LINKS – and what they tell you about someone

My blogroll lists 70 blogs I try to follow – one being an old site of mine which was suddenly removed, without notice. So, be warned, all those precious papers and books could suddenly vanish!!. And buying a web address is not a solution – as this, just as easily, can also vanish via a takeover. Indeed that’s just happened to one of my bank accounts – NatWest International who seem to have taken over the Royal Bank of Scotland - which has intimated that they are closing the account in which I have 5k dollars in late January. They offer no option to allow me to transfer the money to another account. Such are the ways of corporate capitalism.

But revenons aux moutons – to the matter of what links can tell you about a person. The last post led with a link to a file containing a 100 page list of the hyperlinks I had selected this year for their interest. Both the blogroll and this list of hyperlinks tell you a lot about what grabs my interest – for example.

The Journal of Intellectual History is onec of my favourite journals and occasionally has free articles. Two recent were

Neoliberalism – an intellectual history N Mulder review of 3 recent books

one on Anti-fascism which places the literature in the wider context of anti-colonialism

We are not ready - policymaking in the era of era of environmental breakdown

(IPPR 2020) which assesses the UK against 3 criteria

Putting the Gaza ethnic cleansing in context

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/18/chris-hedges-the-death-of-israel/

https://consortiumnews.com/2023/12/12/patrick-lawrence-gaza-confronting-power/

https://contendingmodernities.nd.edu/global-currents/israeli-apartheid-and-its-apologists/

Human Rights Watch 2021 Report on Israeli use of apartheid

polarisation article

https://economy2030.resolutionfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Ending-stagnation-final-report.pdf

In the Ruins of the Present Vijay Prashad 2018

How to understand a world of unemployment and annihilation, of poverty, climate catastrophe and war? What concepts do we have to grasp these complex realities? The modes of thought that come from North American positivism – game theory, regression analysis, multi-level models, inferential statistics – are at a loss to offer a general theory of our condition. Steeped in common sense understandings of power and naive about the role of elites in our world, these approaches might explain this or that aspect of our world.

https://www.councilestatemedia.uk/p/politicians-who-respected-kissinger?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2

https://www.noemamag.com/what-ai-teaches-us-about-good-writing/

Some recent Development material

Newsletter from “thinking and working politically”

Promoting institutional and organisational development 2003

Fragility, Risk and Resilience UN 2016

understanding institutional analysis

civil servants, social norms and corruption

And the number of downloadable BOOKS is increasing eg

• Tomorrow’s Communities Henry Tam 2022

• The Gutenberg Parenthesis Jeff Jarvis 2023

• The Ecology of Freedom M Bookchin 1982

• Institutions Taking Root - Building State Capacity in Challenging Contexts World Bank 2014

• The Government Analyics Handbook – leveraging data to strengthen public administration D Rogger and C Schuster World Bank Sept 2023

• Passion, Craft and Method in Comparative Politics Gerardo Munck and Richard Snyder 2007

• Globalisation and contestation - the new great counter-movement Ronaldo Munck 2007

• Digital Transformation and public services A Larsson and R Teigland 2020

• Struggle makes us human Vijay Prashad 2022

• Prisoners of Time - prussians, germans and other humans chris clark 2021

• Walter Kempowski’s Familienchronic thesis 1990

• The Language of Politics Adrian Beard 2000

• Faith seeking Conviviality Sam Ewell 2020

SOME RECENT LINKS

My hyperlinks have been piling up – indeed those for the full year already fill more than a hundred pages. I find them very useful as reminders of my daily finds. So time to identify what I have found useful in the last few weeks. It’s not all focused on texts – there have been some useful discussions on both video and podcast. I have huge respect for John Mearsheimer who engages here in discussion with Stephen Pinker about Reason and the Enlightenment

Cornel West is another who commands admiration and has a rather mutual-congratulary discussion here with Gabor Mate

“The Great Unravelling” is a term used increasingly to denote the “polycrises” which seem to be bedevilling the world and is explained in a useful report from the Post-Carbon Institute which is important background for this podcast exploration by David Runciman on whether the “anthropocene” is a useful term or whether “Leviacene” night not be a better term

