thrust – all this means little to Bowers, a man who, amidst the hubbub and din, clings to the last to his Big Book of Principles. To his Openness. To his Leadership.
Downward Spiral makes heavy use of all the New Labour human resources-cum-lager lout stock phrases: “marking their own homework”; “not fit for purpose”. Otherwise, the book’s register is pious and wheedling – like Sambo and Flip of St Cyprian’s. Wheedling, because whenever an issue in public life rears its head, Bowers can never resist inviting some titled nobody to step in and resolve it for us. Read on for a characteristic example:
The seriousness of the situation was emphasised by Lord Hennessy of Nympsfield, who described Johnson’s reaction to being fined for breaking Covid regulations as evoking nothing less than a constitutional crisis because it put a great strain on those conventions.
And pious, because Bowers is so tiresomely uncharitable towards all of his foes. Of Boris Johnson opinions vary. But there was nothing open and shut about any of the issues that dogged him. The decision to prorogue Parliament in 2019 was based on a plausible set of assumptions about prerogative powers, and the Partygate saga turned on extremely granular debates on the wording of the lockdown rules. But in Bowers’s hands there is not even a nod to any of the complexities here. It’s all either a prelude to tyranny and general lawlessness, or simply so much marking of one’s own homework.
On a sociological level, this is odd. Bowers is no party man. He is a highly successful barrister approaching his retirement and a master of a college at one of the ancient universities. The perfect time and place, then, to philosophise: to think broadly and generously about the state of the nation and the shape of its future. But the chance is thrown away. At the sight of a designated Enemy, Bowers crinkles into a frown, and his eyes narrow, as if by some automatic process – like a character from the Elder Scrolls turned hostile.
By accepting no real limit to legal recourse, Bowers would create a system that is genuinely lawless. Treating the law as a moral idea to appeal to, rather than an orderly process for resolving disputes, is only to open the door to its complete weaponisation in political battles. At the centre of it all will lie the Nolan Principles (which Bowers wants ministers to swear an oath to), a code so vague and general that it could be feasibly used to punish anyone over anything. It will, inevitably, be found that decisions made by the elected government are not Objective, or fail to evince sufficient Selflessness, and then it’ll simply be curtains.
Of course, Bowers is far from alone in his ideas. This is the house constitutional doctrine of Team Starmer, and is soon to make its final conquest of the democratic executive. As a set of ideas they are simply crass. That you can make an issue non-political by handing it over to a committee. That a lack of ‘bias’ in politics is achievable or even desirable. That law is not only completely independent of power, but also that its main use is to ensure that no one is able to exercise any power, in case they use it badly. That a democracy could be superintended by something like the Nolan Principles: which is a declaration that things ought to be Good rather than Bad, and reads as if it was cadged from a management away-day in Swindon.
How did educated people come to believe in these things? One answer is expediency: that this final stroke against parliamentary democracy will make all change impossible. But I would say that in the vast majority of cases the belief is entirely sincere – that we really did solve the problem of morality in politics at an ethical workshop convened by John Major in 1995. If this is all a big trick, then very few seem to be in on it.
This certainly seems to be true in Bowers’ case. He is of that class of people who are always the most readily won for reigning spooks and legends: plum, stately, though remote from the realities of actual executive power. You can see it in how the ideas in Downward Spiral frequently escape the confines of any narrow political end, and the guns are turned even on members of the high officialdom. There are a number of dark mutterings about the former Cabinet Secretary Simon Case, who was part of a ‘Johnson Set’ (this term is apparently an actionable legal concept) – his real crime, of course, being complicity in parliamentary government.
You can see it, still more, in how our author seems genuinely baffled by the kind of fuzzy compromises that liberal society has to make. Boris Johnson promising things which he did not deliver, or massaging statistics for public consumption, were not examples of ordinary political rhetoric, but an infernal “lie machine”. A slightly irritating habit of Bowers’ is to come up with completely contrived “paradoxes” and then chortle at his own creations. It is paradoxical that Suella Braverman and Priti Patel want lower levels of migration, despite being the children of immigrants. There is “indeed some irony” that a post-Brexit government “involved essentially in rule making was controlled for three years by an inveterate rule breaker”. Significantly, it is also declared to be a paradox that the public voted for Boris Johnson despite knowing him to be a liar. These “paradoxes” are the result of millions of people with divergent interests attempting to arrive at some majority view through deliberation, but one gets the sense that they are all too much for our author and he would like someone to step in and resolve them.
