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Nancy Hollander is an internationally recognized criminal defense lawyer from the Albuquerque, New Mexico, firm of Freedman Boyd Hollander Goldberg Urias & Ward PA, and an Associate Tenant with Doughty Street Chambers, London, UK. The inspiring story of her efforts in freeing Mohamedou Ould Slahi from Guantanamo Bay, where he was held from 2002 to 2016 without charge, were recently captured by the legal drama film The Mauritanian , in which she was played by Jodie Foster. CJLPA : Welcome today, Nancy. I’d like to begin by thanking you again for taking the time to come and interview with The Cambridge Journal of Law, Politics, and Art , to discuss your career as a human rights criminal law defence lawyer. Throughout your career, you’ve been involved in the most high profile of cases, representing clients in a wide range of criminal cases, involving white collar crime, drug trafficking, murder, and terrorism. Equally, you are a highly respected and renowned lawyer in international human rights law, having represented clients before the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Inevitably, there are many legal topics to discuss based on your work, but in the interests of time I thought that in today’s interview we could focus specifically on your work in defending terrorism, and in particular the implications protecting human rights, or really the lack thereof in such cases. Based on that, I’d like to begun by asking you why you think it is that when dealing with the crime of terrorism it is treated so fundamentally different in a court of law compared to other barbaric crimes such as murder, rape, or kidnapping. Nancy Hollander : The fundamental difference between terrorism and other crimes, and why I don’t think we should have the crime of terrorism, is that it always looks at a community, either a racial community, an ethnic community, or some other community. It’s not a crime involving one person, so even if one person is charged with terrorism, it tends to include the whole community. That to me is the difference. It is a crime on top of another crime; It’s vague and it’s unnecessary. There has never been an international definition of terrorism and I doubt that there ever will be because no one can agree on exactly what it is. CJLPA : That’s interesting. Do you think you have this perspective in retrospect after working on terrorism cases or is that a thought that you had before taking on the cases? NH : Before I took on the cases I did not really think about it to tell you the truth. I was asked to talk about the history of the crime of terrorism at some seminar I was at in the Hague, and I looked into it and realised that my thoughts are not new on this. People have been saying for many years that we should have never had the crime of terrorism and I started looking into it more and I realised…You know you’ve heard people say one man’s terrorist is one man’s freedom fighter. Well, there is truth to that! And if you look at history, who is a terrorist and who is not? The founder of the US, George Washington, was considered a terrorist. Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist. Jerry Adams, Yasser Arafat, I mean how many more do we need who were considered terrorists at one time but at the same time became heroes. So if you just charge people with what they’re accused of you don’t get into that issue. CJLPA : I’d like to get more specific in some of the cases that you have worked on, beginning with the Holy Land case. In this case you defended Shukri Abu Baker, who was charged with terrorism alongside other co-defendants. Could you briefly walk me through the main ways where justice and the rule of law were denied in this case? NH : There was no justice in that case. It’s the worst case of my entire legal career as far as I am concerned. Shukri and one of his co-defendants, Ghassan Elashi, are each doing 65 years in jail for the crime of feeding children. That is essentially what they were doing. The Holy Land case…I can send you an article I wrote, if I haven’t already sent it to you; which really outlines the whole history. It was a talk that I gave, that I made into an article. But they’re a case where they are charged with material support for terrorism. There was never any accusation that Shukri and any of his co-defendants committed any what we would call even ‘terrorist acts’. They didn’t blow up anything. They didn’t bomb anything. They were not accused of making antisemitic remarks, even. They were just accused of providing charity to people in Palestine and other countries and according to the government, by providing that charity they were somehow assisting Hamas. It was vague, there was never any allegation of them being related to Hamas. It was simply that they were changing the hearts and minds of the people, by the people they were feeding. It’s a tragic case and it’s an example of how they were accused of something that other people did. So during these trials, I can’t tell you how many times it showed the same bus being blown up. The same American flag being trampled on. But they were never accused of doing those things and during the trial it was clear that they didn’t do those things. Other people did those things. And that’s an example of how terrorism has become so broad that under an American case, humanitarian law, I can’t even assist some organization or individual who’s been designated as a terrorist on how to change that, how to come into the democratic process. By assisting them, I’m committing acts of material support. It’s a terrible case and other things happened in that case. It’s the first case in American history, US history, where an expert was allowed to testify in secret. Basically, we were not allowed to know his real name, we were not allowed to know who he was, we were told we couldn’t research him and yet he was supposedly an expert on Hamas. And that meant that there was no right to real cross examination and certainly no right to confrontation, which is something that is required in the US Constitution. The Sixth Amendment says everyone has the right to confrontation. Well, you can’t confront someone if you are not allowed to know anything about them. CJLPA : Based on what you have just mentioned about not being able to cross-examine the expert and also the video of the bus being blown up but there being no actual linkage to the defendants, how and why was that even admissible and what would you do in those situations when it is quite clearly against the law, but the judges are enabling it. Is there any way around it? NH : You can only do what you can do. You can try to convince the jury that the government is wrong; which we did in the first place. We got a mistrial. But then the government came back with four, maybe five, different pieces of evidence that were clearly more prejudicial than probative. That the appellant court said should not have been admitted, but then said it was a harmless error, which probably was a political decision on the part of the court. How do you confront that? I don’t know. You know, we will never give up on this case, we’ve gone everywhere we can with the courts but we can just hope for a miracle, clemency or something that happens, where they get out eventually. CJLPA : Further to how you said that this case seemed to be more political, does this experience make you feel that some legal decisions are pre-determined when the government gets involved, despite lawyers’ best efforts? And do you think there the rule of law can still prevail in such circumstances? NH : I don’t think the cases are necessarily predetermined, but throughout the process, the decisions that prosecutors make, judges make, are weighed against the defendants, certain defendants. Certainly Muslims in the US now, black people as far as we can remember, Native Americans. The US has never been a democracy for all the people. It’s a misnomer. People believe that at one point it was a great country and we have to get back there. Well, when was that? When was the rule of law applied to everyone? Native Americans were slaughtered, genocide. We started with slaves. It’s very hard to accept that the rule of law really exists for everyone in the United States. It’s true in other countries too. What we want to do and what we have to keep doing as defence lawyers is keep pushing, so that the rule of law does apply to everyone. And so in the case of the US, the US legal system does become a justice system, which it isn’t now. It’s not a US justice system, it’s a US legal system that provides justice sometimes and sometimes doesn’t. CJLPA : Based on that, how does a lawyer operate in a justice system where they cannot always trust it, because as you said the rule of law is not always going to be applicable to everyone? You take on a case and the case process that is occurring in the courts is going to be prejudiced. Decisions are going to be made that aren’t necessarily reflective of the justice system that the US is meant to embody. How does a lawyer take on that case knowing that that’s what’s going to happen? NH : There is always a point because there is always the possibility of a miracle, and I don’t mean miracle in a spiritual sense or religious sense. I mean that there are people within the legal system on both sides who are good people and want to do the right thing. I represented a woman for many years in New York and the way I got her out of prison was through the help of the prosecutor. Mohamedou Ould Slahi is a good example of the assistance of the prosecutor. There are people on both sides in the criminal legal system who do want to see justice prevail and there are judges who want to see justice prevail. And when you don’t have those, you just have to keep fighting, and when you do have those you fight together to do everything you can to provide for the rule of law, and that’s what we have to do. You know, fortunately, in the US system, everyone is entitled to a lawyer. Everyone is entitled to have at least one person stand with them and fight against the power of the government. And that person can make a difference. It happens, it doesn’t always happen. Doesn’t happen enough, but we have to keep pushing so it will happen more and more, in the international system as well. CJLPA : Transitioning to a different high-profile case that you worked on, Mohamedou Slahi. After the 9/11 attacks, the Bush administration promised to find the terrorists responsible, no matter what the costs. Mr Slahi was arrested and was ultimately transferred to Guantanamo Bay Detention camp in 2002 and you got involved in 2005, I believe, to defend him. What prompted you or what intrigued you to take on this case specifically? NH : I wanted to do a Guantanamo case and I wasn’t really looking for one specifically. But this one fell into my lap when a lawyer in France, whom I knew, wrote and said he been requested by a lawyer in Mauritania to look into this case and was I interested. And I said yes. I knew virtually nothing about Mohamedou when I started. I knew what he was accused of and that was it. But this was the one that came to me, so this is the one I took. CJLPA : What would you say, when you began this case, were the key elements in your case strategy to prove his innocence? NH : You’ve got to remember he was never arrested, he was captured. There was no legal process happening here. There was no legitimate US court happening here. He was captured in Mauritania. He was taken to Jordan, where he was tortured for seven or eight months. Then rendered to Jordan, rendered to Afghanistan, rendered to Guantanamo, tortured in Guantanamo, interrogated in Guantanamo, and ultimately the court said that he and others could file petitions for writs of Habeas Corpus. But the government’s position was, well they can file them but we are never going to answer them. And it wasn’t until 2008 that the Supreme Court ruled in the Boumediene case that the government actually had to answer these petitions. And then we at least had a legal forum in which to conduct the case. But there was never a real one; other than the Habeas case, which we won in 2009, there was no legal process happening here. CJLPA : As you said, it was based on the Habeas Corpus, that you were able to take on this case and essentially go to court because the US actually never charged Mr Slahi for the crimes that they alleged. Do you believe that, based on that, it was irrespective or irrelevant whether or not, particularly Mr Slahi but also other detainees in Guantanamo Bay, do you think it was irrelevant in such circumstances when such due process was denied? NH : Yes, it became irrelevant and it’s still irrelevant. There are still thirty or thirty-one of them in there. Seventeen of whom I believe are already cleared for release and all but five, six, seven, eight maybe have never been charged with any crime. They have been there since 2002. That’s not a legal process. That is not the rule of law being carried out. If some American/US citizen is in a foreign country and being held for 20 years without being charged, the US government would go crazy. And yet that’s what it is doing and has been doing and people have been tortured. We were able to get a number of those people out and people were tried. One person has been tried, convicted, his case reversed. Another one pleaded guilty, his case was reversed. I have another one there who is facing the death penalty and there are 9/11 guys that are there and are a couple of others who are facing charges in this military commission. But the military commission is not like any court that is structured under US law; it’s under the Uniform Code of Military Justice for Soldiers. It’s not under the federal rules for the US. It’s a made-up court, and due process doesn’t apply. How do you have the rule of law when due process doesn’t apply? CJLPA : Why do you think, after everything is exposed in Guantanamo Bay, that this prison system still exists and how does the US government get away from that? NH : The US is the bully of the world. The US has troops on over 150 of the 200 odd countries on this planet, on the ground. So the US gets away with whatever it wants, basically. And that’s how it has gotten away with this. The US stands up and talks about the human rights violations in China, the torture of the Russians, Cuba, and yet the US is as guilty or more guilty than any of these other countries but it just can get away with it because of its power. Of its economic power, of its strategic power, and that’s how it gets away with it. Empires rule. That’s been the history of the world. CJLPA : So in terms of the next steps for Guantanamo Bay and supposedly shutting it down. Do you think it means more lawyers needing to get involved in these cases and trying them or is it more starting at the root of the problem and trying to work with the politicians and putting more pressure on them? Where would you see the ultimate change factor? NH : Everyone in Guantanamo who wants a lawyer now has one and has had one for many years. And these lawyers keep fighting and that’s how we end up with one or two getting out once in a while. President Biden promised to close Guantanamo, President Obama promised to close Guantanamo. Neither one took decisive action. President Obama is responsible for Mohamedou spending another seven years in prison, because we won this case, A lot of people were winning the Habeas at that time and all the government had to do under Obama, Obama’s Justice Department, Obama’s Attorney General was just not appeal. They go home. They wouldn’t have to worry about what country they go to or where they go. They would get out, And yet most of them were appealed and so Mohamedou sat there for another seven years. And even after he won the second thing which was not a court, the Periodic Review Board, which was six intelligence agencies that found unanimously that he was not a significant threat to the US or its allies, it took several more months to get him out. And then he did not get a passport for three years because the US, as it did with all the countries, told Mauritania they couldn’t give him a passport. So, the US just has its claws everywhere and all you can do is keep fighting and that’s what we continue to do. I fight for my other client, Ibrahim Al Nasiri, in the international court and the Commission lawyers fight for him in his criminal case. The other lawyers who represent the defendants in the criminal cases or in the Habeas cases continue to fight for them. We continue to try to find places that will take them under these strict US rules. And you know there were a number of, and still are, Yemenis in Guantanamo. And they at one point were beginning to go home. And then a Nigerian guy tried to light his underwear on fire in an airplane over Detroit. And he had been recruited and got the equipment that he had from a Yemeni guy. So President Obama said, no more Yemenis go home. Well, that’s collective punishment. And that’s what happened and they got stuck there. And now there is almost no Yemen for them to go home to. They have to go to other places. CJLPA : Despite the disappointing outcome with Mr Slahi and how the Obama administration appealed it, how do you remain motivated in those circumstances? What did you learn from that case and defending Mr Slahi that you can now apply in these current cases where you are continuing the same fight, where you are working for a system that does not always respect the due process and the justice system? NH : I learned a long time ago, in the law, that you just keep going and hope for a miracle, as I told you. With the woman I represented, Precious Paddel, all of a sudden we had a different judge and the prosecutor said now we have a chance and we did. In Mohamedou’s case, all of a sudden he was called up to the Periodic Review Board, one of the last ones called up. After years of thinking what we going to do, we’ve run out of things to do. Something appeared. That’s always possible. So you just keep going, and that’s what I tell lawyers, you just keep going. You keep thinking of new things, thinking of something else. What else can we do? How can we do something that brings this to people’s attention? In Mohamedou’s case, I believe his book, Guantanamo Diary , helped get him out. And the film, The Mauritanian , we now hope will help others get out because it gets the conversation back. People are speaking about it, thinking about it, talking about it. In all criminal cases, which is what I have been involved with, internationally or domestically. You just do everything you know to do, you investigate every corner. You do everything you have the time, energy, finances to do, so that you don’t miss anything. And it won’t work all the time. It won’t work a lot of the time, but it will work sometimes and you’ve got to keep pressing for it. You know, we recently celebrated the anniversary of a case called Gideon v Wainwright. Gideon was a guy in Florida who wrote a handwritten letter to the Supreme Court of the US and said ‘I didn’t have a lawyer’ and as a result of that case, everyone who is charged with a felony in the United States is entitled to a lawyer. Anyone who is going to go to jail, even for a misdemeanour is entitled to a lawyer. But that wasn’t the case before. Before Brown v Board of Education said separate is not equal and said there shouldn’t be segregation in the US schools; there was segregation. So people have to fight that fight. People still have to fight to make sure that a lawyer means a breathing lawyer, an awake lawyer, a not drunk lawyer. So those cases keep happening. But you just keep building on them and fighting for due process in the rule of law and that’s what lawyers do. That’s what we do. It is hard and it is depressing sometimes, often, and its dispiriting but you just keep doing it. CJLPA : Is there a way to also increase accountability of the US government? So to, say, sue certain officials in such circumstances? NH : Yes, there is a way to increase accountability through lawsuits and civil cases against police departments and against police, but those cases are also very difficult. I don’t do them but those are cases where things do change. Police departments have been forced to change through pressure. Pressure on politicians. Getting a politician who is on your side, to focus on those. Electing different people can make a difference. And in the case of Mr Al Nasiri the accountability that he wants, for people to know what happened to him because he was tortured in the CIA black sites. We had to go to the International Courts. And we have had a success. We won two hundred thousand euros for his family, through the European Court of Human Rights. We have a case in front of the International Criminal Court, a case in the UK, a case in front of the UN working committee on arbitrated detention and that will never get him out, but it will get accountability, where other organisations, people, politicians in other countries will see what happened to him. The US is never going to answer to any of those courts. Recently we heard that there was an arrest warrant against Putin from the ICC and I was reading quite a bit about it. And I noticed, they didn’t say ‘well, Russia doesn’t acknowledge this court’. Well, they also didn’t say that the US doesn’t acknowledge this court either… CJLPA : Why do you think it is that the US would never sign to these courts and these Treaties? NH : Because the US is afraid that that will bring out things that happened which the CIA did. That the US will find itself getting arrest warrants for individuals in the US who have committed war crimes. In fact, there is a law in the US that is euphemistically called the Hague Invasion Act and it is a law in the US that says if any American is locked up in the Hague as result of an ICC arrest warrant, US soldiers can go in and get them out. The US worked very hard to get the Rome Statute passed and then said ‘not for us, doesn’t apply to us’. CJLPA : On that point then, what do you think are the implications of the way the US currently operate in outside the international law by committing torture. Could this impact Americans that are currently wrongly detained in other countries such as Iran, where there is also torture? NH : Of course it can apply to other Americans and it has. We’ve seen other countries say ‘the US does this, so we can do it’. There have been numerous amicus briefs written by former admirals, former generals, saying this is dangerous for Americans in other countries. And of course it is because if the US can do it, why can’t others do it to Americans? And yet that argument doesn’t seem to ever get anywhere because the US is the world police and there is a lot of arrogance that goes with that. CJLPA : I’d like to also talk a bit about a common theme that comes up in criminal law, amongst lawyers about innocent versus guilty and I think this is a question that often comes up from, I suppose, academics and people when they ask a criminal lawyer, defense lawyer ‘what if you know your client is guilty?’. How do you, from your perspective as a criminal defense lawyer, explain this, even in the context of defending the most barbaric crimes? NH : It is not my job to decide who is guilty and who is not guilty. It’s never my job to prove someone is innocent. The concept is, is the person guilty or not guilty and it’s up to the government in the US to prove that beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the standard in most places: proof beyond a reasonable doubt, but that’s the government’s burden. My burden is to defend my client zealously against the government. If, in the end, if the government uses fair tactics, follows the rule of law, provides for due process, and the defendant is convicted, then we will argue about sentencing. But my job is not to be the jury. That’s not my job. My job is to, in the US, essentially defend the US Constitution for everyone, because if it doesn’t apply to my client, it might not apply to someone else, and I don’t think anyone can ever say they won’t be accused of a crime. Someone can say they would never commit a certain crime; they can never say they won’t be accused of committing it. So, that person wants to have the same protection that my client has. I had a client once who I was defending, he was a Republican, who was an oil and gas man and he called me and said, ‘I pulled the lever on the voting booth straight Democrat because I was scared you would find out’. And I said well, the quickest way to turn a Republican into a Democrat is to get him accused of a crime and all of a sudden, ‘What? What is the judge thinking?’