Duncan Green is an Oxfam blogger I follow who frequently confronts the issue of power which is also the topic American academic Jeff Pfeffer writes about- this being a recent typical piece of his on the subject

Moses Naim wrote The End of Power (2013) about how powerful people in powerful roles are experiencing greater limits on their power. Naim notes how many people with fancy titles had confided in him about the perceived (or claimed) gaps between the power others attributed to them and both what they could get done and their own self-expressed perceptions of their power. When Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook fame launched a book club, he named this book his first selection. I trust you appreciate the irony. As I write this, Zuckerberg is recentralizing his control over Facebook, and of course Facebook, like many of its Silicon Valley peers, has a supermajority voting structure that assures that Zuckerberg cannot be fired regardless of what he does. Some people may face the end of power or limits on their power, but certainly not Zuckerberg; a lot fewer people have tenuous power than claim to.

In this same book, which I often hear about as an example of how theories and realities of power have fundamentally changed, Naim asks what globalization was doing to economic concentration. The presumption was that the globalization of business—and therefore, competition—would disperse economic power. He asked that question in 2013. By now the answer is clear, and it is not what many expected. Not only in the US but around the world, antitrust authorities are girding for battle because globalization has increased the concentration of power and wealth, particularly in technology multinationals but in other industries as well, such as telecommunications and even retail (perhaps you have heard of Amazon?). Following the 2008–2009 financial crisis, banks that were criticized as being too big to fail got—bigger. The story of nonexistent antitrust enforcement and increasing concentration of economic power is one often empirically told.

Then there are Jeremy Heimans and Henry Timms, authors of New Power (2018) Their thesis is that power wasn’t ending, but that power and its bases and use were being fundamentally transformed by things like the internet, social media, and new communication modalities. The result of this social and technological change was to be greater democratization, a word they use often, as the ideas of new power would make power less concentrated and available to more people. Their basic argument, expressed by numerous others, was that the ability of many individuals to readily acquire a communications platform (think blogs and accounts on social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram) and to easily access the world’s information (think Google) would lead to a proliferation of innovation and social movements. Much like the oft-discussed but ultimately unsuccessful Arab Spring, there would be, to take a phrase from the 1960s, more power to the people, including those lacking formal positions of power.

Unfortunately, reality intruded, and the most successful users of the new communication methods and social media platforms turned out to be those who already held political and economic power.

More to follow

Just Words

One of the books of which I’m most proud is “Just Words – a sceptic’s glossary” and that’s not just because of the pun in the title - the first word can be read to mean either “mere/only” or “fair/impartial”. Two very different senses.

Victor Klemperer (1881-1960) came to Western notice only after 1995 when his German publisher started to release the Diaries which he had kept since an early age at the start of the 20^th Century; and it was several years later before UK and US audiences were able to read the English versions of I Will Bear Witness 1933-41 and I Will Bear Witness 1942-45 – let alone The Lesser Evil The Diaries of V Klemperer 1945-59. That’s some 40 years after his death!!

He was a philologist who used his experience of listening to passengers on the Dresden trams and buses to publish, in 1947, The Language of the Third Reich. It was 2000 – more than 50 years after his death – before it appeared in English and has now pride of place in the “Roll-call of Honour” which is chapter 4 of “Just Words”.

The book has now 73 pages and can boast

• 25 pages of definitions

• all the key authors – from La Rochefoucauld and Flaubert through Pierce and Klemperer to Susan George and J Ralston Saul

It’s a quite unique compendium - and I thoroughly recommend it.

Fathers

Today was the day my Dad was born – in 1907. Some 14 years ago I paid my extended tribute to his memory which started thus - 

We are all shaped by our upbringing – family; neighbourhood; and education. My father was a Presbyterian Minister (in a Scottish shipbuilding town) whom I would like to have known better. Last year I found myself discussing the possible establishment of a series of lectures (better perhaps “conversations”) which would celebrate my father’s passions and values. These can be tentatively but not adequately expressed in such words as understanding.. tolerance.. sharing.... service....exploration.... reconciliation.... and also, in pastimes, such as "boats, books, bees and bens".

