Ginsburg-worship is just another way to proclaim your place on the political and cultural spectrum, but it might actually have changed American history. In 2013, just as RBG memes were becoming popular, Ginsburg was urged by some supporters to step down and allow President Barack Obama and a Democratic Senate to appoint a younger liberal replacement. Then aged 80 and suffering recurrent cancer, she refused. She died in office in 2020, allowing Donald Trump and Republican senators to tilt the court, and American life, away from her values. Did enjoyment of fame contribute to her decision? Never mind the dangers of judicial vanity: there are T-shirts to sell, and virtues to signal.

Some people clearly dream of turning Brenda Hale into Britain’s RBG, a pioneering feminist lawyer and cultural symbol. These are people who spend too much time online and have #FBPE in their Twitter bio. A couple of years ago, many of them added spider emojis, too, in tribute to Hale: she is best known for wearing a spider-shaped brooch while ruling, as president of the Supreme Court, that Boris Johnson’s prorogation of Parliament — a crude attempt to “get Brexit done” — was unlawful. In the days that followed, people seemed more interested in this “coded statement” — this “secret message” — than the unambiguous ruling, which marked the culmination of Hale’s stellar legal career. She retired not long afterwards and has now written a book that her publishers evidently hope will appeal to all those people who obsessed over her “power dressing”.

I suggest that this is her publishers’ hope because Hale doesn’t seem particularly keen on this attempt to turn her into a celebrity. Her book suggests an author somewhat resistant to the narratives that are being enthusiastically imputed to her.

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One of those narratives is of social mobility and possibly even class struggle: however did a girl from a little village outside Richmond in Yorkshire (not, she says early in the book, “the sort of place where you would expect a top judge to grow up”) reach the Supreme Court? Yet Hale’s origins are hardly humble. Born in 1945, she is the daughter and granddaughter of Oxbridge graduates. Her father is head of a boys’ grammar school. Her parents take the Telegraph, invite neighbours for sherry after church, and send the handyman to collect Hale and her sister from school at lunchtime so they don’t have to eat with the village kids.

Serious, diligent and ferociously bright, Hale progresses to Cambridge with neither difficulty nor trepidation. She rightly notes that this makes her part of a tiny minority: only 4% of school-leavers went to university at the time. She also says the transition to university didn’t faze her, because this was just what her family did: it was normal. So much for that class struggle, then.

Meanwhile, Hale pays only the most superficial attention to wider issues of access to the legal professions. She offers a rose-tinted view of today’s law school as places that mean people who would never have dreamed of becoming lawyers in the past can now do so. And yet, they undeniably remain bastions of privilege, much of it inherited. The sociologists Sam Friedman and Daniel Lauriston calculate that the children of lawyers are 17 times more likely than other kids to become lawyers. A 2020 study by Bridge Group and the University of York concluded that “the legal profession remains dominated by individuals from higher socioeconomic backgrounds with students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds half as likely to attend the top English law schools as other students”.

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Still, Hale seems better placed to discuss struggles not of class but of sex. Her success as a female lawyer in a male-dominated establishment is remarkable, and she deserves to be held up as a role model. But again, she seems reluctant to play the part. Her book has a striking opening, in which she writes frankly of suffering “imposter syndrome” at numerous points in her impressive career. But this candid author then quickly disappears behind a fairly dry account of her career progression. Having been set up to tell the story of a determined woman who rose to the top in the face of male chauvinism, Hale sometimes makes becoming a top judge sound almost easy.

In her telling, the closed male legal establishment actually looked after her rather well. She becomes the first ever female member of the Law Commission, despite not actually applying for the role — a more senior lawyer on the Commission nudges her into it. She becomes a judge after the traditional “tap on the shoulder” from a senior official. Further promotions sound smooth and painless. Occasionally she’s annoyed by anachronistic masculine judicial titles, silly remarks from colleagues and daft old dinner-table traditions that exclude women. But her book isn’t a tale of institutional sexism.

That’s not to say such bias doesn’t exist, and didn’t figure in Hale’s career. Rather, Hale isn’t giving us the whole story here; she often seems reluctant to talk about herself, her experiences and feelings. Her personal life is largely absent. The end of her first marriage, after 24 years, is mentioned only obliquely. Her daughter gets a handful of mentions, but there is no account of how she combined family life with a demanding job. The book is subtitled “A Life” but it would be better to say: “A Career”. Influential men, of course, when they write their memoirs, aren’t expected to explain who was looking after the kids while they were conquering the world — but given that so many women find their careers hindered by family responsibilities, Hale might be a more accessible role model if she’d addressed the subject.

That career has been driven by a truly formidable intellect — it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Hale’s rise demonstrates the old adage that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to achieve the same. But her refusal to talk about herself blunts her ability to explore sexism in the legal establishment. She’s more comfortable talking about her cases and the law itself. This is generally done dispassionately, though she reflects intriguingly that her time as a family court judge was largely spent “oppressing” women.

Perhaps she’d rather not be defined by her sex, but it’s hard not to think, reading her memoir, that an entire book by Hale on how and where the law fails women would be fascinating — and powerful. But that book wouldn’t include the prorogation case, Brexit or that spider brooch — the things that made her properly famous, and therefore the things most likely to sell copies.

