Utopia, you are standing in it!

Seven people have been arrested on suspicion of seizing control of an oil tanker, police have said.

The men were detained when military forces stormed the Nave Andromeda which was thought to have been hijacked off the Isle of Wight on Sunday night.

Sixteen members of the Special Boat Service (SBS) ended a 10-hour stand-off which started when stowaways on board the ship reportedly became violent.

Defence Secretary Ben Wallace said there had been a “threat to life”.

Hampshire Constabulary said the seven men were being held on suspicion of “seizing or exercising control of a ship by use of threats or force under Sections 9(1) and (3) of the Aviation and Maritime and Security Act 1990”.

“All 22 crew members are safe and well and the vessel is now alongside in the port of Southampton,” a spokesman said.

Investigators are now speaking to the ship’s crew to establish what…

Introduction

The line between academia and scholarship on the one hand and punditry and activism on the other has become increasingly blurred in Canada, especially in the wake of the coalition-prorogation crisis of December 2008. Recent works like Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government are emblematic of the attempt, as well as the failure, to reconcile the mutually exclusive concepts of political activism and constitutional scholarship.

A spin off of that book, Lori Turnbull’s column “A three-peat for prorogation? Bring on reform” in the Globe and Mailalso effectively underscores this problem: sometimes the correct academic argument becomes an obstacle to effective activism. The article makes at least two factual errors and, more broadly, purports a serious conceptual error of interpretation about the nature of crown prerogative and the role of unwritten convention in Canada’s constitution.

Problems with Turnbull’s Column and Democratizing the Constitution: Reforming Responsible Government

On Prorogation…

Ahead of Tuesday’sVirtual IHRParliaments, Politics and People seminar, we hear from Dr Michael Taylor, the author of The Interest: How the British Establishment Resisted the Abolition of Slavery (2020). He will be responding to your questions about his research on the parliamentary resistance to the abolition of slavery between 5:15 p.m. and 6:30 p.m. on 3 November 2020. Details on how to join the discussion are available here or by contacting seminar@histparl.ac.uk.

This blog, which explores the parliamentary context of the abolition of slavery, is based on Michael’s full-length seminar paper, ‘The West India Interest and Colonial Slavery in Parliament, 1823-33’, which is available here.

It might be natural to think that, when Parliament abolished the British slave trade in 1807, it also abolished slavery itself. But it did not. In fact, when the Slave Trade Abolition Act came into force on New Year’s Day, 1808, there…

If this Summer’s power rationing and rolling blackouts weren’t enough, California’s wind and solar worshippers are determined to deliver much more of the same.

One of their hopes is to ban all household gas appliances, forcing families to use electric powered kit, instead.

The premise is that all the power needed will come courtesy of mother nature, milked from sunshine and lovingly caressed from the Golden State’s occasional breezes.

Not content with preventing Californians from using natural gas to cook and heat their homes, its climate cult is now looking to put an end to fossil-fuelled motor vehicles, as well.

Again, the cult reckon that California’s windmills and solar panels will be more than sufficient to charge up millions of all-electric vehicles, with power to spare to run everything else.

It is, of course, fantastic nonsense, as Larry Bell outlines below.

Subtracting Fossil Fuels Plus Adding Electric Cars Equals Disaster

We’ve heard often lately that colleges are afflicted with “structural racism”, and that every white person carries a degree of racism—of “implicit” bias—that is not even accessible to consciousness. These claims, at least those about the deep racism of American colleges, are never accompanied by systematic data, only by anecdotes. Are those claims true? A new paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General from the University of Wisconsin at Madison (UWM, reference at bottom) suggest that they aren’t, at least on that campus.

The authors of the paper, also at UWM, tested predictions from two contrasting theories of bias on college campuses. One, the “dispersed discrimination account”, posits that bias is widespread, with most individuals holding biases against groups like women, blacks and Muslims. This is implicit in the anti-racism work of people like Robin DiAngelo, who accepts that everybody has “implicit or unconscious biases” that cannot be…

Very occasionally, when political trouble draws up from the depths some of the most obscure arcana of the British constitution, you may hear about Queen’s Consent. It’s one of the most recherche little pieces of parliamentary flummery. Bills which have a direct impact on the remaining prerogative powers or the private interests of the sovereign are submitted during their passage through parliament for the sovereign’s formal consent. Without it, they will not be allowed to proceed further. It is, crucially, to be distinguished from the Royal Assent to bills, the last stage in legislative procedure and an entirely more significant process. Royal Assent offers the theoretical possibility of a royal veto on bills that have been passed by both houses, although the veto – which has not been used since 1708 – is regarded as effectively defunct. It is suggested from time to time that Queen’s Consent might be used…