It’s common now to say that views like these are part of a savvy and svelte liberal consensus. This consensus, it’s said, errs in not recognising the old-fashioned pieties and moral certainties of those it rules. What Downward Spiral and similar books do, more than anything else, is give the lie to this idea. Bowers constantly invokes the People. It is said that they, with their guttural and instinctive sense of right and wrong, will soon lose faith in the whole system if nothing is done. Their political concerns are classically proletarian: not high constitutional principles, but rather money, sex, and the hypocrisy of the powerful.
The opposite is true. The average Boris Johnson voter knows that he was a liar and a cheat, but was willing to suborn these scruples to a wider political end. Such a calculation is beyond people like Bowers. In the election of 2019, Boris Johnson made his appeal to the people on a constitutional issue: Brexit; but was in some way compromised by his own personal peccadillos. By some margin, ordinary people showed that they cared much more about the former than the latter. By a strange turn of the wheel, then, it is the ordinary people, not their metropolitan rulers, who are more at ease with ethical ambiguity, and can separate morality from their politics: in other words, the essential characteristic of a secular man. But to Bowers this is all dangerously postmodern, Machiavellian. At the end of the book he throws up his hands and decries that “there is no longer a consensus view on what is ethical and what is not”, and what we really need is to “reassert ethical values”. In the chapter on Partygate, Bowers turns away in bafflement and disgust from the debate over legal advice, rules and terminology, denouncing it all as so much verbal trickery: “linguistic contortions”. Men should say what they mean and mean what they say. This is all, in a quite objective sense, the same basic worldview of Colonel Blimp and the Outraged of Tunbridge Wells. It’s simply ludicrous to cast these people as the urbane inheritors to the Bloomsbury Set, or even to the Fabian Society; or to imagine that their outlook is somehow more switched-on and metropolitan than, say, Dominic Cummings’s plans to refashion the state on technocratic lines.
We are doubtless meant to take Bowers as a liberal of the old school. A solid, steady man of affairs, who sticks, perhaps naively, to old constitutionalist principles as the darkness closes in. In reality, his politics is that of the saloon bar bore: that the country is going to the dogs because there’s no morality anymore, that the politicians are all in it for money, and that we need a firm hand to bring them all to heel. The difference is this: the pub bore will actually go out and vote, whereas Bowers wants to abolish the politicians. It is people like Bowers who have truly despaired of liberal democracy. The world in 2024 is growing more complex, consensus is disappearing, and the “cacophony of social media” rattles on. No wonder Bowers and his contemporaries have glommed onto something like the Nolan Principles – such was their frenzied search for some ethical steer. This is not something that others have found necessary. England’s governing classes – as they are fond of saying of denizens of the Red Wall – find themselves left behind by a changing world that they do not understand.
Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Migrant Help receives £65.5 million in taxpayers’ money each year and assisted in a lawsuit against the British state over the Rwanda scheme. We apologise for the error.
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We are governed by an aristocracy of socialist nitwits who worship at the altar of Paul McCartney and Climate Change. It’s not hard to work out why things have deteriorated as they have when the so called right has effectively caved to this aristocracy over everything from gay marriage, nut zero and lock downs. Look at the stupid women wearing her spider, does she thinks she’s clever or something?
I wonder who you thing is in this “so called right”. All those who have “caved” seem to me to be social democrats.
Good observation, this is why I used the term so called, all worship Thunberg and McCartney. The low culture has infantilised almost all. Sorry but pop music is childish rubbish that pollutes the mind and morally corrupts.
The leftists were so in thrall of that spider broach, they were selling copies on ebay.
Is having a ruling class consistent with democracy?
There is always a ruling class, the question is are they in it for themselves/indifferent about whether ppl improve their lot, or in it for themselves/desperate to worse everyone else’s lot. Things worked fine with the former since the former till about 1995, since then with environmentalism it’s very much the latter. Nut zero and mass migration are the hammar for them to wreck ppls living standards.
If you have a democracy you can’t have a “ruling” class. You can have representatives that act on behalf of the people. But they aren’t rulers.
I agree with you that we’ve always had a ruling class and so by extension, never had a democracy really. The only thing that has changed in my view is that our ruling class, which has always acted on behalf of powerful, special interests, has lost much of its sense of moderation and are now doing it shamelessly without any guise or pretence.