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Focusing on them, though, is to forget that Hale was a public figure for decades. During that time, she figured occasionally in newspaper reports. Not all of them were positive, and this rankles — she recalls not just unfriendly Daily Mail headlines about her, but the page numbers and reporters’ bylines (“On 23 October 1995 there was a front-page article by Paul Harris”). In a rare display of emotion, she says such personalised coverage is “distressing”, but insists the greater worry is journalists’ failure to understand her legal thinking.

Was this memoir written as the last word, then? Somewhere behind the veil of judicial dispassion stands a human being with the same frailties as the rest of us — including vanity and inconsistency.

Both of these are displayed in Hale’s account of the prorogation case. To my mind, the Supreme Court’s ruling was a good one, re-establishing Parliament’s constitutional primacy, and deserving of ongoing attention. But how much do we need to know about the people who gave that ruling? How much do we gain from learning that Hale wrote her findings from her house in Yorkshire, and that one of her fellow judges did the same in Sicily?

Hale herself insists that the legal principles are what really matter here — and professes exasperation with public focus on her appearance in court. “What I was wearing that day is not important,” she declares, shortly after telling us what she was wearing that day, including the spider brooch and its history. Despite her exasperation, she appears rather pleased by the people who buy T-shirts with a spider logo or wear spider badges “to show their support”. And then there’s the title of her memoir, Spider Woman, which features the famous brooch on the front cover. Hale may not like that attention on her outfit and jewellery — something a male judge, surely, would never experience — but she’s content to use it to promote her book.

Is there a touch of vanity here? I suspect so, but I don’t say that as a criticism: we are all vain creatures, and there’s no shame in that. Even the most august and dispassionate of judges may succumb to the urge to show off a bit — fame has a terrible allure. To plug her book, Hale has been doing the media circuit of broadcast and print interviews, alongside authors, actors, and influencers. And even before the prorogation case, she heard the siren call: in 2018, she appeared as a judge on Masterchef. This is the age of celebrity, and everyone’s invited, even judges. Indeed, in her book, Hale make the case for diversity on the bench by arguing that judges must look like the society they serve. Perhaps they ought to be selling themselves, on Instagram or TikTok, to ensure that young people engage with the law and relate to those who uphold it.

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Then again judges are arguably the closest thing we now have to Plato’s Guardians, a group that comes from society but still sits apart from it, in order to make decisions in our best interest. We don’t really need to know what they think or — worse — how they feel while they dispense justice. And the more we know about them, the more likely we are to disagree with them. Familiarity breeds distrust. The story of Ruth Bader Ginsburg should be a cautionary tale to British judges, not an inspiration. For every American who adores “Notorious R.B.G.” there is one who distrusts liberals in the judiciary. It is better for public trust in our institutions if impartial public servants keep quiet than if they make themselves more “relatable” figures, a lesson that a certain former House of Commons Speaker has sadly ignored.

I’m wary of imputing thoughts to Brenda Hale, but I wonder if she, too, is in two minds about the wisdom of a senior judge courting celebrity. Perhaps that explains why her book is stuck somewhere in the quagmire between fully revealing autobiography and impersonal legal history.

Like much in contemporary liberalism, this response combines high-minded hysteria with ignorance of history. The Human Rights Act became law in 1998 and came into force in 2000. Was the UK a tyranny until then? Power was significantly more accountable. Judgements involving basic political values were not the property of a judicial elite, but made by legislators who could be removed in democratic elections. Attacked by liberals and some Conservatives as a species of “elective dictatorship”, this was in fact a system that secured self-government. There was no Supreme Court standing above government that could nullify its decisions. Political choices among conflicting goals and values were made openly in parliament.

Only 20 years ago, the British judiciary lacked the capacity, and probably the will, to become seriously involved in politics. Judicial independence was never in doubt. At the same time — and not unrelatedly — the judiciary did not assert the authority to overturn acts of government. It would have been unthinkable for it to pronounce, as the Supreme Court did unanimously in Miller 2, that a decision on proroguing parliament would have “an extreme effect on the fundamentals of our democracy”.

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Clearly, this is political language — and of a crude, silly, over-heated kind. Equally clearly, that is not how the judges see it. In their minds, their views on political questions are so self-evidently correct that they are not political views at all. For them, it seems, the fact that politics remains a sphere of irresolvable disagreement shows that collective decisions about basic freedoms are best decided by an elite that is not politically accountable. It is no accident that the dominant strand in liberal thinking over the past generation has been a species of anti-political legalism.

A compelling case can be made for returning to the pre-1998 regime. Whether the Supreme Court is allowed to continue in its present form is not the most important issue. Disestablishing the Court, and returning it to a more limited role as a Lords committee of final appeals, could have a useful symbolic role in curbing judicial overreach. But whether a body with the title of Supreme Court continues to exist is not the real issue. Nor is the central question of how judges are chosen. An American-style system of political nomination should be firmly rejected. The proper remedy for the politicisation of the judiciary cannot be to make the judiciary yet more political. Instead, judges should be deprived of the powers that enable them to make political decisions.