. Now you know. You have to approach it that way. I tell people who say, ‘well I could defend certain crimes but not others’, that they’ve got to a really rethink whether you can be a criminal defence lawyer. There are clients I don’t want to defend and I have; I can make that choice. But public defenders don’t get to make that choice. They shouldn’t, they have to represent everyone and everyone the same. And that’s the way it must be. Just because you represent someone who commits a murder, or child abuse, or fraud, doesn’t mean that you did it. It just means that you are providing what the Constitution requires and making sure that there is a rule of law in the country. If we don’t have a rule of law at all, we have a police state. CJLPA : Absolutely. I think inevitably, it doesn’t matter guilty or innocent, every individual has the right to his protection and the right to be treated with human dignity. And that goes back also to Guantanamo Bay. I think a lot of people spoke about the prisoners, whether or not they did it or were they involved. From my point of view, and from what I have read about Guantanamo Bay and the cases, it doesn’t matter if they did do it or they didn’t do it. You read into the torture that they have endured, that the government was responsible for. It’s despicable. No human, no matter what they have done, should ever endure that treatment and they should have had that protection and the justice system failed them because that ever occurred. And so on that point then, I thought it was quite interesting, watching The Mauritanian , which I thought was a fantastic film, I did notice as well that there was a lot of discussion of innocence versus guilt and did he do it, did he not do it. Do you think that was important in the film? NH : I think it was important in the film. It was never important to me. Teri [Duncan] actually, is a death penalty lawyer who represents people on death row and would never have cared in real life whether someone was guilty or not, but the role she took in the film was kind of to be a proxy for the audience. We know that is what the audience is thinking at that point and that’s when I kick her out, you have to leave. Which never happened by the way. There was another lawyer involved who quit but not Teri. But Teri agreed to do this for the film’s sake, to combine these people, so that the audience would have someone to identify with. That whole scene is really interesting because I really would tell someone who took that position, you need to rethink whether you want to be a criminal defence lawyer and you are not on this case anymore. That would have happened. I wouldn’t have been as rude as Jodie was. Jodie has said she was much meaner than I am and ruder. But I did say the last words that are in that scene and those were my words and I must have said them to Jodie when we were talking at one point because she mouthed them. ‘You’ve gotta believe your own shit’, and it’s something that we call trial psychosis. When you get into it you really got to believe, wow, I can really win this. Even when you know you can’t. You’ve got to believe it, you’ve got to believe it and work towards it. And in Mohamedou’s case, there were overwhelming allegations against him that we had to fight one after the other and it turned out that they were all made of nothing. But if you read the police, the first reports you would think he was guilty. Which is true in all criminal cases, if all you do is read the police reports you would think everyone is guilty. And then you got to start parsing it. But I did think it was important for the audience to see how that debate worked out. CJLPA : Reflecting back on your work in that case, today, what would be your advice to present-day lawyers defending a client in a similar situation, not necessarily Guantanamo Bay case, but cases where they are accused of terrorism and confined in the most inhumane prison? Would you have approached the case differently now, thinking back of how it worked through all those years? NH : I don’t know what I would have done differently in Mohamedou’s case, other cases where I have re-thought what I did. But in that case, I think we did everything we knew how to do. I wish we had done some of the investigations that we weren’t able to do, that we didn’t have the funds to do. And maybe things would have moved a little faster. And I am not sure anything would have made a difference at that point at that case. But you know, my advice to people is just don’t give up, turn every corner, be a lawyer, take care of your client. Clients’ stories are the most important and most crimes that are committed by people are the worst five minutes of their lives and they would never do it again. Everyone should be treated with human dignity. And that is the bottom line. Treat your clients the same way you would treat everyone else and care for them, listen to them, listen to what they have to say and do everything you possibly can to win the case. As long as you do it ethically. CJLPA : You mentioned that in Mohamedou’s case you wouldn’t have done something different, but potentially in other cases. Could you expand a bit more on that? NH : Yes, in my first cases. I tried a whole bunch of felony cases when I was a brand-new lawyer. And I know, if I looked back and I did those cases, the ones I lost, and most of them as a public defender, I would say ‘wow, why didn’t I think of this’, ‘why didn’t I think of that’. I didn’t really have very many people to help me at that time, I had some. I went in, I was thrown in and there are other cases where I just feel like I missed something along the way, and I wish I could go back and do them again. CJLPA : What was the most memorable case you have done and why particularly it is that one? Not necessarily the most important, but the most memorable that stuck with you over the years. NH : I really thought about this question, Nadia. There are cases that no one knows about, and I suppose they might be the most memorable, because people know about Mohamedou’s case, they know about Chelsea Manning’s case, they know about Precious Padel’s case, they know about other cases I have won. Lots and lots of high-profile cases, but I was thinking about it. I represented people where we were able to get the charges dismissed and no one ever knew about it. And isn’t that really the best for the client. I remember representing a lawyer who was charged with child abuse. Two people who were charged with child abuse. In both cases they were completely innocent, completely innocent and the cases were dismissed after investigation, and no one ever knew that they were charged. It was the end. Came and went. There was this other guy who was accused of 13 murders and that case people did know about because he got arrested. So it was really high profile, so that case was dismissed. The ones where no one ever knew about them I think are the best. Because that’s where I did my job, because that’s where the criminal legal system worked. Somebody is charged with a crime and then the case goes away because it should and to me those are the most memorable. CJLPA : Do you think that also corresponds with the fact that there was a less of a public eye on it, which in a way offered it more of a due process, having the media cut out of it and the politicians not involved? NH : I do think that matters, a lot. I know that the child abuse cases that I was involved in twenty years ago were a lot different than if I were to be involved in the same case today. The press would be all over it. And it would be a real tragedy for both the complaining witness, who needed some psychiatric care, and for my client, who needed not to have to go through this in the public eye. So I think in many cases that would be different. And that is unfortunate because, you know, there is so much, so much news now about things we never used to know about. We have amber alerts, which we never used to have. We have twenty-four-hour news. We have draconian sentences. And so all of this goes against in many ways the rule of law. Yes, of course we need to protect real victims of rape, real victims of child abuse. But there are times where you don’t know who the real victim is, when the case starts. Is it the defendant or the complaining witness and who is the real victim here? And that is often true in the sex related cases. And those are the ones where they keep the complaining witness’s name and you don’t get to know who that person is, if it is a child. But you know who the defendant is and maybe they shouldn’t, maybe neither one be public until we know where these cases are going. The news is different now than it was twenty years ago. And in many ways that is unfortunate. We don’t have more crime, I keep telling people this. I tell people who say ‘well, it was safer when your son was young’, that, no, it wasn’t, it was actually less safe in the eighties in the US than it is now. Except for murders which went up in the US, during the pandemic, and nobody quite knows why. I mean if you leave the pandemic and the peculiarities of that time out of it. Crime is down, but we never hear more about it. So you’ve got these helicopter parents who won’t let their kids go outside alone. And yet, they are safer than when I let my son go out alone, forty years ago. CJLPA : What would you say is an appropriate balance between having that privacy in the courtroom and the trial taking its course and then equally the public also having awareness of what’s going on around them and their surroundings and the crimes occurring in their neighbourhoods? NH : Well, it is a balance and the public has right to know, and that also benefits someone who is accused because you want the public to be aware, you don’t want to have trials in private, and so there is a balance. But in the balance the defendant’s Sixth Amendment right to protection in favour of confrontation, in due process, the right to a fair trial, always has to be the balance that you look for, always, that balance has to be the one that tips the scale. CJLPA : It would be interesting to know from your experience as a lawyer and working with various other lawyers, what have you noticed makes a good lawyer or a distinguishing one? NH : A good lawyer, in my view, and I tell this to people coming out of law school and people I have been about to hire over years, is someone who is for lack of better words a full-service lawyer. If my client is going to jail and my client says ‘but there is nobody home to take care of my cat’, it’s my job to make sure that the cat gets taken care of. Whenever people go into prison to meet to the client, talk about the crime, talk about the defence, but also make sure that the client is okay, make sure that the client is getting the medicine, and getting the visits he needs, or she needs, make sure that everyone is alright all the time, and listen to the client, listen to the client’s stories and make sure you understand who they are, go visit the crime scene but also visit the family, talk about the history, talk about who this person is, get to know that person, and just be everything that person needs, because the lawyer is ultimately the only person between the defendant and the accused and the world and the government. It’s pretty simple. CJLPA : Absolutely. One more question, just to wrap everything up: in your legacy of defending human rights law throughout your career, how would you want this fight to continue by your successors and what do you hope is going to improve over the years in the justice system? NH : If I were starting today, I’d be figuring out how to represent migrants and refugees around the world. There are people in refugee camps all over the world that we don’t know anything about. Hundreds and hundreds of people who were born, live, die in camps where they get no services, no UN services, no NGO services, they don’t even know they exist. They’re huge, they’re all over the place. And that’s where I think that’s where I would devote my time if I were starting now. I work in an organisation, I’m on its advisory board at the International Bridges to Justice and a goal is to provide lawyers to everyone, and making sure that people who are in prison in countries that have very few lawyers get lawyers, to make sure lawyers are trained all over the world, make sure that the world understands why we need lawyers, and why people who think they will never commit a crime need to make sure that everyone has a lawyer to protect them, and their families, and the rule of law for everyone. But I tell lawyers now when they say ‘what would you do?’, I say I would do immigration law and migrant law, refugee law, because that to me is becoming the biggest issue around the world. CJLPA : Absolutely. I agree on that. Thank you very much for taking the time to speak with us today. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is currently working as a Trainee Lawyer and will qualify as a lawyer in England and Wales in March 2024.

The United Kingdom has experienced two major political crises in the last five years. Brexit and COVID-19 are crises of very different kinds. But they have a significant feature in common whose implications will live with us for a long time. They are milestones in the demise of liberal democracy.   The model which will replace liberal democracy is already emerging. It will be more authoritarian and less dependent on Parliamentary deliberation. It will view our society as a great collective with a single collective notion of the public good, and treat dissent as antisocial, even treasonable. It will be less accepting of the idea that there are islands of human life in which, extremes apart, individuals are entitled to make their own decisions irrespective of the wishes of the state. The defining feature of totalitarian societies is a model of the relations between the state and the citizen in which individuals are first and foremost instruments of collective policy. This once distinguished them from democracies. The distinction will become less important, as formerly liberal societies move closer to the totalitarian model.   The first symptoms of this change were apparent well before anyone had heard of either Brexit or COVID-19. The Pew Research Centre has been tracking attitudes to democracy in different countries for some 30 years. Dissatisfaction with democracy has been rising in advanced democracies for most of that time, especially among the young, and particularly in the oldest democracies: the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. The UK has one of the highest levels of dissatisfaction in the world, at 69%. Only in Bulgaria and Greece is it higher. Dissatisfaction with democracy does not necessarily imply a preference for some other system. But more disturbing findings emerge from the regular surveys of political engagement conducted in the UK by the Hansard Society. In the 2019 survey 54% of respondents agreed that ‘Britain needs a strong leader willing to break the rules’, and only 23% disagreed. As many as 42% thought that the government ‘shouldn’t have to worry so much about votes in Parliament’.   These attitudes are closely correlated to economic performance. People who are dissatisfied with the economy, people who feel economically left behind or pessimistic about the future, are more likely to reject democracy. This is not altogether surprising. Historically, democracies have always been heavily dependent on economic good fortune. Western democracy was born in the nineteenth century, in an age of creative optimism, economic expansion, and European supremacy. Except for two short periods, the United States has enjoyed continuously rising levels of prosperity, both absolutely and relative to other countries, until quite recently. Britain’s economic history has been more chequered, but the trajectory has generally been upward. In the life of any community, the shattering of optimism is a dangerous moment. Disillusionment with the promise of progress was a major factor in the 30-year crisis of Europe which began in 1914 and ended in 1945. That crisis was characterised by a resort to autocracy in much of Europe. Three-quarters of a century have passed since 1945, years marked by rapid economic growth and exponential improvements in standards of living. But today, the outlook is darker. Most Western democracies face problems of faltering growth and relative economic decline, of redundant skills and capricious patterns of inequality, most of them the legacy of past successes. These trends are likely to be aggravated in the UK by Brexit, and nearly everywhere by COVID-19. Climate change is a future challenge the implications of which are only beginning to dawn on people. Most of the measures proposed for dealing with it involve curtailing economic growth. Economic pessimism generates feelings of disempowerment which tend to discredit democratic institutions.   Against an unfavourable background like this, what will Brexit and COVID-19 contribute to these trends?   The Brexit crisis proved to be a watershed moment for British democracy. The first task of any political system is to accommodate differences of interest and opinion among citizens, so that they can live together in community without the systematic application of force. Democracies operate on the basis that although the majority has authorised policies which the minority rejects, these differences are transcended by their common acceptance of the legitimacy of the decision-making process. It is legally and constitutionally possible for a bare majority to take all the political spoils without engaging with the minority. But a democracy which persistently did that would not accommodate differences, but brutalise them. It would cease to be a political community, and could hardly function as a democracy.   For this reason, thoughtful democrats have always recognised that too much democracy is bad for democracy. They have been able to avoid the self-destructive tendency of democracy by spurning the direct decision of contentious issues by the electorate, and opting for representative politics instead. Representative politics are essentially an institutionalised system of compromise. The rigidity of party discipline in the House of Commons means that compromise is rare across the House. But it happens indirectly because political parties have to accommodate a broad spectrum of opinion and interests if they want to be elected. People are naturally averse to compromise about issues on which they feel strongly. They prefer not to engage with the views of those with whom they profoundly disagree. Parliamentary systems force them to do so. Although political parties can exploit a single issue in a moment of national emotion to carry them to power without compromise, in the medium and long term they cannot afford to become ideological sects. If they did, they would move to the margins of politics where they would have limited influence and no prospect of power. This is what nearly happened to the Labour Party in 1983 and again in 2019.   The Brexit referendum of 2016 was adopted as a way of circumventing the Parliamentary process. The theory is that once the answer has been supplied by the majority, it is the answer of the entire community. This notion is both false and profoundly damaging. It is false because the minority still exists and has no reason to alter its opinion simply because it is a minority. It is damaging because it creates a sense of entitlement in the majority, which dispenses them from the need to engage with those who disagree. Referenda have often been used as the tools of tyrants. Napoleons I and III, Hitler, and Putin have all used them as a license to institute authoritarian governments. In Britain, the effect of the Brexit referendum was more subtle. It did not bring a tyrant to power. What it did was to undermine representative politics and prevent it from accommodating differences among our people on one of the most contentious issues of modern times. Since an ability to do that is essential to the long-term survival of a democratic constitution, this has impoverished our politics and destroyed the tolerant conventions by which we had previously been governed.   The natural consequence has been the election of a government with a strong authoritarian streak, characterised by a resentment of opposition and dissent. At what earlier stage in our history would the Attorney General have told the House of Commons, as Geoffrey Cox did in all seriousness in September 2019, that it was ‘unfit to sit’ because it would not allow the government to leave the European Union until it had made satisfactory alternative arrangements? This was not an isolated event, but part of a consistent pattern. Other symptoms of the rejection of our pluralist traditions include: the brutal political purge of the once-dominant Europhile element in the Parliamentary Conservative Party; the threat of revenge against the Supreme Court for its temerity in insisting, in the two Gina Miller cases, on the constitutional authority of Parliament; the overt hostility to the BBC for its alleged failure to share the government’s outlook, coupled with a threat to destroy its financial model; the insistence on filling positions in the government’s gift from the Cabinet to the Trustees of the British Museum with loyalists and placemen regardless of their qualifications for the job, or lack of them; and the contempt for civil servants who dare to give expert but unwelcome advice. These have all been attacks on national institutions which stand for a plurality of opinion. They represent something new and unwelcome in our political culture.   The constitutional baggage carried over from the Brexit debacle proved to be the starting point for the government’s response to the next crisis.   At the root of the problems generated by the pandemic was the public’s attitude to the state and to risk. People have remarkable confidence in the capacity of the state to contain risk and ward off misfortune. An earlier generation regarded natural catastrophes as only marginally amenable to state action. The Spanish flu pandemic of 1918–21 is the event most closely comparable to the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020. It is estimated to have killed 200,000 people in the United Kingdom at a time when its population was about two thirds what it is now. The UK government took no special steps to curtail its transmission, apart from isolating the infected and the sick, which had been the classic response to epidemics from time immemorial. No one criticised it for this. COVID-19 is a somewhat more infectious pathogen than Spanish flu, but it is significantly less mortal. It is also easier to deal with because it mainly affects those with underlying vulnerabilities due to age or certain underlying clinical conditions. A high proportion of these people are economically inactive. By comparison, Spanish flu had a particularly devastating impact on healthy people aged under 50. Yet in 2020 Britain, in common with most Western countries, ordered a general lockdown of the whole population, healthy or sick, something which had never been done before in response to any disease anywhere. These measures enjoyed substantial public support.   In the intervening century, something has radically changed in our collective outlook. Two things in particular have changed. One is that we now expect more of the state, and are less inclined to accept that there are limits to what it can do. The other is that we are no longer willing to accept risks that have always been inherent in life itself. Human beings have lived with epidemic disease from the beginning of time. If one can imagine a hypothetical world in which every community had a sterile space into which it could withdraw at the onset of disease, humanity would have become extinct. It would have no natural immunity and would simply be wiped out the next time that a new pathogen struck too quickly or silently for flight.   COVID-19 is a relatively serious epidemic but historically it is well within the range of health risks which are inseparable from ordinary existence. In Britain, bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and tuberculosis were all worse in their time. Internationally, the list of comparable or worse epidemics is substantially longer, even if they did not happen to strike Europe and North America. The average age at which people die with COVID-19 is 82.4, which is not significantly different from the average age at which they die without COVID-19. The change is in ourselves, not in the nature or scale of the risks that we face.   In the first of my 2019 Reith lectures, I drew attention to the implications of our aversion to risk for our relationship with the state. I referred to what I have called, then and since, the Hobbesian bargain. The seventeenth-century political philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that human beings surrendered their liberty completely, unconditionally, and irrevocably to an absolute ruler in return for security. Hobbes was an apologist for absolute government. In his model of society, the state could do absolutely anything for the purpose of reducing the risks that threaten our wellbeing, other than deliberately kill us. Hobbes’s state was an unpleasant thing, but he had grasped a profound truth. Most despotisms come into being not because a despot has seized power, but because people willingly surrender their freedoms for security. To resist this tendency requires of us a collective restraint and self-discipline, an appreciation of the complexity and interconnectedness of human affairs, and a willingness to resist the empire of fear. Our culture has always rejected Hobbes’s model of society. Intellectually, it still does. But in recent years it has increasingly tended to act on it. The response to COVID-19 has taken that tendency a long way further. I could not have imagined in 2019 that my concerns would be so dramatically vindicated so quickly.    Until March 2020, it was unthinkable that liberal democracies should confine healthy people in their homes indefinitely, with limited exceptions at the discretion of ministers. It was unthinkable that a whole population should be subject to criminal penalties for associating with other human beings and answerable to the police for the ordinary activities of daily life. In a now-notorious interview in February 2021, Professor Neil Ferguson explained what changed. It was the lockdown in China. ‘It’s a communist one-party state, we said. We couldn’t get away with it in Europe, we thought … And then Italy did it. And we realised we could.’ It is worth pausing to reflect on what this means. It means that because a lockdown of the entire population appeared to work in a country which was notoriously indifferent to individual rights and traditionally treats human beings as mere instruments of state policy, they could ‘get away with’ doing the same thing here. As I write this, the British government has published an ‘Integrated Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy’ which identifies China as presenting a ‘systemic challenge to our values’. Liberty and personal autonomy are surely among our most fundamental of those values. They are also essential conditions for human happiness and creativity. Yet we have been willing to jettison them in favour of the Chinese model. Entirely absent from Professor Ferguson’s analysis was any conception of the principled reasons why it had hitherto been unthinkable for Western countries to do such a thing. It was unthinkable because it was based on a conception of the state’s authority over its citizens which was morally repellent even if it worked.   This is not, as many people appear to think, a phase which will pass when COVID-19 disappears (if it ever does). Governments rarely relinquish powers that they have once acquired. Wartime controls were kept in being for years after the end of the war. Some wartime powers continued to be exercised right up to the 1990s. But the problem is more fundamental than that. The government has immense powers, not just in the field of public health, but generally. These powers have existed for many years. Their existence has been tolerable in a liberal democracy only because of a culture of restraint which made it unthinkable that they should be used in the intrusive and abrasive manner in which the government has used its public health powers. Before 2020, it was only culture and convention which prevented us from adopting a totalitarian model. If something is unthinkable until someone in authority thinks of it, the psychological barriers which were once our only protection against despotism have vanished.   In the circumstances, we can hardly be surprised that this fundamental change has been accompanied by a deliberate and persistent attempt on the part of the government to limit Parliamentary scrutiny or any real political accountability. It has issued ‘guidance’ going well beyond its legal powers, and issued ‘orders’ at press conferences which had no legal basis. It has rammed complex legislation through Parliament without serious debate. It has absolved itself from any real Parliamentary control over public expenditure. It has evaded statutory requirements for advance Parliamentary approval on grounds of urgency which are difficult to justify. It has deliberately waited before making supposedly urgent statutory orders until Parliament was not in session. It has taken steps to prevent activities which its own regulations expressly permit, such as visits to doctors and dentists. In many respects, Parliament itself has not been willing to live up to its high constitutional calling.   However, at least as serious as the implications for our relations with the state are the implications for our relations with each other. The pandemic has generated distrust, resentment and mutual hostility. Authoritarian governments fracture the societies in which they operate. The use of political power as an instrument of mass coercion fuelled by public fear, is corrosive. It is corrosive even, perhaps especially, when it enjoys majority support. It tends to be accompanied, as it has been in Britain, by manipulative government propaganda and vociferous intolerance of the minority who disagree. These are the authentic symptoms of totalitarianism.   There is no inevitability about the future course of any historical trend. Social controls can become unpopular. There is an analogy in the fate of food rationing after 1939. It was necessary during the Second World War and enjoyed general public support. Belief in the efficacy of social control was an important part of the appeal of the Labour Party in the general election of 1945 which brought it to power with a huge Parliamentary majority. But people wearied of it over the following years. The insistence of the post-war Labour government on retaining it indefinitely cost it its majority in the general election of 1950 and put the Conservatives in power in 1951. Nevertheless, I am not optimistic about the future of my country. The changes in our political culture seem to me to reflect a profound change in the public mood, which has been many years in the making and may be many years in the unmaking. We are entering a Hobbesian world, the enormity of which has not yet dawned on our people. The Rt Hon Lord Sumption   Jonathan Sumption, The Rt Hon Lord Sumption, is a retired Supreme Court Justice and was the first to be appointed from outside of the judiciary. He is renowned for his lucid and methodical judgments.

