I yield to no-one in my love for Star Wars. As I've written here before, I saw the original films when they came out in the 70s, and was young enough to be overwhelmed by them, although old enough to recognise that the moral, personal and political world they portrayed was fundamentally tosh.
I made my wife, my eldest and a friend come out and watch Rogue One with me yesterday, because it was my birthday. This is what I thought.
1. It was an enjoyable way to spend two and quarter hours. The film looks great, although once SPOILER ALERT you know that the fleeting cameos of Peter Cushing and the young Princess Leia are merely CGI mock-ups, you can tell. Interesting that the human face should prove so hard to fake.
2. Rogue One is, as Mark Kermode keeps telling us, dark; which is all very well, except part of the attraction of the original three films was that the darkness (particularly in The Empire Strikes Back, easily the best of them) was nicely mixed with humour, a variety of tone which is very, very difficult to accomplish without the one undermining the other. No such luck here. The new 'droid, whose name escapes me, was often funny, but the other characters were wooden dullards by comparison.
3. The original characters were interesting and memorable. Any one of Han Solo, Leia, Vader, C3PO, the other 'droid, Obi or Yoda has more interest than the whole of Rogue One's cast put together. The new baddie, played by Aussie actor Ben Mendelsohn, looks like a middle-manager at Debenhams who has just been told the company golf day has been cancelled, again. I didn't care SPOILER ALERT that the cast were overwhelmed by the Death Star at the end, because they failed to come alive in the first place.
4. The plausibility issue. The blind martial arts bloke who thinks the Force will protect him, and then finds out that it won't could have made tragic viewing, but Rogue One just made it look the idea of the blind ninja ridiculous. The hero of David Carradine's Kung Fu series in the 70s looked daft enough fighting men with guns, and he could actually see. Why do the Death Star operators don hats which look to this (retired) cricketer as they have put their heads inside a bowling machine? We don't know, and the film doesn't tell us.
5. My son points out that the Empire in the Star Wars franchise is perhaps the only one in (cultural) history to have no ideology. It's almost as if the Empire is so bad that its sole purpose lies in being bad, just for its own sake. And then there was the lazy set design - Darth Vader lives in a ghastly evil genius tower set at the heart of an Icelandic CGI lava flow. Why? Did he go to some architect and say, "I'd like an evil genius tower please"? It's almost as if the film makers had got together and said, "How could we find somewhere for Darth Vader to live which will look like every villain's retreat ever since cinema began?" As for the transmission tower from which, at the denouement, our heroine - the heroically dull Felicity Jones - must send the Death Star plans to the Rebel mothership, how curious and unimaginative that the clunking controls should be on the outside of the tower, exposed to the elements and in plain view of passing Empire vessels. Yes, expecting Star Wars to be realistic is naive. But what we expect from fantasy adventure is not realism: it is internal consistency. If the world is to be like that, we want it to make sense on its own terms. This is something Mervyn Peake does so well in Gormenghast, and, for that matter, George RR Martin in Game of Thrones.
6. The music. John Williams has taken a back seat, and the reins have been taken by Michael Giacchino, who first came to my attention with The Incredibles. Giacchino does a decent job, but he is not Williams, and the few occasions when he uses the master's tunes only remind one how operatic and varied were the original scores. I listened to Luke and Leia today from The Empire. Now that is quality.
7. That so half-hearted, ill thought through and badly written a film (the Council scene is beyond lame) could have been given a reasonable reception goes to show that film critics my age who were brought up on the originals are almost willing the new films to be as good as the first three. I think the truth is that the first three mixed adventure, humour, great characters, peerless scores, a new world of special effects and a sort of camp approach to cliche which induced a suspension of disbelief in a young audience which is now well on into middle age.
So on the whole B or B minus. But I'll still be going to see the next one. My birthday or not.
Wednesday 21 December 2016
Wednesday 7 December 2016
Brexit reflections #16 - Judicial activism, Article 50 and the irony of Miller
That amiable denizen of Pinner, Danny Finkelstein, has written an article in the Times this morning which lays bare the bitter irony of the Supreme Court's handling of the Article 50 case. He writes, "Courts have to interpret the law, and the point of law the Supreme Court is interpreting is . . . whether the power of governments to agree treaties extends to their power over Article 50".
In a way Finkelstein's clumsy syntax makes the problem clear. The Court is not "interpreting . . . whether". It is deciding whether.
Let me explain.
No one knows what the legal position is regarding Article 50 and the Royal Prerogative. If anyone did, the case would never have come to Court. If, for example, triggering Art 50 without a vote was manifestly unlawful, the Government's advisers would have said, "Look chaps. Don't waste public money. You're going to lose". But actually both sides' advisers will have said, "You've a chance of winning because you've got an arguable case. But we really don't know because these circumstances have never arisen before."