The Conservative manifesto suggests derogations from the HRA where it hobbles government in its most essential tasks. Human rights laws have obstructed the deportation of terrorists and other criminals and limited the terms under which they are sentenced and released, exposed the armed forces to vexatious historic law-suits and dictated the conditions in which prisoners are held in British gaols. Amending the Act to prevent these abuses would be an advance, but would not remove the power of judges to impose unjustified limits on the authority of government. The single most direct route to this end would be by repealing the Human Rights Act, and withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights.

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It will be pointed out that the ECHR, which the HRA incorporated into UK law, was framed largely by British civil servants. But in the nearly 70 years that have followed since it came into force, the scope of the Convention has expanded greatly, as European judges have interpreted its provisions ever more broadly (Judicial over-reach extends beyond the inflation of rights; the ruling by the Court of Appeal that a third Heathrow runway would be unlawful shows courts acting as arbiters of public policy).

A British Bill of Rights has been proposed as an alternative, but would not necessarily reduce judicial over-reach. Drawing up such a bill would be a protracted process, and with much of the legal profession in thrall to theories that enhance their own standing and scope of operations, the resulting rights would probably be little different from those in force at present. The rule of law would still mean rule by lawyers. If the HRA were repealed, and the UK no longer signed up to the ECHR, the situation would alter fundamentally. Britain would become like Australia, a modern democracy that operates without a national bill of rights.

Liberals will respond with horror to any suggestion of returning to the pre-1998 British ancien regime. Yet it secured the values an earlier generation of liberals rightly prized. Homosexuality between men was legalised in 1967, as was abortion except in Northern Ireland. (In a civilized reform, same-sex marriage became lawful in England and Wales in 2013, and Scotland a year later. Extending the benefits of marriage, it widens the good life available to gay people. Human rights are irrelevant.) The Race Relations Act making it illegal to refuse housing, jobs or public services to people on the basis of their ethnic origins, was passed in 1968. In all these cases, liberal values were secured by legislation, not the judicial adjudication of rights.

Relying on parliament rather than the judiciary for our freedoms is a distinctively British liberal tradition. John Stuart Mill never supposed human freedom could be embodied in a list of rights. Having himself served as an MP, he assigned to legislators the task of determining the scope and limits of freedom. Parliamentarians, not a jumped-up collection of lawyers, was supreme. Legislators should ask whether harm to others is at issue, and if so, which mix of freedom and restraint would best promote general well-being. Unlike basic rights, liberties could would vary widely according to changing circumstances.

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There is much that is wanting in Mill’s utilitarianism, not least his assumption that harm and well-being can be assessed in easily agreed terms. But Mill’s account of how questions of freedom are to be decided has crucial advantages over the rights-based legalism that has effectively replaced it as the official philosophy of the British governing classes. Mill recognised that vital freedoms may conflict with one another, and when they do, the conflict should be settled by elected law-makers not judges.

The decline of this British liberal tradition began well before the passing of the Human Rights Act. Writing in 1990, I noted:

“If there is a single characteristic that typifies liberal political philosophy over the past quarter of a century, it is its domination by a jurisprudential paradigm…It has generated a series of intractable conflicts, which portend deepening division, growing ungovernability and even a sort of chronic, low-intensity civil war…of these conflicts the abortion question is only the most obvious, but it serves well enough to illustrate the fateful implications for political practice of the hegemony of a rights-based jurisprudence that has been inflated by the inordinate claims of liberal theorizing—that, since fundamental rights cannot be moderated, their judicial interpretation can only mean unconditional victory or complete surrender for the protagonists in the dispute. This is not a recipe for civic peace, or for a stable liberal civil society.”[1. “An epitaph for liberalism”, Times Literary Supplement, January 12, 1990, reprinted in Post-liberalism: studies in Political Thought,1993, pp. 238-9.]

A diagnosis that may have seemed hyperbolic 30 years ago may look less so today. The effect of turning practically every major public issue into a question of human rights is to make conflicts of values intractable. The abortion issue was only the beginning of a culture war that has left American politics hopelessly polarised. Britain has followed America down a road that leads to a war of all against all, fought out between contending social groups armed with inordinate rights.

Contrary to the legalist philosophy that has shaped liberal thinking over the past 30 or more years, human freedoms are not a system of dovetailing rights. Protecting often divergent human interests, they are the site of unending value-conflict. A failure to recognise this fact has created the hyper-liberalism that now attempts to impose on society a particular set of values that much of the population does not accept.

Like human identities, rights are not unilateral acts of self-assertion. In order to be enforced, they need recognition in society, which is particularly problematic when one right collides with another. The right to free speech is at odds with the right to be protected against hate speech, the right to stage protest marches with the rights of people to go about their daily business, the rights of transgender people with those of people who demand single-sex facilities, and so on.

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Liberal legalists say warring rights can be moderated, and their conflicts resolved, by judicial process. But the conceptions of public interest and social wellbeing to which judges appeal in order to revolve these conflicts are not themselves matters of legal judgement. They are inherently and unalterably political, and the political opinions of judges have no more authority or value than anyone else’s.