Part of what has unmasked them is the internet and that has accelerated with smartphones and social media as uncontrolled information flows more quickly than ever. That’s a genie they are trying to put back in bottle with their new draconian digital laws.
Btw, everyone is in for themselves. Everyone. To expect otherwise is futile and will only lead to disappointment. It’s better to accept it and manage it as best as possible by identifying interests and incentives and aligning them.
We do need to love ourselves, to look after ourselves: but part of that should include wanting our neighbours to be content. After all, it will make our lives easier, and more enjoyable.
Not long after the Berlin Wall came down then, maybe there is some connection there.
1995 is three years after the Maastricht Treaty, time, for those inclined, to develop a new social network, ready to spread their malevolence, disguised as European Democracy. Perhaps there’s no disguise.
What’s your idea of democracy?
A system of collective government in which laws and rules are made by the majority or are understood to have the approval of the majority.
That would be my definition.
Then, it’s obviously possible to have a ruling class in a democracy, provided the ruling class gets popular approval for its policy decision, say, by holding Hitler-style ex post factum referendums.
I wouldn’t call them a ruling class though because they don’t rule. They represent. The majority of the people rule, supposedly.
It could be just semantics except that words seem to matter and if you call someone your ruler, that’s what you tend to end up thinking.
We used to have an aristocratic class which held sway in the HoL. Generally it was efficient and responded to democratic or social and economic pressure.
What we now have is a political class, Matt Goodwin calls them an elite, and David Goodhart descibes them as coming from the Nowhere section of the community. We did not used to have that. People could and did get into the senior ranks of the civil service and into Parliament without joining a club or adopting group-think. We were better governed than but instead we have had rulers imposed upon us who are every bit as oppressive as the less good sovereigns use to be and against whom deadly riots and the threat of insurrection hung over the country.
I’m not sure we were better governed. I think that perhaps the scope of governance has expanded to the point where we now have rules and regulations for every little bit of our lives, directly or indirectly.
But we shouldn’t forget that the rulers of the past were able to get away with, for example, sending millions of people to be butchered in trench warfare, in defence of god knows what exactly.
It’s beginning to seem to me as if we may just have lived through some very unusual goldilocks period in the late 20th century and very early 21st of prosperity and relative freedom. And now were heading back to a more common form of society where a ruling class shits all over the masses.
I get that impression when I watch old British comedies from the 70s 80s & 90s. We seem to be in a decay now despite state of the art technology.
The Political Bubble and those involved creating the ‘state of the art technology’ are two very different ‘communities’, probably distinguished by the usefulness of the undergraduate degrees.
In fact 2.67 million British soldiers joined as volunteers and 2.77 million as conscripts during WW1.
We have lived through ‘The (European) Long Peace’, 1945-2014, as a consequence of conventional deterrence in Europe, Britain defence spending 5% of gdp in 1950, dropping to 4% in the 1990s, to 3% in 1997 and then to 2%.
Hmmm…….
Recall the pax Britannica too.
There was less government and less government is invariably better government.
I call it the Liberal Progressive Virus. Symptoms include Group Think, decision making based on ideology rather than common sense, indulging in a symbiotic relationship with the scientists that you fund in order to give an air of authority to decision making, a desire to put the interests and goals of global entities like the UN and WEF first and the people that vote for you last.
There is only one cure. A return to Equal Justice for all, and Social Justice thrown into the trash. A ditching of post normal science and the return of evidence and observation based science. Conservatives must re-adopt conservative values and stop with this morphing into Labour Lite because they think there are more votes in it. Clearly as the polls are showing, there are not.
I’d argue most Tories are hard left, they just don’t know it.
I think a large part of the love affair with the EU, the UN, WEF, WHO and others is that our MP’s dont have to make decisions, the ‘correct’ decision having been given to them on a platter to implement. Our Government is not sovereign, just a link in a chain. This is also why we as the citizenry have become disillusioned with them. Integrity, openness, accountability, have all fallen by the wayside. Tony Benn used to say that democracy was the ability to say to our leaders, ‘we’ve had enough of you, now go’. How does that work when there are supra-national bodies above them, and quango’s below.
The Conservatives are not doing what they are doing because they think there are votes there.