So the law is not clear. The Court will clarify it. But consider what that process involves. It involves picking from various options. There may be only two (Options A and B, say), but it's much more realistic to say that there will be half a dozen.
In picking one option rather than all the others the Court is making a decision. It is deciding what the law is. Not interpreting.
So we have the bitter irony that a case brought to prevent the Government triggering Art 50 without democratic scrutiny by Parliament will be decided instead by the judicial activism of the Supreme Court.
Thus a Government elected by the people on a manifesto pledge to hold an In-Out referendum and to implement the outcome if Leave won, buttressed by the votes of nearly 18 million citizens, will be stymied and obstructed by eleven unelected judges.
What particularly grates about the prospect of a victory by Ms Miller and her City chums is that a case designed to prevent law-making by the executive - never mind its double mandate from the electorate - will have been decided instead by the law-making of a tiny group of people with no mandate at all. At any time. Ever.
Of course the fact that the judges are from the exact demographic which opposed Brexit so passionately and sneered at the mugs from the provinces who, you know, didn't think the EU worked so well for them, just makes it worse.
If the Court upholds the earlier decision - which I think it will, albeit for different and more carefully argued reasons, perhaps with a couple of dissenting voices - it will do so in terms which do their best to disguise its legal activism. It will say that this is what the law has always been, and that they have merely interpreted it afresh.
The pro-Remain press - of which Danny Finkelstein is a reasonable and articulate exemplar - will ignore the Court's activism (at best, or fail to notice it at worst), and dismiss the resulting surge of pro-Brexit anger as the inchoate howl of the ignorant and uneducated.
I've referred before on here to the historian Tom Holland's identification of this clash as one between democracy and the law. I think that's a fair characterisation on the whole. But a finding for Ms Miller will be to prefer one sort of decision making (the undemocratic one of the Court) to one backed up by an election-winning manifesto pledge and referendum result.
That is not a clash between democracy and the law. It is a clash between democracy and anti-democracy, in which democracy is the loser.
In a way Finkelstein's clumsy syntax makes the problem clear. The Court is not "interpreting . . . whether". It is deciding whether.
Let me explain.
No one knows what the legal position is regarding Article 50 and the Royal Prerogative. If anyone did, the case would never have come to Court. If, for example, triggering Art 50 without a vote was manifestly unlawful, the Government's advisers would have said, "Look chaps. Don't waste public money. You're going to lose". But actually both sides' advisers will have said, "You've a chance of winning because you've got an arguable case. But we really don't know because these circumstances have never arisen before."
So the law is not clear. The Court will clarify it. But consider what that process involves. It involves picking from various options. There may be only two (Options A and B, say), but it's much more realistic to say that there will be half a dozen.
In picking one option rather than all the others the Court is making a decision. It is deciding what the law is. Not interpreting.
So we have the bitter irony that a case brought to prevent the Government triggering Art 50 without democratic scrutiny by Parliament will be decided instead by the judicial activism of the Supreme Court.
Thus a Government elected by the people on a manifesto pledge to hold an In-Out referendum and to implement the outcome if Leave won, buttressed by the votes of nearly 18 million citizens, will be stymied and obstructed by eleven unelected judges.
What particularly grates about the prospect of a victory by Ms Miller and her City chums is that a case designed to prevent law-making by the executive - never mind its double mandate from the electorate - will have been decided instead by the law-making of a tiny group of people with no mandate at all. At any time. Ever.
Of course the fact that the judges are from the exact demographic which opposed Brexit so passionately and sneered at the mugs from the provinces who, you know, didn't think the EU worked so well for them, just makes it worse.
If the Court upholds the earlier decision - which I think it will, albeit for different and more carefully argued reasons, perhaps with a couple of dissenting voices - it will do so in terms which do their best to disguise its legal activism. It will say that this is what the law has always been, and that they have merely interpreted it afresh.
The pro-Remain press - of which Danny Finkelstein is a reasonable and articulate exemplar - will ignore the Court's activism (at best, or fail to notice it at worst), and dismiss the resulting surge of pro-Brexit anger as the inchoate howl of the ignorant and uneducated.
I've referred before on here to the historian Tom Holland's identification of this clash as one between democracy and the law. I think that's a fair characterisation on the whole. But a finding for Ms Miller will be to prefer one sort of decision making (the undemocratic one of the Court) to one backed up by an election-winning manifesto pledge and referendum result.
That is not a clash between democracy and the law. It is a clash between democracy and anti-democracy, in which democracy is the loser.
Friday 2 December 2016
Brexit reflections #15 - the myth of judicial independence
Following the High Court's Article 50 hearing there's been a lot of rubbish written recently about judicial impartiality. Judges are independent, goes the cry (you can tell that a lot of the writers, even the ones on the Left, would really like to carry on with a few choice extracts from Henry V).