The legalist philosophy in which rights insulate freedom from the hazards of politics is an illusion. All the majestic panoply of the American constitution will not stop Trump turning America into an illiberal democracy if — in a scenario the time-wasting fiasco of impeachment has made more likely — he wins a second term.

In Britain, liberals often ask what life would be like under a Corbyn government without the HRA. The answer is that it would be not much different from life in Britain with the HRA. When it suited his purposes, Corbyn would ignore, override or circumvent human rights, as he has done in regard to the investigation of Labour anti-Semitism. It was not a regime of rights but the moral decency of voters that prevented an institutionally racist party coming to power in this country. In contrast, the European rights regime has not stopped far right parties advancing to the point where they have entered government in several countries. Human rights have no magical power to shield freedom from political challenge and defeat.

If the government is serious about reviewing the position of human rights laws in this country, it should not be put off by hysterical claims of a slide into despotism. Inspired by legalist ideologies that are at variance with the British political tradition, the regime of rights that has been imposed over the past two decades need not be accepted as permanent. Clinging to a faddish orthodoxy is not the most authentic kind of conservatism, or the most effective way of protecting freedom.

Wondering when all this political polarisation will end and people will learn to, like, chillax again? Curious as to what life with a politicised judiciary will be like? Thinking about the long-term consequences of all those cool new tricks that John Bercow has conjured forth from hitherto arcane parliamentary precedents?

Well, I am here to reveal all — and I don’t even need to stare at a chicken’s entrails to do it. You see, I’ve been living in the US for the past 13 years, a land where unhinged levels of polarisation and an ultra-politicised judiciary are par for the course. And all of this has given me a certain degree of insight as to the future facing the land of my birth.

So let’s answer some questions and see what lies in store. After all, the future is already upon us.

1: I’m tired of Brexit and wish that people would stop thinking in ludicrously binary terms and treating politics as a zero-sum war against pure evil. When will it end?

Never. Or at least, not any time soon. I arrived in the US in 2006, while the Iraq War was raging and memories of Florida, “hanging chads” and a very sad Al Gore from six years earlier still divided the nation. Indeed, I vividly recall walking into a Barnes & Noble where there was a table heaped high with books dedicated to the then-thriving genre of Bush-hate, which had also spawned TV shows, stage productions, websites and even a movie portraying his assassination.

This doesn’t seem healthy, I thought, but at least he’ll be gone in two years’ time. The rage will burn itself out… then Obama was elected and, for a second, it really did seem as if the spirit of kumbaya was abroad in the land, and that maybe, just maybe, people would settle down a little bit.

But before you knew it, he was talking about government healthcare and stimulus spending, and suddenly a terror of socialism gripped the hearts of freedom-loving patriots, the Tea Party was on the march, and angry people were stockpiling ammo lest the government come for their guns, etc. It all got to be very, very exhausting. Then we got Trump, who successfully scrambled the brains of his opponents, his own party and the media, and it got even more exhausting.

It’s bad my friends, it’s bad. Of course, you might argue that the US was settled by millenarian Puritans not known for their love of nuance, and so they have form for this kind of stuff, while good old Britannia will get over it. But the Brexit vote was a once-in-a-generation decision that will change the country forever, whereas Americans can and do kick out their presidents on a regular basis, yet still they rage as if “The Republic” were perpetually on the verge of extinction. Brexit strikes deeper; so whether the vote is respected or somehow overturned, there is no path forward that does not involve great bitterness.

Expect shrieking, paranoia, and more reductio ad Hitlerams than you can shake a copy of The Guardian at. You can also expect that voices of reason will arise, you know, like Ian Austin’s just announced Mainstream movement.

They will be ignored.

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2: So what should I expect from a politicised Supreme Court?

Yeah, you’re going to really hate that.

I mean, it’s not that I actually believe that Boris Johnson was all that interested in the Queen’s Speech either. I just assumed that everybody knew and agreed that, in politics, hypocrisy, game-playing and general chicanery come with the territory — like that time John Major prorogued Parliament to duck the cash-for-questions scandal. You know, the same John Major who took Boris Johnson to court to prevent him from proroguing Parliament to stop it from messing with his Brexit mojo. And yet here we are, with the Supreme Court getting mixed up with this mess, and ruling that Boris acted “unlawfully” and is a very naughty boy.

In the US, of course, the Supreme Court is constantly being asked to deliver judgments on issues that divide the country along partisan lines, and its judges can almost always be relied on to vote on entirely partisan lines (except for the lonely guy who has to referee between the two sides). Annoyed by the teaching of evolution? Do you desire to burn the flag? Pro- or anti-abortion? Let’s ask the folk on the Supreme Court what they think.

In fact, here in the States, the justices on the court are celebrities, the objects of hate and/or adoration depending on your political views. Heck, I spotted a hagiographic book about Sonia Sotomayor in the kids’ section of my local library the other week. Meanwhile Ruth Bader Ginsburg is such an icon that Hollywood made a film about her life, starring an actress from one of those rubbish Star Wars films Disney has been making, and you can even buy Catholic-style candles with her face on them instead of a saint. Really.

