It is an interesting dilemma as to whether, if you are going to be ruled by a Government to whom you are politically opposed, it is better for that Government to be competent or incompetent. Good governance is a virtue in itself. But a competent Government can also do lamentable things much more expediently than an incompetent one if it has the wrong aims or objectives. It may in the end be better to be governed by a buffoon than a genius if either way they are going to be motivated by dangerous ideas – although really of course it is a distinction along the lines of the difference between being stabbed or shot. All things considered, one of those options is probably slightly better than the other, but both are going to hurt and the only thing to hope for in either scenario is that the wound won’t be fatal or turn gangrenous and necrotise.
I had call to reflect on these matters recently while reading the Labour Party’s now somewhat infamous ‘A New Britain: Renewing Our Democracy and Rebuilding Our Economy‘. This document, a report of something called the Commission on the U.K.’s Future (set up by Sir Keir Starmer after becoming Labour leader) was issued in 2022, but is now being read with serious attention for more or less the first time as it became clear that a Labour Government was imminent. In brief, the idea is more or less to create a written constitution for the U.K. in all but name, through the passing of a New Britain Act (a “constitutional statute” – more on that in a future post, perhaps) that would reform the House of Lords, devolve power to regional and devolved assemblies, entrench new social and economic rights, provide a mission statement for the United Kingdom and so on.
The prospect of the report being implemented has, it seems fair to say, thoroughly spooked sections of the conservative commentariat. Peter Hitchens tells us that it is a “plan to make it impossible for Parliament to overturn [Labour’s] left-wing revolution“; David Starkey warns it will “eradicate our traditions of Parliamentary Government“; Tim Stanley thinks it means “the Left will remain in power forever“; J. Sorel labels it a programme “to reduce Parliament and Downing Street to constitutional ciphers and end majority rule“; Andrew Collingwood meanwhile settles on calling it “revolutionary“.
No doubt there is a great deal in ‘A New Britain’ that would be concerning if it were indeed put into effect (and it is important to mention that although Sir Keir Starmer endorsed the document early in 2023, very few of its recommendations appear in Labour’s manifesto). But I would like to focus here on an element of the report that has not been widely reported on – if at all – and which I think reveals something important about its authors, about the incoming Labour Government, and by extension about our political class as a whole.
And it is simply this: setting substance entirely to one side, the report is shoddy, slapdash, riddled with grammatical and syntactical errors, and in places incoherent. It is not by any means the Federalist Papers, or anything that comes close to shining the Federalist Papers’ boots with spittle and shoe polish. It is a thin tissue of notions resembling ideas, written in the breathless style of an undergraduate student project by somebody who is gamely aiming for a decent 2:1 in Political Science, and who will ask his mum to proofread it for him before he submits. It is simply not what one would expect from purportedly intelligent people who have thought deeply about the subject of constitutional reform and who treat the matter with sufficient weight.
I ought to provide some examples, and these are found on almost every page. Sometimes there are slips of the finger that can be attributed to a basic failure to pay attention to detail (“We have been in touch with the Welsh governments [sic] own commission…”; “so that people across all four nations feels [sic] represented”; “our own systems and governance cannot continue to be a barrier [sic] to our future success”; “most people see that the pound sterling as a U.K. asset [sic] and that the central state should manage the macro economy for the whole country”; “We take the view that these purposes should clearly and explicitly stated [sic]”, etc.). And throughout we find oddly spliced commas that interfere with careful reading (“This we believe, can be achieved by…”; “This will, help bring a fractured and divided country back together”; “The common desire for more local control should be reflected in a legal requirement, to require decisions to be taken…”).
There are also chunks of bizarrely inept and clumsy phrasing, which reinforce the feeling that the report was written in the fashion of a humanities student’s “all-nighter”:
Because, for too long, we have developed only some of the potential of some of the parts of our country, not of everyone, everywhere in the country. …
The individual changes that we recommend are in our view, common sense reforms that have widespread support across party and geographic lines, but taken together they add up to a radical blueprint for the significant and serious change that people the length and breadth of this country have told us that they want to see. [The places where there are accidental double spacings are real, and appear throughout the document – at least a few times on each page.] …
We recommend strengthening the powers that deliver self-government in the devolved nations of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland – based on the principles that devolved self-government should be permanent, expansive, and each elected body held in equal esteem.
