Faced with a choice between Mohammed Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood and some stooge from the old regime, Egypt's voters installed the former, many of them holding their noses at the same time. Now it's all gone wrong. Morsi turns out not to have been a one-nation conciliator after all, imprisoning journalists, shutting newspapers and packing the committee devising a constitution with his own supporters.
But if Morsi was naive to expect Egypt's newly energised voters to bear this high-handedness for long, so too were his opponents. You can argue that Morsi's own conduct undermined his democratic credentials, but try explaining that to the hundreds of thousands of supporters who will only see that between them the army and opposition have torn down a democratically elected government. To be replaced by what? This is not the greatest start to the new Egypt, and it might have been better if the opposition had instead just gritted its teeth and waited for the next election.
One of the arguments used to oppose the 2003 invasion of Iraq was that the Iraqis had no democratic tradition and would be unable to cope with the forbearance democracy requires of its citizens. It looks in Egypt as if that argument might be vindicated; as if people who might have been expected not to know any better in theory, actually didn't know better in practice.
Speaking of naivety, the European Court of Human Rights has outraged a section of cross-party opinion (including David Blunkett, the Blairite former Home Secretary) by striking down the UK's life-means-life prison sentence as "inhuman and degrading". A bevy of mass murderers took HMG to Brussels to argue successfully for a system of review after twenty five years.
To be clear, a review system strikes me as the better option, but the ECHR's decision vividly shows up everything that's wrong with the EU. It's a decision made by unelected judges which strikes down a law made by the British Parliament, elected by you and me. Parliament has democratic legitimacy. The ECHR has almost none.
A close family member, who still practises law, sighed that at least the judges could have had an eye for the political sensitivities; instead their decision is a disaster for Euro-enthusiasts and manna from heaven for UKIP; and this at a time when it looks as if we will get an in-out referendum in the next couple of years. But, she said, at least it shows the judges aren't interested in the political consequences of their decision.
Perhaps. But to me that lack of interest essentially means lack of accountability. We didn't elect the ECHR; nor did we elect the people who put them in place; none of which would matter if they hadn't struck down a law passed by our Government. And if you don't like the Government, reflect that it's not the Government they're striking at, but its electorate. Us in other words.
Ah, says my close family member, but the ECHR is just doing what UK Courts do all the time with the common law. To explain, Britain's highest courts have long done a certain amount of legal interpretation, which essentially involves making law. Rules on the degree of intent required for murder for example, or for the warning a judge must give a jury where the prosecution relies solely on identification evidence, were for years known to lawyers by the names of the cases in which the judges made the rules (Caldwell and Turnbull respectively). Whole branches of law, from judicial review to medical negligence were essentially made up by the courts.
But there is the world of a difference between interpreting statutes passed by Parliament, which is what our courts do, and striking those statutes down, which is what the ECHR has done. If Parliament doesn't like the law-making decisions of our courts it is at liberty to pass statutes overriding them. Or rather it was. This ruling shows that even that is no longer true.
The fact that the ECHR is almost entirely staffed by non-British judges is not the most important point, but it doesn't make the process any more attractive either.
No-one who values democracy can relish the prospect of a small unelected group of people telling the British electorate, via the medium of its Government, what it can and can't do. Somewhere in a saloon bar near you, Nigel Farage must be laughing his head off.