The discussion involved me drafting the following thoughts - partly in an effort to clarify why I felt my father's memory deserved resurrection;

partly because I was aware that he represented a world we have lost and should celebrate. And partly, I realise, because I was trying to find out what being Scottish now means to me. Memorials are normally for famous people – but the point about my father is that he had no affectations or ambitions (at least that I knew about!) and was simply “well ken’t” and loved in several distinct communities. It was enough for him to serve one community (Mount Pleasant Church in Greenock for 50 years) and to use his time on earth to try to open up - to a range of very different types of individuals - the richness of other fields of knowledge. So he tutored in ancient languages and history – he was a prison chaplain – he was chairman of Greenock’s McLellan Gallery and Philosophical Society – latterly he was a lecturer on a British circuit about his travels (which included an expedition to Greenland in his sixties!). In all of this, of course, he was quietly supported by my mother. His well-known passions for books and travel were expressions of his passion for the world. His service as an independent (“moderate”) councillor (and Baillie) on Greenock Town Council equally showed his lack of dogma and his openness. When, in my late teens, I became both an atheist and socialist (offending some of our West-end neighbours) I felt only his quiet pride that I was, in my own way, searching for myself and, in different ways, living up to his values

Die Qual der Wahl

“Candide” was Voltaire’s takedown of the Enlightenment - Andersen’s “The Emperor has no clothes” is a lesser tale which demonstrates the power of ”groupthink”

Rory Stewart seems everywhere these days – his craggy face on television interviews about his life, his gravelly voice on podcasts revealing what is clearly a "beautiful mind". He has recently been promoting his latest book “Politics on the Edge – a memoir from within” which paints a devastating picture of the state of British politics. Few doubt the scale of his commitment to public service. It was bred in him at Eton - after a brief period in military service, he became a diplomat, ran a NGO in Afghanistan, became an MP in 2010, a Minister shortly thereafter, actually ran a campaign to be Prime Minister and was one of an illustrious group of 21 to be booted out of the Conservative party in 2019

But what exactly is his motivation for the excessive marketing of his brand? He clearly enjoyed his time wielding what power he had as a Minister but, as a 50-year old he clearly suffers from what the Germans call “Die Qual der Wahl” – the torture of choice. He’s had too gilded a career - he doesn’t know which of the many options open to him he should choose for the rest of his illustrious career.

• His latest book seems quite brilliant in its analysis of how the exercise of power eats into the soul (I have only these interviews to go on). So he could become an interesting member of the political punditry – although he might need to extend his range to cover more than British politics

• He already manages an international NGO encouraging cash transfers so could eventually land up with a plum job with a key international agency

• he remains a (traditional) conservative but is unlikely to be tempted back to ministerial roles. His caustic comments about colleagues make him “unreliable” – a great sin in politics.

• He has an American wife – perhaps he should acquire US citizenship and lobby to become President of the World Bank

Other interviews

https://open.spotify.com/episode/4IbnTBgYxGbJLi39lE3KZT with mary beard

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbA5hfHCnjw&ab_channel=Tortoise

James o’brien interviews Rory Stewart 

Jonathan Aitken interviews Rory Stewart

Ivan Illich - why the attraction?

I am still trying to puzzle over the power Illich’s writing had for me in the 1970s.

1968 had been, of course, the year of rebellion against the forces of power and tradition. My first thought was to go back to ask who else had been competing for attention in those days? C Wright Mills had been a dominant figure with his “The Power Elite” of 1956 an attack on established power.

Illich’s work was some 15 years later and went deeper – with no obvious target to blame. But I do remember some New Statesman cartoons of “Pillars of the Establishment” (as in Grosz’s painting) tearing off their masks to reveal evil and savage faces. Illich’s books were short and an essay in The Challenges of Ivan Illich – a collective reflection; by L Hainacki (2002) suggested he used epigrammatic assertions rather than persuasive arguments – which would probably have impressed me in the 1970s.

