Utopia, you are standing in it!

Jean-Bedel Bokassa, the self-proclaimed emperor of the Central African empire, after crowning himself in 1977.

The coronation took place on 4 December 1977 at the Palais des Sports ;, on Bokassa Avenue, next to the Université Jean-Bedel Bokassa. To the strains of Mozart and Beethoven, wearing a twenty-foot-long red-velvet cloak trimmed with ermine, Bokassa crowned himself and then received as a symbol of office a six-foot diamond-encrusted sceptre.

The spectacle of Bokassa’s lavish coronation, costing $22 million, in a country with few government services, huge infant mortality, widespread illiteracy, only 260 miles of paved roads and in serious economic difficulty, aroused universal criticism. But the French, who picked up most of the bill, curtly dismissed all such criticism. ‘Personally,’ said the French Cooperation Minister, Robert Galley, who represented Giscard at the coronation, ‘I find it quite extraordinary to criticise what is to take place in Bangui while finding the Queen…

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.
– – –
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…