Politicised judiciaries are a symptom of polarised politics; when nobody can agree on anything, a handful of unelected people in robes step in. Already I have heard fantasies about tossing Johnson in jail if he refuses to pursue a Brexit extension. But this is just the start.

Now that the judges are wading into politics, prepare for immense acrimony. You will see more lawfare, as people try to take down governments they dislike through the courts. You will learn the names of the judges. You will discover how the judges are appointed. Newspapers will start to dig into their political affiliations. You will learn whether they ever wore blackface, about the bar fights they instigated at UB40 concerts in the 1980s, and you will see them attacked and vilified by politicians on the Right and Left.

You will wish you could go back to the old days, when judges were old folk in curly wigs.

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3. OK, but what about the legacy of John Bercow? At least Parliament is more powerful now, right?

Attitudes to the actions of the Speaker in the ongoing parliamentary shenanigans serve as a Brexit Rorschach test. If you’re for Remain, then his interpretation of the rules is a pretty butterfly, if you’re for Leave, it’s a dead dog with its head split open by a meat cleaver.

Regardless, the glee felt by Boris-haters may well turn out to be short lived. For while it may feel empowering to delay Brexit, and to force him to submit a letter to the EU asking for an extension, it is evident that Parliament has no strategy other than to humiliate and torment the PM. It is also obvious that the leader of the opposition is afraid of an election as he thinks he might lose. After all, Boris is not exactly collapsing in the polls.

But the larger and most obvious point is that Bercow’s innovations, cooked up in the heat of Parliament’s nervous breakdown will — like the politicisation of the judiciary — have all kinds of consequences further down the road. Here in the US we tend to be a little more straightforward, but blowing up tradition can still backfire, and quickly. In 2013, when the Democrats grew tired of Senate Republicans blocking Obama’s executive and judicial nominees they didn’t discover new possibilities in old rulings, but rather exercised the “nuclear option” by simply changing the existing rules, lowering the threshold for approval from 60 votes to 51. Hey presto, they could now get their nominations through the Senate.

It felt good at the time, but a precedent had been set, and the Republicans under Trump would soon go further and apply the same reduced threshold to Supreme Court nominations. Enter stage right Brett Kavanaugh, who, because he could not be blocked by the Democrats in the Senate, had to be destroyed by other means. And yet, today he sits on the bench regardless. The Democrats lost.

And so it is that one day the new rules of Parliament laid down by Bercow will be used against some of those celebrating them now, and there will be much wailing and gnashing of teeth when it does happen.

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4. This future you’re talking about is totally depressing. Is there anything I can do about it?

No. The bitterness, the rancour, it runs deep, and shall abide.

What do I do, out here in my hyper-polarised future? Well, I don’t watch a whole lot of news, as the news that matters finds me anyway. I don’t do social media. I do read poetry, and visit state parks with my family, and listen to music. Recently, for instance, I got through all ten of Mahler’s symphonies, plus Das Lied von der Erde. That was nice.

Well OK, there is at least one bit of good news. You live in the UK, and whenever the UK attempts to copy something the US is doing, it always comes out a bit crap. Think about those giant strip malls in American cities, vast and filled with restaurant chains, gyms, cinemas and shopping options. Transplant them to Britain and what do you get? Maybe a bowling alley and a McDonald’s next to a car park on the outskirts of Basildon. Our version of hyper-polarisation will likely be a slightly more feeble imitation of the American original.

But that small comfort aside, I recommend that you settle in, and make yourself comfortable. You are in it for the long haul.

Apparently, I – as an MEP – get a say on whether to endorse them, but it’s not exactly a free and fair election. There is no actual choice, for a start, just a chance to reject or query a pre-ordained list. With Britain not putting anyone forward (as we’re – allegedly – preparing to leave on October 31) and Germany denied choosing one as they already have Mrs von der Leyen, there are 26 new commissioners, each nominated by member states, and given their jobs based on “a series of formal interviews” by the president-elect. The powers that be will present them to Parliament as a dream team ticket, and we are expected to rubber stamp them before 1 November.

So, who are these people who will hold sway over the lives of so many Europeans for the next five years? It’s a rather mixed bag. Much has been made of the fact that the line-up features 13 women, making it the “most gender-balanced Commission in EU history”. I am not a supporter of identity politics, but when Ms Von der Leyen boasts that the new Commission cabinet is “as diverse as Europe is”, one is tempted to point out that they are all white. Unless you count the Belgian nominee Didier Reynders, who in 2015 was accused of racism after he dressed up in blackface for a charity event in Brussels.

The newly-appointed Justice Commissioner (whose role involves ensuring compliance with the rule of law) insisted it was a harmless tradition. Fair enough, but after listening to endless speeches at the European Parliament achingly flaunting their anti-racists credentials, and calling for legal sanctions against hate speech, this hypocrisy is hard to take.

Perhaps he is a quality politician and is worth the grief? Perhaps, except that he recently failed to become President of the Council of Europe and was passed over for the Commission in 2014, making it third time lucky for a seat on the gravy train. But then he does have solid credentials, having previously worked in the Belgium government under its then Prime Minister, the anti-Brexit, friend-of-the-Lib-Dems  Guy Verhofstadt.