At times, this slips into a sort of quasi-English, which almost parses, almost makes sense, almost convinces the reader that the author has a glimmer of an understanding of what he or she is in fact trying to say:
So while many of our immediate economic problems can be fixed by pursuing better policies, by stopping the race to the bottom in our economy, Britain, needs change that runs much deeper – giving the people of Britain more power and control over our lives and the decisions that matter to us. …
The alternative we put before the people of Scotland and Wales is better than either costly and destructive independence and a stagnating status quo: change within the United Kingdom that can entrench self-government in Scotland whilst improving shared government across Britain and we believe that our recommendations offer not just faster and safer change, but fairer change. …
For this transformative agenda to succeed, we will need to draw on the best resource Britain has: its people. In that way, we will be able to face the challenges of the coming decades with confidence, and the recommendations in this report will help it [what?] do so. …
Climate change and protecting our environment also clearly transcend national boundaries within and beyond the UK and require action at the UK level, and greater cooperation between different levels of government, as we set out later.
No, I’m not making any of this up; this is actually how the report reads – like somebody making a game attempt at coherent English expression simply by throwing together various phrases that sound as though they ought to go alongside one another. My favourite example of all comes on page 68 of the report, in the section which – given my professional interests – I focused on most closely, pertaining to constitutional reform. Bear in mind as you read the following sentence that this is billed as being the zero draft of an overarching constitutional “mission statement” for the U.K. that should be embodied in law:
The UK is a group of nations, peoples and places and which have come together in a shared Parliament at Westminster to provide together what can be better provided together than separately.
Just read that out loud to yourself and then go and compare the result with “We the People of the United States…“, if you can stomach doing so.
‘A New Britain’ is not, in other words, a serious document, and the people who wrote it (I doubt Gordon Brown, notionally the Chair of the Commission, has even read it) are patently, on this evidence, not serious people. They are playing at government. They inhabit a world of platitudes and feeble intellectual gestures. They don’t really think; they gesticulate at ideas that they believe sound nice. They can’t even be bothered to proofread a document which they suggest should be the foundation for a new constitutional settlement for a mature democracy like the U.K.; they don’t appear even to know that MS Word will do some of it for them. They are contemptuous and disrespectful of their audience and of the country which they intend to make anew, and they behave as though the most serious politico-legal matter of all, the rearranging of the constitution of a nation, is something about which it is permissible to write drivel.
This all sends two paradoxical signals. On the one hand, while it is appalling and horrifying, it is also somehow reassuring: Labour’s constitutional project, such as it is, will be drawn up and “inspired” by people of the profoundest mediocrity. I would therefore be very surprised if the new Labour Government will have anything like the wherewithal to get close to actually implementing the plan; I think it much more likely that it will end up being the constitutional equivalent of HS2 – an expensive megaproject that should never have been started, leads nowhere and achieves nothing except to demonstrate that the country’s political class as a whole is patently ill-equipped to govern.
On the other hand, the message sent by the way that the document has been prepared and presented undoubtedly is appalling and horrifying: I tremble for my country when I reflect that these frivolous, lightweight people are apparently the best that we have to offer by way of political decision-makers and that it is their ideas which will be informing the honest-to-goodness rewiring of the constitution of the British State. We all of us can tell, intuitively, that our political leaders, journalists, media commentators and civil servants are like a pack of squabbling compsognathus in comparison to the tyrannosaurs of the past, but it is another thing to be confronted with the malaise so starkly and brutally as in ‘A New Britain’.
And this of course raises a much wider set of concerns. No doubt you will have noticed, as nobody can fail to have noticed, that our culture – and this is by no means limited to Britain, though I think it is most noticeable and pronounced here – has largely abandoned the notion that excellence matters. Everybody will have their own stories for illustrating this and their own theories as to why it has happened. It is a long, sad tale that would require too much time and space to really delve too deeply into here. But it is important to observe that the rot has gone so deep that it has even seeped into matters as serious and important as constitutional reform: those who have taken upon themselves the task of remaking the relationship between the people and the state do not even think it necessary to pay sufficient attention to detail to ensure that their recommendations are intelligible, let alone that their report should have been done well.