Introduction COVID-19 should not have struck us so unawares: similar viruses, SARS and MERS, had emerged within the last 20 years, and global pandemics had been widely discussed. So why were even rich countries so unprepared? It’s because politicians and the public have a local focus. They downplay the long-term and the global. They ignore Nate Silver’s maxim: ‘The unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable.’   Indeed, we’re in denial about a whole raft of newly emergent threats to our interconnected world, that could be devastating. Pandemics and massive cyberattacks, for instance, are immediately destructive. Their probability may seem low, but they could happen at any time. The worst of them could be so devastating that one occurrence would be too many. And their probability and potential severity is increasing. Indeed, I fear we are guaranteed a bumpy ride through this century. COVID-19 must be a wake-up call, reminding us—and our governments—that we’re vulnerable.   Humans are now so numerous, and have now such a heavy collective ‘footprint’, that they can transform, or even ravage, the entire biosphere. The world is growing, and a more demanding population puts the natural environment under strain. Our collective actions could trigger dangerous climate change and mass extinctions if ‘tipping points’ are crossed—outcomes that would bequeath a depleted and impoverished world to future generations. We’re familiar with these threats, but fail to prioritise countermeasures, because their worst impact stretches beyond the time horizon of political and investment decisions. It’s like the proverbial boiling frog—contented in a warming tank until it’s too late to save itself. We have endured a ‘plague year’, and it remains unclear when, or indeed if, the world will revert to anything close to its ‘old normal’. The ‘global spasm’ that we have collectively experienced—a spasm that is, at the time of this writing, far from over—shows clearly that the ability to make wise decisions based on science has a direct impact on survival—not just personally, but collectively. Because our entire world is so interconnected, a catastrophe in any region can cascade globally, making our society vulnerable to breakdowns. But well-directed, internationally deployed science and technology can offer salvation.   The potentials of biotech and the cyberworld are exhilarating—but they’re frightening too. We are already, individually and collectively, so greatly empowered by rapidly changing technology that we can— by design, or as unintended consequences—engender global changes that will resonate for centuries.   Climate and environment   There are some things we can confidently predict. For instance, there’s firm evidence for climate change. Even within the next 20 years, regional shifts in climatic patterns, and more extreme weather, will aggravate pressures on food and water, and enhance migration pressure. Moreover, under ‘business as usual’ scenarios we can’t rule out, later in the century, really catastrophic global warming, and tipping points triggering long-term trends like the melting of Greenland’s ice sheet. But even those who accept these statements have diverse views on the best policy response. These divergences stem from differences in economics and ethics—in particular, in how much obligation we should feel towards future generations.   The Danish campaigner Bjørn Lomborg has bogeyman status among environmentalists—somewhat unfairly, as he doesn’t contest the science. But his ‘Copenhagen Consensus’ of economists downplays the priority of addressing climate change in comparison with shorter-term efforts to help the world’s poor. That’s because he applies a ‘standard’ discount rate—and in effect writes off what happens beyond 2050. But if you care about those who’ll live into the twenty-second century and beyond, then, as economists like Lord Stern and Professor Martin Weitzman argue, it is worth paying an insurance premium now, to protect those generations against the worst-case longer-term scenarios.[1]   So, even those who agree that there’s a significant risk of climate catastrophe a century hence, will differ in how urgently they advocate action today. Their assessment will depend on expectations of future growth, and optimism about technological fixes. But, above all, it depends on an ethical issue—in optimising people’s life-chances, should we discriminate on grounds of date of birth?   That the world will get warmer is a confident prediction. And with similar confidence we expect that it will get more crowded during this century. 50 years ago, world population was about 3.5 billion. It’s now about 7.7 billion. The growth has been mainly in Asia and Africa. The number of births per year, worldwide, peaked a few years ago and is going down. Nonetheless, world population is forecast to rise to around nine billion by 2050. That’s partly because most people in the developing world are young. They are yet to have children, and they will live longer. The age histogram in the developing world will become more like it is in Europe. By mid-century, Africa will have five times Europe’s population. Lagos and other megacities could have populations of around 40 million.   Population growth seems under-discussed. That’s partly, perhaps, because doom-laden forecasts in the late 1960s—for instance, by the Club of Rome and by Paul Ehrlich—proved off the mark. Also, some deem population growth to be a taboo subject—tainted by association with eugenics in the 1920s and 1930s, with Indian policies under Indira Gandhi, and more recently with China’s hard-line one-child policy. As it’s turned out, food production and resource extraction have kept pace with the rising population. Famines still occur, but they’re due to conflict or maldistribution, not overall scarcity.   To feed nine billion in 2050 will require further-improved agriculture—low-till, water-conserving, and GM crops. It may also require dietary innovations—converting insects, highly nutritious and rich in proteins, into palatable food; and making artificial meat. To quote Gandhi—enough for everyone’s need but not for everyone’s greed.   Demographics beyond 2050 are uncertain. It’s not even clear whether there’ll be a continuing global rise, or a fall. Urbanisation, declining infant mortality, and women’s education trigger the transition towards lower birthrates—but there could be countervailing cultural influences.   If, for whatever reason, families in Africa remain large, then according to the UN that continent’s population could double again by 2100, to four billion, thereby raising the global population to 11 billion. Nigeria alone would by then have as big a population as Europe and North America combined.   Optimists may note that each extra mouth brings two hands and a brain. But the potential geopolitical stresses of runaway population growth are deeply worrying. As compared to the fatalism of earlier generations, those in poor countries now know, via the Internet etc, what they’re missing. And migration is easier. Moreover, the advent of robots, and ‘reshoring’ of manufacturing, mean that still-poor countries won’t be able to grow their economies by offering cheap skilled labour, as the Asian tiger economies did. It’s a portent for disaffection and instability—multiple megaversions of the tragic loads of boat people crossing the Mediterranean today. Wealthy nations, especially those in Europe, should urgently promote prosperity in Africa, and not just for altruistic reasons.   And another thing: if humanity’s collective impact on land use and climate is too deep, the resultant ‘ecological shock’ could cause mass extinctions. We’d be destroying the book of life before we’d read it. Already, there’s more biomass in chickens and turkeys than in all the world’s wild birds. And the biomass in humans, cows, and domestic animals is 20 times that in wild mammals.   Biodiversity is a crucial component of human wellbeing. We’re clearly harmed if fish stocks dwindle to extinction. There are plants in the rain forest whose gene pool might be useful to us. And insects are crucial for the food chain and fertilisation. But for many environmentalists, preserving the richness of our biosphere has value in its own right, over and above what it means to us humans. To quote the great ecologist EO Wilson, ‘mass extinction is the sin that future generations will least forgive us for’.   Prospects for technology   It would be hard to think of a more inspiring challenge for young scientists and engineers than devising clean and economical energy systems—and sustainable, humane agriculture—for the entire world. Nations should accelerate R&D into all forms of low-carbon energy generation, and into other technologies where parallel progress is crucial—especially storage (batteries, compressed air, pumped storage, flywheels, etc) and smart grids. If carbon-free energy gets cheap enough, then India, for instance, can leapfrog to it. The health of the poor is jeopardised by smoky stoves burning wood or dung, and there would otherwise be pressure to build coal-fired power stations. Likewise, public health should be a global priority.   But we need wisely directed technology. Indeed, many are anxious that innovation is proceeding so fast that we may not properly cope with it—and that we’ll have a bumpy ride through this century. We’re ever more dependent on elaborate networks: electric power grids, air traffic control, international finance, just-in-time delivery, globally dispersed manufacturing, and so forth. Unless these networks are highly resilient, their manifest benefits could be outweighed by catastrophic (albeit rare) breakdowns that cascade globally—real-world analogues of what happened in 2008 to the financial system. Air travel can spread a pandemic worldwide within days.[2] And social media can spread panic and rumour, and psychic and economic contagion, literally at the speed of light.   Biotech offers huge prospects for enhancing health and food production. But there are downsides, from both ethical and prudential perspectives. It offers, for instance, the ability to modify viruses. In 2012, experiments done in Wisconsin and in Holland showed that it was surprisingly easy to make the influenza virus more virulent and more transmissible. This seemed a portent, and in 2014 the US federal government ceased funding these ‘gain of function’ experiments. Similar manipulations can be carried out on coronaviruses. There is of course no suggestion that COVID-19 was malevolently engineered, though there is an ongoing debate about the possibility that it could have been an accidental release from the Wuhan Institute of Virology, where it is known that gain of function experiments were being done.   The new CRISPR-Cas9 technique for gene editing is hugely promising, but there are already ethical concerns—for instance, about Chinese experiments modifying embryos—and anxiety about possible runaway ecological consequences of ‘gene drive’ programmes to wipe out species as diverse as mosquitos or grey squirrels.   Governments will surely adopt a stringent and precautionary attitude to the applications of biotech—and even to the kinds of experiment that can be legally pursued. But I’d worry that whatever regulations are imposed can’t be enforced worldwide, any more than the drug laws or tax laws. Whatever can be done will be done by someone, somewhere.   An atomic bomb can’t be built without large-scale special-purpose facilities. But biotech involves small-scale dual-use equipment. Indeed, biohacking is burgeoning even as a hobby. The rising empowerment of tech-savvy groups (or even individuals), by bio-as well as cyber-technology, will pose an intractable challenge to governments and aggravate the tension between freedom, privacy, and security. The global village will have its village idiots, and they’ll have global range. These concerns are relatively near-term—within ten or 15 years.   By mid-century we might expect two things: a better understanding of the combinations of genes that determine key characteristics of humans and animals; and the ability to synthesise genomes that match these features. If it becomes possible to ‘play God on a kitchen table’, our ecology (and even our species) may not long survive unscathed.   And what about another transformative technology: robotics and artificial intelligence (AI)? DeepMind’s ‘AlphaGo Zero’ computer famously achieved world championship level in the games of Go and chess in just a few hours—it was given just the rules, and learnt by playing against itself over and over again. Its processing speed allowed it to complete several games every second.   Already AI can cope better than humans with complex fast-changing networks—traffic flow, or electric grids. It could let the Chinese gather and process all the information needed to run an efficient planned economy that Marx could only dream of. And in science, its capacity to explore millions of options could allow it to discover recipes for better drugs, or a material that conducts electricity with zero resistance at room temperature. Computers learn to identify dogs, cats, and human faces by ‘crunching’ through millions of images—not the way babies learn. They learn to translate by reading millions of pages of multilingual text—EU documents, for instance (their boredom threshold is infinite!).   The implications for our society are already ambivalent. If there is a ‘bug’ in the software of an AI system, it is not always possible to track it down. This is likely to create public concern if the system’s ‘decisions’ have potentially grave consequences for individuals. If we are sentenced to a term in prison, recommended for surgery, or even given a poor credit rating, we would expect the reasons to be accessible to us, and contestable by us. If such decisions were delegated to an algorithm, we would be entitled to feel uneasy, even if presented with compelling evidence that, on average, the machines make better decisions than the humans they have usurped.   AI systems will become more intrusive and pervasive. Records of all our movements, our health, and our financial transactions, will be in the ‘cloud’, managed by a multinational quasi-monopoly. The data may be used for benign reasons (for instance, for medical research, or to warn us of incipient health risks), but its availability to internet companies is already shifting the balance of power from governments to globe-spanning conglomerates.   There will be other privacy concerns. Are you happy if a random stranger sitting near you in a restaurant or on public transportation can, via facial recognition, identify you and invade your privacy? Or if fake videos of you become so convincing that visual evidence can no longer be trusted? Or if a machine knows enough about you to compose emails that seem to come from you? The ‘arms race’ between cybercriminals and those trying to defend against them will become still more expensive and vexatious when drones, driverless cars, etc proliferate.   Many experts think that AI, like synthetic biotech, already needs guidelines for ‘responsible innovation’. But others, like the roboticist Rodney Brooks (creator of the Baxter robot and the Roomba vacuum cleaner), think that for many decades artificial intelligence will be less of a concern than real stupidity. And machines are still clumsy compared to children in sensing and interacting with the real world.   The incipient shifts in the nature of work have been addressed in several excellent books by economists and social scientists. Clearly, machines will take over much of the work of manufacturing and retail distribution. They can supplement, if not replace, many white-collar jobs: routine legal work, accountancy, computer coding, medical diagnostics, and even surgery. Many ‘professionals’ will find their hard-earned skills in less demand. In contrast, some skilled service-sector jobs—plumbing and gardening, for instance—require non-routine interactions with the external world and will be among the hardest jobs to automate.   The digital revolution generates enormous wealth for innovators and global companies, but preserving a healthy society will surely require redistribution of that wealth. There is talk of using it to provide a universal income. It is better when all who are capable of doing so can perform socially useful work rather than receive a handout.   Indeed, to create a humane society, governments will need to vastly enhance the number and status of those who care for the old, the young, and the sick. There are currently far too few, and they’re poorly paid, inadequately esteemed, and insecure in their positions. Such work is more fulfilling than a job in a call centre or Amazon warehouse. I can foresee this benign redeployment happening in Scandinavia, though there might be ideological barriers in some other nations. We surely hope, when old, to be cared for by someone with real, not synthetic, empathy. We want young children to be told stories by real people who can share and understand their emotions. It is likely that society will be transformed by autonomous robots, even though the jury is out on whether they will be idiots savants  or display superhuman capabilities.   If robots become less clumsy in interacting with the world, would they truly be perceived as intelligent beings? Would we then have obligations towards them? Should we feel guilty if they are underemployed or bored? Ray Kurzweil, author of The Age of Spiritual Machines , even foresees that humans could transcend biology by merging with computers. In old-style spiritualist parlance, they would ‘go over to the other side’. We then confront the classic philosophical problem of personal identity. If your brain were downloaded into a machine, in what sense would it still be ‘you’? Or are the input into our sense organs, and our physical interactions with the real external world, so essential to our being that this transition would be not only abhorrent but also impossible? These are ancient conundrums for philosophers, but practical ethicists may soon need to address them.   Not even Kurzweil thinks this will happen in his lifetime, so he wants his body frozen until immortality’s on offer, and he can be resurrected into some posthuman world.[3] But of course research on ageing is being seriously prioritised. Some think it’s a ‘disease’ that can be cured. Dramatic life extension would plainly have huge ramifications, for society and population projections.   It’s certainly credible that human beings—in their mentality and their physique—may become malleable through genetic and cybernetic technologies. Moreover, this future evolution—a kind of secular ‘intelligent design’—would take only centuries, in contrast to the thousands of centuries needed for Darwinian evolution. This is a game changer. When we admire the literature and artefacts that have survived from antiquity, we feel an affinity, across a time gulf of thousands of years, with those ancient artists and their civilisations. But we can have zero confidence that the dominant intelligences a few centuries hence will have any emotional resonance with us, even though they may have an algorithmic understanding of how we behaved.   Prospects in space   And now I turn briefly to another technology: space. This is where robots surely have a future, and where I‘d argue that these changes will happen fastest and should worry us less.   We depend every day on space for satnav, environmental monitoring, communication, and so forth. These are in large part now commercially funded, though projects with a focus on scientific research and planetary exploration are bankrolled by national or international agencies.   During this century the whole solar system will be explored by swarms of miniature probes, far more advanced than the probes that have beamed back pictures of Saturn’s moons, of Pluto, and beyond—20,000 times further away than the Moon. Think back to the computers and phones of the 1990s, when these probes were designed, and realise how much better we can do today. The next step will be deployment in space of robotic fabricators, which can build large structures under zero gravity—for instance, solar energy collectors, or giant telescopes with huge gossamer-thin mirrors   What about manned spaceflight? The practical case gets weaker with each advance in robots and miniaturisation. Were I an American, I would only support NASA’s un manned programme. And I certainly wouldn’t support a manned programme done by the European Space Agency. I would argue that private ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX or Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin—bringing a Silicon Valley culture into a domain long dominated by NASA and a few aerospace conglomerates—should ‘front’ all manned missions. They can impose higher risks than can a Western country on publicly funded civilian astronauts, and thereby slash costs. There would still be many volunteers—some willing to accept the risk of ‘one-way tickets’—driven by the same motives as early explorers, mountaineers, and the like.   By 2100, courageous thrill-seekers may have established ‘bases’ independent from the Earth—on Mars, or maybe on asteroids. Elon Musk says he wants to die on Mars (though not on impact). But don’t ever expect mass emigration from Earth. Nowhere in our solar system offers an environment as clement as even the Antarctic or the top of Everest. Here I disagree with Musk and my late colleague Stephen Hawking. It’s a dangerous delusion to think that space offers an escape from Earth’s problems. Dealing with climate change on Earth is a doddle compared to terraforming Mars. There’s no ‘planet B’ for ordinary risk-averse people.   But those pioneer adventurers who escape the Earth could be cosmically important. This is why. They’ll be ill-adapted to their new environment, and beyond the clutches of our terrestrial regulators. They will use all the resources of genetics and cybernetics to adapt. They will change faster and could within a few centuries become a new species. Moreover, if they make the transition to fully inorganic intelligences, they won’t need an atmosphere. They may prefer zero-G. They’ll also be nearly immortal. So it’s in deep space—not on Earth, nor even on Mars—that non-biological ‘brains’ may develop powers that humans can’t even imagine.   This raises the question that astronomers are asked most often: is there life out there already? Or is a sterile cosmos awaiting our progeny? We know too little about how life began on Earth to lay confident odds. We don’t know what triggered the transition from complex molecules to entities that can metabolise and reproduce. Moreover, even if simple life is common, it is not clear whether it’s likely to evolve into anything intelligent or complex.   Maybe we’ll one day find ET. On the other hand, Earth’s intricate biosphere could be unique. But it’s important that this wouldn’t render life a cosmic sideshow. That’s because there’s abundant time ahead for posthuman life seeded from Earth to pervade the Galaxy. We’re the outcome of four billion years of Darwinian evolution, but the Sun is less than half way through its life. And the universe may continue for ever. To quote Woody Allen, eternity is very long, especially towards the end.   But even in this ‘concertina’ed’ timeline, extending billions of years into the future as well as into the past, we’re living in a special century. The century when humans could jump-start the transition to entities that far transcend our limitations, and eventually spread their influence far beyond the Earth. Or—to take a darker view— the century where our follies could foreclose the immense future potential and leave an anarchic and depleted planet.   On our future, this century   Zooming back closer to the here and now, one can offer some tentative hopes, fears, and recipes.   Technologies offer huge promise. But our society is brittle, interconnected, and vulnerable. We fret unduly about small risks— air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, etc. But we’re in denial about some newly emergent threats that could be globally devastating. Some of these are environmental—the pressures of a growing and more demanding population. Others are the potential downsides of novel technologies.   And, of course, most of the challenges are global. Coping with potential shortage of food, water, and resources—and transitioning to low-carbon energy—can’t be achieved by each nation separately. Nor can regulation of potentially threatening innovations. Indeed, a key issue is whether nations need to give up more sovereignty to new organisations along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the World Health Organization, etc.   Scientists have an obligation to promote beneficial applications of their work and warn against the downsides. Universities and academies need to assess which scary scenarios—eco-threats, or risks from misapplied technology—can be dismissed as science fiction, and how best to avoid the hazards that cannot be so dismissed.   The trouble is that even the best politicians focus mainly on the urgent and parochial. They do not focus on long-term global issues, or on averting possible catastrophes that haven’t yet happened, unless such policies feature sufficiently prominently in the press and in their inboxes that they are confident they won’t lose votes by endorsing them.   So concerned scientists must enhance their leverage—by involvement with NGOs, via blogging and journalism, and by enlisting charismatic individuals and the media to amplify their voices. Here are two recent instances:   The Papal encyclical Laudato Si’  had a worldwide influence in the lead-up to the Paris climate conference in 2015. There’s no gainsaying the Catholic Church’s global reach, long-term vision, and concern for the world’s poor.   And I doubt that we in the UK would have legislated against non-biodegradable plastic waste had it not been for the BBC’s Blue Planet II  television programmes fronted by our secular pope, David   Attenborough. The images of albatrosses returning to their nests and regurgitating plastic debris are as iconic as the polar bear on the melting ice floe was in the climate debate.   It’s encouraging to witness more activists among the young, who can hope to live to the end of the century. Their vocal commitment is welcome. It gives grounds for hope.   I’ll end with a flashback, right back to the Middle Ages. For medieval people, the entire cosmology—from creation to apocalypse—spanned only a few thousand years. They were bewildered and helpless in the face of floods and pestilences, and prone to irrational dread. Large parts of the Earth were terra incognita .   But they built cathedrals, constructed with primitive technology by masons who knew they wouldn’t live to see them finished—vast and glorious buildings, that still inspire us centuries later.   In contrast, our horizons in space and time are now vastly extended, as are our resources and knowledge. But we don’t plan centuries ahead. This seems a paradox. But there is a reason. Medieval lives played out against a ‘backdrop’ that changed little from one generation to the next. They were confident that they’d have grandchildren who would appreciate the finished cathedral. But for us, unlike for them, the next century will be drastically different from the present. We can’t foresee it, so it’s harder to plan for it. There is now a huge disjunction between the ever-shortening timescales of social and technological change and the billion-year time spans of biology, geology, and cosmology.   ‘Spaceship Earth’ is hurtling through the void. Its passengers are anxious and fractious. Their life-support system is vulnerable to disruption and breakdowns. But there is too little planning—too little horizon-scanning. This ‘pale blue dot’ in the cosmos is a special place. It may be a unique place. And we’re its stewards at a specially crucial era. That’s an important message for us all, whether or not we’re astronomers.   We need to think globally, we need to think rationally, we need to think long-term. We need to be ’good ancestors’, empowered by twenty-first-century technology but guided by values that science alone can’t provide. Professor Lord Rees Professor Martin Rees, Lord Rees of Ludlow OM FRS, is the UK’s Astronomer Royal. He is based at Cambridge University where he is a Fellow (and former Master) of Trinity College. He is a former President of the Royal Society and a member of many foreign academies. His research interests include space exploration, high energy astrophysics, and cosmology. He is co-founder of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at Cambridge University (CSER), and has served on many bodies connected with education, space research, arms control, and international collaboration in science. In addition to his research publications he has written many general articles and ten books, including most recently  On the Future: Prospects for Humanity (paperback version due in October 2021). [1] I’d note that there’s one policy context when an essentially zero discount rate is applied: radioactive waste disposal, where the depositories are required to prevent leakage for at least 10,000 years. This is somewhat ironic, since we can’t plan the rest of energy policy even 30 years ahead. [2] Pandemics also cause far more societal breakdown than in earlier centuries. English villages in the fourteenth century continued to function even when the black death halved their populations. In contrast, our societies would be vulnerable to serious unrest as soon as hospitals were overwhelmed– which would occur before the fatality rate was even one percent. (And there’s likewise huge societal risk from cyberattacks on infrastructure, etc.) [3] I was surprised to find that three academics back in England had gone in for these ‘cryonics’. Two had paid the full whack; the third had taken the cut-price option of wanting just his head frozen. I was glad they were from Oxford, not from my university. For my part, I’d rather end my days in an English churchyard than an American refrigerator.