What do I now make of his legacy? It was his critical message which made the impact on me but this seems, however, to have been taken up and morphed into a widespread cynicism about anyone exercising any sort of power. This has been a deeply dangerous development which simply serves the interests of those with the real power

update; https://www.bollier.org/blog/why-ivan-illich-still-matters-today

https://www.bollier.org/blog/why-ivan-illich-still-matters-today

Ivan Illich

Ivan Illich had a strange but profound influence on me in my early 30s and I’ve just downloaded a couple of books to help me understand his appeal – viz Ivan Illich in Conversation (1992) and Ivan Illich – an intellectual journey (2021) both by David Cayley

By then I was a politician – if a reforming one – with increasingly responsible positions as, first, a Chairman of a (newly-established) municipal social work committee and then as Secretary of the ruling group of Scotland’s (and Europe’s) largest Region and its strategist for its central policy relating to multiple deprivation – or social justice as it would be called these days. What, you might well ask, was I doing with a dangerous anarchist who challenged the claims of health and educational professionals?

Illich was an Austrian priest working in South America who set the cat amongst the pigeons of professionalism with his anarchistic critiques of the grip which educational and medical castes had on our minds – namely Deschooling Society (1971) and Medical Nemesi (1974) I used to tour the various professional associations in Scotland in those years – using both the Illich critique and the insights I had gained as a Chair of one of the new Social Work Committees to challenge the conventional wisdoms of these professions.

I had, admittedly, been open to community action since first encountering 

the likes of Saul Alinsky and Paulo Freire as I fought the local housing bureaucracy 

with local residents in the late 1960s – as you can see in the long 1977 article 

Community Development – its political and administrative challenge. 

Alinsky was more of a tactical street-fighter; Freire the deep and inspirational 

thinker about self-help. But it was Illich who supplied the hard weaponry. 

The seeds were probably sown a decade earlier – at university – when I was 

exposed to Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies (1945) and its 

demolition of those who claimed universal truths. The article given by the link 

is a critical reassessment of the 2 volume work after 50 years but can’t detract 

from the powerful impact it had on this reader in the early 1960s. Even at school,

 I had learned to be a “freethinker” and to be suspicious of what JK Galbraith 

called “the conventional wisdom”.
Illich’s critique in the 1970s of the monstrous arrogance of health and educational 

professionals in claiming to know best was, therefore, pushing at an open door 

for the likes of us….In all the talk of the dominant narrative of Neoliberalism, 

this element in my generation’s formation tends to be forgotten. 

Social Democracy was undermined to a large extent because my generation 

stopped believing in the big battalions – not least because of the power of 

such writers as Illich. In so doing, we committed the first but unnoticed 

unilateral disarmament! It was the Trade Unions and the working class who had 

given democracy its teeth. But – as individualists and members of identity tribes 

- we came to scorn organisational power and allowed Big Money to subvert 

democracy with its lobbying, Think Tanks and Corporate Media.

I am not, of course, doing Illich justice when I paint his contribution as one largely of criticism. There was also a deep caring and compassion for the ordinary person – and their capabilities. But, somehow, we western readers tended to take that for granted – such was the power of his dismantling of the claims of the powerful. Herbert Gintis was one of the few radicals of the left who recognised the importance of Illich in subjecting “Deschooling Society” to a 27-page critique – most others ignored the man and the hostility he brought to the very idea of modernity and our readiness to accept change. In its stead be preached the importance of relationships and what he called “conviviality:. Indeed amongst the welter of books he produced in the 1970s was "Tools for Conviviality"

And it was probably for this reason that, under the influence of John Stewart 

of the Institute of Local Government Studies (INLOGOV), I became an early 

convert to the idea of corporate planning and management which was then 

fashionable - although its time soon passed, with complaints about “silo management”

 being, if anything stronger in recent years (see Gillian Tett’s The Silo Effect 

(2015). 
I’ve had a curious relationship with management over the past half century – 

the first half of my adult life, from age 25, was spent as a reforming politician 

(my paid job in academia was a bit of a sideline). That changed in the second half 

of my life from 1990 when I entered the project management world of consultancy 

where I was generally Team Leader of small groups of professionals trying to 

develop the capacity of state organisations in ex-communist countries. 

That was, quite frankly, very much a question of the blind leading the blind 

since we “westerners” were only subject specialists (usually of only one country’

s system) and had little experience of change management – let alone 

understanding of the context in which we were working. So I made a point of 

doing my homework on what the literature of “change management” (which had 

started in the mid 1980s and was a decade later the most popular field) had 

to say. And have continued to try to keep up-to-date with the literature with 

this latest Short Note and bibliography on Change.

