Tag: democracy

Democratic antinomianism

One thing that the US and UK have in common is a sort of democratic antinomianism — a pervading sense that to the holy all things are holy, and to the inherently democratic all things are democratic. Thus they can spy on their populace, torture prisoners held indefinitely without trial, hold embarrassingly badly organised elections, and still be offended at the notion that anyone might have anything to lecture them about democracy. They can elect, or come close to electing, a comically unfit would-be ethnic-nationalist authoritarian strongman and still celebrate their constitutional order.

This is a reason why I feel particularly comfortable in Germany. Germans can be arrogant, on a personal and national level, but they have learned deep in their bones distrust of colourful demagogues.

Moving the goalposts

Reactions to the high court’s ruling that Brexit requires approval of parliament can only be understood in the context of the fundamental unseriousness of British politics. It’s all sport, and they won, so you can’t take away their victory.
But “their victory” involves taking away people’s rights, so there’s a parliamentary procedure. That’s how politics differs from sport. If you win the championship, as the cliché goes, they can never take that away from you. In politics every victory is immediately followed by a struggle over what the victory means.

The Daily Mail calls the judges “Enemies of the People” who “defied 17.4 million Brexit voters.” The Sun’s headline attacked the lead plaintiff for being foreign-born. The Daily Express said that three judges have “blocked Brexit”.

How odd, as many have pointed out, that the Brexit supporters suddenly object to parliamentary sovereignty.
Continue reading “Moving the goalposts”

Less than zero

All this discussion of Donald Trump’s nearly-billion-dollar losses and multiple bankruptcies reminded me of my own intellectual debt to Mr Trump. I remember reading about his bankruptcies back in the 1990s, and being genuinely confused and shocked. A mathematician inclines to think of wealth as a number, in a well-ordered place on a number-line. Positive numbers represent assets and negative numbers debts, and total wealth is the sum of all of them. A person with a million dollars has a lot more than a person with nothing, but the person with nothing — I thought — has much more than the million-dollar debtor.

That was wrong, and the Trump bankruptcy first made me realise this.

Wealth isn’t a line, it is a circle, with the large positive and large negative numbers much closer to each other than they are to zero. The person with nothing cannot get to a million or minus a million (except by fluke chances, like winning a lottery). The mogul is used to talking in units of millions, and everyone around him takes it for granted. When Trump found himself unable to meet his obligations in 1990, the banks didn’t just seize his assets. They loaned him more money, on the condition that the banks name someone to actually run his business, and he constrain his personal spending to a $450,000 a month allowance.

Imagine that: A formerly rich man finds himself with less than nothing, and the banks give him the money with which to keep paying them their interest, and himself a monthly stipend of $450,000. The condition is that he stop doing any work. And then he managed to flee his creditors into bankruptcy five years later anyway, while cheating a load of equity investors.

It’s like Napoleon being allowed to take a retinue with him to become ruler of Elba. Just because he had been a sort-of king, you couldn’t leave him with nothing. It would be too cruel, even though there are millions of people who never had anything, and didn’t have the guilt of having plunged the Continent into chaos.

And you can’t expect a rich man to suddenly get a cashier job at the supermarket. Even while you recognise that his contribution to his companies and the wider world has been purely negative. It would be too cruel. He’s one of “us”.

I suppose, as with Napoleon, they worry about the danger of a scorched-earth defense if they try to take what is owed to them in a frontal assault. The person with millions in debts (or better, hundreds of millions) can move his assets and debts around so that the positive never collides with the larger negative. And the creditors, afraid that they’ll end up with nothing, will be eager to make a deal that lets most of the negative disappear.

Thinking out loud

Trump is now predicting massive voter fraud, usually something you do after you’ve lost. There’s a theory that people tend to accuse others of what they are ashamed of planning or having done themselves. I don’t think he has any shame, or that he’s strategic enough to be planning anything so complicated himself. But his backers? How hard would it really be for a top-notch state hacking operation in, say, Russia, to crack the locally organised election computer systems?

Refer madness

Shortly after the EU referendum, someone asked me why the EU referendum was made to allow such an enormous change from a simple majority. After all, many countries have either supermajority threshold for referenda, or requirements that a majority be attained in a majority of regions or states. The answer, of course, is that

  1. The point of this referendum was to settle a conflict between two wings of the Conservative party. This was not an election, but a sporting contest — though sooner or later, in Britain, everything turns into a sporting contest — and it would have been completely unacceptable if both sides did not feel they had a reasonable chance of winning.
  2. There wasn’t any threshold at all. As many have pointed out, this wasn’t a referendum in the normal sense of the word. It was an opinion poll. The relevant law, the European Union Referendum Act 2015, orders only that the question be asked, and describes eligibility for voting. It says nothing about how the result is to be interpreted or enforced. (The most intricate part of the law seems to concern the question of which hereditary aristocrats are eligible to vote.)

There is nothing inevitable about concluding that the UK should withdraw from the EU because 52% voted that way in the referendum. Most democracies would not make it so easy for one group of citizens to deprive another group of citizens of cherished rights — particularly when the groups really are clearly defined social groups, whether age groups or semi-autonomous component nations (Scotland and Northern Ireland).

In principle, there’s a good argument that the government is constitutionally obliged to get clear authorisation from Parliament before pulling the Article 50 trigger. And if they do that, the MPs could reasonably point to the national divisions, or just the lack of an overwhelming majority, as justification for avoiding such wrenching change.