Nadia Murad is a Yazidi human rights activist. In 2014, she was abducted from her hometown in Iraq, Kocho, by the Islamic State, as part of the Yazidi genocide. After her escape, she founded Nadia's Initiative, which advocates for survivors of sexual violence. In 2018, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize alongside Denis Mukwege for her fight to end the use of sexual violence as a weapon of war and armed conflicts. CJLPA : Throughout history and to present day, we see that whenever armed conflict arises, rape and brutality against women and girls follow. Just recently, we see it repeat in Palestine, Israel, and Ukraine. Outside of war, we see it embedded in society with high rape crimes, forced marriages, inability to choose what we do with our body (whether wanting an abortion or the force of FGM). We expect more for women’s rights. Despite acclaimed efforts from the UN, NGOs, and Member States, in your opinion why does inequality remain a leading global crisis to combat?   Nadia Murad : This is a really interesting question, and you are right because women, wherever in the world they live, are still not afforded true equality.   This inequality is historical, systemic, and cultural. It exists because no one in power has ever felt the want or need to change it. Why would they?   To truly combat inequality, we need to completely rethink the way we approach society.   From their earliest years, children need to see gender equality modelled at home. Both boys and girls should have access to secondary schooling, where the curriculum promotes equality, and the infrastructure of the school building allows girls privacy when changing for sports lessons and access to facilities and necessary products when they have their periods.   Additionally, equality needs to be built into our systems. That begins with basic rights like bodily autonomy and equal pay—but carries on into meaningful female representation in politics, the judiciary and in policy work.   I think we need to look very carefully at our world and ask if it is working well as it is—or do we need to change the way we think?   CJLPA : Further to the above, what are the biggest disappointments from the international community and their responses in respect to helping the victims of sexual violence from armed conflicts? This could be inaction during the conflict, perhaps enabling it (funding state actors responsible), or the response in helping victims after.    NM : I am always disappointed when survivors, like me, give so much of ourselves to tell our stories on a public platform, just to be met with kind words but little meaningful action. From the earliest records of history to the first written stories and poems, women have been used and abused in wartime. For thousands of years it has been accepted. As we saw in Iraq, this abuse is not a momentary loss of morals in the midst of battle on the part of the perpetrators. It is a tactic deployed to break not only the women, but their communities as well. In Iraq, the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used rape as a weapon of genocide. I have been calling for 9 years for the ISIS militants who raped my friends and family members in Iraq to be tried for their crimes. Thousands of Yazidi girls have given testimonies to investigators—at personal cost. Yet only 3 militants have been to court on the charge of genocide. I am disappointed that the international community and the Iraqi government isn’t moving faster here. After all, unless we start showing the world that these kind of heinous crimes will not be tolerated, then sexual violence in conflict will continue with impunity for perpetrators.   This perhaps feeds back into your first question about inequality. Perhaps the international community doesn’t see rape and the ensuing lifelong trauma as problematic enough. It still accepts rape, which mainly happens to women, as simply a side effect of wars begun by men.   CJLPA : What has been overshadowed and not emphasized enough in our world and yet is fundamental for our understanding in helping the victims of the targeted violence against the Yazidi women, and victims from all armed conflicts?   NM : I don’t believe enough emphasis is placed on survivor-centred policies. Only survivors know what they need and what is best for them and their communities for the long term. That’s why Nadia’s Initiative works with and for survivors in Sinjar to rebuild infrastructure like schools and hospitals, but also run educational and economic programs and projects. A photo from Nadia's recent trip to Sinjar. She is embracing a mother at the cemetery at Kocho (Nadia's village). The mother told Nadia that she is terrified she will die before she can be reunited with the bodies of her sons. 400 men were murdered in Kocho in August 2014. I think that authorities and organizations are often not practical enough in the help they give the victims of conflict related sexual violence. These survivors, who are often stigmatized, need meaningful reparations to rebuild their lives. This could come in financial form, but also in psycho-social support or help with housing.   There is also another dimension to the support we can give survivors, and that is how they are treated by investigators and reporters. These vulnerable women are at risk of retraumatisation every time they re-tell their story. This is why I happily put my name to the Murad Code, which is a code of conduct that investigators and reporters should adhere to when speaking to survivors. It allows them agency and control whilst promoting honesty and safety throughout the process.   CJLPA : For you, what is the meaning of ‘justice’?  Can we ever find ‘justice’ for even the most grotesque crimes against humanity such as those inflicted on the Yazidi women and girls? If so, how?   NM : I am often asked this question and I have come to believe that justice is multifaceted. For my community it is certainly judicial; our attackers must be held accountable in court for the evil crimes they committed against us. However, justice can also be more practical; we must rescue the missing women and girls so families can be reunited and reparations can be granted so lives can begin again. Justice can also be more emotional; it can be having a space to grieve for our lost loved ones and it can be found in the acknowledgment of our pain. And, justice can also be found in healing and surviving, in showing the ISIS militants that they did not succeed in eradicating the Yazidi community.   CJLPA : How would you like to see the perpetrators held accountable for these crimes?   NM : My counsel, the barrister Amal Clooney, and I, have been advocating for the implementation of a hybrid court. It would be an internationally supported tribunal which would sit in Baghdad and act as a continuation of UNITAD (the UN team which is investigating ISIS crimes in Iraq). There are a vast number of fighters to process, more than any national court could process at scale, so there would have to be international cooperation and financial backing. This hybrid court would need to be operated in tandem with another country which could then hold homegrown and foreign fighters accountable for the crime of genocide. At the moment they are charged with ‘membership of a terrorist organisation’ which is far more anodyne than the genocide charge of which they are also guilty.   CJLPA : Can you walk us through what happened to the Yazidi women and children upon their escape? What reparations did they receive and to what extent were they supported psychologically and financially?   NM : Everyone has a different story. I lived in an Internally Displaced People (IDP) camp with survivors from my family and then was taken to Germany as a refugee. Thousands of other girls like me are still in camps, without access to privacy, education, or employment. Although the Iraqi government promised reparations—and I am pleased that some Yazidis have benefitted—it has been increasingly hard for many survivors to access them.   It is worth saying though that at least two thousand Yazidi women are still in captivity and we also need to work hard to get them home.   CJLPA : Further to the above, can you speak about the support that is missing for victims currently?   NM : I think that policymakers are often fixed on the short-term and the quick fix for survivors. However, rebuilding communities sustainably requires long-term vision and planning. That's why my initiative plans for decades rather than days. We run economic empowerment and educational programs. We help women set up businesses and then give the support they need to succeed.   Survivors need to know they have a long future in which they can be safe, active, and equal participants in their communities.   Nadia at the Yazidi Genocide Memorial in Sinjar, opened October 2023 and built using funds from her peace prize and USAID. It was a project led by Nadia's Initiative and the International Organization on Migration. More details available at . CJLPA : How can the international community help prevent sexual violence from occurring in conflicts? Are there countries currently that you have seen have begun an inspiring change in their policy that other countries should follow?   NM : The international community must start prosecuting perpetrators of sexual violence in conflict so that it is universally acknowledged that it is not acceptable in any country, in any instance. Germany has led the way in prosecuting its ISIS citizens—but much more needs to be done globally.   CJLPA : You have devoted your life to combat the sexual violence occurring in conflicts and to help save women and children falling victim to these inhumane crimes. You are constantly meeting with policymakers, NGOs, the UN, and going before the courts. How has this experience been to date? Do you find they are responding with the urgency needed?   NM : There is never enough urgency. When I wrote my book, which details the horror of my experience, I said that I wanted to be the last girl this happens to. But I haven’t been the last. There have been so many more which is heartbreaking. It’s not due to a lack of political will, but a lack of political action. I don’t advocate at the UN and with other policy makers just for Yazidi girls, but for all girls. And if we want to keep our girls safe, there has to be a stronger framework.   CJLPA : Further to the above, what laws—domestic and international law—do you think need to change in order to ensure accountability? Inaction is a crime in itself. It is one thing to hold the perpetrators accountable, but what about the countries that are able, but unwilling to help?   NM : I believe that you are right when you say that inaction is a crime in itself. I often think of the governments who looked the other way when my community was under brutal attack. One of the first steps they can take now is to officially recognise the murder of Yazidis in 2014 as a genocide. The second step is to adopt universal jurisdiction so that more foreign fighters can be prosecuted. Beyond that I would advocate for reparations for survivors to be put into law. I have been advocating for reparations for survivors of conflict-related sexual violence (CRSV), not just in Iraq, but in other countries where sexual violence has been used in conflict, including in Ukraine, where I asked the President of Ukraine to consider passing a law that will enable survivors of CRSV to receive reparations.   CJLPA : You created The Murad Code Project which is a set of guidelines aimed at building a community of better practice for, with, and concerning survivors of systematic and conflict-related sexual violence. Can you briefly walk us through what prompted you to this initiative and your hopes for how it will be used moving forward? NM : When I first started telling my story, I was interviewed by many investigators and reporters. Some of them had my best interests at heart and treated me with kindness and gave me agency. However, many did not.   I was not always aware of how my story would be used and I was subjected to questioning that was heartless. Therefore, I wanted to lend my name, experiences, and expertise to a code that worked to protect other survivors from this.   The Murad Code lays out the bare minimum of standards that interviewers should adhere to when they speak to traumatised survivors. It has also been translated into a number of different languages so that survivors know how they should be treated by their interlocutors.   I hope that eventually it will be put into policy frameworks, as well as newsrooms, so that survivors are treated as people with agency, not a walking headline.   CJLPA : What is a final message you would like to send to the reader, in the name of spreading awareness and inspiring hope?   NM : There is always hope. Even when the world seems dark, there are good people working for justice, peace, and a stable future. This interview was conducted by Nadia Jahnecke, Legal Editor and Founder of Human Rights Volume of CJLPA 3. In addition to her role at CJLPA, Nadia is a qualified lawyer in England & Wales specialising in public international law.