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These new members of Ms Von der Leyen’s cabinet have been given new titles, supposedly to focus on their goals, but with a tinge of Orwellian doublespeak. So, we have a Commissioner for “A Stronger Europe in the World” and a Commissioner for “An Economy that Works for People”. One particularly creepy rebrand involves Greece‘s Margaritis Schinas – a former MEP, LSE alumnus and spokesman for previous President Jean-Claude Juncker – who has been given the migration portfolio and now revels in the title of Vice President for “Protecting our European Way of life”.

Jeez! Even in the supine world of EU bureaucracy this sobriquet has already led to some queasiness. A Dutch liberal MEP, Sophie in ‘t Veld, told The Independent that implying “Europeans need to be protected from external cultures is grotesque and this narrative should be rejected”. Other Europhiles denounced the title as “grotesque” and reminiscent of “fascist” rhetoric, but for me it shows up the two-faced nature of the claims that the EU is an internationalist enterprise. The truth is, it is a protectionist bloc, only committed to freedom of movement within its borders, at the expense of pesky foreigners from without.

What is most galling is that so many Remain champions here in the UK have the nerve to label those who want democratic control of national borders as xenophobic, when the more racist dynamic resides in Fortress Europe; it is a circling-the-wagons mentality that savagely polices its own borders to protect it from non-European immigrants, who are posited as a threat to “our European Way of Life”.

Another appointee is Spain’s Josep Borrell, who now heads up European diplomacy. This is the same Josep Borrell who entered Spain’s foreign ministry with one main aim: to defeat the Catalan independence movement. In 2018, he withdrew the diplomatic credentials of the Flemish government’s delegate in Spain in response to criticisms by the Flemish parliament speaker, Jan Peumans, about the jailing of Catalan leaders.

As this “diplomat” regularly defends the imprisoning and exile of elected Catalan politicians, maybe the SNP MEPs – who make much of their support for Catalan independence – will oppose his appointment? But… maybe not, as Borrell has been diplomatic enough to pander to Scottish nationalism, indicating that an independent Scotland should be allowed to join the EU, even while endorsing locking up those with similar views closer to home.

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On the economy, there’s France’s appointee Sylvie Goulard, who is in charge of Domestic Markets. Ms Goulard is a close ally of French President Emmanuel Macron, and quit as an MEP to join his government as Armed Forces Minister in 2017. However, she lasted less than a month and was forced to resign when an investigation was opened into how her party had misused EU funds; she had to reimburse the European Parliament Є45,000 euros (£40,200) in a case involving fake Parliamentary assistant jobs.

But please don’t worry about her. The following January, Ms Goulard was back with Mr Macron as deputy governor of the Bank of France! Barely a year later, she has now landed a plum job at the Commission. Nominated with no discussion. Nice work if you can get it.

That said, I’m sure that most of the Commissioners are upstanding. Although, only last Friday, the European Anti-fraud Office (OLAF) revealed that they had begun an investigation into the Polish candidate, Janusz Wojciechowski. OLAF said that the investigation into the 64-year-old former MEP, and former president of the Polish Court of Auditors, concerns financial “irregularities”. Even if MEPs challenge his appointment (as much because of his politics, being a member of the Right-wing Law and Justice Party) von de Leyen will simply pull another name from a hat of non-discussed allies for us to “choose”. This smacks of an Xi Jinping version of democratic accountability.

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Look what happens when you ignore Parliament

By Diana Purkiss

I could go on. And on. There are so many examples of the essentially undemocratic and unaccountable nature of the Commission, but perhaps nothing better illustrates this than the new president herself. A gigantic poster of Ursula von der Leyen has just been erected in Brussels that reads: “In fair free elections, the power of the people determines the people in power”. Fine words, but simply not true. Juncker’s successor did not get her elevated position as a result of people power, but was appointed to the top job after secret negotiations in July that followed a row when the candidates put forward by the European Parliament were turned down by EU heads of government.

An unpopular politician at home (as defence minister she was dubbed by one wag as the German equivalent of Chris Grayling), I was there when she was confirmed as president after a fierce fight and lots of opposition in the European Parliament, only scraping home by nine votes (she won by 383 votes to 327, needing the support of 374 MEPs for an absolute majority). She played down the narrowness of her win, insisting that a “majority is a majority”. On that, I agree with her, and so do 17.4 million others: they are the real embodiment of “power of the people”. She and her new Commissioners should show a genuine commitment to people power, and stop keeping us tied to their dictats against our will.

Claire Fox is Brexit Party MEP for North West England

After all, Jeremy Corbyn had only been in the job a few months and some officials noted — not unkindly — the toll the job was taking on him. Two general elections in barely six months had been followed by the immense task of governing Britain in its first year outside the European Union.

On top of that, he, nominally at least, was overseeing John McDonnell’s “economic revolution”. That agenda had already seen the Corbyn government facing staunch opposition in the Commons, the Lords and in the courts, as aggrieved investors claimed the British government had violated international trade agreements and even human rights law by confiscating shares.