They won’t, though. Because it’s a sport, and nothing is more important to the British than appearing to be “good sports”. They call this “democracy”, and there have been any number of articles from left-wing Remain supporters, arguing that a commitment to democracy requires that they get behind the Brexit project now. The people have spoken, and any other response is an elitist insistence that you know better than the unwashed masses.

Where does that leave us, the foreigners? I am reminded of the work of David Blight and other historians on the “Lost Cause” historiography of the US Civil War. Americans of the North and the South decided to come together in a spirit of reconciliation, requiring that the Northerners agree to look past points of dispute, like the civil rights of African Americans. They — that is, the white people — pretty much all agreed that this was the charitable and democratic thing to do. Similarly, Britons are divided by economic and class differences, but they can all come together in agreement that the real problem is the foreigners. This is something I noticed when I first arrived here.

Things aren’t so bad in Oxford — though we all know people who have at least been menaced in public in the last couple of weeks for speaking a foreign language — and those of us with good professional jobs have a fairly easy out, if we want it, by acquiring UK citizenship. At least, that gets us to the other side of the rope line in terms of formal legal harassment. Elsewhere foreigners have to be thinking imminently about being driven out of places where they have resided for decades, and where they mistakenly thought they were at home.

The worst form of government

One of the key points of indictment of the EU, favoured by those in the Leave campaign chary of venting raw xenophobia in public, was the “democracy deficit”. “Take back control” they said. Decisions about Britain need to be taken by the British parliament, rather than by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. The British people need to show they are capable of governing their own fate.

Well, apparently we need to put Britain on the list of those countries whose culture is not yet ready for democracy:

Electoral services workers have reported calls from people asking if they could change their decision after Friday’s result became clear, while some publicly admitted they intended to use a “protest vote” in the belief the UK was certain to remain in the European Union.

Among those who “democratically” chose to take us out of the EU was

Mandy Suthi, a student who voted to leave, told ITV News she would tick the Remain box if she had a second chance and said her parents and siblings also regretted their choice.

“I would go back to the polling station and vote to stay, simply because this morning the reality is kicking in,” she said.

“I wish we had the opportunity to vote again,” she added, saying she was “very disappointed”.

My email inbox is full of solicitations from friends promoting a petition for a second referendum. That’s not how it works, I’m afraid, even if the petition has gathered close to 3 million signatures. It’s done.

 

Military fears emasculation, shrinkage

… but they’re not taking it lying down!

An anonymous “senior serving general” said in a recent interview that the army would “mutiny” if mere politicians tried to reduce the size of the military or take away its nuclear weapons (which are never called “weapons”, but rather “deterrent”, taking as self-evident that they would never be used.)

The unnamed general said members of the armed forces would begin directly and publicly challenging the labour leader if he tried to scrap Trident, pull out of Nato or announce “any plans to emasculate and shrink the size of the armed forces.”

He told the Sunday Times: “The Army just wouldn’t stand for it. The general staff would not allow a prime minister to jeopardise the security of this country and I think people would use whatever means possible, fair or foul to prevent that… and you would face the very real prospect of an event which would effectively be a mutiny.”

The head of the UK armed forces has repeated the threat publicly, if more obliquely.

Asked about Mr Corbyn’s refusal to use nuclear weapons, Sir Nicholas said: “It would worry me if that thought was translated into power as it were.”

So don’t think you can pansify the British Armed Forces into a girly, shriveled, no-nukes military just by voting for some new politicians!

Qualified majorities

The new Conservative government has announced plans to make strikes by public-sector unions more difficult, including

A strike affecting essential public services will need the backing of 40% of eligible union members under government plans.

Currently, a strike is valid if backed by a majority of those balloted.

There will also need to be a minimum 50% turnout in strike ballots.

The new Business Secretary Sajid Javid said “What people are fed up of is strike action that hasn’t been properly supported by the members of the relevant union.” It is notable that this complaint comes from a government that received less than 37% of the votes in the last election, accounting for less than 25% of eligible voters.

A bomb in mathematics

I’ve just been reading Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent. It’s more than a century old, and I was surprised to find it such an acute analysis of the psychology of terrorism. It follows the planning and aftermath of a ridiculous and botched scheme to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. The ringleader Mr Verloc, the “secret agent” of the title, who spends his time infiltrating anarchist organisations, is put up to it by his employer, the embassy of an unnamed Central Asian nation. The crime seems almost entirely unmotivated. The new First Secretary of the embassy is irked by Verloc’s indolence and apparent uselessness, and seeks to prod him into making some exertions for his salary. The inane goal of the attack is to show up the ineptitude of the English police, and so stimulate an autocratic turn in its inconveniently soft and democratic government. Plus ça change… The target must be such as to seem senseless (hence not a tiresomely conventional target, like a crown prince or a government building), important (hence not the National Gallery — “There would be some screaming, of course, but from whom? Artists — art critics and such like — people of no account. No one minds what they say.”) and sufficiently menacing. He announces

The demonstration must be against learning—science.  But not every science will do.  The attack must have all the shocking senselessness of gratuitous blasphemy.  Since bombs are your means of expression, it would be really telling if one could throw a bomb into pure mathematics.  But that is impossible…  What do you think of having a go at astronomy?

I was also amused by the comment of the bomb engineer:

The system’s worked perfectly.  And yet you would think that a common fool in a hurry would be much more likely to forget to make the contact altogether.  I was worrying myself about that sort of failure mostly.  But there are more kinds of fools than one can guard against.  You can’t expect a detonator to be absolutely fool-proof.