Abstract Expressionism emerged amid a tense post-war climate, as a new genre of art that seemed so devoid of representational form or meaning that it could not be political. However, it was precisely this apparent apoliticality that made it so intensely political. Historiography on the topic has followed what I am inclined to call a ‘top-down’ trend. As outlined by Eva Cockcroft and Frances Stonor Saunders, those in power consciously used the art of the Abstract Expressionists as a means of cultural diplomacy or propaganda to influence the opinions of both Western and Russian intelligentsia. In this sense it provided a riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism.[1] It is important to note that this view was precipitated by the 1967 exposé which revealed the CIA’s political involvement in the Cultural Cold War, and it has been supported since.[2] By contrast, revisionist interpretations, such as Kozloff’s Artforum  piece, have sought to present the parallels between ‘American Cold War rhetoric’ and the individualistic philosophy of Abstract Expressionism as purely coincidental. They cite the lack of evidence of political manoeuvres and agreements between arts institutions—such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)—and the US government.[3]   To evaluate the extent to which Abstract Expressionism was an ideological weapon, one must explore the intentions of the actors involved in the structure of the cultural-diplomatic operation— if that is how one characterises the movement. It is necessary to analyse the objectives of artists within the movement, as well as subsequent interpretations by critics and those at the forefront of the American conservative backlash. It is more plausible that the political significance of Abstract Expressionism was created by those with influence—such as art critics and the heads of cultural institutions, whose opinions carried intellectual weight—than by artists. MoMA enthusiastically supported Abstract Expressionism through exhibitions abroad, and there were suspicious links between its leadership and that of the CIA, as highlighted by Louis Menand and David and Cecile Shapiro. These facts further endorse this view.[4] Abstract Expressionism was in many ways a riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism, but the discourse between these two movements is beyond the scope of this essay, which instead interrogates the institutional processes behind this politicisation of the American art movement. Although individuals at all levels of influence had the political agency to engender combative ideology, those in the upper echelons of the political structure were markedly energetic in their promotion of art as a tool of war. They ensured Abstract Expressionism was rendered a weapon in the Cultural Cold War.   In many cases, artists did not produce work with a political purpose in mind. Art critics were largely responsible for constructing the combative personality of Abstract Expressionism. ‘Abstract Expressionism’ encompassed such a wide range of abstract art that those within it were reluctant to label themselves a collective. Yet, a common feature of Abstract Expressionist works was the absence of distinguishable or referential subject matter, and therefore any apparent political leaning. However, if one were to emphasise the significance of the artist’s agency, as Stonor Saunders does in her view that it is ‘hard to sustain the argument that the Abstract Expressionists merely “happened to be painting in the Cold War and not for the Cold War”’, then the artist’s political affiliation would become of interest to the historian.[5]   Harold Rosenberg, an influential art critic and outspoken supporter of Abstract Expressionism, proposes an argument from individualism for the artist’s personal agency. However, this interpretation of Abstract Expressionism is flawed. Rosenberg asserts that the new ‘American Action Painters’ were distinct because of their ‘consciousness of a function for a painting’, tacitly implying the possibility of the politicality of Abstract Expressionists.[6] However, his argument that the ‘act-painting is of the same metaphysical substance as the artist’s existence’ contradicts this. It suggests that the artist’s work is inextricable from biographical influences, and therefore that one is incapable of creating work with a meaning or motive different from those of their artistic upbringing.[7] Furthermore, when applied to Abstract Expressionism in the context of the Cold War, the argument invalidates that of Stonor Saunders. The infamous Jackson Pollock had previously worked in the workshops of Communist-sponsored artists. He had also collaborated with Mexican muralist David Alfaro Siqueiros, a Mexican Communist Party member and supporter of Stalinism. Had Pollock’s artistic life been truly inseparable from his work, his art could be read by Rosenberg as ‘communistic’. Cockcroft believed that the alignment between American Cold War ideals and ‘the way many Abstract Expressionists phrased their existentialist-individualist credos’ was ‘consciously forged’. This is unconvincing, yet so is Max Kozloff’s argument that it was coincidental.[8] New York School artists were more probably concerned with creating the first internationally influential American artistic movement than with using their art as a propaganda weapon. This was instead done by those in power. We must therefore view the artist and the influencer as working within individual yet intersecting spheres.   The compelling rhetoric of American freedom that critics and officials applied to Abstract Expressionism engendered a pugnacious artistic climate. There was debate between art critics such as Alfred Barr and American conservatives on the movement’s ‘communistic’ leanings. This debate demonstrates how art was not merely ‘for art’s sake’, but was viewed as a propagandistic battleground. Barr countered conservative assertions, such as those of Representative Dondero, in a 1952 New York Times  piece. It exemplifies the rhetoric of individualism that both critics and state figures repeatedly used as a riposte to Socialist Realism and the oppressive nature of Soviet totalitarianism.[9] Barr stated that ‘the modern artist’s non-conformity and love of freedom cannot be tolerated within a monolithic tyranny and modern art is useless for the dictators’ propaganda’. These statements dismiss the ‘communistic’ leanings of Abstract Expressionism and reframe it as a symbol of political freedom.[10] Moreover, Socialist Realism came to be included in the US artistic sphere, for example with MoMA’s 1946 retrospective exhibition of the Lithuanian-born American Socialist Realist artist Ben Shahn, strengthening the US’s philosophy of freedom. Giants of capitalist business, such as Rockefeller, appeared open to funding art like that being displayed on the other side of the Iron Curtain. Although the US government itself exported art, without critics such as Barr and Rosenberg, as well as the actions of MoMA, Abstract Expressionism would have been a futile and apolitical ‘weapon’.   MoMA’s economic connections exemplify how a Manhattan-based oligarchy used Abstract Expressionism to further the political interests of American capitalism. MoMA’s funding, leadership, and very foundation were supported overtly by American financiers, and covertly by the CIA. The establishment of MoMA in 1929 was enabled by the support of Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, and Nelson Rockefeller controlled it throughout the 1940s and 1950s—the peak of its cultural-diplomatic ventures. Cockcroft compellingly asserts that one must look to patronage and the ‘ideological needs of the powerful’ when analysing the success of an artistic movement.[11] It is difficult to maintain that MoMA would have had free rein without its Rockefeller benefactors. As giants of American capitalism, the Rockefellers would surely have supported the exhibition of a movement which advertised the US’ rhetoric of freedom. One might disregard the connection between a person’s wealth and their politics. Nonetheless, it is not a far-fetched possibility that Nelson Rockefeller, a high-profile Republican and one-term Vice President, would have supported US cultural-diplomatic ventures against the Soviet intellectual threat. The US arts sector was privatised, unlike its European counterparts. This let what David Caute describes as ‘the pantheon of ever-ready demons of patronage’ influence American psychological warfare, and thus Cold War politics.[12]   MoMA’s International Council energetically displayed Abstract Expressionism abroad, demonstrating how the movement was used as cultural propaganda directed at Western European intellectuals. MoMA’s purchase of the US Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, and subsequent curation of its exhibitions there between 1954 and 1962, was the first time a Biennale pavilion had been autonomous from government ownership and influence. However, much like for Abstract Expressionism itself, the apparent apoliticality of this was more likely a front. MoMA’s leaders had vested interests in the fight against communism. Abstract Expressionism already had a support base in Venice at Peggy Guggenheim’s palazzo—she had given Pollock one-man shows in 1943, 1945, and 1947. MoMA exhibited Willem De Kooning’s work in a US pavilion at an international event in 1948. Cockcroft argues that its private ownership made this pavilion free of ‘the kinds of pressure of unsubtle red-baiting and super-jingoism applied to official governmental agencies’.[13]   MoMA aggressively exported Abstract Expressionism across Europe through exhibitions in the late 1950s. ‘Modern Art in the United States’ toured Europe in 1956. The largest of its five sections dedicated to ‘Contemporary Abstract Art’ comprised 28 paintings by 17 Abstract Expressionists. In 1959, ‘The New American Painting’ was shown in eight European countries. The tour would have exposed Western European intellectuals, many of whom might have been Soviet travellers, to an artistic movement which stylistically promoted American ideals of freedom of personal expression. It ran contrary to the Socialist Realism of the USSR, an explicit form of propaganda.   The US government passionately endorsed cultural diplomacy through art, both covertly and overtly. As mentioned, there is evidence, albeit dubious, of CIA influence on MoMA’s leadership. Thomas Braden, executive secretary of MoMA in the late 1940s, went on to join the CIA as Supervisor of Cultural Activities in 1951. Braden enthusiastically supported the export of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon in the ‘propaganda war’.[14] He defended this in his 1967 article ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’: given that the Cold War was ‘fought with ideas instead of bombs’, ‘to choose innocence [was] to choose defeat’.[15] Furthermore, René d’Harnoncourt and Porter A McCray, both from Roosevelt’s Center of Inter-American Affairs, later joined MoMA. McCray, described by Cockcroft as a key figure in the history of ‘cultural imperialism’, joined as director of the museum’s international programmes.[16] However, state intervention was more direct in some instances, with open government sponsorship of exhibitions. In 1946, the Office of International Information and Cultural Affairs curated ‘Advancing American Art’, an exhibition which used $49,000 of government money to purchase 79 paintings. Although its art was not exclusively abstract, the collection was overwhelmingly Modernist, providing an apt riposte to Soviet Socialist Realism.   The most explicit and successful example of Abstract Expressionism’s deployment as a Cold War weapon was at the American National Exhibition’s visit to Moscow’s Sokolniki Park in 1959. Its open sponsorship by the USIA (United States Information Agency) is significant. The USIA helped censor the work of ‘avowed communists … or persons who publicly refuse to answer questions of Congressional committees regarding connection with the communist movement’.[17] David and Cecile Shapiro assert that almost anything was a potential target for ‘congressional pot-shots’. This supports traditional interpretations that emphasise the role of Abstract Expressionism as a weapon in the Cold War. Critics had so successfully fostered a connection between Abstract Expressionism and the ideals of the American psyche that the State was willing to promote it. Marilyn S Kushner asserts that despite Pollock’s Cathedral  (1947) and Lachaise’s Standing Woman  (1932) being seen   as ‘grotesque and mocking’, the art at the exhibition was seen as a ‘manifestation of a free society, much as was originally intended by the USIA’.[18] Pollock’s brash handling of paint, his cold colour palette, and his non-representational subject matter may have contributed to Soviet disdain. They were antithetical to the vibrant colours used by artists such as Taslitzky, and the highly naturalistic scenes, frequently of a political subject matter, painted by Gerasimov.[19] This display of American values in the heart of the Soviet world sparked questions of political freedom, particularly from young Soviets who were interested in what forbidden ideals they had been sheltered from. It was an aggressive form of propaganda.   Abstract Expressionist works were not, therefore, inherently weapons of the cultural Cold War. Harold Rosenberg, in ‘American Action Painters’, said that Abstract Expressionists created an ‘environment not of people but of functions’, that ‘his paintings are employed  not wanted ’ (my italics).[20] Abstract Expressionism was not   created with the purpose of being a psychological weapon against communism, but those with intellectual influence politicised it and made it such. It was this ‘middle stratum’ that engendered and buttressed cultural diplomacy through art. I have taken a hierarchical approach to analysing the impact of different strata within the cultural-diplomatic structure—from the artists, to the critic, to the museum, to the state. This approach demonstrates that critics created the weapon through politicising the apolitical Abstract Expressionism and aligning it with American ideals. Furthermore, MoMA, allied with the state, physically exported and mobilised art as propaganda, using the weapon created by critics. First came the fashioning of a culture that was anti-communist, and thus anti-Socialist Realist. Along with this came the dissemination of a belief among US art critics that Abstract Expressionism was the superior movement. Second came the aggressive physical exportation and touring of the artworks across Europe, including to Moscow in the late 1950s, in an attempt to woo Western intellectuals with the ‘benefits’ of capitalism. These currents were mutually supportive, bolstering the idea that art could be political. Regardless of whether the US government was successful in its psychological war against the Soviet Union, the argument that Abstract Expressionism was used as a weapon in the Cold War is persuasive. Mina Polo   Mina Polo is a second-year undergraduate in History at University College London, interested in cultural history. In 2021, she hopes to take further her research on jazz diplomacy and its impact on the American Civil Rights Movement. [1] Eva Cockcroft, Abstract Expressionism: Weapon of the Cold War. Pollock and   After: The Critical Debate  (Harper and Row 1985) 125-33; Frances Stonor Saunders, Who Paid the Piper?: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War  (Granta 1999). [2] In March 1967, Ramparts Magazine  exposed links between the CIA and the National Students’ Association (NSA), revealing the extent of the alleged Operation Mockingbird. In May of that year, Thomas Braden’s Saturday Evening Post article ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’ unveiled the   connections between the CIA and US cultural programs. [3] Max Kozloff, ‘American Painting during the Cold War’ in Francis Frascina (ed), Pollock and After: The Critical Debate (Routledge 2000). [4] Louis Menand, ‘Unpopular Front: American Art and the Cold War’ The New Yorker ; David Shapiro and Cecile Shapiro, ‘Excerpt from “Abstract   Expressionism: The Politics of Apolitical Painting” Part 3’ in Reading Abstract Expressionism: Context and Critique  (Yale University Press 2005). [5] Stonor Saunders (n 1) (as quoted in David Caute, The Dancer Defects: The Struggle for Cultural Supremacy during the Cold War (Oxford University Press 2008) 546). [6] Harold Rosenberg, ‘The American Action Painters’ (first published 1952) in Harold Rosenberg, The Tradition of the New (Horizon Press 1959) 24. [7] ibid 28. [8] Cockcroft (n 1) 126. [9] Alfred H Barr, ‘Is Modern Art Communistic?’ The New York Times  (New York, 14 December 1952). [10] ibid 22. [11] Cockcroft (n 1) 125. [12] Caute (n 5) 541. [13] Cockcroft (n 1) 129. [14] Shapiro and Shapiro (n 4) 441. [15] Thomas W Braden, ‘I’m Glad the CIA is “Immoral”’ The Saturday Evening Post  (20 May 1967) 14. [16] Cockcroft (n 1) 127. [17] As quoted in Shapiro and Shapiro (n 4) 339-40. [18] Marilyn S Kushner, ‘Exhibiting Art at the American National Exhibition in Moscow, 1959’ (2002) 4(1) Journal of Cold War Studies 19. [19] See the paintings The Strikes of June, 1936 (Boris Taslitzky 1936), and Stalin and Voroshilov in the Kremlin  (Aleksandr Gerasimov 1938).   Gerasimov won the Stalin Prize in 1941 for this painting. [20] Rosenberg (n 6) 38.

Introduction   The principle of parliamentary sovereignty has been a long-held tenet of the UK’s unwritten constitution. AV   Dicey outlined its features in 1885. However, 87 years later, the UK became a member of the European Economic Communities, with the European Communities Act 1972 providing the domestic legal basis for EU law in the UK. Lord Denning described EU law as ‘an incoming tide […] [that] cannot be held back’.[1] However, others, such as Professor Phillip Norton, likened the relationship between the UK and EU as a ‘patchwork quilt’, with the UK consistently being in a position of ‘playing catch-up of trying to make sense of the constitutional consequences of different treaties negotiated since membership’.[2] This is perhaps best illustrated by the relationship between EU supremacy and the UK’s parliamentary sovereignty.   As a result of membership to the EU, the UK became subject to the extensive doctrine of EU supremacy, firmly established by the CJEU in Costa v Enel  in 1964. In 1991, the House of Lords (in Factortame ) were required to set aside primary legislation which was found to be incompatible with EU Law provisions.[3] The ruling in Factortame  gave rise to numerous arguments that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and the doctrine of EU supremacy were incompatible. This argument was a significant driving force behind the UK leaving the EU. This essay explores two questions. Firstly, the position of parliamentary sovereignty while the UK was still a member state of the EU, and in particular whether or not EU supremacy and parliamentary sovereignty were in fact incompatible. Secondly, whether leaving the EU helped to restore a traditional notion of sovereignty, by examining the role and development of the courts in Miller  (No 1)[4], devolution and the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018, and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022.    While the primary focus is the legal effect that the UK’s EU membership and subsequent withdrawal had on the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, discussions regarding Brexit, Parliament, and the constitution are inherently influenced by politics. In 2009, Vernon Bogdanor argued that the UK is ‘as a nation notoriously uninterested in our constitution’, due to the nature of the constitution. As such, he notes that ‘constitution’ has two meanings. Firstly, it can refer to ‘a selection of the most important legal rules regulating the government and embodied in a document promulgated in a particular moment in time’.[5] Regarding the second meaning of ‘constitution’, Bogdanor asserts that ‘anyone living in an organised society must certainly possess a constitution’.[6] It is in this category of constitution that the UK falls. However, since conversations around the UK leaving the EU began, the UK’s constitution and parliamentary sovereignty in particular have been brought to the forefront of parliamentary debates, which have consequently been amplified by the media.[7] This has shaped public opinion on the relationship between EU membership and parliamentary sovereignty and brought the topic of the UK’s constitutional arrangements to a more prominent position compared to the suggestion of Bogdanor in 2009. Furthermore, while the question of devolution and its effect on parliamentary sovereignty is undoubtedly an important one, it is nonetheless a complex area within the UK’s constitution. In light of this complexity, and constraints on space, this essay will focus on devolution in Scotland.   This essay ultimately puts forward the view that EU membership was not incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty and that sovereignty was still able to operate in a meaningful way following Factortame . This is on the basis that while EU membership undoubtedly resulted in a move away from the traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty, this change resulted from a natural evolution of an uncodified principle rather than a single revolutionary change. In light of this natural evolution, it is argued that the act of leaving the EU alone cannot amount to the restoration of the traditional interpretation of sovereignty in the nineteenth century.   The Position of Parliamentary Sovereignty throughout EU Membership   Following the Treaty of Rome (1958), the European Economic Community (EEC) was formed. The initial member states were comprised of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and Italy. The EEC, therefore, formed the basis for the EU. The EU expanded from a body solely focused on the economic integration of member states, into a complex and sophisticated legal system, enacting legislation throughout a large range of policy areas.[8] With the EU enacting significant amounts of legislation, in such an extensive range of areas (in addition to various requirements as to how it should be integrated into domestic law), the question arises as to how this legislation is followed uniformly and consistently throughout the member states. This question was first raised in Costa v Enel .[9]   In Costa , the issue was whether pieces of national legislation could prevail over community law where the two were in conflict. The Italian government argued that community law had been ‘transposed into the Italian legal order by national legislation’.[10] However, the CJEU, in their preliminary ruling, reasoned: ‘By contrast with ordinary principles of international treaties, the EEC treaty had created its own legal system, which on entry into force of the treaty, became an integral part of the legal systems of that member state and which their courts are bound to apply’.[11] The CJEU stated: ‘The transfer by the states from their domestic legal system to the community legal system of rights and obligations arising under the treaties carries with it a permanent limitation on their sovereign rights’.[12] The decision was a clear statement from the CJEU in regard to the doctrine of EU law supremacy—where domestic law and community law are in conflict, community law will take precedence.   The subsequent German case of Internationale Handelsgesellschaft [13] demonstrated how far the doctrine of EU supremacy could extend. At issue was whether or not EU law can take precedence over the fundamental rights enshrined in the German constitution where the two were in conflict.[14] The CJEU held that the government could not take recourse to the legal rules or concepts of national law in order to judge the validity of community law.[15] Costa  and Internationale Handelsgesellschaft demonstrate the wide-reaching effect that the doctrine of EU law supremacy has upon the domestic legal systems of EU member states. This brings us to the question of how the doctrine of EU supremacy has been received within the UK’s unwritten constitution and legal framework.   In 1972, the UK became a member of the EU. This was facilitated within domestic law via the European Communities Act 1972 (ECA 1972).[16] The UK constitution is unwritten, meaning that the principle of parliamentary sovereignty is not codified formally. Nonetheless, the principle has historically been written about and defined by writers such as A V Dicey. In 1885, Dicey outlined three key elements of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty. Firstly, parliament can make or unmake any law that it chooses. Secondly, parliament cannot bind its successors. And finally, no other institution can set aside or override an act of parliament.[17] The first significant UK case concerning the potential conflict between the doctrine of EU supremacy and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty came in 1991 in Factortame .[18]   The Factortame  case arose following the implementation of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988. S 14 required vessels to register in order to be able to fish in British waters. However, to do so, the vessels were required to either be British-owned or be managed from within the UK. Therefore, any vessel which did not meet these requirements was unable to be re-registered under the new provisions. 95 (predominately Spanish-controlled) vessels were unable to re-register under the act.