Utopia, you are standing in it!

According to AP: ‘Additionally, the court supported the idea that severe restrictions on freedom are acceptable when related to efforts to prevent climate change.’ Severe! You have been warned.
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Clean Energy Wire reports:

Germany’s Constitutional Court ruling that the government’s climate policies are insufficient will have a major impact on the country’s election campaign and beyond, media commentators say.

“The political impact of the ruling is likely to be enormous,” writes Jakob Schlandt in Der Tagesspiegel. “The judges leave no doubt at all that there is a robust, actionable scientific consensus on man-made climate change,” which results in an obligation for politicians to act, Schlandt writes.

It often puzzles people that accusing someone of lying in parliament seems to be taken more seriously than actually lying – at least that there is some consequence. The member who has made the accusation is called on to withdraw, or rephrase, the allegation; whereas it is rare that anything is done to reprove the member who is alleged to have lied. The reason probably lies in the sixteenth-century conventions of gentlemanly violence.

The Hansard report of the debate on Roman Catholic emancipation on 17 April 1823 records a heated and tense exchange between the prominent and bitter-tongued opposition spokesman Henry Brougham and George Canning, now foreign secretary and effective leader of the House of Commons. Brougham, in the course of a strenuous attack on Canning, a previous supporter of Catholic rights, accused him of abandoning his principles in order to secure office in an anti-catholic administration. It was…

We’ve had a couple of widely-reported contributions to discussions on housing policy in the last few days.

The first was the Concluding Statement from the staff mission responsible for conducting the latest International Monetary Fund Article IV consultation with New Zealand (usually a physical mission here from Washington, but presumably done remotely this time). These statements are not formally the official view of the IMF management, let alone the Board, but you don’t get to be a mission leader without demonstrating your soundness and ability to run a line that won’t upset the Board and management. That doesn’t mean the messages are typically consistent either across time or across countries, but it does mean the final report (and the Board review of it) won’t be materially different. Of course, it helps that New Zealand isn’t a very important country (to the IMF – we don’t borrow from them, we pose…

The end of the Commonwealth and the Protectorate reign of Oliver Cromwell closed a dour, gloomy epoch in English history. Theatres were reopened, dancing was permitted once again, and other English revelries were welcomed back into society. The people of England longed for a return to familiarity, stability, heritage, and the restoration of the monarchy. In a way it was not Charles II that reclaimed the crown, rather it was the Cromwellian Protectorate regime that fell apart. It invited the return of the king. After more than a decade of Puritanical religious extremism, the new Carolinian age hailed a rebirth of literature, science, the arts, and theatre in England.

This was the era of Dryden, Farquhar, Vanbrugh, and Congreve; the reconstruction of London took place after the Great Fire under Christopher Wren’s capable architectural administration; and a Royal Society charter carried with it the promise of the Enlightenment under Newton’s…

Brexit has led to numerous clashes between London and the devolved governments, raising fundamental questions about the very nature of the United Kingdom, in a context where the European Union is no longer available as an ‘external support system’. Michael Keating argues that we need to find new constitutional concepts for living together in a world in which traditional ideas of national sovereignty have lost their relevance.

Since the Brexit vote, there have been repeated clashes between the UK and devolved governments. Some of these concern policy differences, notably over the form Brexit should take. Some reflect the inadequacies of mechanisms for intergovernmental relations. There is an inevitable rivalry between political parties at different levels. Beneath all this, however, are fundamental questions about the nature of the United Kingdom as a polity and where ultimate authority lies, especially after 20 years of devolution.

On the one hand, there…

Three Ways of Dissolving Parliament

In his famous treatise Commentaries on the Laws of England, Blackstone identified that dissolution can occur through one of three ways:

“1. By the king’s will […];
2. By a demise of the crown […];
3. By length of time.”[1]

Under Responsible Government, where Ministers of the Crown take responsibility for all acts of the Crown and the Crown acts on ministerial advice, dissolution by “the king’s will” now means dissolution by the prime minister’s or premier’s will. All dissolutions of the Parliament of Canada since 1867 have occurred under this method, and based on what I’ve seen in the last ten years of researching this field, the premiers have effected all dissolutions of the provincial legislatures since 1867 as well. (But if someone can find a contrary example, please do let me know – because that would prove most interesting). The first minister…

Talk is cheap. Governments, particularly wealthy, western ones, have been quick to make promises on climate change. They swear blind that they understand the threat the world faces, and that they will implement a policy response commensurate with it.Few nations have adopted this rhetoric as determinedly as the UK, with the British government promising to transform the UK into a net-zero country by 2050, an oath enshrined in law through the passing of the Climate Change Act 2008 (Order 2019) by Parliament in the summer of 2019.