But if you think about it for a moment, judicial independence is a myth.
It's true that, once they get into office, judges are free to apply the law as they see fit, always subject to the humiliation of being overturned on appeal. However there's the vexed question of how they get to be judges in the first place, and moreover what qualities they bring with them to the post.
In the old days becoming a judge was, like the process of becoming Queen's Counsel, a matter of a tap on the shoulder. Is old Scroggins a sound chap? Very much so. Not bad for a Wykehamist. Sign him up then, pronto. That all changed in the Blair years. Exhaustive application forms were to be filled in. Applicants were invited to state the steps they had taken to promote diversity (one QC applicant failed on this part of the test; surprising, since he was married to a black woman, a fact he didn't dare mention). Interview panels were set up. A small cottage industry (in which I once made a fleeting appearance) grew up to assist applicants, one which was so successful that some forms now require hopefuls to state whether they have used its services.
The effect of this process has been to accelerate what was in any event a tendency. The old Sir Bufton Tufton judges one still occasionally came across in my sojourn in the profession have been gradually replaced by the impeccably liberal types who toked on the occasional spliff at Oxford in the 60s or pogo'd to the Clash in the 70s. These men and women are in the 50s and 60s, and I know a good many of them. They are civilised, interesting, intelligent and, almost invariably, Left of centre and pro-EU.
In a way it's true that they are independent; but they are not independent of themselves. They come into judicial office as fully formed mature individuals, with views of the world and of British society they take with them into office. The only one I can think of who is not of the liberal Left claims to shoot rabbits through his bathroom window whilst at stool (notwithstanding the grotesqueries, this is a picture I would quite like to see).
And so do these people put their weltanschauung to one side whilst on the bench? They may honourably try. But, as I've written elsewhere, judges so often, consciously or otherwise, look for the meritorious party and then search for the legally defensible way of finding for them. They do not merely examine the law. Legal history is full of the antics of these judicial contortionists, and their hapless thrashing around has given rise to the old cliche, "hard cases make bad law".
The thorough trashing the High Court got for their handling of the Art 50 case (even from pro-Remain legal academics) suggests either that such motivations may have been at work or alternatively that the judges in the Miller case were simply way out of their depth.
Expect a more sophisticated version of the same in the Supreme Court. Judicial independence is a load of tosh.
But if you think about it for a moment, judicial independence is a myth.
It's true that, once they get into office, judges are free to apply the law as they see fit, always subject to the humiliation of being overturned on appeal. However there's the vexed question of how they get to be judges in the first place, and moreover what qualities they bring with them to the post.
In the old days becoming a judge was, like the process of becoming Queen's Counsel, a matter of a tap on the shoulder. Is old Scroggins a sound chap? Very much so. Not bad for a Wykehamist. Sign him up then, pronto. That all changed in the Blair years. Exhaustive application forms were to be filled in. Applicants were invited to state the steps they had taken to promote diversity (one QC applicant failed on this part of the test; surprising, since he was married to a black woman, a fact he didn't dare mention). Interview panels were set up. A small cottage industry (in which I once made a fleeting appearance) grew up to assist applicants, one which was so successful that some forms now require hopefuls to state whether they have used its services.
The effect of this process has been to accelerate what was in any event a tendency. The old Sir Bufton Tufton judges one still occasionally came across in my sojourn in the profession have been gradually replaced by the impeccably liberal types who toked on the occasional spliff at Oxford in the 60s or pogo'd to the Clash in the 70s. These men and women are in the 50s and 60s, and I know a good many of them. They are civilised, interesting, intelligent and, almost invariably, Left of centre and pro-EU.
In a way it's true that they are independent; but they are not independent of themselves. They come into judicial office as fully formed mature individuals, with views of the world and of British society they take with them into office. The only one I can think of who is not of the liberal Left claims to shoot rabbits through his bathroom window whilst at stool (notwithstanding the grotesqueries, this is a picture I would quite like to see).
And so do these people put their weltanschauung to one side whilst on the bench? They may honourably try. But, as I've written elsewhere, judges so often, consciously or otherwise, look for the meritorious party and then search for the legally defensible way of finding for them. They do not merely examine the law. Legal history is full of the antics of these judicial contortionists, and their hapless thrashing around has given rise to the old cliche, "hard cases make bad law".
The thorough trashing the High Court got for their handling of the Art 50 case (even from pro-Remain legal academics) suggests either that such motivations may have been at work or alternatively that the judges in the Miller case were simply way out of their depth.
Expect a more sophisticated version of the same in the Supreme Court. Judicial independence is a load of tosh.
An end to austerity?
