Utopia, you are standing in it!

The Labour Party’s Commission on the UK’s Future has published a report making some bold proposals for constitutional reform.  The most striking proposal in A New Britain: Renewing our Democracy and Rebuilding our Economy is to change the UK’s constitutional model in a way which introduces a form of entrenchment into our legal and political system.  In essence, this mechanism would protect certain constitutional arrangements or principles from being repealed or amended in the same way as ordinary legislation – the entrenched provisions might include a new statement of purposes for the UK, the autonomy of local government, a new set of social rights, a legalised version of the Sewel convention (constraining the law-making power of the UK Parliament in relation to devolution), and a series of other ‘protected constitutional statutes’.  Entrenchment of these provisions would be achieved through a new Assembly of the Nations and Regions, which would have a veto…

Munich street [image credit: muenchen.de]
The Daily Mail headlines it: ‘Eco-mob’s global warming protest fails…because it is too COLD!’ — Climate obsession can do strange things to some people. Does the phrase ‘sub-zero temperatures’ mean anything to them?
– – –
The orders were simple: Run out onto the road, glue yourself to the tarmac and stop drivers from getting through, says the Daily Mail.

But for two climate activists in Germany, that plan didn’t work out quite as they’d hoped because sub-zero temperatures stopped the glue from working properly in an embarrassing lack of foresight.

The ‘Last Generation’ activists, who were protesting against global warming, desperately poured a bucket of glue over each other before sitting stone-faced in the middle of the road in Munich this morning.

But the freezing temperature scuppered their plans and instead of being stuck to the road, the pair of protesters sat glumly…

Spreading millions of solar panels and spearing thousands of wind turbines far and wide doesn’t make sense, at any level.

Intermittent and diffuse energy sources do not represent progress in the state of human affairs; that was the way of the world pre-Industrial Revolution – science, enterprise and engineering made all that a part of our miserable history.

True it is that the developing world has a way to go, but finance and meddling climate cult elites aside, the path has already been laid out and is well trodden.

At the heart of the wind and sun cult’s bleating about saving the planet is the myth that wind and solar power are actually good for the planet and the environment that we live in.

Unfortunately for the myth makers, the evidence all runs in the other direction.

Viv Forbes explains precisely what we mean. On the ball, as usual, Viv…

We never pay enough attention to Latin America – which includes the nations of Central and South America – except when something is in crisis, like Argentina and the Falklands War, or revolutions and military coups.

As just a small example, I’m only now adding a category for “Latin America” for posts such as this.

There are probably any number of reasons for this neglect: a non-English-speaking world; only minor involvement in two world wars and the Cold War; not big economic players in the world (yet); not a big cultural influence (what influence has occurred has been via the American entertainment industry and translations of novelists like Isabel Allende and Gabriel Garcia Marquez); a continent fractured in exactly the way North America is not.

Admittedly Africa is even more neglected in everyday Western thought and for much the same reasons, but at least there one also can point the…

• BRYCE EDWARDS writes –

 The Labour Party used to advocate for a properly-funded, multi-platform public broadcaster. There was real merit in the proposal to set this up when Labour campaigned for it in 2017. After all, New Zealand lacks a public broadcaster along the lines of the BBC or the ABC. And the idea of merging RNZ and TVNZ meant that synergies, together with proper funding, could finally produce a broadcaster that would enhance democracy and New Zealand society. The idea had hints of transformation about it.
 
The plan was also to update public media for the 21st century in which the future is clearly digital. Public media needed to be online and less reliant on TV and radio. By future-proofing the public broadcasters, setting up new digital offerings that would coexist with the mega tech companies, public media operating in the public interest could survive and prosper.

Frequently people think that there are only two ways address flexibility in a constitution: to legally entrench an entire document and to protect it with strong judicial oversight, or to have a political constitution and a sovereign parliament, which, in the words of A.V. Dicey, ‘has … the right to make or unmake any law whatever….’ One aspect of this sovereignty is that parliament cannot bind itself: ‘That Parliaments have more than once intended and endeavoured to pass Acts which should tie the hands of their successors is certain, but the endeavour has always ended in failure.’

Parliament has regularly used language limiting its future options. The Bill of Rights (1688) says that the rights declared there ‘shall be declared, enacted, and established by Authority of this present Parliament, and shall stand, remain, and be the Law of this Realm for ever’. More recently, Parliament promised in the European Union…

The publication of the Report of the Commission on the UK’s Future is attracting widespread attention.  The centrepiece of its constitutional content is the replacement of the House of Lords with a new second chamber with new composition and a reformed role, which would have particular responsibility for territorial aspects of the constitution (discussed here) and act as guardian of (newly) entrenched elements of the constitution –not just in the devolution context but also more widely. 

This post develops in preliminary form some doubts about the radicalism of the entrenchment aspect of these proposals.Whilst they appear to have many of the trappings of radicalism (the language of entrenchment, a new hierarchically superior category of legislation, a novel role for the supreme court in the legislative process, suggestions of super-majorities and so on) I want to suggest that this aspect of the Report is in fact rather cautious.I’ll make four interrelated…

A documentary, five years in the making, about the slow-footed race-against-time to finish an epic “three volume” biography of Lyndon Johnson’s fifth and final volume before the researcher/author and his editor pass away from very old age is nobody’s idea of an easy sale — not to a film distributor, nor to most filmgoers.

Even the title — “Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb” — seems ironic, if not oxymoronic. “Turn every page” and “adventures?”

But filmmaker Lizzie Gottlieb (“Romeo Romeo” was hers), daughter of 90something editor Robert Gottlieb, has produced a filmed appreciation not just of her father and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Caro and their epic final collaboration. It’s a film about a decades-long deep dive into “power” in America and a monument to a sort of life-long collaboration we will never see again.

Turn every page” was a discipline passed on to…