Yet for all this hot air, whether in the form of domestic legislation like the above or international treaties like the Paris Agreement, even those wearing the most rose-tinted spectacles will see only incremental progress.Reporting last year, the UK’s Committee on Climate Change (CCC) concluded that ‘this [2020] was not the year of policy progress that the Committee called for in 2019’, while…

The turbulent eleven years known as the “Interregnum” (from the Latin for inter “between” and regnum “reign”) was the only period in English history to not have a ruling monarch. It was an age of suspicion and paranoia. A king had been executed, Parliament and the New Model Army jockeyed for power, and Puritanical fanaticism took hold. The Interregnum took place in two effective periods: the Commonwealth (1649-1653) wherein power was largely concentrated in the hands of Parliament, and the Protectorate (153-1659) wherein Oliver Cromwell and his son Richard took power with the support of the military as the Lords Protectorate.

After the shocking beheading of Charles I, England became a nominal republic. Abroad on the Continent, the monarchs of Europe looked on in horror as England committed regicide, but not a single European monarch offered military support to Charles. In London, a statue of Charles was cast down with…

Most of us probably think of pubs as informal spaces for leisure and socialising. In the period we research for the House of Commons 1832-1868 project, however, things were rather different. Public houses played a central role in many of the formal routines of public life, providing meeting places and temporary offices for a range of civic and commercial activities. These more formal functions were especially apparent when it came to the business of organising and running election campaigns. The idea of the pub as a suitable venue for electioneering might seem rather alien to us today, but our research shows that they continued to play a significant part in British political life well beyond the 1832 Reform Act.

Unused ‘refreshment’ ticket, 1841

The traditional view of the pub in early Victorian elections, of course, is as providers of drink. Vast quantities of alcohol were often given away in the…

When James VI left Edinburgh to become King James I of England, his frail younger son, Charles, was left behind in Scotland. “Baby Charles” was a sickly child who had unfortunately inherited his father’s lack of confidence. He was never supposed to be king. That honor was conferred upon Charles’s elder brother, Prince Henry, a vigorous and confident young man who many embraced as successor to the crown. However, he tragically died of an illness early in 1612. Charles was further isolated when his older sister, Elizabeth, departed to marry the King of Bohemia in 1613. At that point all eyes turned toward Charles for the succession of the crown. To fulfill his solemn duty, Charles grew into a proud, pious, and ultimately pathetic figure. He continued his father’s delusions about the “divine right of kings” and exacerbated hostilities between King and Parliament, and Church and State. His failures and…

Posted by Krista J. Kesselring, 20 April 2021.

‘Justice’ comes in many forms. Women mired in violent marriages in early modern England had little hope of formal, legal escape but might try for justice of a rougher sort. A woman might seek a separation authorized by the church courts if her very life was in danger, or at least ask a justice of the peace to take bonds for her husband’s good behaviour, but that was about all the law offered, and even that only sparingly. That’s not to say that women in abusive relationships had no other options, though. Early modern wives, and their friends, sometimes tried rather less licit ways to improve their situations. This post tells the story of one woman whose complaints about her drunken brute of a spouse prompted a sympathetic vicar to sneak into her husband’s house at night, whip in hand and wearing…

The Elizabethan era came to a close in 1603 when the good queen gave up the ghost after a long and consequential reign. The twilight of the Tudors marked the end of the most transformative epoch in English history. The seed of Henry VIII was finally exhausted and there was no immediate heir to the crown. England was forced to look abroad for a stable political future. Queen Elizabeth’s ongoing refusal to acknowledge a successor befuddled her court and caused great consternation within her council. It was only thanks to the skillful and covert diplomacy of her greatest administrator, the hunchbacked Robert Cecil, that a peaceful transfer of power was secured. The new king of England was to be a Scotsman, James VI, the only son of Mary Queen of Scots.

When Elizabeth breathed her last, a messenger, Sir Robert Carey, was dispatched from Elizabeth’s death bed at Richmond Palace…