I'm not the only person to think that last week's Autumn Statement marks a shift in economic outlook by the Government. This may seem arcane, but it says a lot about where Britain is as a nation.
You'll recall that in the dim and distant past of his Chancellorship, George Osborne had plans to bring down the deficit to zero by the end of this Parliament. His successor, Philip Hammond, has abandoned these plans. There will be a number of reasons for this. The first might well be the economic uncertainty of approaching Brexit - the last thing the UK needs is an avoidable recession caused by a further squeeze on HMG spending.
It's the other reasons which are interesting though.
One is that the Government thinks that it can stand to borrow a bit more in an era of historically low rates. This is what Labour has been saying for years (although they have also, incoherently, been criticising the Tories for borrowing too much). Another is that a significant part of Osborne's plan for getting borrowing down lay in bearing down on tax credits, the in-work benefits introduced by Gordon Brown. Many Tory MPs, fearful at the reaction of their constituents, refused point blank to countenance this and the plan was quietly dropped.
I can't think of a better example of the ratchet effect of public spending - giving benefits to people is very easy; taking them away is very difficult.
What will the effect be of Hammond's purse-string slackening? The obvious one is that as the deficit remains stubbornly high our stock of debt goes up still further. Hammond's spending is calculated to take Britain's stock of debt to 90% of GDP, the point at which, according to some research, interest repayments start to impede an economy's ability to grow. Interest rates on bonds are low now, but in the future borrowing will have to be rolled over, at rates which are unknown but could scarcely be lower than at present. Every extra £ borrowed is a gamble on future interest rates.
The proposition that a state cannot go on living beyond its means forever is susceptible to the observation that provided GDP (or more accurately tax revenue) continues to grow more quickly than accumulated debt it is likely that markets will continue to lend at affordable rates. The trouble with this calculation in the case of the UK is the reverse is happening. Public debt is rising faster than tax revenues. In other words, we are spending an ever increasing amount of our national income on interest payments.
So the situation is that with a narrow but serviceable Tory majority in the Commons, the opposition in disarrary, there are insufficient fiscal conservatives at Westminster to grasp the nettle. We are back in the land of Please-Lord-make-me-solvent-but-not-yet. To a return to a point made many times on this blog, we cannot afford to pay for our public services. We appear to be intent on continuing to live unaffordably forever, the pain of living within our means being too great for it to be contemplated.
This state of affairs will continue until the pain of living beyond our means is even greater. I shudder to think about what our country will be like at that point.
You'll recall that in the dim and distant past of his Chancellorship, George Osborne had plans to bring down the deficit to zero by the end of this Parliament. His successor, Philip Hammond, has abandoned these plans. There will be a number of reasons for this. The first might well be the economic uncertainty of approaching Brexit - the last thing the UK needs is an avoidable recession caused by a further squeeze on HMG spending.
It's the other reasons which are interesting though.
One is that the Government thinks that it can stand to borrow a bit more in an era of historically low rates. This is what Labour has been saying for years (although they have also, incoherently, been criticising the Tories for borrowing too much). Another is that a significant part of Osborne's plan for getting borrowing down lay in bearing down on tax credits, the in-work benefits introduced by Gordon Brown. Many Tory MPs, fearful at the reaction of their constituents, refused point blank to countenance this and the plan was quietly dropped.
I can't think of a better example of the ratchet effect of public spending - giving benefits to people is very easy; taking them away is very difficult.
What will the effect be of Hammond's purse-string slackening? The obvious one is that as the deficit remains stubbornly high our stock of debt goes up still further. Hammond's spending is calculated to take Britain's stock of debt to 90% of GDP, the point at which, according to some research, interest repayments start to impede an economy's ability to grow. Interest rates on bonds are low now, but in the future borrowing will have to be rolled over, at rates which are unknown but could scarcely be lower than at present. Every extra £ borrowed is a gamble on future interest rates.
The proposition that a state cannot go on living beyond its means forever is susceptible to the observation that provided GDP (or more accurately tax revenue) continues to grow more quickly than accumulated debt it is likely that markets will continue to lend at affordable rates. The trouble with this calculation in the case of the UK is the reverse is happening. Public debt is rising faster than tax revenues. In other words, we are spending an ever increasing amount of our national income on interest payments.
So the situation is that with a narrow but serviceable Tory majority in the Commons, the opposition in disarrary, there are insufficient fiscal conservatives at Westminster to grasp the nettle. We are back in the land of Please-Lord-make-me-solvent-but-not-yet. To a return to a point made many times on this blog, we cannot afford to pay for our public services. We appear to be intent on continuing to live unaffordably forever, the pain of living within our means being too great for it to be contemplated.
This state of affairs will continue until the pain of living beyond our means is even greater. I shudder to think about what our country will be like at that point.
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