[19] The Spanish vessels sought a judicial review, claiming that this provision infringed on their rights granted by EU law. A key question arose as to whether the appellants could be granted interim relief. While the House of Lords agreed that the appellants would ‘suffer irreparable damage’[20] if they were not granted interim relief by temporarily suspending the provision, they held that the national courts did not have the power to grant such a measure[21] and sent the case to the CJEU for a preliminary ruling.   Regarding this, the CJEU held that ‘the obligations on national courts to apply community law having direct effect and to protect rights which the latter confers on individuals includes the obligation to consider whether interim protection of rights claimed against the authorities of a member state should be granted in order to avoid irremediable damage and, where appropriate, to grant such interim relief’.[22] It has often been suggested that the ruling demonstrates how the UK’s membership in the EU, and therefore the acceptance of EU supremacy, was incompatible with the principle of parliamentary sovereignty since an institution other than Parliament was obliged to suspend the enforcement of a provision from an Act. Therefore, the Parliament of 1988 had been bound by the Parliament of 1972.   This was the view taken by William Wade. Writing in 1996, following the Factortame  decision, Wade states: ‘While Britain remains in the community, we are in a regime in which Parliament has bound it’s successors successfully, and for which it is nothing if not revolutionary’.[23] Wade goes on note that while the 1972 Act was being passed by Parliament, there was much debate as to whether entering the EU would bind Parliament’s successors. However, ultimately, ‘members were assured that the sovereignty of Parliament would remain intact because it was legally indestructible’[24] on the basis that any provision made under the Act could be repealed and that Parliament remained free to repeal the 1972 Act whenever it chose. While recent history has demonstrated the latter remained true throughout the UK’s period as a member state, Wade nevertheless ultimately argues that ‘Parliament’s powers had suffered a seismic change’ following Factortame .[25] However, the extent to which this could be considered to be true has been subject to debate.   In the House of Lords ruling on Factortame ,[26] Lord Bridge asserts that there was clear jurisprudence surrounding the doctrine of EU supremacy prior to the UK joining the EU. Therefore, ‘whatever limitation of its sovereignty when it enacted the European Communities Act 1972 was entirely voluntary’. Furthermore, Lord Bridge goes on to state that ‘similarly, when decisions of the CJEU have exposed areas of UK statute law which have failed to implement Council directives, Parliament has always loyally accepted the obligation to make appropriate and prompt amendments. Thus, there is nothing in any way novel in according supremacy to rules of community law to those areas to which they apply’.[27]   The statements of Lord Bridge therefore give rise to the suggestion that parliamentary sovereignty was not drastically changed as a consequence of the UK being a member of the EU. While some change to parliamentary sovereignty did occur, the changes were not as ‘seismic’ as Wade asserts. Mark Elliot notes that the constitutional significance of disapplying an Act of Parliament ‘was reduced to little more than background to the litigation’. Furthermore, Elliot highlights that while it was only Lord Bridge who spoke about such issues in his judgement, this was only insofar as to highlight that, as noted earlier, Parliament voluntarily accepted a limitation on its sovereignty by enacting the ECA 1972. However, Elliot also notes several ways in which the domestic courts could have responded to Factortame . Firstly, the House of Lords could have held that ‘the primary responsibility of the UK Courts is to give effect to the most recent expression of Parliament’s will’ and consequently enforced the provisions of the Merchant Shipping Act 1988 in question, regardless of their compatibility with EU Law. However, as Elliot notes, ‘such a response would have implied a very rigid understanding of the domestic constitutional order and notion of parliamentary sovereignty’, notwithstanding the difficulties which would arise as a consequence of the UK breaching its international obligations. The second approach explained by Elliot highlights that the approach adopted by the House of Lords was more ‘intermediate’ in nature. Thus, instead of the UK constitution being fixed and unmoving, it is, ‘flexible enough to accord to EU law some degree of priority over incompatible domestic legislation’.[28]   Upon this view, it can be suggested that Wade’s approach fails to consider any form of flexibility in domestic constitutional law. Paul Craig highlights that Wade’s analysis of the traditional view of sovereignty is based, in part, on the reasoning that ‘Parliament is sovereign in the sense there depicted because it accords with the reasoning of Coke, Blackstone and Dicey’.[29] While this accords with Elliot’s rigid interpretation of how Factortame  could have potentially been decided, this ultimately was not followed by the Court. Therefore, Wade’s strong adherence to the traditional notion of sovereignty fails to consider the possibility of flexibility and, consequently, any degree of a natural evolution of sovereignty and how this may affect its operation.   At the time of the Factortame  case, Dicey’s writing on parliamentary sovereignty was already over 100 years old. In addition to this, sovereignty, alongside other principles of the UK constitution, remains formally uncodified. Due to the uncodified nature of parliamentary sovereignty, it is impossible for it to not be subject to change or evolution as society evolves. While membership to the EU has changed Dicey’s traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty, such a change ultimately highlights the existence of the ability for sovereignty to evolve and adapt to the needs of modern society. In Factortame , sovereignty was shown to be flexible enough to encompass the doctrine of EU supremacy. Consequently, Wade’s strong assertions that sovereignty suffered a ‘seismic change’ in the wake of Factortame  and that this was ‘nothing short of revolutionary’ seem diminished.[30]   NW Barber arguably takes a more extreme view than Wade and states that parliamentary sovereignty no longer existed following Factortame . Barber asserts that ‘when the pre-1991 interpretations are considered, it is clear that the rule ceased to be a feature in the British Constitution after Factortame ’.[31] However, the role of the courts under the Human Rights Act 1998 (HRA 1998) can be seen as evidence to challenge this view. The HRA 1998 was enacted to give effect to the European Convention of Human Rights (ECHR) within domestic law. However, in situations where courts cannot give effect to a provision in a way which is compatible with convention rights, courts do not have the power to strike down incompatible legislation. Section 4 only allows for higher courts to make a declaration of incompatibility. However, such declarations do not ‘affect the validity, continuing operation or enforcement of the provision in respect to which it was given’.[32] It is therefore the decision of Parliament to amend any provisions deemed incompatible with convention rights. Although Lord Hope notes that the court’s ability to interpret legislation under s 3(1) is ‘far-reaching’,[33] the fact that the courts cannot strike down legislation and such power remained with Parliament suggests that parliamentary sovereignty did in fact continue to operate following Factortame . This is on the basis that powers granted to the courts under s 4 ultimately respects that Parliament is the ultimate law-making body.   Overall, concerning the question of whether EU Membership infringed on parliamentary sovereignty, it can be shown that while there was a move away from the traditional interpretation of sovereignty as a result of EU membership, the principle was nonetheless still able to operate while the UK was a member of the EU. This is on the basis that this represented a natural development of a long-standing uncodified principle. Therefore, sovereignty was able to adapt and change to fulfil the requirements of EU membership while still being able to operate meaningfully.   The Courts and Parliamentary Sovereignty    The case of Miller  (No1)[34] arose amid the Government’s attempt to use prerogative powers in order to trigger Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union (TEU),[35] which enables member states to begin the process of leaving the EU. Article 50(2) requires that the member state notifies the European Council of their intention to withdraw. Once this notice has been given, a two-year period begins in which a withdrawal agreement must be negotiated between the member state and the European Council.[36]   Following the 2016 Referendum, Prime Minister Theresa May’s government attempted to use prerogative powers to trigger Article 50. Gina Miller, alongside other applicants, challenged this use of prerogative powers. The case was brought on the basis that once notice had been given it could not be reversed. Consequently, the use of prerogative powers would ‘pre-empt the decision of Parliament on the Great Repeal Bill’ which would amount to ‘altering the law by ministerial action […] Without prior legislation’.[37] Delivering their judgement in January 2017, the Supreme Court highlighted the comments of Lord Denning in Blackburn v Attorney General , which outlined the general position of treaty negotiations: ‘The treaty making provisions of this country rest not in the courts but the Crown […] When ministers negotiate a treaty […] They act on behalf of the country as a whole’.[38] However, despite recognising this general position, the court noted that withdrawing from the EU would ‘constitute as significant a constitutional change’[39] as joining the EU in 1972. Accordingly, ‘it would be inconsistent with the long-standing and fundamental principle for such a far-reaching change to the UK constitutional arrangements to be brought about by[…]ministerial action alone’.[40] Additionally, it was noted that EU law created a distinct source of law and legal rights which had become ‘inextricably linked’ with domestic rights and obligations from other sources of law.[41] It was the view of the majority that the government could not trigger Article 50 using prerogative powers and instead required the consent of Parliament via an Act of Parliament in order to do so.[42] This led to the passing of the European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017.   The reasoning of the majority has been criticised. Mark Elliot puts forward the view that the majority’s assertion that major constitutional changes can only be made by legislation ‘lacks support in authority, imports into law a novel and highly imprecise criterion by which prerogative powers are delimited and rests upon normative powers that are unarticulated and notably absent’.[43] Despite this, there has been support for the court’s ruling, suggesting that it essentially accords with existing common law principles.[44] An example of such a principle can be seen in the Fire Brigades Union case in 1995, where Lord Browne-Wilkinson stated: ‘It would most surprising if, at present day, prerogative powers could be validly exercised by the executive as to frustrate the will of Parliament […] and to an extent, pre-empt the decision of Parliament’.[45] Therefore, for Barber, Hickman, and King, the decision upholds the sovereignty of Parliament.[46] In this light, the Supreme Court’s decision to prevent the Government from using prerogative in Miller (No. 1)  can be seen as the Court maintaining Parliament’s sovereignty and it’s law-making power, albeit in what has been considered an unorthodox way.   Throughout the UK’s membership to the EU, the nature and role of the domestic courts have undoubtedly developed and altered.[47] However, this is in no way novel, as there have also been instances of the courts developing in order to meet the circumstances and challenges of the time. One historical example of this is the development of the Court of Chancery in the Middle Ages. Prior to the Norman Conquest in 1066, the legal system in England was fragmented and varied depending on the area, with no official records.[48] The common law system which subsequently developed during this period comprised of very rigid and inflexible principles which would often lead to unfair outcomes.[49] Individuals could petition the King to adjudicate on their issue. Sir John Baker highlights that as far back as King Alfred, coronation oaths referred to a ‘clear royal duty of ensuring equitable judgements’.[50] This function of the King was in time delegated to the Lord Chancellor and eventually led to the development of the Courts of Chancery. The Court of Chancery was much more flexible than that of the Common Law courts, having powers that the Common Law courts did not.[51] The two courts operated separately alongside one another until the Judicature Acts of 1873 and 1875, removing the Chancery and Common Law courts and replacing them with the High Court (which was split into the Chancery, King’s Bench and Family Divisions)[52] which are still seen today.[53]   The above illustrates that the development and evolution of the Constitution and other similarly important areas have arisen when needed to address areas of the law considered deficient. While membership to the EU can be considered a catalyst for some of the developments seen in recent decades, the evolution of constitutional principles can nonetheless be shown to not be limited to the period in which the UK was a member of the EU. On this basis, as the evolution of parliamentary sovereignty cannot be solely attributed to EU membership, the act of leaving the EU alone cannot restore a traditional notion of sovereignty due to other factors which may influence development.   Devolution and Parliamentary Sovereignty   Another significant constitutional development which has had a more direct impact on parliamentary sovereignty, is the implementation and development of devolution. In 1973, the Kilbrandon Commission recommended that devolution of some powers should occur, with Scotland and Wales having their own elected assemblies. Professor Norton highlights that there are both political and economic benefits to devolution: it allows individuals in devolved regions to have ‘a greater sense of attachment to the [political] process’ and resources can be more easily allocated where needed.[54]   Despite support for devolution in the early 70s, devolution in Scotland was not facilitated until the late 1990s with the Scotland Act 1998. While Scotland was already considered to have a significant degree of ‘administrative devolution’, the 1998 act nonetheless developed this in two distinct ways. Firstly, by ‘conferring legislative competence on the Scottish Parliament’, and, secondly, ‘create[ing] new institutions for political representations in Scotland’. These developments allowed Scotland to have a greater degree of control over law and policy and has been said to have created a greater divide between Scotland and Westminster in this regard.[55] The subsequent Scotland Acts of 2012 and 2016 further widened the powers of the Scottish Parliament.[56]   The implementation of devolution has given rise to a debate on whether the UK has developed into a ‘Quasi-federal’ state. Nicholas Aroney highlights that while the UK has traditionally been considered a ‘unitary state’, the development of devolution has ‘given creditability’ to this debate. Furthermore, Aroney notes that while devolution has created a degree of federalism in the UK (due to Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland having their own elected legislatures), there are important differences between the UK and traditional federal systems. Firstly, due to the powers of the devolved legislatures being granted by virtue of the Westminster Parliament, instead of a written constitution binding the two. Secondly, due to the level of asymmetry fundamental to the system. Aroney argues that this is because while Wales, Scotland and Northern Island’s devolution frameworks are ‘tailored’ to each territory, England does not have a corresponding devolved institution and is instead governed solely by the Westminster Parliament.[57] With the above in mind, it can be argued that devolution does not strictly accord with Dicey’s traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty, due to an institution other than the Westminster Parliament having the power to make laws. While the Westminster Parliament does retain the ultimate law-making power in the UK and therefore remains sovereign in that sense, devolution can nonetheless be shown to represent another development away from Dicey’s interpretation of sovereignty.   The potential side-effect of quasi-federalism on parliamentary sovereignty can be seen in the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill) 2022. The bill seeks to sunset all retained EU law by the end of December 2023, unless explicitly specifically saved by a Minister. However, in regard to retained EU law that falls under a devolved competence, the bill allows a Minister of said devolved legislature to save it from being sunsetted. However, it has been noted that the powers under the bill have been drafted so widely that ministers of devolved nations could potentially save all retained EU law and devolved competence from being sunsetted.[58] In regard to Scotland specifically, the 2016 Brexit referendum saw the majority of Scotland voting to remain in the EU. In light of this, the Scottish Parliament may elect to save all retained EU law which falls under its competence. A consequence of this would be a greater divergence of laws between Scotland and Westminster which would have further impact on the operation of parliamentary sovereignty. Furthermore, this course of action also does not align with Dicey’s interpretation of sovereignty.   Overall, the implementation of devolution in the UK represents a further development in the operation of parliamentary sovereignty away from Dicey’s traditional interpretation of it. Therefore, in light of such a significant constitutional development, an attempt to restore the traditional notion of parliamentary sovereignty can be shown to be a far more complex endeavour than simply withdrawing from the EU.   EU Withdrawal and Parliamentary Sovereignty   The European Union (Withdrawal) Act (EUWA) 2018 sought to deal with the ‘wide-ranging impact upon the law of the United Kingdom upon exit of the European Union’. Its primary aim was to create a framework whereby the roughly 20,000 pieces of EU-derived legislation could be preserved in domestic law upon the UK’s exit from the EU.[59] While the Act makes wide-ranging provisions for various types of retained EU law (REUL), this essay will focus on the continuation of EU supremacy and the extensive powers given to ministers to correct ‘deficiencies’ left behind by EU law.   S 5 of the EUWA outlines the circumstances in which the principle of supremacy continues to operate. While s 5(1) states that supremacy does not apply to legislation made on or after completion day, s 5(2) states that ‘Accordingly, the principle of supremacy of EU law continues to apply on or after [IP Completion] day so far as relevant to the interpretation, disapplication or quashing of any enactment made on or before [IP completion] day’.[60] While Elliot and Tierney note that limiting the scope of EU supremacy to pre-exit legislation was a sensible course of action, the continued use of the word ‘supremacy’ was problematic.[61] This issue was explored by the House of Lords Constitutional Committee in their report on EUWA when it was still in bill form.[62] Despite the committee agreeing with the policy aims behind the provision[63] they highlighted several issues with how the government sought to achieve it. Firstly, they expressed concern with the ‘vagueness and ambiguity’ of the provision, in particular in regard to the types of retained EU law the principle is to continue to apply to,[64] in addition to ‘which forms of domestic law […] are intended to yield to retained EU law because of the supremacy principle’.[65]   However, the most significant issue highlighted by the Constitution Committee was the question of how EU supremacy could be ‘meaningfully’ maintained following exit day,[66] saying that the continuation of supremacy ‘is a fundamental flaw at the heart of the bill’.[67] While the Committee made several suggestions as to how to remedy this, the Government declined to make any changes and the bill was enacted with EU supremacy still operating post-exit from the EU. S 1 of the EUWA expressly repeals the ECA 1972 upon exit day. Therefore, the continuation of a fundamental EU-derived principle (especially as one as strongly contested as supremacy) without its domestic legal basis seems somewhat nonsensical. Moreover, it strongly suggests that leaving the EU has been unable to restore a traditional notion of sovereignty.   Another significant provision of the EUWA is Section 8, which provides: ‘A Minister of the Crown may by regulations make such provision as the minister considers appropriate to prevent, remedy or mitigate (a) any failure of retained EU law to operate effectively, or (b) any other deficiency in retained EU law, arising from the Withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the EU’.[68]   The passing of secondary legislation into law is a very different process to that of primary legislation and can be done in several ways. For example, an affirmative procedure requires the approval of Parliament before it is passed into law whereas, with a negative procedure, a draft of the SI is laid before Parliament and will automatically come into force unless a motion is passed to annul it within a fixed period.[69] It has long been recognised that while the use of secondary legislation has increased, along with the importance and complexity of its contents, the parliamentary time dedicated to its scrutiny has decreased. Additionally, Philippa Tudor highlights that there is a ‘Scarcely acknowledged […] democratic deficit in the current parliamentary scrutiny arrangements for domestic delegated legislation’.[70]   The issue of a ‘democratic deficit’ is still relevant to s 8 of the EUWA: the provision contains an extensive Henry VIII power. Such powers are defined as a ‘clause in a bill which enables ministers to amend or repeal provisions in an Act of Parliament using secondary legislation, which is subject to varying degrees of parliamentary scrutiny’.[71] In their report of the (then) bill, the House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution highlighted a number of concerns with the inclusion of such a wide-ranging Henry VII power. An initial concern related to some of the language. In particular, the use of the word ‘appropriate’, which the committee stated was ‘subjective and wide’. The Faculty of Advocates stated that the use of the word meant that any changes made would be ‘in essence a matter for the minister’s opinion’.[72] Furthermore, concern was also expressed as to the open-endedness of the provision.[73] While it was noted that some Henry VIII powers were needed to facilitate withdrawal, it nonetheless recommended that the use of these powers should be limited. While s 8(7) does contain some restrictions on the use of the power, the committee concluded that they were not sufficient to ‘minimise the delegation of excessive powers to the Executive’.[74]   The most significant area of concern related to how delegated legislation made under the Act was to be scrutinised. Scrutiny procedures are outlined under schedule 7. The vast majority of regulations would be subject to the negative procedure,[75] whereas only a limited number would be subject to the affirmative procedure.[76] Examples of the types of instruments which would require an affirmative procedure include ones creating a new public authority, or transferring new powers to said authority.[77] However, the most worrying was the ‘made affirmative’ procedure, which allows a minister to create and approve a statutory instrument without parliament’s approval in situations that the minister considers to be urgent.[78] In order to remain in force, the regulation must be approved by both houses within 28 sitting days.[79] Concern for this procedure was expressed by several groups and individuals providing written evidence to the committee. The Public Law Project stated: ‘The potency of powers that could be exercised in ‘urgent’ cases is hard to overstate. Ministers could deprive people of their liberty and Parliament could do nothing about it’.[80] Furthermore, Professor Alison Young noted the practical effect of the procedure, stating that regulations would ‘remain lawful even if the measure itself is not approved within a month and new regulations, can be made, presumably, if still urgent through the same procedure’.[81] The EUWA 2018 ultimately provided the executive with wide-ranging legislative powers, while also providing parliament with limited opportunity to effectively scrutinise the legislation being made. Despite this, s 8(8) did place a limitation on the use of s 8 to two years after exit day, seemingly limiting the long-term impact of the provision on parliamentary sovereignty.   However, this may not be the case following the enactment of the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Act 2023.