Some Reading on Paulo Freire and Ivan Illich

https://www.noemamag.com/a-forgotten-prophet-whose-time-has-come/ a short article
The Prophet of Cuernavaca – Ivan Illich and the Crisis of the West by Todd Hartch (2015) 

is a testimony to the man.
The Challenges of Ivan Illich – a collective reflection; by L Hoinacki (2002)
We Make the Road by Walking – conversations on education and social change; Myles Horton 

and Paulo Freire (1990) Myles Horton was a great American practitioner of working class 

education who teamed up with Freire for this book
Tools for Conviviality; is a short book by Ivan Illich (1975) which gives a sense of his style.

https://manhattan.institute/article/the-genius-of-ivan-illich 2022

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2019/1/16/echoes-affinities-resonances-ivan-illich-in-contemporary-thought

https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/19227_ivan-illich-an-intellectual-biography-by-david-cayley-reviewed-by-tim-christiaens/

https://www.scielo.br/j/cebape/a/NJw7rykyqZWT6cj8vYdJJtH/?format=pdf&lang=en Illich's impact on organisational studies

https://laviedesidees.fr/The-Two-Lives-of-Ivan-Illich

English Voices

Last night I watched a documentary about Brexit which my favourite newspaper – Byline Times – had commissioned. It was fairly grim viewing with working class fishermen and middle class farming women expressing their disillusionment with the politicians; and Anthony Barnett, Gina Miller and Caroline Lucas trying to explain how the country had got into such a mess. Foot soldiers from both brexit camps were brought in for some colour.

But what really hit home for me was the difficulty I had in understanding the regional accents. Admittedly I’ve been out of the country for 33 years and am more used to the Scottish burr. But it brought home to me the scale of the class structure which continues to bedevil England – indeed it’s getting worse as Fiona Hill reveals in the book “There is Nothing for You Here” (2022) which records her experience as a miner’s daughter who managed to break out. Thanks to her Russian linguistic and policy skills, she made it to the US State Department where she testified at the Trump impeachment. 

One of the strongest points she makes is that such opportunities are becoming much rarer nowadays – with the new meritocracy rewarding the children of the well-off Professional and Managerial Class

Can we penetrate anyone’s Soul?

In the early days of the Russian invasion of Ukraine I penned, in a sort of protest, a celebration of life consisting of a list of autobiographies. Today I was reminded of Among You Taking Notes – the wartime diary of Naomi Mitchinson 1939-1945 ed by Dorothy Sheridan (1985) which I duly retrieved from my library – Mitchinson being a Scottish writer and Sheridan has written a useful article about editing the Mitchinson book. It persuaded me to add a (n admittedly small) section to the post to which I have also added the fascinating essay which Paul Theroux gave us in “The Trouble with Autobiography”, the most comprehensive notes on the autobiographies of literary classics. I have entitled the new collection “Memoirs, Diaries and Intellectual biographies”

That duly led me to this article on The Diary in 20^th Century Britain and to the book “The Diary – the epic of everyday life”

Elizabeth Podnieks reiterates this observation in her more detailed description of the diary as

a book of days presented in chronological sequence, though not necessarily recorded as such. It inscribes the thoughts, feelings, and experiences of its author and may depict the social, historical, and intellectual period in which she or he lives and writes. Aspects of the author’s character may be denied or repressed, or acknowledged and celebrated. . . .

The diary is an open-ended book, but it may include internal closures and summations. By virtue of its status as a book of days, it is disconnected, yet it may offer structural and thematic patterns and connectives.

Though likely written spontaneously, it is a consciously crafted text, such that the diarist often takes content and aesthetics into account. Finally, though composed in private, the diary is not necessarily a secret document.

It may be intended for an audience: an individual, a small group of people, or a general public, and either contemporary with or future to the diarist’s lifetime

For those wanting to know more about Mitchinson, I recommend 

• Naomi Mitchinson – a writer in Time ed J Purdon 2023

• Witness to a Century – the autobiographical writings of Naomi Mitchinson thesis by H Lloyd 2005

Why are we so indifferent to Inequality?

