Lord Neuberger is reported in the Guardian today concerning comments he made to a meeting of lawyers, last night:
The government's Brexit strategy is in danger of driving the UK down a “very slippery slope” towards “dictatorship” or “tyranny”, according to a former president of the supreme court.
Addressing an online meeting of lawyers, Lord Neuberger on Wednesday evening condemned the internal market bill, which enables the government to breach international law and exempts some of its powers from legal challenge.
“Once you deprive people of the right to go to court to challenge the government, you are in a dictatorship, you are in a tyranny,” Neuberger told the webinar. “The right of litigants to go to court to protect their rights and ensure that the government complies with its legal obligation is fundamental to any system … You could be going down a very slippery slope.”
Do I need to add more?
Lord Neuberger was, until recently, a Supreme Court judge.
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Not only a judge of the Supreme Court, but the president between 2012 and 2017.
Indeed….
And reasonably frightened by what is happening
Fascists don’t do joined-up thinking especially in the area of balancing their wants with those of others. They don’t do this because they weren’t taught it as as children, often the opposite they were subject in varying degrees to the psychologically abusive exact opposite:-
https://www.naturalchild.org/articles/alice_miller/adolf_hitler.html
Helen, thank you for the Alice Miller link. I am familiar with her work but missed this somehow, probably because of where it appeared. Unfortunately, she originally wrote in German. Although I know some German, it isn’t good enough for this sort of sophisticated writing. Thanks gain.
The insights of Alice Miller and others, was part of the reason for Sure Start to give a better start for children. it was criticised by Cummings in this article below
The arrogance and ignorance of the man makes me angry, which i don’t do very often.
Quite what he meant by genetics, I don’t know. In the mid sixties at Teacher Training College I was taught that studies with identical twins brought up apart and then having had IQ tests, showed that 80% of intelligence was due to the genes. Sir Cyril Burt was the big name.
It was the part of the justification for the tripartite system , Grammar, Technical and Secondary Modern schools. Then it was shown that Sir Cyril Burt had fudged the figures to fit his theories. We now know that the brain is much more ‘plastic’ than we thought as recently as the 1990s. It thrives on stimulation and love. The human genome project showed that genes have a more limited function than we used to think. That insight undermines the justification for racism too.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-54447053?fbclid=IwAR1eZbJLlX1qyBaa_CdotoxPywK6aUZtO6G8Pu0Z6P7pbYFm22u-O-nBJXY
Alice Miller’s work is reinforced by the work of Darcia Narvaez, Professor of Psychology at Notre Dame University. She specialises in ethical development and moral education. Her very comprehensive book on the development of virtuous qualities in human beings is “Neurobiology and the Development of Human Morality: Evolution, Culture and Wisdom” in which the take-away message is the strong role played by both biology and good-parenting to create the high level of cooperation amongst human beings to meet each other’s needs. I really liked the article in yesterday’s Guardian by the American journalist Rebecca Solnit in which she identified to my mind that the failure of good-parenting is to create individuals whose fundamental outlook on life is “nothing is really connected to anything else,” and manifests as a lack of connectedness to others especially but not exclusively their fellow human beings. This in turn produces the weird Libertarian mind-set that restraint on human behaviour always tends towards the tyrannical.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/oct/08/trump-coronavirus-pandemic-dishonest-cruel#comment-144368523
I’m sorry I missed this. Thanks for the link to the presentation. He is right.
Yes, the government is certainly going down the slippery slope to unaccountability and tyranny. Not only with the flouting of international law with the EU and internal market bill but also legislation contravening the Geneva Convention with dropping cases of British military criminal war crimes after 5 years and the illegal deportation of migrants, thus flouting international law regarding the treatment refugees. When senior ministers are rubbishing lawyers and people who do good this is a real threat to our and international civil liberties. Starmer and his MPs must vote against these barbaric measures and not just abstain.
The DWP has been working towards denial of access to court (in the form of tribunals) for years now so this is nothing new, just a further step along the same road. They came for the disabled, and people did nothing…
Interesting to see if this makes the TV news. BBC ?? Channel 4 ??
It should!
Part of the problem is that views have become entrenched. You could tell some people that their feet are dry when the water is lapping at their chin and they would believe you. I’ve just listened to a hospitality business chap on the BBC not happy about covid restrictions and worried about further restrictions whilst also saying that the sun shines out of the Chancellor’s gary.
I’m sure that I’m the same in many ways. With the way I’m feeling at the moment I don’t imagine being impressed or won over by anything the governement might say.
These kind of fixed divisions are going to get in the way of any change and whilst we all bicker and fret amongst ourselves the likes of Cummings and the ultra-wealthy consolidate their positions.
They are one tribe while we are many 🙁
I saw this too, and you are right to highlight it. You and I might have imagined this was big news, but I’ve not heard it reported on the BBC, and there is nothing on their website. Alas I am not surprised by this omission.
