Image credit: Eliot Lord

What makes Britain unique? Well, maybe we should begin to question the tense. What made Britain unique? And indeed, what is Britain? Britain is not a conventional nation state. This is something that we need to understand more than anything else. Britain is also not a modern state. Britain is this strange thing which is a pre-modern state that led modernity. That is to say that it is the result of the Union, finally at the parliamentary union of England and Scotland in 1707, which leads to the formation of the Britain. When we talk about Britain, we're talking about Anglo-Britain. We're talking about England plus. Now the road of Scotland in that plus is very important at certain stages of the 18th century, but the source of our peculiarity is the nature of England itself. England in so many ways is a pioneer, a pioneer country, a pioneer kingdom. What we think of as the foundations of economic progress, of social progress and so on, to such a very, very large extent is developed here. Conventionally, it's assumed to be in the 17th century with the the civil wars between the Crown and Parliament between Catholic and Protestant and so on. I think it goes back far, far further. I think the peculiarity of England goes way back to the period of Magna Carta to the 12th century and to the development of the idea, which of course in some ways is a very old one, but also a very new one, but the idea that the governor should answer to the governed. That is really what the whole nature of Magna Carta is about, the demand of a king that finally he should have due respect both to law and to the interest of his subjects. And it begins in Magna Carta itself, the Magna Carta of 1215. It begins as a very radical, as a very revolutionary idea. The Magna Carta of 1215, if it had actually lasted, would have turned us into an aristocratic public, a republic. It would have turned us into something like Poland. Fortunately, the barons didn't get their way and the intervention by the French failed. And instead, we had one of those extraordinary strange changes of England. England, again, is both this very progressive country and this profoundly conservative one. And this revolutionary text of Magna Carta only lasts five minutes because of the intervention of the Pope and political failure. But it's then superseded in 1216, the following year after King John, the king whose bad kingness had led to the political struggle, which created Magna Carta. It's then superseded by a second version of Magna Carta, which is masterminded by the first great conservative politician in English history, a man who is the William the Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, regent of John's son, the infant, Henry III. And what that Magna Carta does is something very remarkable. It keeps the notion of the answerability of the governors to the governed, the ideas which broadly guarantee a notion of equal justice, which guarantee forms of consent for taxation, which guarantee astonishingly things like uniformity of weights and measures. It keeps all those, but it gets rid of the radical Republican elements. So instead of being an overthrowing of a monarchy, it becomes this extraordinary thing. It becomes for the first time a monarchy with a recognizable constitutional structure, a structure that actually acts as a framework against which the authority of government, the competence of government, and the legitimacy of government can be tested. And that then expresses itself as time rose on quite quickly, often through struggle, often through conflict in the creation of institutions, and particularly the institution of parliament, and which itself becomes the embodiment of this idea of the governors and govern actually joining together, king, lords, commons, sitting together and determining the interest of the state, the interest of the kingdom, and being the highest authority within the kingdom. And that idea, it acts also as the ground of other vital things, of ideas of the sanctity of law and the independence of the substantial independence of judges. It acts as, again, a kind of cradle for the development of the idea of certainty of law and certainty of property law, all of those sort of things, going right, right, right back to then. In other words, way before we've had enlightenment, way before we've had reformations, way before you've even had much impact from the extraordinary revival of the antique learning, the learning of the ancient world of Cicero amongst the Latins and Plato and Aristotle amongst the Greeks. So it's this very, very odd development. And this, I think, is why eventually England becomes manifestly the cradle of modernity. A country that got in first Because we are a country which in so many ways got in first, and perhaps gets out first. In the sense, we can see this very clearly with industrialization, the one of the great consequences of that explosion of the late 17th century that I was talking about, along with the British Empire, the two things being very very industrialization economic growth. The Empire all being very closely related. We can see this explosive expansion of a nation of its confidence of its culture, of its industry of its power, the unique and genuine worldwide embrace. The British Navy is the first genuine instrument of global power. It's not an astonishing thing. The French found it difficult to keep a fleet at sea for six weeks. So filthy. So badly run. We were capable of saving to Australia and back again. That is extraordinary. But of course, it, they have gone. Question is, what's left. And inevitably, you know you are, particularly if you're a historian, particularly if you get older yourself. You have a long white beard. I suspect I may be older than you are. I though I do not have a long white beard, but you are very aware of the wonderful phrase the reflection of time, the flowing away of time. One of the great meditations on the death of greatness is of course, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon. And Gibbon had the idea to write it, as he was in Rome, looking at the Roman Forum, and looking at the pitter-patter of the slippers and sandals of the lackadaisical Catholic clergy of Rome, walking where Cicero and Caesar trod. But when you wander around London now, and look at a Finsbury Park that bears a strong resemblance to Mogadishu, you are tempted to have similar feelings. So