In light of this, the problems that confront the country – the swollen pile of national debt, mass migration, the energy crisis, the housing crisis, the failure to police the borders, the failure to deter and punish crime, deteriorating public services, the looming crisis in social care and pensions provision, the breakdown in civility and the impending financial collapse of universities, to name but a few – take on an entirely different hue. It is common for conservatives to attribute these problems to malevolence or at least misguided design. But might it simply be the case that the people who are notionally in charge do not have the capacity to effectively govern? Might it just be that they do not know what they are doing – an ideology of plain nincompoopery rather than a “long march through the institutions”?
What, in any event, does one say about the future of a country like this? The image that increasingly comes to mind when I dwell on these issues is one of an attic in a dilapidated country house, dusty and mildewed, with many old spider webs strung between the rafters. Brittle and frail, these strands of gossamer still somehow cling to the physical realm and to physical existence because the still, stale air does not contain quite enough movement to dispel them into nothingness. But all it will take is one decent breath of wind, one strong draft from a suddenly opened window somewhere else in the house, for them to be swept away forever.
That is how I envisage our political class and the chattering classes which surround them. They are of such thinness and intellectual fragility that they could be knocked over by a feather, and all we are really waiting for is to find out where the coup de grâce will come from and whether it will be economic, social, military, or something else entirely. To return to a different analogy, the feeling is increasingly one of wondering not whether the future is going to hurt, but how much – whether it will be equivalent of a knife or a bullet wound. We’re coming to the end of something, and we all know it; in this respect the promise of a “new Britain” does seem somehow to be prophetic, although one strongly suspects that “renewing our democracy and rebuilding our economy” are unlikely to be on the cards for a long while yet.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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Wouldn’t the saturation effect show in a fairly simple lab experiment?
Chris Morrison’s explanation of the CO2 saturation effect caused me to remember using infra-red spectroscopy in my early career as a lab technician. If the sample was physically too thick I couldn’t measure the relative strength of the absorption at the various different frequencies. The only way to take a meaningful IR spectrograph was to make the sample thin enough for the available energy from the source to make it through.
Basically, we’ve got so much CO2 in the atmosphere (the article implies 400ppm) that it absorbs all the available IR energy from the source (the Sun) at the relevant frequency of CO2. More CO2 can’t absorb more IR as it’s already absorbing all the energy at that frequency.
Yes, a simple lab experiment will show this effect but…
And “system science” may well be the best way of modelling climatic changes, since it involves a huge number of variables. If that is the case then the question should be: has this “system science” yet been put into effect, and if the answer is yes, then why does the public face of the “settled science” surrounding humans’ impact on climate change, and consequent green policymaking, been only about one single element (CO2)?
The IR energy comes from the earth, not the sun.
It seems to me that net-zero is now a religious apocalyptic death cult and is impervious to any rational arguments or experimental data.
”And the perverted fear of violence chokes a smile on every face
And common sense is ringing out the bells
This ain’t no technological breakdown, oh no, this is the road to hell”
Every time I play Chris Rea’s ‘Road to Hell’ those words strike me as being not just a forecast but alarmingly accurate.
Thanks for the reminder.
95% of Co2 is emitted by Gaia.
98% is reused.
It is a trace chemical of 0.04% weight. Ergo, heretofore it does not trap a f*ing thing.
Co2 falls out of convection climactic systems.
It is part of the process to make oxygen.
It is a benefit not a threat or toxin.
There. Science closed.
(Now please grant me my pretty happy dude degree and lots of money.)