Scottish lawyers making the same point in open letter: https://www.thenational.scot/news/18779672.boris-johnson-priti-patel-warned-attacks-lawyers-incite-violence/
Good for them
Lord Neuberger’s comments must be viewed in context: in common with other governments across the world, Johnson’s administration is using a health crisis to implement draconian curtailments of civil liberties, much of it without full (or even any) democratic review. Our human rights are being restricted in an unprecedented scale, yet the majority seem blind to the danger all around us and obvious to those ahead if this continues.
Indeed. The problem is not just government and those behind them who want to seize power by undermining Parliament and the judiciary, but the mass of people who don’t want to see what’s happening under their noses. There’s none so blind as those who don’t want to see
No, you do not need to say any more.
It’s as plain as day.
Fascists, or whatever name Historians will invent to describe this mess, are so predictable, wherever they pop up in the world, the same techniques are used.
They go for the Law, education, and means of communication.
They disable all forms of intellectual debate and dissent.
Teachers are being told to stop being teachers and become employees of the neo-liberal, extreme capitalist regime.
Lawyers are being told to stop looking for justice.
The media are told to stop asking awkward question and digging for dirt on the Gang in power.
The thing that cheers me up is that they always get their day of reckoning.
He also referred to this aspect in the same webinar:
“Lord Neuberger also suggested that it was ironic the UK government had introduced “some pretty strong rules” to manage the coronavirus pandemic — which it expects people to obey.
“But I ask rhetorically, what moral authority does the government have expecting people to obey these draconian laws, if it itself is announcing that it intends to break its obligations under international law and intends to stop people going to court to enforce their rights against the government?”
https://www.irishlegal.com/article/lord-neuberger-warns-of-slippery-slope-towards-tyranny
Spot on
There’s more going on here. Read this from Journo Neil Clarke: ““…here we are in October, and, let’s face it, there is absolutely no sign, despite very low numbers of deaths ‘with’ Coronavirus, that we are returning to anything like normal. In fact, in his keynote speech yesterday, Prime Minister Boris Johnson specifically ruled out a return to normal, not even with a vaccine. “After all we have been through, it isn’t enough just to go back to normal. We have lost too much. History teaches us that things of this magnitude — wars, famines, plagues, events that affect the vast bulk of humanity, as this virus has — they do not just come and go. They can be the trigger for economic and social change.” When I heard Johnson utter those words I thought, ‘where have I heard this stuff before?’ Well, the answer is in the book ‘Covid-19: The Great Reset’ by Klaus Schwab, the executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, and Thierry Malleret. They too, like Johnson, invoked the Second World War as the trigger for fundamental changes, not only to the global order and global economy, but to society and the way human beings interact with one another. Like Johnson, they don’t want to return to normal. “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is never.”””
https://www.rt.com/op-ed/502795-boris-johnson-uk-great-reset/
Scary enough alone, but it gets worse when you look round the world to see who else, apart from Boris, is using the Build Back Better slogan. Here it is from Australia
https://probonoaustralia.com.au/news/2020/04/how-australia-can-build-back-better-after-coronavirus/
from the EU
https://www.globalelr.com/2020/05/the-eu-recovery-fund-building-back-better-in-a-post-covid-19-world/
Switzerland (and the UN too)
https://www.swissre.com/risk-knowledge/building-societal-resilience/this-is-how-we-can-build-back-better-post-covid-19.html
Canada
https://www.newswire.ca/news-releases/the-building-back-better-canada-plan-will-create-or-maintain-6-3-million-jobs-and-it-s-all-green-840366347.html
Pakistan
https://www.adb.org/results/building-back-better-pakistan
America
https://joebiden.com/build-back-better/#
This doesn’t seem entirely natural to me. What’s going on?
This line can mean all things to all people
No wonder politicians have latched on to it
I was listening to 5 live yesterday on a car journey, they had an author (Robert Harris) of a new book covering the history of the V2 bombing campaign during WWII. He is a bit of a war expert. He was asked how the war like conditions then related to today. As a bit of a Churchill buff he said the main thing that he saw different between now and then was that Churchill never played down dangers to the nation. In fact he would emphasise the danger at every opportunity so that everyone knew the seriousness of possible outcomes. As opposed to Boris (who wants to appear Churchillian) who promises “world beating” test and trace, then disappoints. Everything is “simple” and “easy ” to solve in Boris’ view, this disarms people who are less likely to realise that their own individual actions can make a difference to the overall “war effort” .
I agree wholeheartedly with Lord Neuberger’s assessment – a “very slippery slope”.
This, though, begs the question. What can I do about it?
I am aware that “The Only Thing Necessary for the Triumph of Evil is that Good Men Do Nothing” so feel that I should do something.
But what do I, as a concerned citizen, actually do?
Keep talking
Do Twitter
Phone in to Jeremy Vine
Or anyone else
Makle it clear that there are sane [people in the world