[82] The bill published under Liz Truss’s government, and was taken forward by Prime Minster Rishi Sunak with the principal aim of the bill is to sunset ‘all EU-derived subordinate legislation and retained direct EU legislation’.[83] It also changes the name of retained EU law to ‘assimilated law’.[84] The effect of the bill has been described as a ‘reversal of the natural order’[85] as large amounts of EU-derived legislation will automatically be sunsetted by the end of 2023 unless chosen by a minister to either be saved, or preserved until 2026 at the latest, instead of individual pieces of legislation being chosen to be sunsetted. It is thought that there are over 2,000 pieces of retained EU legislation, spanning over 30 different policy areas.[86] The bill encompassed important EU-derived legislation such as the Working Time Directive,[87] but not primary legislation such as the Equality Act 2010.   Dr Ruth Fox, Director of the Hansard Society, has highlighted several concerns arising from the bill. Fox notes that automatically sunsetting such a large volume of retained EU law would be an ‘abdication of Parliament’s scrutiny and oversight role’.[88] Furthermore, she has noted that the bill moves democratic oversight of retained EU law away from Parliament.[89] This is evident in the extensive powers given to ministers, in clauses 12, 13,14, and 15, to revoke or alter retained EU law. Clause 15 (now s 14 of the Act) arguably contains the most extensive powers—giving ministers the power to either revoke secondary REUL without replacing it[90] or make an alternative provision that they deem to be ‘appropriate’.[91] However, as noted by George Peretz KC, the alternate provisions do not have to match the ones that they’re replacing.[92] Similar to s 8 of the EUWA, the bill grants considerable law-making provisions to the executive, while simultaneously limiting parliament’s ability to scrutinise legislation and assert its sovereignty. During its second reading in the House of Commons, the bill was strongly opposed by opposition MPs—being labelled a ‘vanity project’, ‘not fit for purpose’, and that it would result in ‘chaos and confusion’.[93] Some changes were made to the Bill prior to its enactment although the content and aims have largely remained the same. Most notably, instead of the automatic revocation of all retained law, any legislation that it to be revoked is listed in schedule 1. While this does provide for greater legal certainty, this is still affects a significant amount of legislation across a broad range of policy areas. Furthermore, the Act still removes parliamentary oversight over assimilated law and places it with ministers instead. Therefore, the Act can be shown to remain problematic for the operation of parliamentary sovereignty and its traditional interpretation.   Regardless, taken together, s 8 of the EUWA, and the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, represent a significant shift in the balance of law-making powers away from Parliament and towards the Executive. Consequently, Parliament’s ability to effectively scrutinise and control what legislation is passed has also been significantly curtailed. Therefore, both the way in which Brexit was facilitated in Parliament and the way in which retained EU law has been dealt with following exit day has meant that a traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty has not been restored by leaving the EU. This is on the basis that Parliament’s legislative powers have been significantly weakened by the substantial powers granted to the executive. It is difficult to determine for certain what the future holds for the operation of the principle of parliamentary sovereignty, however recent years have undoubtedly shown several attempts from the executive to diminish its power.   Conclusion   Traditionally, discussions into the precise nature of the relationship between the doctrine of EU supremacy and the principle of parliamentary sovereignty have been portrayed has being relatively clear cut, in the sense that they were either compatible or incompatible with one another. However, such portrayals have been rooted in nineteenth-century interpretations of sovereignty, and consequently fail to take into account the degree of flexibility which is intrinsic to the UK’s unwritten constitution. In light of this, while membership to the EU can be shown to represent a move away from this traditional interpretation, it cannot be said to be completely incompatible with parliamentary sovereignty due to the latter’s inherent ability to evolve. Similarly, the act of leaving the EU has not been able to restore this traditional interpretation of parliamentary sovereignty, due to other factors external to EU membership which have shaped and influenced parliamentary sovereignty into the form which operates today. While the UK leaving the EU has closed one avenue of constitutional evolution, it is by no means the end. Katie Ann Twelves   Katie Twelves graduated in 2023 with a Bachelor of Laws from the University of Hull. During her time at Hull, she developed a particular interest in UK public and constitutional law. In February 2023, Katie was invited to present the above paper at the 15 th  Trinity College Dublin Law Student Colloquium. She is currently studying for a Master of Laws in Legal and Political Theory at the University of York, with a dissertation project examining reform of the House of Lords. [1]  HP Bulmer Ltd v J Bollinger SA  [1974] CH 401 at 418 per Lord Denning MR. [2] Phillip Norton, Governing Britain  (Manchester University Press 2020) 167. [3]  R v Secretary of State for Transport ex parte Factortame Ltd (No 2) [1991] AC 603. [4]  R (on the application of Miller) v Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union [2017] UKSC 5. [5] Vernon Bogdanor, The New British Constitution  (Hart Publishing 2009) 6. [6] ibid 8. [7] See eg Nicholas Watt and Rowena Mason, ‘EU Deal: Cameron vows to put Commons sovereignty “beyond doubt”’ Guardian  (London, 3 February 2016) < https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/feb/03/eu-deal-david-cameron-uk-parliament-sovereignty-beyond-doubt-boris-johnson > accessed 3 August 2023. [8] Paul Craig, ‘Development of the EU’ in Catherine Barnard and Steve Peers (eds), European Union Law  (3rd edn, Oxford University Press 2020). [9] Case 6/64 Costa   v Enel  [1964] ECR 585. [10] Robert Schütze, ‘Constitutionalism and the European Union’ in Barnard and Peers (n 8) 78. [11]  Costa (n 9) [593]-[594]. The court also stated that, ‘The integration into the laws of each member state of provisions which derive from the community […] make it impossible for the states, as a corollary, to accord precedence to a unilateral and subsequent measure over a legal system accepted by them on the basis of reciprocity’.  [12] ibid. [13] Case 11/70 Internationale Handelsgesellschaft mbH   v Einfuhr-und Vorratsstelle für Getreide und Futtermittel [1970] ECR 1125. [14] ibid [1]. [15] In its reasoning, the court stated: ‘The validity of such measures can only be judged in the light of community law. In fact, the law stemming from the treaty, and independent source of law, cannot because of its very nature be overridden by rules of national law […] without it being deprived of its character as community law and without the legal basis being called into question. Therefore, the validity of a community measure or its effect within a member state cannot be affected by the allegations that it runs counter to whether the fundamental rights as formulated by the constitution of that state or the principles of a national constitutional structure’ (ibid). [16] European Communities Act 1972. Of particular relevance is s 2(1) which states: ‘All such rights, powers, liabilities, obligations and restrictions from time to time, created or arising by or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the treaties and all such remedies and procedures from time to time provided for or under the Treaties, as in accordance with the treaties are without any further enactment to be given legal effect or used in the United Kingdom shall be recognised and available in law, and be enforced, allowed and followed accordingly; and the expression ‘enforceable Community right’ and similar expressions shall be read as referring to one to which this subsection applies’. [17] AV Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution (Macmillan & Co. 1885) 3. [18]  Factortame (n 3). [19] Case C-213/89 R   v Secretary of State for Transport, ex p Factortame Ltd (No 2) [1990] [1]. [20] ibid [10]. [21] ibid [11]. [22] ibid [66]. [23] HWR Wade, ‘Sovereignty – revolution or evolution?’ (1996) 112 LQR 571. [24] ibid 573. [25] ibid 574. [26]  Factortame (n 3). [27] ibid per Lord Bridge at [659]. [28] Mark Elliot, ‘sovereignty, Primacy and the Common Law Constitution: What has EU Membership Taught Us?’ (University of Cambridge Legislative Research Paper series, Paper No. 24/2018). [29] Paul Craig, ‘Sovereignty of the United Kingdom Parliament after Factortame’ (1991) 11(1) Yearbook of European Law 222. [30] Wade (n 23) 574. [31] NW Barber, ‘The afterlife of parliamentary sovereignty’ (2011) 9(1) International Journal of Constitutional Law (2011) 152 [32] Human Rights Act 1998, s 4(6)(a). [33] Lord Hope, ‘The Human Rights Act 1998: The Task of the Judges’ (1999) 20(3) Statute Law Rev 185. [34]  Miller (n 4). [35] Consolidated version of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, Article 50. [36] Mark Elliot, ‘The Supreme Court Judgement in Miller: In Search of a Constitutional principle’ (University of Cambridge Legal Research Paper Series, Paper No. 23/2017). [37]  Miller (n 4) [36]. [38]  Blackburn v Attorney General  [1971] 1 WLR 1037, at 1040. [39]  Miller (n 4) [81]. [40] ibid. [41] ibid [86]. [42] ibid [101]. [43] Elliot (n 36). [44] Nick Barber, Tom Hickman, and Jeff King, ‘Pulling the Article 50 “trigger”: Parliament’s Indispensable Role’ ( UK Constitutional Law Association , 27 June 2016) < https://ukconstitutionallaw.org/2016/06/27/nick-barber-tom-hickman-and-jeff-king-pulling-the-article-50-trigger-parliaments-indispensable-role/ > accessed 5 January 2023. [45]  R   v Secretary of State for the Home Department ex parte Fire Brigades Union [1995], 2 AC 513, per Lord Browne Wilkinson at [552]. [46] Barber, Hickman, and King (n 44). [47] See Steven Gow Calabresi, ‘The United States: Creation, Reconstruction, the Progressives, and the Modern Era’ in The   History and Growth of Judicial Review, Vol 1: The G-20 Common Law Countries and Israel  (Oxford University Press 2021). [48] Sir John Baker, An Introduction to English Legal History  (5th edn, Oxford University Press 2019) 12 [49] Graham Virgo, The Principles of Equity and Trusts  (4th edn, Oxford University Press 2020) 6 [50] Baker (n 48) 12. [51] Virgo (n 49) 6. [52] ibid 7. [53] A more recent example of the courts developing and having a lasting impact can also be seen in the development of Wednesbury Reasonableness. First outlined in Associated Provincial Picture House Ltd v Wednesbury Corporation [1948] 1 KB 223, which developed a test to assess whether a decision of a public authority can be considered reasonable. Outlining the principle, Lord Greene stated: ‘A person entrusted with a discretion must […] Direct himself properly in the law. He must call his own attention to the matters which he bound to consider. He must exclude from consideration matters which are irrelevant to what he has to consider. If he does not obey these rules, he may truly be said to... be acting unreasonably. Similarly, there may be something so absurd that no sensible person can ever dream that it lay within the powers of the authority (per Lord Greene at 229)’. The test still constitutes an important element of judicial review; see comments of Mrs Justice Lang in Worthing Borough Council v Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities [2022] EWHC 2044 (Admin) [37]). [54] Norton (n 2) 168 [55] Aileen McHarg, ‘Devolution in Scotland’ in Jeffrey Jowell and Colm O’Cinneide (eds), The Changing Constitution  (9th edn, Oxford University Press 2019) 271. [56] Norton (n 2) 169. [57] Nicholas Aroney, ‘The formation and amendment of federal constitutions in a Westminster-derived context’ (2018) 16(1) Int J Constitutional Law (2018) 41. [58] Monckton Chambers, ‘Webinar on the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill’ ( YouTube , 30 September 2022) 58:00 < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j5gQlkRadKA&list=FLAkDukVPOfZCvrVhx-lBhrA&index=3 > accessed 5 January 2023. [59] Mark Elliot and Stephen Tierney, ‘Political Pragmatism and Constitutional Principle: The European Union (Withdrawal) Act’ (University of Cambridge Legal Studies Research Paper Series, Paper No. 54/2018). [60] European Union (Withdrawal) Act (EUWA) 2018, s 5(2). [61] Elliot and Tierney (n 59). [62] House of Lords Select Committee on the Constitution, European Union (Withdrawal) Bill 2018, 9 th  report of Session 207-2019. [63] ibid, para 79. [64] ibid, para 81. [65] ibid, para 84. [66] ibid, para 88. [67] ibid, para 89. [68] EUWA (n 60) s 8(1) [69] ‘What is Secondary Legislation?’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://www.parliament.uk/about/how/laws/secondary-legislation/ > accessed 4 January 2023. [70] Philippa Tudor, ‘Secondary Legislation: Second Class or Crucial?’ (2000) 21(3) Statute Law Rev   149. [71] Henry VIII Clauses’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://www.parliament.uk/site-information/glossary/henry-viii-clauses/ > accessed 4 January 2023. [72] House of Lords Select Committee (n 62), para 163. [73] ibid, para 187. [74] ibid. [75] ibid, para 214. [76] ibid, para 216. [77] Ibid [78] EUWA (n 60) s 7, para 5(2). [79] ibid s 7, para 5(4). [80] ‘The Public Law Project—Written evidence (EUW0034)’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/constitution-committee/european-union-withdrawal-bill/written/71272.html > accessed 4 January 2023. [81] ‘Professor Alison L Young, University of Oxford—Written evidence (EUW0003)’ ( UK Parliament ) < https://data.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/committeeevidence.svc/evidencedocument/constitution-committee/european-union-withdrawal-bill/written/69634.html > accessed 4 January 2023. [82] Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill, HC Bill, Session 2022-23, 204. [83] ibid 1(1). [84] ibid, clause 6 (1). [85] Monckton Chambers (n 58) 10:20. [86] Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy, ‘The Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill 2022’ ( UK Government ) < https://www.gov.uk/government/news/the-retained-eu-law-revocation-and-reform-bill-2022 > accessed January 5 2023. [87] ‘Directive 2033/88/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 November 2003 concerning certain aspects of the organisation of working time’ OJ L 299. [88] Ruth Fox, ‘Five Problems with the Retained EU Law (Revocation and Reform) Bill’ ( Hansard Society , 24 October 2022) < https://www.hansardsociety.org.uk/publications/briefings/five-problems-with-the-retained-eu-law-revocation-and-reform-bill > accessed January 5 2023. [89] ibid. [90] Retained EU Law Bill (n 82), clause 15(1). [91] ibid, clause 15(3). [92] Monckton Chambers (n 58) 24:40. [93] Layla Moran MP, HC Deb, 25 October 2022, Vol 721, Col 229.

Dog-races, football pools, Woolworth’s, the pictures, Gracie Fields, Wall’s ice cream, potato crisps, Celanese stockings, dart-boards, pin-tables, cigarettes, cups of tea, and Saturday evenings in the four ale bar.[1] This rapid-fire enumeration of distinctive features of Englishness, one of George Orwell’s recurring party-tricks, seems today a tall order. What is it to be English? Those like Tory MP Robert Jenrick rely on inane tautologies: English identity is simply English ‘history and culture’, no elaboration needed.[2] Others, such as podcaster Konstantin Kisin, appeal to broader ‘British values’—freedom of expression, women’s rights, equitable treatment of minorities, and the like.[3] These abstract principles, largely indistinguishable from the liberal ideals of, say, France or Germany, prove in turn an easy target for those further right, for whom Englishness can only be grasped as a racial category.[4] Indeed, Kisin himself seems to have had a change of heart in this regard, rebuffing ex- Spectator editor Fraser Nelson’s insistence that Rishi Sunak is English on the grounds that the former PM is a ‘brown Hindu’.[5] In their strident delineation of who is and is not English, these civic and ethnic nationalisms reveal an insecurity about the possibility of a positive account of Englishness in the manner of Orwell or his contemporaries.[6] Today’s talking heads offer an essentially apophatic definition of Englishness, approaching it through what it is not. Instead of naming features of a shared and self-evident cultural repository, they focus on those—migrants, criminals, Muslims—who allegedly fail to make the cut. This negative definition easily slides into a political programme: simply remove all offending groups and the mythic unity will return as if by magic. On the shortest-sighted model of this chronology, it is only the increased migration under recent governments, catalysed by the concurrent excesses of ‘woke’ theory, which has consigned English identity to oblivion. Talk of a ‘crisis of Englishness’ is, however, far from new. Casting our eyes for the moment only as far back as the turn of the millennium, when the threats of Scottish and Welsh devolution loomed large, we find a glut of books and television series taking the nation’s vital signs. In the manner of an anatomical dissection, Albion’s dismembered parts—the countryside, grammar schools, aristocracy, or Anglican church—are hoisted aloft for a rapt audience. Roger Scruton, in the introduction to his England: An Elegy  (2000), joins over a dozen authors pacing round England’s grave.[7] The tenor of such works varies, from the cosmopolitan excitement of Andrew Marr’s The Day Britain Died  (2000) to the all-encompassing despair of Peter Hitchens’s The Abolition of Britain  (1999). Yet we owe the most interesting artefact of this media explosion to someone born not in Old England but in Trinidad, and who is not generally judged a fusty reactionary. Darcus Howe arrived in England in 1961, soon pivoting from legal study to journalism and political activism, becoming a member of the British Black Panthers and long-standing editor of Race Today . He rose to prominence in 1970 as one of the ‘Mangrove Nine’, arrested, tried, and acquitted for protesting against police raids at The Mangrove restaurant in Notting Hill, a legal proceeding which saw the Metropolitan Police formally admit to racist behaviour. Seven years later, as his biographers Paul Bunce and Robin Field recount, he was again arrested and tried without charge. Whilst pointedly celebrating African Liberation Day rather than the Silver Jubilee, he had performed a citizen’s arrest on a police officer who was shouting racist abuse and locked him up in a basement.[8] Howe’s radicalism can then hardly be questioned, and one might be forgiven for expecting him to condemn Englishness entirely, as a malignant discourse of chauvinism and racial superiority. This was the tack taken by the so-called Parekh report, published in 2000 by the Runnymede Trust under the title ‘The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain’.[9] But Howe has a habit of surprising, especially in his later career as a broadcaster. For his first documentary on the topic, 1988’s England, My England , Howe personally selected arch-conservative Peregrine Worsthorne to be his co-presenter.[10] Later, in the 2004 production Who You Callin’ a Nigger? , he focused on violent tensions between ethnic minority populations—a controversial topic, and one which might seem to provide grist to the mill of those opposed to migration and multiculturalism. His relationship to England and Englishness was fiercely dialectical. As he put it: Although I spent part of my life in a struggle against England it was, I now know, also a personal and political struggle for England. My life has been largely spent in trying to help force an often reluctant and purblind England to be true to the benign ‘Motherland’ of my parents’ vision.[11] It is this dual perspective which makes Howe’s three-part television series White Tribe (2000), freely available at the time of writing on Channel 4’s website, such compelling viewing.[12] In an inversion of the colonial travelogue or ethnography, Howe roams the highlands and lowlands of England, interrogating those he finds about their self-conception, their shared rituals and practices. White Tribe  is grounded in the belief that English identity both exists—or at least existed in recent memory, for Howe can fondly recall it from the 1960s—and is, when expressed without prejudice, essentially good. Its interviewees might be arranged in a simple matrix: they are either possessed of a meaningful, historically and geographically informed sense of identity or not; and they are either racist or not. He sets off with optimism. * From the outset, the former criterion seems in distinctly short supply. The first episode opens with Howe quizzing bemused pedestrians about the content of white culture. He is met with a mixture of genuine befuddlement—‘I haven’t got a clue really’—and pessimistic historicization: ‘We set the standards for the rest of the world. Well, we used to’. But this is nothing to be gloated over, for Howe knows well the unstable mixture of melancholy and agitation which results from such loss of self. ‘Until I made this journey’, he reflects, ‘I thought white people were certain of themselves and knew who they were’. No, ‘these are people who are in a crisis. Something is finished, there’s nothing in its place’. In Howe’s Brixton neighbourhood, this sense of an ending is illustrated by way of contrast. On one side of the street presides a church, that bastion of Englishness, whose flock now consists almost entirely of immigrants. On the other swells a nightclub peopled until the early hours by partying whites, whom Howe, dipping into the register of social conservatism, disdains as ‘hedonistic in behaviour, licentious’. This opening juxtaposition is reprised as Howe speaks to Simon, a young white man living in majority-Asian Southall. Simon’s minority status invites the question of identity more pressingly than elsewhere, but it is not answered convincingly; he unfavourably compares a white population which takes little pride in their Christian religion with the Sikh community seen celebrating a festival in the streets. Blame for this inertia is placed not on migrants, or even on mass migration as a phenomenon, but on the enervating effects of consumer capitalism: ‘you buy an Easter egg, it’s done’. The Sikhs, whom Howe agrees are ‘full of certainty, full of bounce and colour’, represent a source of both envy and potential inspiration, an instructive case for a population losing its global self-evidence. In Newcastle, listless ennui makes way for pandemonic intensity. Howe encounters a group of football fans, again branded ‘licentious’, pasty faces swarming the camera as they gyrate their bodies and swig from cans of lager. There is, he admits, a ‘carnival spirit’ at play, but with a crucial proviso. ‘We had something to celebrate: freedom from slavery’, whilst this is merely a ‘celebration of nothingness’, grounded in no deeper cultural convictions than football and beer. Casting aspersions on the authentic Englishness of football may seem implausible, though here too Howe is echoing nineteenth-century critiques of the sport which condemned its violent disorder, sensationalistic media coverage, and increasing professionalization as betrayals of the properly English value of ‘fair play’, thought to be embodied by cricket. Most everything now deemed archetypally English has previously been presented as its mortal enemy. But the important point is a socioeconomic one. This hedonistic furore may, Howe speculates, be all that remains of white working class culture ‘when you take the work away’, replacing the heavy industry of shipbuilding and coalmining with a night-time economy of bars and clubs.[13] A yet more dystopian confirmation of this thesis is found at a post-industrial estate in Grangetown, North Yorkshire. As the steelworks have closed down, a mass of unemployed remain, ensnared by crime or drugs and surveilled all the while by omnipresent cameras. No Englishness survives in this ghetto, no past or future, only a terminal, degrading present. Who is to blame for this? For Howe, the culprits are clear: all those proponents of Thatcherite neoliberalism whose destructive war against trade unions and old industry saw the replacement of working class English culture with foreign capital. Quite by chance, at a Conservative party annual dinner in Skegness, he runs into a chief architect of this transformation, Norman Tebbit, delivering a speech on—what else?—the fate of Englishness under the threat of devolution. Laconic as ever, Howe points out the hypocrisy in mourning, just when it becomes politically expedient, a ‘little England which he himself wiped out’. His verbal joust with Tebbit returns us to the question of who exactly can be classed as English. Tebbit’s line is unwavering, and he insists to Howe that ‘clearly you’re not English, but you are British’, despite recognizing that on this logic the Union’s disintegration would leave Howe and millions of others in no man’s land.[14] The former Conservative Party Chairman’s argument is not just echoed by Kisin nowadays, but also—more uncomfortably—by the Parekh report, in which Englishness is deemed an inappropriate identification for ethnic minorities in Britain, too laden with ‘systematic, largely unspoken, racial connotations’. Better, the report suggests, to describe oneself as British, though even this is ‘not ideal’.