No wonder the man was tired: let him sleep. No point waking him about some rock in the Baltic Sea with a population of 20,000 Swedes. No, the duty clerk thought, I’ll just tell the Chief of Staff. He might be a ferocious manager of Government advisers — he’d just summarily sacked another of Home Secretary Angela Rayner’s spads for alleged disloyalty  — but he’s always very keen to hear news about Russia.

Curiously, when the clerk called the Chief of Staff just after 2am, the phone was answered on the first ring and he sounded wide awake. Nor did he sound surprised to hear that initial assessments suggested that the “fishing boats” were carrying several thousand armed Russian men who, though they were not in uniform, moved and spoke like a professional military unit.

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“Interesting,” the Chief of Staff drawled in response to the clerk, public school vowels to the fore, “but not urgent, surely? Sweden’s not even in Nato, after all. Not sure this is one we want to jump into.”

Surprisingly, that was not the view in Washington. Everyone knew that President Trump’s father, Fred, was not, as he had long claimed, from Sweden, but that didn’t stop the President from invoking his supposed Swedish blood in a televised address to the nation warning Vladimir Putin to “get those men off my father’s soil”. (The Washington commentariat were divided in their explanations for this new approach to Russia: some said it just was part of the 2020 election strategy; some said it related to the potential seizure of a Trump International hotel in St Petersburg; CNN ran another analysis piece suggesting the President was now in the advanced stages of dementia.)

Almost equally surprising, was President Macron’s similarly bellicose response. Keen not to let Trump set the pace, Macron made his own address, promising that France would honour its role as the ultimate guarantor of European security: “Aujourd’hui et pour toujours, la France protégera l’Europe.” Pledging to stand in solidarity with a fellow EU member, he even reminded the French and the world that France retained full nuclear strike capability.

In London, a rather different story. Prime Minister Corbyn of course addressed the Commons, but insisted that there was no clear evidence of Russian state involvement in “the events” in the Baltic. Britain would wait for the accounts of the Swedish and Russian governments before drawing conclusions, he told MPs, but talk of a military response was “baseless and irresponsible”. Calm diplomacy was the only way forward, he told a restive House.

He even drew some grim laughs as he ridiculed demands from Conservative Leader, Dominic Raab, for a more muscular response in defence of Sweden: “May I remind him, Mr Speaker, that he was foreign secretary in the government that tore Britain out of the European Union without an agreement and so severed our most important relationship with the Swedish people he now claims to care about?”

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From that day in early April 2020, things moved quickly. The Russian fishermen established a large, secure compound with fortifications, secure communications links and what satellite images suggested were several batteries of anti-aircraft missiles. According to the Russian Foreign Ministry, the fishermen were simply patriotic Russian citizens who had taken it upon themselves to protect Russia’s interests in the Baltic. In Moscow, state-run news channels ran packages about the Russian occupation of Gotland in 1808, quoting historians who said the island had always been Russian but was unlawfully seized by the Swedes.

Meanwhile, Macron pulled a further surprise by demanding that the response to the “Russian invasion of Sweden” be coordinated through Nato, not the EU military planning cell.

This, the cynics said, was an acceptance that the EU, shorn of British military involvement, lacked the clout needed to face down the Russians. Taking the Nato route was Macron’s way of testing American committment to the Alliance, and pressuring the Corbyn Government to support him.

The Corbyn Government did no such thing. Despite — or perhaps because of — the outrage of Conservatives and British diplomats and generals, the Prime Minister continued to insist on an approach he called “security through peace”. Britain would not take sides, No 10 said, because that would only escalate the situation. “Just as Jeremy worked for peace in the Middle East and Northern Ireland, he will work for peace here too,” the Chief of Staff told journalists.

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As part of the new government’s new way of doing politics, the Baltic crisis would be put to the new “citizens’ assemblies”, consultative panels that were supposed to inject fresh legitimacy into politics. “Jeremy is bringing the voice of the people to the heart of government,” in the words of a Guardian columnist.

When the Prime Minister addressed the Commons, in July, to report on the verdict of the citizens and the Government’s response, his statement set new standards for shock and surprise.

Not only did “the people” want no part in any dispute with Russia over Gotland, they wanted no part in any Nato response, Corbyn declared. Accordingly, the Government of the United Kingdom was invoking Article 13 of the North Atlantic Treaty. Britain would leave Nato.

The ensuing rage in the Commons forced Speaker Bercow to suspend the sitting for 15 minutes, and threaten to expel several Conservative members from the chamber. Even Emily Thornberry, shouting from the Labour backbenches, was severely reprimanded.

When the Prime Minister was able to resume his statement, he had more. Once that exit from Nato was completed, Corbyn continued, Britain would begin the process of retiring the Trident nuclear deterrent; the replacements for the Vanguard-class nuclear subs would be cancelled. “As a neutral nation committed to security through peace, Britain has no need of weapons that could kill millions,” he said, promising to spend the Trident budget on the NHS instead. Additional health spending would be focused on areas that had reported shortages of medical supplies and NHS staff following Britain’s EU exit, he added: “We will use this peace dividend to heal the wounds caused by the reckless Tory Brexit.”