It was Michael Robert’s post on Branko Milanovic’s latest book – “Visions of Inequality – from the French Revolution to the end of the Cold War” which spurred me to make some observations about inequality – a subject, I realised, I hadn’t really posted explicitly about, although it had absorbed a couple of decades of my life in Scotland between 1968 and 1990

Roberts, as befits a Marxist, is fixated on Marx whereas Milanovic focuses on 6 classical writers on the subject – Quesnay, Smith, Ricardo, Marx, Pareto and Kuznets – with more recent researchers on the subject such as Tony Atkinson and Thomas Pikety relegated to.a chapter, given the book’s curious ending in 1989

My own commitment to equality was sparked by RH Tawney and Tony Crosland – Tawney for the almost religious tone of his support for the idea and Crosland for the libertarian force of his arguments against the Conservative Enemy

This tantalising introduction to Ben Jackson’s book on “Equality and the British Left – a study in progressive political thought 1900-64” sets the scene for the power of the idea in the first part of the century in the UK. But it was The Spirit Level – why greater equality makes societies stronger by Wilkinson and Pickett in 2010 which really impacted on people. More recently Danny Dorling’s “Injustice – why social inequality persists” (2011 edition) was and remains for me a powerful and unique exploration of the reasons for our indifference to the inequalities which disfigure so many societies.

These days, everyone talks about inequality – it has become the go-to descriptor of “western civilisation” but that civilisation remains a gilded one, with few politicians daring to take serious action against the plutocrats. I’m not sure if anyone has given a satisfactory answer to the indifference – sure, since Johnson’s War on Poverty in the 1960s, we have become inured to the rhetoric about inequalities. And some progress has been made on righting racial and gender inequalities. But there is a long way to go

Further Reading

Two Nations – the state of poverty in the UK CSJ 2023

What we owe each other – a new social contract for a better society Minouche Safik 2021

Capital and Ideology Thomas Pikety 2020

Inequality – a short history M Alacevich and A Soci 2018

Inequality – what can be done? Tony Atkinson 2015

Inequality Matters UN 2013

The Spirit Level – why greater equality makes societies stronger Wilkinson and Pickett 2010

Equality RH Tawney 1931

CAN ANYONE EXPLAIN THE BRITISH CONSTITUTION?

I’m encouraged by positive feedback on my last post to venture further into the nature of the continuing confusions about the respective role in UK government of the roles of Ministers, civil servants, parliament, the judiciary and voters.

No less a body than the House of Lords issued a report last month (October) which probably served to further the confusion – with the exciting title “The Appointment and Dismissal of Permanent Secretaries and other Senior Civil Servants”, attracting a useful response from the Constitution Society - with a brief background report from Martin Stanley who runs this excellent site about the civil service

But the most concise answer to the question which heads this post is probably given in the 2019 report from the Constitution Society with the revealing title of “Good Chaps No More”

The ‘good chap’ principle emerged over a long period of time. Its existence was 

assumed rather than expressly defined. As Gladstone put it in 1879, the British 

constitution ‘presumes more boldly than any other the good sense and good faith 

of those who work it.’ What we might regard as the closest equivalent to a formal 

codification of what is expected of a ‘good chap’ came relatively recently in the form 

of the "Seven Principles of Public Life". First issued by the Committee on Standards 

in Public Life in 1995, they are known as the ‘Nolan Principles’, after the inaugural 

chair of the committee, Lord (Michael) Nolan (who served in this post from 1994 to 

1997). These standards supposedly apply to all exercisers of public functions, though 

they have no legal force. The principles, with official explanatory texts, are: 

• 1. Selflessness; Holders of public office should act solely in terms of the public interest. 

• 2. 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 in order to gain financial or other material benefits for themselves, their family

• 3. Objectivity; Holders of public office must act and take decisions impartially, 

fairly and on merit, using the best evidence and without discrimination or bias. 

• 4. 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.

• 5. 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.

• 6. Honesty; Holders of public office should be truthful. 

• 7. Leadership; Holders of public office should exhibit these principles in their 

 own behaviour. They should actively promote and robustly support the principles and be willing to challenge poor behaviour wherever it occurs.’ 