Haha..I would love to get a ‘Happy Dude Degree too, Ferd! Yes, I completely agree with you. Down here in sleepy Dorset we are planning a public debate with a group who claim to be all about sustainability (and Net Zero). The good thing is that they are willing to at least engage and encourage it in fact. I don’t wish to use the term ‘useful idiot’ (although I just did!) but many of these people who are helping to construct the prison around us seem to be ignorant of any science or rational arguments that counters their view, such has been the success of people like Attenborough, Thunberg, Gore etc. They do not delve any further nor do they join up any dots because that would be a ‘conspiracy’! Anyway, the more we can have open discussions, the more we can begin to understand where we’re all coming from and the more hope we have of averting the social suicide of Net Zero.
I look forward to reading your report on the encounter Aethelred.
Give em hell!
Perhaps you could get the attached junior school poster printed up and put on a wall as a simple visual to help with the ‘debate’.
Yor are one big happy dude mate! Well said
Yep.
https://madhavasetty.substack.com/p/a-convenient-lie
Excellent example
Trillions of dollars, many years and uncountable populations dragged into poverty, we get from this:
To this: (spot the difference)
Well put. It’s not just that it’s a trace element that makes up a miniscule percentage of atmospheric composition, It’s also the fact that all we’ve done is tweaked one single variable! In the formidably complex dynamic system that is the climate, we’re being led to believe that we can just dial down the CO2 a bit and it’ll all be fixed!
If someone (government) pays me money to find purple horses I might not be in a big hurry to say I cannot find any. I might string the search out month after month and year after year and issue occasional reports on my “findings”.—– I might report that “my studies are not inconsistent with the likelihood of there being purple horses”. I might insist that ” Purple horses are highly likely (80% probability) etc etc etc. ———Ofcourse it could be that I am simply taking advantage of the political desire to find these horses. I after all have a family to feed and a mortgage to pay. ——-In the real world scientists also have families to feed and mortgages to pay, and if government are going to make that easy for them by dishing out taxpayers money to any and all scientists (climate modellers) who will come up with reports and studies that arrive at the desired conclusion that humans are warming the planet and causing dangerous changes to climate then why would those scientists not take advantage of that? Infact before all the climate change science scooting up to number on in the science charts in around 1990, not many of those scientists were interested in this issue, but once government started chucking money around they became like wasps at the jam jar.———- But at the end of the day we can all argue about the science day and night and never get to the bottom of it. The alarmists can speak of runaway global warming and increasing extreme weather events (that are not happening). They can rant on about “saving the planet” and millions of climate refugees That is not happening) etc etc etc. Sceptics will talk of there being no Hotspot in the troposphere which would indicate that any warming isn’t likely to be because of greenhouse gasses. They can speak of the effect of CO2 on the atmosphere being logarithmic rather than linear, etc etc —–We can all have a punch and Judy show about it all day. ————-But CO2 apart from being a greenhouse gas that might cause a little bit of warming, is also something else. It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism, and that is what this issue is really about. It is about the world’s wealth and resources in a world where there are now 8 billion people all wanting to use the finite fossil fuel resources in the ground. We in the wealthy western world are to stop using those fuels because the UN and it’s IPCC say we have used up more than our fair share —(Climate Justice). To get away with fobbing western populations off with heat pumps instead of gas central heating and taking away their perfectly good petrol and diesel cars, stopping us from flying and eating beef and lamb etc etc you need a very plausible excuse, and that excuse is CLIMATE CHANGE. You don’t need any evidence for it. All you need is AUTHORITY. On the issue of climate we now live in a scientific dictatorship.
Well said, varmint! The blinkers are slowly coming off a lot of the population but probably not fast enough. I am encouraging debate with those who have us all swapping our cars for EVs and shutting down town centres as they are trying to do here in Dorset. Once an idea has been introduced that it is the ‘good thing’ to do to eliminate emissions to ‘save the planet’ – all the worthy virtue signallers jump on it, aided and encouraged by a corrupt MSM and all the MPs. It also becomes an unstoppable train because anyone who goes against it is seen as ‘unreasonable’, ‘a bit of nuisance’, ‘a conspiracy theorist, or, alarmingly, ‘an extremist’. Whenever I’ve seen footage of XR or JSO (bought and paid for) activists being interviewed, they do not have an argument. It is mainly headline stats they’ve not bothered to really research plus a lot of emotional content. In fact, I would venture to say it is mainly emotional. No substance. People even view these people being arrested as draconian or fascist leanings by the state – even when they’ve blocked the road for days or spoiled people’s enjoyment in some way. The Guardian (that bastion of Woke) loves this type of stuff. All in all, it is a shrill, vain attempt, in my view, to appear relevant and emulate the radical student movements of the 1960s, but not be aware of how it is all part of a bigger agenda in play. It’s this lack of awareness by these young people that is worrying. They seem to be unable to really focus on what is going on and to join up all the dots.