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He ended his statement by setting out how these proposals had come directly from those citizens’ assemblies. “Up and down the country, thousands of British women and men and people of other gender identities have told us clearly that Britain’s future, the future of their children, will be secured not by rushing into the imperialist wars of past centuries, but by taking the path of peace and healing,” he told MPs. “This is the will of the people and we will implement it.”

In a briefing following the statement, the Chief of Staff waited patiently for journalists to stop shouting before explaining that, even as he spoke, UK ambassadors were serving notice to Nato members that Article 13 would apply and UK membership would cease on 31st October 2020. In the meantime, he explained, UK officers and officials had been ordered to withdraw from Nato structures and operations immediately. “We are leaving, so there is no point in them being there any longer,” he said.

Would Parliament get a say on the withdrawal, he was asked? No. The Prime Minister would be exercising prerogative power. “He is well within his rights to do so,” the Chief of Staff said. “There is ample precedent for a Prime Minister acting this way in service of the people.”

The legal challenge to that decision began the very next day. Raab himself said he wanted to be party to the action and was even prepared to appear in court, but quickly abandoned that plan when it became clear that the case would rest on the precedent set in R. (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, otherwise known as the Gina Miller case.

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Despite contesting the case, the Government lost — and lost quickly. By late August, the Supreme Court had ruled that Parliament must have the final say on Article 13 and Nato exit. While Britain’s politicians fixated on court hearings in London, the rest of the world watched a rock in the Baltic.

The day after the Supreme Court ruling, Vladimir Putin made a televised statement: Russian citizens would be “rescued” from Gotland by the Russian Navy under a process witnessed by “monitors from neutral countries, including Great Britain”. The Russian president was effusive in his praise for Jeremy Corbyn, “a man of peace who is delivering security for his people and the world.”

Asked if the Prime Minister had spoken to the Russian President before that address, Downing Street declined to answer. Nor did No 10 respond to questions about a Reuters report from Moscow suggesting that the Chief of Staff had held two days of meetings with Putin in a Black Sea resort the previous week. A Moscow-based blog linked to the few remaining liberal opponents to Putin also suggested that the President had decorated the Chief of Staff with a medal, possibly the Medal for Impeccable Service XX, and legal title to a seaside dacha.

Within hours of that report hitting the wires, several prominent supporters of the Corbyn Government began to argue on Twitter that the Chief of Staff was not just a genius who had out-thought his domestic opponents, he was also a major international figure who deserved credit for defusing the Baltic crisis. Attempts to smear him as a Russian agent of influence, it was suggested, were just another “Black Ops” move to undermine the elected government by the British deep state.

When the Commons returned in early September, Prime Minister Corbyn showed no signs of changing his plans over the Alliance. He explained to MPs that, having served notice to quit, the process of UK departure from Nato could not now be stopped. His case was supported by both Trump and Macron, who both, in their own ways, made plain that Britain had made its choice and chosen a side.

Asked repeatedly by MPs to say that the Government would comply with the Court ruling and introduce legislation for the Article 13 exit, Corbyn declined to give a clear answer, instead pointing at the Conservative front bench and naming, in turn, every member who had sat in the Government of Boris Johnson. “How dare they, Mr Speaker, how dare they seek to block the will of the people, the people’s demand for security through peace?” he asked.

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No one was surprised by what came next in the Commons. Raab quickly formed an ad hoc alliance with around 20 Labour MPs (they quickly became known as the Atlee Group, though some preferred “Bevin’s Boys”) who moved to take control of the Order Paper and introduce legislation that would require the Government to pause the Article 13 notice and get Parliamentary consent to reinstating it.

Nor was the Chief of Staff’s first response a surprise: all Labour MPs supporting the motion would lose the Labour Whip and the party’s general secretary would not endorse their reselection as Labour candidates in future elections.  “These MPs are siding with the Conservatives to try to drag Britain into war and danger,” the Chief of Staff told reporters. “The people have clearly said they want security through peace, but these MPs have made themselves the enemies of peace.”

The motion passed nonetheless. In early September 2020, lacking a Commons majority, facing a Supreme Court ruling and the prospect of parliamentary defeat, it was now widely expected that even the Corbyn Government would have to back down.

That was what journalists summoned to an on-camera Downing Street statement by both the Prime Minister and Chancellor McDonnell expected. McDonnell’s presence promoted widespread Twitter speculation that Corbyn would actually announce he was stepping down, perhaps for reasons of health, and hand over to his ally.

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In fact, the Prime Minister announced that he was immediately asking the Queen to prorogue Parliament. The new session would begin on 1st November, with a Queen’s Speech setting out Chancellor McDonnell’s New Green Deal. There would also be a bill setting a legal cap on military spending at 1% of GDP and giving details of the new hospitals and nurses that would be hired “in every constituency” using the “peace dividend” produced by scrapping the “Trident weapon of mass murder”.

“The will of the people is clear,” the Prime Minister declared. “They want security through peace and they want medicine not murder. That is what this Government will give them, by any means necessary.