Rule of Law under attack

One thing I know – ALL POWER CORRUPTS. I know that because I was a senior politician for 22 years and could feel and see its effects on both myself and my colleagues. And that was the 1970s when - despite the swirling doubts - idealism was still in play, understood and respected.

But power brings yes-men, groupthink and conceit. Politicians have generally been well-intentioned and, by nature, seek applause. Criticism they will attribute to malevolence – journalists are written off as purveyors of gossip who are too cynical to appreciate the good intentions of the policy-makers. Sadly, however, those with power make little attempt to run their policy ideas through critical testing - unless they are in a political system which forces them to seek consensus – such as Germany and, increasingly, mainland Europe with their coalition government.   

But the negotiation which is central to the political system of many European countries is actually a dirty word in England. Britain, like the US, has chosen an adversarial two-party system – in the belief that this can better smoke out the truth. The reality couldn’t be further from the truth – with groupthink being strongly evident in both countries. A senior Conservative Minister indeed once argued in an important lecture (in the 1970s) that the UK was “an elective dictatorship”. And that was in an era when the civil service still functioned to challenge simplistic policy ideas - nowadays the echo-chamber of political advisers has replaced neutral civil servants. One prominent political commentator put it very aptly - this Prime Minister is so weak that he has surrounded himself with  "courtiers"

The absence of a constitution is certainly a curious feature in the modern age – and british citizens were stunned to learn in 2019 that their Prime Minister apparently had the power to send parliament packing when he found it troublesome. Only an appeal to the country’s new Supreme Court by a citizen saved parliament’s skin – but a supine press which had branded such judges as “enemies of the state” gives the government full scope to rein in such judicial cheek. 

I had actually wanted to write about a great paper which was commissioned by an Irish member of the European Parliament about the rule of law in European countries (which now excludes the UK) - but find myself sidetracked by the scandal which has blown up this week by Boris Johnson’s typically ham-fisted attempt to protect one of his parliamentary friends from scrutiny.

The details are boring – what it boils down to is that not only was a British PM prepared to throw out an agreed system of scrutiny and bring in a new one simply to protect a friend but that he actually required his conservative MPs (at 24 hours’ notice) to vote that way. With some protests 250 obeyed him – an honourable few refused. When all opposition parties refused to participate in the new system, Johnson backed down. You can imagine how many of those 250 now feel about themselves....They have been made to look craven lapdogs. This was a good article on the debacle – just the latest of a long line of stupidities from the British government 

There is an Arabic expression that warns against the perils of an abundance of wealth: “Loose money teaches theft.” Britain has the dubious honour of being the home of the loose money of the global rich, facilitating its movement through secret offshore companies, setting up entirely legal means to profit from these opaque transactions. 

Taking liberties in office tends to work the same way. Loose power teaches corruption, which in turn happens through technically above-board means. That loose power broadly requires three further conditions to trigger misconduct –

·       a craven or cowed press,

·       a lack of what is seen as a viable political alternative and

·       a large section of the public made quiescent, either through apathy or tribalism. 

Sound familiar? Welcome to the global community of those living under corrupt governance. The good news is that you are not alone. The bad news is that, once corruption starts to set in, it becomes very hard to reverse. It becomes (this will also sound familiar to you), “priced in” to people’s expectations of the political class, even institutionalised. 

People in those other countries – the ones you more easily associate with corruption than your own – will explain the subtle evolution: what was before a furtive cash bribe that you needed to pay for a government stamp becomes an official fee that you are handed a nice crisp receipt for. What was before an outrageous grab of power from a democratically elected government becomes a legal process blessed by an election, perhaps one even overseen by international observers. The unprincipled will not be shunned but enriched and honoured. 

The press will contradict what you have seen with your own eyes. Conspiracy theories will begin to flourish because everyone is in the business of making up narratives, so the truth becomes a matter of spinning and selling the most convincing lie. Ministers might even, after attempting to rig a regulatory system in their favour, tell you that their government is trying to “restore a degree of integrity and probity in public life”. It will begin to exhaust your sense of outrage and warp your sense of right and wrong.

Eventually what will begin to settle is a sense that you as an individual have no control, no matter how many freedoms – voting, protesting – you feel you can exercise. Those rights will feel like levers that aren’t connected to anything. And so you give up. The main political emotion I grew up with in the Middle East and north Africa was not that of suffering oppression, but of jaundice – a sort of cultivated cynicism that protected us against the despair of life under regimes that stole from us and then remade the rules in their favour. 

I have felt this creeping up on me in the UK. It is an impulse that I recognise in the continuing support for the Conservatives, or the tepid resistance to them despite their proven malpractice, their endless scandals, their failure to deliver on what were once considered basic criteria for governments: that the state does everything it can to protect its citizens’ lives in a pandemic, and that most people’s material circumstances get better with time.  

Once the state withdraws from that role of honest broker and facilitator, the result is a fatalism: we must carry on and make do with what we have. 

I will return in the next post to the European aspects of the attack on the rule of law