the short answer is, I think we need, we need rescuing, that what we were, the glory that was Greece, whatever it was, I've now forgotten, I've forgotten the couple, it isn't that terrible, the glory that was Greece, is it the grandeur that was Rome? Anyway, both of those, as far as Britain is concerned, have departed. There is a husk left. And the question is, can it be reanimated? I would also argue, you asked the question of sovereignty. It's one in which that formula that I was talking about, the idea, which I think is the key to everything, the idea of responsible government, that the governor answers to the government, was deliberately destroyed. Destroyed is perhaps too strong a word, was deliberately put in leading chains and limited. In other words, there've been two great sets of changes. One is the departure of empire, the decline of industrialization, the shattering reversal of the 19th century pattern, in which the world of aggressive economic growth was Northern Ireland, Glasgow, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, Manchester, and London, you know, clearly highly important commercially, but not to the extraordinary inversion, the death of the North, the death of the old industrial heartlands. The Strangest Combination It's why we are the strangest combination of high levels of both public order of remarkable levels of unconsciously imposed order, and at the same time, very large measures of individuality, of freedom that act as of what I would argue is a kind of perfect petri dish, a kind of perfect well fertilised ground for the astonishing developments in the late 17th century, everybody from the foundation of the everybody from the foundation of the Royal Society to Peeps, the great diarist to John Locke, to Isaac Newton, political science, the mathematical and physical sciences and so on. This extraordinary explosion, which really I would argue is the foundation of the modern world, whose great vehicle is of course what becomes the British Empire, British after the fusion with England and Scotland. So this is what is remarkable about Anglo-Britain, about the United Kingdom, and at its center was that idea of what you summarize in a single word of sovereignty, that idea of a country which finally governs itself and is itself its highest authority. Now the idea is implicit of course in everything I was talking about and it is given extraordinarily vigorous expression by by one of the kings, as it were, who least respected most of these structures that I've been talking about, who is of course Henry VIII, with that assertion of an imperial sovereignty directed against any form of external authority with the breach with Rome. But I think the idea, in other words, we are again, I am more and more convinced that the whole historical chronology that we normally apply, which is a developmental one, so we tend to talk about ideas of nation states as being essentially post-French revolutionary in 19th century and so on, I think all the monuments of a nation state are perfectly clearly developed in Anglo-Britain, England in particular, as early as the 16th century. The whole language of self-sufficiency of nationhood, the assertion which you get very clearly by the 1530s, that English is already a great language able to stand alongside the classical languages of Greek and Latin and alongside the great contemporary languages of Italian, of French, Spanish and German. That is explicitly put forward in the early 1530s that we have a foundation poet in Chaucer of equal status with Homer or with Virgil. So this extraordinary idea of a country self-sufficient in its language, in its culture, in its history, and above all passionately asserted in its self-government, that's all there. Clearly it acquires fresh meaning, it shifts with different moments of time, a patriotism that has handle for its war music is significantly different from one before, but the elements are there. Now the really big question we should then be asking is, I raise the question of tense right at the beginning. How much of this survives? How much of it is left? There is no separation of powers. Parliament is supreme, legislative, supreme, judicature, and supreme executive. It's all of the things together. That's remarkable. It's a people in conclave, and in theory, able to do anything. The decision is taken, on the contrary, to remove as much power as possible from elected politicians. That is what happens from 1997. And you do it in two particular ways. You create a network of expert bodies, quasi-autonomous, non-governmental organisations, beginning with things like the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England, which determines interest rates, English nature, which effectively determines patterns of land usage, the Climate Change Committee, which determines the whole of energy policy, and so on. Now, if you look at those areas, the setting of interest rates, land use, and climate change, those are effectively lifted outside the responsibility of parliament, and handed over to non-removable bodies of experts. I am not saying that democracy, I'm not saying that elected politicians are perfect. On the contrary, I am famous for denouncing them for being very imperfect indeed. But the entire point about democracy, or indeed parliamentary politics long, long before anything like democracy, remember, we do not become a democracy until relatively late, that we don't get foolish male suffrage until the end of the 19th century. We don't get female suffrage till the 1920s, but we were a highly responsible tradition of government, thanks to parliament, hundreds of years before that anyway. The great point about representative government and still more so democracy is you can get rid of the buggers, that if they fail, you can get rid of them. In the same way, we were notorious in the Middle Ages for getting rid of kings. If an English king didn't perform, he went pretty damn quick. And this seems to me to be a wholly good thing. You're effectively answerable to your subject, but committees of experts aren't. The worst possible way of governing And all of that's happened, which was again, part of the decline of the vanishing of empire, and so on. But something else happened. That external power went. But then from 1997 onwards, under the government of Tony Blair, there was a complete and deliberate attempt, and much more than an attempt, immensely