Thanks——-Young people are always the easiest to brainwash, but you see a lot of easily manipulated older people sitting in the road as well. There is always a section of society that will fall for the propaganda hook line and sinker. But what I find amazing is that today government are trusted less than they have ever been apparently. No one believes what they say on Foreign Policy, on Immigration, on Education on Crime etc etc etc, and yet on climate people somehow believe it all, manly because they think it is all about science. They don’t realise that all the climate science is actually funded by the same governments that they don’t trust on every other issue. So what you see is people gluing themselves to the street because they think a climate apocalypse is about to occur all based on the bought and paid for “official science”.
Well ,would you believe it?
That looks to me like a virtual horse. But then that is what climate change science really is isn’t it? ——-Computer models are Virtual Science.
It is the one gas that can be directly tied to Industrial Capitalism
That’s not really true. Humans are (and have been for a while) using fire as source of energy and fire is an exothermic reaction turning carbon contained in a suitable material into (gaseous) carbon oxides. This more general focus is reflected in the Cooking on wood fires kills peoples! stories targetted at the so-called developping wolrd. The other exothermic reaction humans have so far managed to utilize is nuclear fission. Unsurprisingly, so-called environmentalists hate that, too, and should we ever manage to use controlled nuclear fusion for anything, the anti-life preaching of these people will reach a whole new level.
But the UN is not in the business of retrospectively taxing stonage people with a carbon tax. CO2 can be directly tied to industrial capitalism because, the wealthiest emit the most CO2, and the poorest emit the least for obvious reasons. Wealthier people have bigger houses, use more energy, drive more, fly more etc etc. When Edenhoffer of the IPCC said “One has to free oneself from the illusion that climate policies are environmental policies anymore, we redistribute the worlds wealth via climate policy” what do you think he actually meant? —–Climate Change policy is eco Socialism. That is why it is the left and the One World Government people at the UN who embrace climate policies. It has little to do with climate. But actually I am pretty sure you already know that.
“Professor Stephen Schneider who promoted the saturation hypothesis in the early 1970s when the global temperature was falling, but switched suddenly to the tenets of anthropogenic warming when it started to rise.”
First earth day, 53 years ago and the sea comes up to same level in skegness that it did when I was just a nipper! Shock horror! Headline news! Nothings f-ing changed!
Another paper offering support for this theory of Saturation appeared in Junk Science and was led by Dr David Coe , a British atmospheric research bod.
It would be really helpful to get rid of all of these scientifically meaningless titles and degrees like professor of global change. The proper term for this kind of change is politics, hence, political activist on university payroll would be a much better professional occupation description.
Schneider is proof that you can become a revered and famous scientist by predicting catastrophe from cold, or catastrophe from heat, but not by saying nothing particularly catastrophic is on the cards.
“ Since greenhouses gases such as CO2 are estimated to have raised the temperature of the Earth by 33°…”
?
Do I detect a missing decimal point, like it should be 3.3?
Schneider died from hypothermia. Did you know 5 out of 3 scientists struggle with fractions.
And what is the going rate required by a scientific institution to switch from forecasting an ice age to catastrophic global warming?
Like many on here my awakening to the modern state and its manipulation of evidence came through Lockdown. I was completing a masters degree in behavioural economics. I expected the academics teaching us about evidence and rigour to poke holes in the pandemic response. Surely we could do a CBA of the economic damage. Not a bit if it because the funding spigot was turned on and they were allowed to work from home. When i asked one at a re-union why they didn’t he said because we are not natural scientists. When i explained that we were supposed to explore and explain decision making his response was chilling. ‘I am not about to deny this department opportunities because some people don’t trust governments’ .