First of all, our political parties don’t represent ordinary people. They are there to control ordinary people. They represent powerful, special interests who pick the individuals to lead the parties based on (a) their ability to pursue the policies that those power special interests want and (b) their ability to sell those policies to the general public while keeping them pacified.
Truss for example failed on (a) so she got tossed out and replaced by Rishi Sunak who at least fulfilled good stick to the right policy. But he has clearly failed with (b). The Conservatives have no public support. Luckily they have Starmer in the Labour Party or Team B as I like to call it. He is good with (a) – the policy. And will just about get the job done with (b) – by winning an election and at least temporarily giving the impression that these monstrous policies have public support, because after all that’s what winning an election means, right?
Sunak is falling on his sword by sticking to grotesque unpopular policies because he’s really interviewing for some future establishment post in an NGO or an institution for when he gets dumped in the election.
And just for good measure, any attempt to create a new party that isn’t beholden to these powerful special interests and actually represents ordinary people is quickly crushed. The system is rigged against any new party anyway, but if by any chance it gets momentum they’ll do whatever it takes to crush it.
That’s the piece of shit of system we have. To think it’s anything other than that is an illusion.
Best to get out of one’s mind that any of these clowns represent any of us or care about anything but themselves. Certainly none of the ones who make it to senior positions.
So, Increase the perceived level of personal threat by hard-hitting emotional messaging
was an example of holders of public office acting honestly while Johnson’s I honestly don’t give a shit about this virus! wasn’t? Would it have been more honest for Johnson to maintain the facade of lies even in private, then?
How utterly bizarre.
We can expect more of the same downward spiral with assistance from graduates from Brasenose.
I do not agree that the habit of handing over regulatioin to unaccountable Quangos is only ten years old. The Financial Standards Authoruty had the power to make its own rules which had the authority of the law and to judge its own priorities for enforcement and penalties.
When it favoured big business and penalised the small it could not be challenged; when big business told it to get out of the way, it did so. Subsequently its trainees were given high paid jobs in the regulated businesses and with their successors at the FSA formed a nomenclatura who could not be gainsaid.
Ministers and MPs and journalists were not prepared to consider any complaints because they held the FSA as righteous and beyond challenge. That’s how Northern Rock went wrong but it could not be admitted nor dealt with other than with ever more regulations, higher cost and restrictions oin business innovation and competitiveness.
Huge amounts of business has left or stopped coming to London because of the FSA.
The administrative state has been growing out of control for several decades. The scope of the state is far too great. Reducing the state’s overall scope and decentralizing as far as practicable are imperative if democratic oversight of the state is to be restored.
“Holders of public office must avoid placing themselves under any obligation to people or organisations that might try inappropriately to influence them in their work. They should not act or take decisions to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family, or their friends”
I think that ship has well passed, and back again!
“Holders of public office should act and take decisions in an open and transparent manner. Information should not be withheld from the public unless there are clear and lawful reasons for so doing”
Speaking of the epic fail LOL.
A somewhat over long review of a nonsensical power grab book. Ever since Blair and his Wicked Witch introduced the laughable Supreme Court the lawyers et al have sought to be “The Power” rather than simply implement the Law laid down by an elected Parliament.
One notes that at no point does the author of the book mention who polices the Courts. He wishes to introduce a list of things other people must adhere to. He and his brethren then hold them to account. Who holds him to account?
There is a very good reason in these disparate and divided nations why Parliament is Sovereign: fools like the author of the book would decide everything and who votes for a senior Judge? Judges.
“A somewhat over long review of a nonsensical power grab book”
I disagree. It is a worthwhile review which is highly critical and necessarily explains those criticisms.
Furthermore if the book is a blueprint for news laws by Starmer’s national socialist party then it is worth having the reviewer’s J Sorel’s views spelt out to counter those of the book’s author, John Bowers KC.
It is ironic that the book’s author is a KC when a large part of the decline of standards particularly in law and the legal system has been created by corrupt practices in the English Bar and by some of the judges who fill the benches of the courts who are drawn from the English Bar’s ranks.
The leftist establishment is a neo-aristocracy whose purpose is to rule not serve the public. They will use the courts and international treaties to negate the democratic will. Any future government serious about restoring freedom and prosperity will need first to restore democracy. The Conservative Party is incapable of such a radical, reforming mission and the destruction of this utterly corrupt party is a necessary condition for a free and prosperous future.