Coppola Comment

The fashionable concentration on democracy as the main value threatened is not without danger. It is largely responsible for the misleading and unfounded belief that so long as the ultimate source of power is the will of the majority, the power cannot be arbitrary. The false assurance which many people derive from this belief is an important cause of the general unawareness of the dangers which we face. There is no justification for the belief that so long as power is conferred by democratic procedure, it cannot be arbitrary; the contrast suggested by this statement is altogether false: it is not the source but the limitation of power which prevents it from becoming arbitrary. Democratic control may prevent power from becoming arbitrary, but it does not do so by its mere existence. If democracy resolves on a task which necessarily involves the use of power which cannot be guided by fixed rules, it must become arbitrary power.   No, this isn't Hannah Arendt. It's the final parag

Monday afternoon, 25th May 2020. A beautiful, warm day on which to watch our new overlord make his first speech to the nation. I refer, of course, to Dominic Cummings's press conference . The Daily Mirror and the Guardian had revealed that Cummings had gone to stay in a family cottage near Durham at the end of March, and that he had also been seen in Barnard Castle, about 30 miles from Durham. The country was under full lockdown at the time, with non-essential travel completely banned, so both trips appeared to break the law. Furthermore, his wife, Mary Wakefield, had published an article in the Spectator magazine towards the end of April which said that she had developed CV-19 symptoms on 27th March and he became ill with suspected CV-19 the following day. Wakefield described him as "lying doggo" for 10 days, too ill to move. Yet on 31st March, Cummings's father had confirmed to the police that his son was self-isolating in a property on his estate. So Cummings appea

I spent much of this weekend arguing on Twitter. (Yes, I know, nothing new there....) Specifically, arguing that Brexit cannot go ahead without Parliament. I said that before Article 50 is triggered, the result of the referendum must be debated by the full House of Commons, and ratified by a free vote. Unsurprisingly, since I openly supported Remain, a number of people assumed that I was suggesting this as a way of overturning the result. They are wrong. I think a Parliamentary vote is necessary not to overturn the result, but to confirm it. This referendum was in many ways a travesty . It did not require an absolute majority: even a few votes would be sufficient to end forty years of EU membership. There remains a grumbling unease that a majority of the UK population did NOT vote for Leave. and as I have noted before , the conduct of the campaign was shocking. The lies and deception on both sides were so extensive that people cannot possibly have made a fully informed decisio

My Forbes post on the threat to democracy in the EU touched a nerve. Well, several nerves, actually. Some people regarded my invocation of the Prague Spring as insulting to the people who suffered under Soviet oppression: others objected to my comparison of the benevolent EU with the evil USSR: and a few complained that I had presented the Syriza government as "martyrs", when they are nothing of the kind. And lots of Portuguese called me out for misrepresenting how their parliamentary democracy works. First, let me deal with the Portuguese. I'm not going to discuss the Portuguese semi-presidential political system, here or anywhere else. I don't claim to be an expert on the political system of my own country, let alone someone else's. In the Forbes post, I was careful not to suggest that the Portuguese President had exceeded his constitutional authority. I criticised his words, not his actions. Unfortunately it appears that my post, like others on similar

The final paragraphs of Greek prime minister Alexis Tsipras's  op-ed in Le Monde  read thus: Europe, therefore, is at a crossroads. Following the serious concessions made by the Greek government, the decision is now not in the hands of the institutions, which in any case – with the exception of the European Commission- are not elected and are not accountable to the people, but rather in the hands of Europe’s leaders. Which strategy will prevail? The one that calls for a Europe of solidarity, equality and democracy, or the one that calls for rupture and division? If some, however, think or want to believe that this decision concerns only Greece, they are making a grave mistake. I would suggest that they re-read Hemingway’s masterpiece, “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. Hemingway's book is set in the Spanish Civil War. It graphically describes the ugly fight between those he describes as "fascists" - the Nationalists, who were supported by (among others) Italy's

As dawn broke on 21st February 2012, the leaders of the European Union announced that they had agreed terms for additional financial support to Greece to enable it to meet scheduled debt repayments on 20th March. European Union officials pronounced that "the European debt crisis is ended".  Light has dawned, the sun is shining and everything is rosy. Except it isn't.  Not one commentor on the dawn deal thinks that it solves anything. As the BBC Breakfast reporter said, all it does is "buy time". Time for what? Time will solve nothing. Even with this deal and a VERY large amount of economic luck, Greece's debt is only forecast to reduce to 120% of GDP by 2020, which for a country as poor as Greece looks unsustainable. And that assumes that Greece is able to return to growth in 2013 despite the extra cuts imposed in this deal, which are almost certain to deepen recession further. And it also assumes that Greece somehow manages to maintain a primary surplu

After a tense few days, EU leadership have finally come up with a draft proposal for easing Greece's debt problems, recapitalising banks and helping other debt distressed countries to finance their debt more easily. The full text of the EU leadership's statement is here (downloadable pdf). The devil will be in the detail, of course, which is pretty sketchy at the moment. But my initial impression of the report is that it contains far too much magical thinking. External agents will apparently willingly provide money to distressed Eurocountries when the ECB won't; growth will somehow appear in highly-indebted countries despite severe spending cuts and lack of inward investment; countries with uncompetitive business sectors and large trade deficits will somehow balance their budgets. And financial conjuring tricks will create the amount of money the report says will be available. How these will work in practice remains to be seen. Media interest in this report has focused