The period since the European Union (EU) referendum of June 2016 has seen a series of disputes about whether constitutional abuses have taken place. They have touched upon many of the main governmental organs: the Cabinet, the Civil Service, Parliament, the judiciary, the devolved institutions, and even the monarchy. From being a by-word for tedium the condition of the UK constitution has become a first order question cracking with political electricity. ….To provide a perspective on the extent to which previous assumptions have been challenged, it is worth considering an aforementioned document published in 2011, “The Cabinet Manual - A guide to the laws, conventions and rules on the operation of government”, it provides an account, from the perspective of the executive, of the working of the political system. Like the “Seven Principles of Public Life”, it has no direct legal force. But it provides the fullest account, in an official text, of the overall configuration of the UK constitution. Its opening paragraph states: 

‘The UK is a Parliamentary democracy which has a constitutional sovereign as Head of State; a sovereign Parliament, which is supreme to all other government institutions, consisting of the Sovereign, the House of Commons and the House of Lords; an Executive drawn from and accountable to Parliament; and an independent judiciary.’ 

The manual makes no mention at this point of the role of referendums

In our consideration of the draft manual, we called for some clarification of the role of referendums in the final text, that was not provided, though we did not anticipate the scale of disruption that has come about following the 2016 European referendum - or that such exercises in direct democracy might override the fundamental principles set out in this paragraph. It does not suggest that the monarch, Parliament and courts might be required to facilitate the objectives of an executive claiming to be the vehicle for such a supposedly irresistible expression of popular will. Indeed, the word ‘referendum’ does not occur until page 37 of the manual. It is used a total of six times in the text, once in a footnote relating to suspensions of collective responsibility

None of these applications of the term suggest that referendums could take on an overweening constitutional significance. Yet from the time of the public vote of June 2016 onwards, the UK government – including within it politicians who were ministers at the time the Cabinet Manual was issued in 2011 – maintained that a referendum had indeed upended arrangements as presented in its opening paragraph.20 Nor does the Cabinet Manual touch on the difficulty of reconciling plebiscitary democracy with representative democracy with which Parliament has wrestled for nearly three-and-a-half years. On the basis of this premise, the executive has for more than three years exhibited patterns of behaviour that are troubling and ominous regarding the sustainability of constitutional norms and standards of behaviour in the UK….

The law plays an important part in the maintenance of constitutional norms, as we discuss later in this report. But many of the most fundamental ethical and operational rules applying to the executive do not have full legal force, taking the form of conventions. These types of rules can be amorphous in nature. They rest on precedent, usage and interpretation, and can come into being, change, and disappear without any specific player within the political system intending them to. Conventions rely on those involved in their operation recognising and choosing to abide by them. They may not be written down in any official document; and disagreements may arise about whether they exist at all, their precise nature, and how they apply in a specific case. Increasingly, however, the executive has taken to publishing descriptions of some of the most important conventions to which it is subject. The accounts contained in these texts should not necessarily be regarded as the final word, and may be disputed. But between them they take us as close as is presently possible to a formal account of a number of key features of the UK constitution….

We do not claim that the UK constitution is on the brink of unravelling. A more likely pessimistic scenario is a gradual fraying by stages. This outcome is particularly anxiety-inducing, since it would be hard to recognise and could be more readily accepted as normal. Already, a generation whose conscious experience of politics began mid-way through the present decade may regard ongoing turbulence, a lack of clear principles and flagrant challenges to the system as standard features of politics. This perception is liable to exploitation by those who wish to circumvent the rules, or change them for malign purposes. Even if, over coming months and years, the present difficulties appear to subside, it would be a mistake to assume that there was no threat. We should remember this experience.

Further Reading

• Constitution and Governance in the UK  (the UK in a changing Europe 2022)

• Role and status of PM Office (House of Commons 2021)

• Beyond Brexit – toward a British Constitution Vernan Bogdanor 2019

• https://consoc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/07/Blick-and-Hennessy-Brexit-and-the-Melting-of-the-British-Constitution.pdf 

• Codes of the Constitution  Andrew Blick 2016

UPDATE

Just arrived - an important report https://ukcivilservant.substack.com/p/independent-review-of-governance?utm_source=profile&utm_medium=reader2