I recently stumbled across a reference to book called Constituting Empire : New York and the Transformation of Constitutionalism in the Atlantic World, 1664-1830, by a professor at NYU, Daniel Hulsebosch. Prof. Hulsebosch gets to study for a living two of the things that have been of interest to me in the last few years — the continuities between British and American legal and political institutions, and the under-appreciated role of New York in the development of the USA.
Month: May 2006
Did these elections matter?
On a most obvious level local elections do not matter in Britain. Local councils have long ago lost many of their powers; most of their money comes from central government, which decides which council gets the most funds and practices redistribution of wealth between them; legislation is made in Westminster (or Edinburgh or Cardiff) at best but much more likely in Brussels. Recycling, so beloved by David Cameron (though not much discussed by Tories at the local level) is an EU competence as are all environmental issues, and the decisions taken locally are very limited.
So, really, who sits on the local council is of little interest or importance to the people of Britain. This is reflected in the turn-out: uniformly low. This year it was 36 per cent on average, a couple of points down from 2004, though there were anomalies, as I shall point out later.
Local elections can be used to give an unpopular government a bloody nose but this does not necessarily translate itself into a subsequent general election victory. Both William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith led the Conservative Party to superlative results in the local elections. Hague then proceeded to lose spectacularly in the general and IDS was knifed by his own party five months after his success.
Bearing all that in mind, it is fair to point out that the Labour government was given a spectacular bloody nose, just as everyone expected. They lost 319 seats and control of 18 councils. The Conservatives won 316 seats and gained control of 11 councils, some rather unexpected.
Call for Scam Hunters
A new scam is running around. A bank account is cracked, real checks are printed, sent out in large numbers, the checks are deposited by people thinking they are for payment of “taxes” for a lottery and the “tax payment” is sent via Western Union / Moneygram to the “tax agent”, in other words, the scam artist. The name, bank information, routing number, security features on the check are all entirely legitimate. This way the group gets money sent to them without ever actually having to touch the bank.
I just got the 2nd one of these in a month and it’s ticking me off. My local police are too lazy to follow up on reporting this sort of scam (the route I took in the first case) so I’m throwing this out for a bit of international justice. Is there a coalition of the willing out there willing to bust scammers?
The “agent” gives a number of 011-491-60-91-92-39-92 which seems to be Germany. If anybody could trace this to a locality and get the police to act, I will press charges.
A Gentleman
We often quote Acton’s “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power tends to corrupt absolutely.” His site uses as its epigraph another argument: “Liberty consists in the division of power. Absolutism, in concentration of power.”
But how is our awareness of such a truth likely to be revealed & implicitly acknowledged in our customs? (Or when such tendencies are reinforced, unfortunately, by other traditions and customs.) Perhaps we should accord the greatest of dignities to he who lets another keep his, even when that person risks his own pride & dignity (or perhaps we should say, apparent pride & dignity).
When General Robert E. Lee chose the task, as Fischer describes it, of “of training a new generation of southern leaders in his Stoic and Christian vision of liberty and self-mastery,” he described Washington College’s rule as simple: “We have but one rule here, and it is that every student must be a gentleman.” Lee’s definition of a “gentleman” remains the code of many and such values lie beneath the civil (generally) exchanges on this blog. Here it is:
A glorious burst of sanity
The DC Circuit Court of Appeals ruled yesterday that dying patients have a due process right to access drugs once they have been through FDA approved safety trials.
Yes, 70 years after the FDA was first imposed on us, and 40 years after its demands were intensified, a court has spelled out that people whose lives are in danger have a right to buy drugs that might save them, and others (including pharmaceutical companies) have a right to come to the aid of someone whose life is in danger without interference.
Will this bit of clear thinking and respect for people’s rights make it into Supreme Court precedent? Stay tuned…