successful at changing the way in which we were governed. And that I think is alongside what it was accompanied by a deliberate importation of the former subject peoples of the empire into Britain. It's those two things, the transformation both of the nature of our government, and even the nature of the population from 1997 that's landed as in our present mess. They were again an attempt at undoing the uniqueness of Britain. They were an attempt at undoing what was left of the peculiarity of Britain, and assimilating it much more to the structure of the post Second World War continental states, and then pick in particular to Germany. If you look in Germany, and the with, of course, a constitution, very much the work of the allies, led particularly by ourselves in the aftermath of the Second World War, there was on the one hand, a profound theoretical commitment to the idea of democracy. But on the other hand, there was an equally profound fear of the German people. That is to say, that the most civilized what you could argue in some ways, was the most civilised country in Europe, if you look at its achievements in in music, in the sciences, and in philosophy, and so on, its submergence into the horrors of the Nazi regime, with certainly the compliance of the people, and arguably with their enthusiastic participation. And that resulted in a strange paradox, a democracy that doesn't trust the people. a democracy that does not actually recognize really majority rule, that tries to create legal and institutional structures that make sure that although the people are consulted, what they can actually do is pretty limited. So that becomes, and again, the whole structures of the European Union, as it eventually becomes, are that pattern writ large. Now, the traditions of Anglo-British government are a radical reproof to that idea. And what you see on the Blair, I think, is a perfectly deliberate, how far it began as a genuine universal plan, I think remains entirely unclear. It's done piecemeal, and over two decades and more, because the Conservative Party is stupid enough to jump on the bandwagon from 2010. But its effect is very simply to reproduce the essence of what has become the continental state system in Britain. And the target is the sovereignty of parliament. The idea is that you try and remove, in theory, in Anglo-Britain, going right back to the Middle Ages, Parliament itself, which is King, Lord and Commons, is the final authority that determines everything that's done in Britain. It is deranged. And then the second group, so that's the rule of the expert. And then the second great change is the total alteration in the relationship between political and legal power. And you do that through A, the importation of the European Convention on Human Rights, B, the setting up of the Supreme Court and C, the Equality Act of 2010. And between those three things, they totally alter the functioning of law in Britain. And law, the peculiarities of common law, a law which is shaped fundamentally by the consent of the people to governing itself is transformed into something completely different. Why an Act of Parliament bound everybody was in theory, because everybody had been involved in the making of it. That's what it means. Instead, you replace it with something different. Conceptually, a framework of law, which is based on a European convention, by definition, cannot be the creation of a nation state. Above the nation state It sits above the nation state. It means that parliament becomes subordinate to some higher notion of lawmaking, which presumably comes out of the ether. Where do, where do these universal rights come from? The answer is the acts of the imagination. You also, again, as part of this process of the transformation of the nature of law, incorporate doctrines of international law, which again, sit above the nation state. And you bind all this together with the idea of the rule of law, which now sits in the mind of lawyers at any rate, as a co-equal principle in our constitution to the idea of the sovereignty of parliament. And as far as the Supreme Court is concerned, seems in fact to occupy a higher position, which is why you have that extraordinary verdict of the Supreme Court in Miller II in the that the Boris Johnson's prorogation of parliament was illegal. The COVID committee had a single purpose. It was to try to make sure nobody died of COVID. It didn't matter if you died of a heart attack. Because the NHS ceased to be a national health service, it became a national COVID service. It stopped treating cancer. It stopped treating heart disease. So if in a fact, as far as the committee was concerned, who'd gave a damn if you died of a heart attack? Who gave a damn if you died of cancer? That wasn't the issue. Who gave a damn if you decided to protect the rest of the population? You'd also got to imprison our children and remove them from school. Entire generations whose upbringing is flawed so that two or three extra people did not die from COVID. That you wreck our entire finances. We incur with furlough or whatever the costs of a world war. That is how we've been misgoverned. It is scandalous. So the expert committee, nowadays we have hundreds of these things and roughly one third of government expenditure passes through their hands and is fundamentally uncontrollable by parliament. Now, proceedings in parliament are protected by the Bill of Rights, that key document of that extraordinary period that I was talking about in the late 17th century. This was deliberately pushed aside by the merest fiction. So in other words, we are now in a world in which parliament itself is no longer supreme. Parliament is not sovereign anymore. We have quasi-sovereign experts and would be sovereign lawyers. And between those, what's left of the old Britain is crushed and crumbling. We do genuinely have things that would once have been unsayable, unspeakable, unthinkable. We really do have two tier justice. And it's the man who is largely responsible for these conceptual changes in law, Tom Bingham, Lord Bingham, says he dares to say it in Australia. Prioritising Minorities He then goes on and says it's designed to protect minorities against the majority, which is why we've seen this extraordinary business of the hyper-protection of the whole list of minorities that Bingham talks about. We've stood our old politics on its head.

Continue Reading