[15] From today’s vantage point, such reasoning seems worryingly at risk of appropriation by ethnonationalists—‘see, they don’t want to integrate anyway’. Howe wisely takes a more strident strategy, not ceding language but claiming it for himself. He bluntly maintains that being English would be ‘no problem with me’, a perfectly coherent position provided one views identity in terms of cultural consciousness rather than unflexing bloodline. Ironically, Howe’s desire to be English sets him apart from a substantial segment of his interviewees, whose primary wish seems to be to divest themselves from their own Englishness. Birmingham is becoming a ‘Yankee town’, its inhabitants enjoying basketball and barbecue food in vast shopping centres. Globalization has killed the old high street and installed in its place a never-ending strip mall. Through it roams ‘Thatcher’s working class’, linked by nothing but the relentless desire to exercise their consumer choice. In the bourgeois Cotswolds, ‘the England that I dreamt about in Trinidad’, Howe uncovers a virulent strain of Francophilia. Participants at a wine-tasting see their spiritual home over the Channel, promising a therapeutic journey into the past since, as one tippler avers, ‘France now seems to be as England was in 1955’. One can just as easily imagine Howe prowling Brick Lane, interrogating diners about whether they prefer curry to pie and mash. Viewed cynically, multiculturalism’s appeal is revealed as merely a chance for the bland British middle classes to liven themselves up a little, experimenting with new colours and flavours. Echoes of more distant regions reverberate in Yorkshire’s Todmorden, where the cotton industry has been phased out in favour of health food shops replete with advertisements for holistic medicine, reflexology, shiatsu, aromatherapy, and the like. A castle in the area is now inhabited by some forty Buddhists living in a community of meditation. Evoking Slavoj Žižek’s concept of ‘Western Buddhism’—the optimal ideological fetish with which to claim inner peace whilst participating in a frenetic neoliberal capitalism—Howe elegantly observes that ‘the mills have gone to the far east and the far east has come to the castle’.[16] So inspiring for early 2000s authors like Zadie Smith, all this anarchic play of hybrid identities seems to make him distinctly uneasy. Howe has some strange bedfellows in this suspicion. In White Tribe ’s second episode, focused on those self-avowedly proud to be English, he speaks to adherents of an orthodox church modelled on the pre-1066 Anglo-Saxon population. For one gentleman, who advocates for a distinctly English parliament, the ‘coming of the Normans was something like the arrival of the Nazis and Pol Pot combined’. Yet he is not, he claims, opposed to diversity—on the contrary, this is a struggle ‘against the monoculture of globalism’, epitomized by ‘McDonald’s and Coca Cola’. This logic, whereby the false difference of consumerist globalization represents an annihilation of true ethnic difference, is—as Miri Davidson has shown—often found on the far right as a tactical appropriation of the language of left-wing decolonial theory.[17] Does Englishness deserve protection as an indigenous identity? Howe is unconvinced. For one, asserting identity’s immutability would deny the possibility of meaningful acculturation to which his own life is a testament. Despite a period of fascination with his Afro-Caribbean heritage, during which he took on an African name, he is forced to admit that he is ‘more English than [he] could ever be African’. Not only is the idea that the saints of pre-Norman religion could provide a meaningful identity after the turn of the millennium far from credible, England is a ‘mongrel nation’ of irreversibly mixed genealogies. Should Tebbit, who recalls that his family came over from the Low Countries in the seventeenth century, be excluded from Englishness just as firmly as Howe? Belonging, on these grounds, is either a milestone which can never be reached or one which falls victim to precisely the arbitrary flexibility its proponents are trying to evade. Defences of ‘cultural relativism’ or the ‘right to difference’ stop short of overt racism. Not everyone Howe speaks to is so subtle. Playing bingo with retired workers in Todmorden, he is initially enchanted. ‘Full of confidence and dignity’, this is ‘the last of the good England, the best of it’. Yet this sentimentality soon evaporates when one, speaking to a cameraman, proclaims the white English a ‘superior race’. Nor can Howe be accused of oversensitivity to minor slights or jibes. Indeed, he perhaps unexpectedly defends the existence of comedian Bernard Manning’s controversial Embassy Club, its humour a kind of racial war of all against all, himself stifling a chuckle at more than a few wisecracks. Learning that Manning’s son would soon take over, with a plan to turn the venue into an ‘alternative comedy club catering for the metropolitan elite’, Howe confesses that he doesn’t want to see ‘another bit of traditional English culture wiped out by political correctness’. If racially provocative humour, provided it is doled out equally, can form a healthy part of English identity, the line must be drawn at genuine hatred, the ‘mark of the beast’. This Howe encounters in both Dover and on a deprived housing estate in Oldham. His excursion to the south coast could easily have been filmed in 2025: fuelled by the tabloid press, locals fear an onslaught of swarthy, moustachioed, Eastern European interlopers arriving in lorries by night with vast wads of notes, bringing disease, muggings, and disorder. The Folkestone Road, their alleged stomping ground, is deemed a ‘no-go area’, though Howe merrily parades up and down the street and—not for lack of trying—can find no migrants there. All he manages to stump up are three mild-mannered students sitting in a local park, teenage refugees from Kosovo who politely deny having harassed any local residents. The point is not that the number of asylum seekers crossing the channel—still a central preoccupation for Fleet Street and Whitehall alike—has not increased, nor that such migration is entirely without issue. Rather, these parallels serve as a reminder that the underside of arguments against the mass movement of the 2010s and 2020s, their nostalgic projection of a prelapsarian utopia free of worries about violence, instability, or social disintegration, would hardly have been recognized as such by the inhabitants of those past times. This case is made particularly effectively by Geoffrey Pearson in his Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears .[18] Published in 1983, Pearson’s book sought to throw into question the dominant narrative that a ‘permissive revolution’ in the prior two decades had precipitated an unprecedented decline in public morals, an explosion of disorder and criminality ending centuries of peaceable stability. As Pearson shows, this supposed stability, a substantial part of the ‘British way of life’, would have been news to earlier commentators, who complained of a similar malaise not only ‘before the war’ (so often a nostalgia-infused hinterland) but back well into the eighteenth century and beyond. The 1950s Teddy Boy, Victorian garrotter, and unruly Georgian apprentice step into line as earlier incarnations of the violent, ‘invading’ migrant nowadays. Of course, the existence of prior moral panics does not automatically invalidate contemporary ones. But, given its apparent survival across more than 300 years of crisis, one suspects that the British (or English) ‘way of life’ is either considerably stronger than generally thought or in many instances just a rhetorical tool whose chief utility consists in providing an ahistoric, idealized foil to the undesirable present.[19] In Oldham, an equal sense of crisis prevails. Residents are convinced they have been made ‘second class citizens’, viewing themselves as ‘ethnic minorities’ on an estate where ninety percent of inhabitants are white and only a tiny fraction Asian. Support for the National Front and ‘Third Position’ is widespread, and a ‘racial war’ eagerly awaited. This is hatred in its most insidious form, and Howe is utterly horrified. But as unpleasant as such exchanges are, they are nonetheless instructive. For one, they reveal the emptiness of the residents’ identifications. As White Tribe ’s producer Narinder Minhas reflected: I wanted to see whether it was possible for people in places like Oldham to be white and proud but not racist—after all, it is possible for me to be Asian and proud, and for Darcus to be black and proud. But sadly, there is a thin line between English nationalism and racism. People struggle to describe their Englishness in positive terms. They often resort to negatives. Uncertain of themselves, they attack others.[20] A strong identity is a tolerant one, uncowed by the presence of the Other. Not here: overflowing aggression plasters over an Englishness almost wholly denuded of content. A similar tension characterizes the imperatives they seek to place on recent immigrants. Where one resident complains that their Asian neighbours rarely speak English, another insists that the estate must remain wholly ethnically English in makeup. Are migrants expected to integrate—‘into what?’, Howe might ask—or to segregate? Whilst seamless integration is often touted as the apotheosis of the migrant experience, this has not always been the case. Consider the verdict delivered by Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir Joseph Simpson in 1964: The ordinary white citizen generally accepts his place in society and makes no attempt to gate crash places where he would not only feel out of place but is clearly unwelcome. Not all immigrants have the ability to do this and for the most part they are hypersensitive over race and colour.[21] Is this not inviting precisely the ghettoization deemed nowadays the worst possible result of migration? The twin anxieties of contamination, disrupting a prearranged social order, and isolation, refusing to enter into it, place the new arrival on the horns of a dilemma. Those migrants on that estate in Oldham, never seen but much discussed, were only those most violently impaled. Howe, for his part, strove always to escape this contradiction, advocating an ‘integration on our terms’. In this way, he asserted the right to self-definition against a presumptuous, paternalistic rhetoric which framed integration as the continuation of Britain’s imperial ‘civilizing mission’.[22] After so many failures and false starts, one wonders whether Howe will award anyone with the stamp of true Englishness. But we are in luck; there is a winner after all and her name is Mary, a member of the long-standing landed gentry in Tynedale. Joining Mary on a fox hunt, Howe is enraptured—finally, people who know who they are! This enthusiasm would hardly be surprising for a conservative like Scruton,[23] but in the case of an urban radical like Howe it surely is. And yet much connects the unlikely pair. For one, their sense that any moral objection to animal suffering is outweighed by the value of tradition. Then there is the family model Mary espouses, according to which everyone should be ‘within striking distance’, rooted rather than scattered. But their closest affinity is a shared love for butter, which ‘Blair and his olive oil crew’, as Howe puts it, are trying to sacrifice at the altar of ‘health and safety’. Butter is one symbol for identity, resisting the corrosive torrent of post-industrial capitalism. The hunt is another. Howe praises the tender detail with which it is organized, the historical care and attention to ritual which has gone into every aspect. Yet this care exists alongside the spontaneity of birthright; it is somehow unthinking, automatic, and thus—unlike so much else he has seen—wholly authentic: English. * Soon enough, the olive oil brigade had its way. Fox hunting was outlawed in England and Wales in 2004. Howe’s view of the Blairite project remained dim in the extreme. Interviewed the same year, he offered a Janus-faced view of the prior four decades: The England that I came to was the England of the patrician Tory. There was a consensus between the Tories and the working classes that was rooted, in my view, in the war, when the courage of the working classes had been immense. Margaret Thatcher wiped that away. She destroyed the working classes at their best and most powerful, and all we’re left with is office boys and girls. Mrs Thatcher worked in an office with a few people. So did Tony Blair. If you work in a factory, you work with thousands of people. If you are one of the landed gentry or you own a business, you are responsible for masses of people. Mrs Thatcher and Blair know nothing about anything. Blair never met anybody, never travelled anywhere before he started travelling as Prime Minister. And now these people are in charge.[24] If 1941’s The Lion and the Unicorn  was, as his wife Eileen Blair suggested, Orwell’s answer to the question of ‘how to be a socialist whilst Tory’, White Tribe plays a similar role for Howe.[25] But whilst one is an exhortation, a stoking of the fires, the other is an elegy oscillating between tragedy and farce, its lone positive note resounding like a trip to see the last of an endangered species behind bars at the zoo. Howe plays a man out of time, a belated modernist—a belated Englishman —finding everywhere he goes a nation which cannot live up to the promised ideal of his childhood in Trinidad. In this he is far removed from today’s left-liberal discourses around race and identity. There is nothing ‘woke’ here, no call for allyship, recognition, or education. Howe endorses the idea that one could (and perhaps even should ) be ‘proud to be white’, albeit lamenting that in practice this is often accompanied by execrable racism. Yet there is also little impression given that this prejudice might be the expression, product, or engine of any systemic privilege, buttressed and emboldened by structural advantages. Rather, a desperate, last-ditch racism appears all that a beleaguered white working class has left, having been gutted by the ‘office workers’ Thatcher and Blair—another incarnation of the ‘professional managerial class’ often blamed for an occlusion of class politics by identitarian struggles. On this framing, it is easy to see Howe’s potential allure for the populist right or the anti-woke, workerist left. This has been the fate of his lifelong friend and mentor CLR James, held up in the pages of UnHerd and Spiked  as the ultimate Marxist opponent of identity politics, a staunch admirer of ‘Western civ’ for whom issues of race never outflanked those of class.[26] It is nonetheless hard to imagine the political right of the 2020s taking much joy from a viewing of White Tribe . For one, there is a pointed historical rejoinder: any collapse of English identity must be traced back far further than the so-called ‘Boriswave’, as young rightists have taken to dubbing the surge in immigration after 2021.[27] It is surprising to recall that, just before the turn of the millennium, German political sociologist Christian Joppke was able to describe Britain as a would-be ‘zero-immigration country’.[28] So perhaps we have Blair to blame for opening the floodgates and drowning Englishness alive. But the buck does not stop there. If Thatcher succeeded in harnessing the anxieties of the petty bourgeoisie—her ‘nation of shopkeepers’—and turning them against spectres of crime, disorder, and unfairness, an approach aped to great effect by Reform UK’s Nigel Farage,[29] Howe sees the disaster beneath. This frenzy of negative identification gave cover to the erosion of the industrial working classes’ communal traditions and the elevation across society of empty ‘consumer choice’ to the primary vessel of identity and freedom. It is hard to see how the comparatively tiny population of migrants in Britain at that time can be blamed for this. One could go yet further back. Take the reactionary modernists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, from DH Lawrence and WB Yeats to Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis, all labouring under a pervasive Nietzschean influence.[30] The contemporary far right often borrows from this discourse, rehashing its prognoses of decadence and degeneration, its mourning of a martial valour and nobility ostensibly replaced by mediocre equality. Yet this inevitably remains a partial ventriloquism. For earlier elitists, the great antagonist is not the migrant but the masses: the vast industrial proletariat unmoored by capitalism and progressively given political voice by democracy. It is not that these thinkers never applied a racial lens—quite the opposite—but the idea that shared English birth could meaningfully smooth over the immense hierarchical divisions within the population would have been ludicrous to them. Thus the proletariat was itself  racialized, its emergence experienced as the mass immigration of an alien species whose proliferation and empowerment would, if unchecked, destroy the very possibility of culture. On this token, the masses are scarcely human, let alone ‘English’. Clearly, Howe’s pessimistic threnody in White Tribe  cannot be placed in this tradition. The man was, after all, a socialist, a ‘black Leveller’,[31] for whom the working classes had a heroic, liberatory role to play in history. Yet his account of Englishness as a cultural repository of traditions, rituals, and relics, something embodied and lived out rather than innately but accidentally possessed, and therefore wholly at risk of historicization, is distinctly modernist in character. With it comes an implicit riposte to nationalists of every stripe: merely claiming fealty to Englishness or ‘Western civilization’ is not enough—you need to prove it. Such a challenge is now provocative in its untimeliness. Populism has come to dominate in politics over recent decades, playing off a supposedly organic whole tied inextricably together by nationhood or race against malicious forces: shadowy international ‘elites’ in league with racial or sexual minorities. Riotous, miscegenating ‘chavs’ à la Little Britain have been replaced in public discourse by a downtrodden but dignified and ethnically specific ‘white working class’. For this mass politics to succeed electorally, conditions for in-group belonging must be as inflexible as they are minimal; the focus should always be on the barbarians at the gates. Whether those in the citadel can figure out who they are is less certain—their interest lies in deferring this reckoning. An early scene in White Tribe  is illustrative. We find Howe interviewing clubbers in his Brixton neighbourhood. Under pressure, one reveller essays the idea that he is English simply because he and his parents were born in England. What is presented by Howe as an impotent cop-out has become in contemporary politics a rallying cry of generational birthright. Now, it may be an explanation for citizenship, but the incidental fact of where one was born hardly implies active belonging to culture or identity. Likewise, a piece of paper showing one’s genetic lineage is in itself just another arbitrary and worthless tautology, which tells us next to nothing about people’s ideals and behaviours. For those on the new right, however, it is the be-all and end-all of identitarian thinking, in turn forming the bedrock of their proposed immigration policies. They recurringly note, as in a recent article in the Pimlico Journal , that if following the discourse of ‘British values’ one is ‘logically forced to deny that the vast majority of British people born prior to the ’70s’ are British, and to ‘disclaim many contemporary people we intuitively know’ are British, giving the example of members of the far-right British National Party.[32] For one, such a framing drastically diverges from the historical tradition of conservative cultural pessimism, which liked nothing more than denying Britishness to those it found wanting—usually the white working class masses whose identity we are here expected to ‘intuitively’ recognize.[33] But there is another, more pressing, question: even if we leave these endogenous differences to one side, why exactly should one care about shared ethnic status? At risk of yet again vindicating Godwin’s law, let us compare—as a paradigmatic case of racial identification—Nazi Germany. Genocidal and scientifically absurd though it was, Nazi race science and its predecessors at the very least strove to be convincing. It constructed a continuum of Germanic culture stretching back through millennia and taking in a dazzling variety of influences, from Teutonic tribes to ancient Greece, Nordic territories to the Roman Empire. It established revitalizing rituals in the present, whether so-called Thingspiele  or sporting celebrations of the body and physical prowess, epitomized by Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia . And it anchored all this within a teleological model of history which predicted the Aryan race to emerge necessarily victorious over its despised antagonist, establishing a ‘thousand year Reich ’. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it demonstrates well the central point: that race or nationality alone , bereft of any positive cultural or historical buttresses, is but an empty shell. We have seen the clearest example of this already, in Jenrick’s mealy-mouthed evasions. It is likewise telling that, on the page of Reform UK’s manifesto titled ‘Reform is Needed to Defend and Promote British Culture, Identity and Values’, the lone bullet point which could be seen as identifying any affirmative feature of Britishness is that which proposes to make St George’s and St David’s Days public holidays. The rest of the recommendations are purely critical: ‘reject’ the World Economic Forum and the World Health Organisation; ‘oppose’ cashless society; ‘scrap’ DEI and the BBC licence fee; ‘stop’ de-banking, cancel culture, ‘left wing hate mobs’, and ‘political bias in public institutions’.[34] We are, it seems, expected to believe that British culture and identity will simply spring back into existence once these pernicious influences are removed, a reassuring deus ex machina . Others veer into absurdity or kitsch when attempting to answer the question of what cultural identity they are promoting or defending. Carl Benjamin, a right-wing influencer better known as ‘Sargon of Akkad’, has gushed on social media: ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration […] People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’.[35] The stimulus? A music video from 2001 of American rock band Alien Ant Farm performing their song ‘Smooth Criminal’. Remarkable for its bizarrely twee sentimentality, the post is also a good illustration of the USA’s outsized influence on contemporary discourses of identity. If Englishness is evaporating, hope is placed in the broad tent of ‘whiteness’ or ‘white culture’, deemed more likely to survive the much-lamented ravages of wokeness and neoliberalism. Alongside endless posts of Gothic cathedrals and marble statues, impressive enough but decontextualized online into empty simulacra, we are presented as zeniths of ‘white culture’ professional figure skating[36] and celebrity conductor André Rieu.[37] Such posts are perhaps easy targets, though, as Sam Adler-Bell has outlined, this mood of vague yet aggressive nostalgia is constitutive of the entire Trumpian project.[38] With notable exceptions—we hear increasing talk of ‘Anglofuturism’, a fusionist combination of technological progress with traditionalist aesthetics, drawing on historian Alan Macfarlane to paint the Englishman as the economic individualist par excellence[39]—this applies to the UK as well. It is not, however, a cause for relief. On the contrary, as Theodor Adorno observed in the wake of Nazism, ‘it is very often the case that convictions and ideologies take on their demonic, their genuinely destructive character, precisely when the objective situation has deprived them of substance’.[40] Where the reliable commonplaces of pre-1945 English culture have been uprooted, populists have turned to a fetishized concept of racial identity aimed at plastering over this sense of loss and quelling an incumbent nihilism. Yet we need be neither as distrusting of identity as, for example, Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, for whom identification of any kind seems a sure path to fascism,[41] nor as utterly pessimistic about Englishness as Howe, nor again as militantly but superficially fixated on it as the new right. It need not—indeed, it should not—form the basis of our politics. That it is no longer wholly ‘automatic’ does not mean it cannot be cultivated; that this process is challenging is no excuse to scapegoat others for one’s own failure. After all, there is no right to identity, though it can be a privilege. Jack Graveney Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Orwell quoted in Ben Clarke, ‘Orwell and Englishness’ (2006) The Review of English Studies 57(228) 103. [2] ‘Tory leadership candidate Robert Jenrick says ‘woke culture’ threatens ‘English identity’’ ( YouTube , 20 September 2024) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-xovmIxyg > accessed 15 March 2025. [3] See the attached video at Richard Tice MP, ‘Superb by @KonstantinKisin on British values. If you don’t like them or accept them, please do enjoy living somewhere else, because you would not then be welcome here’ ( X , 19 December 2024) < https://x.com/TiceRichard/status/1869695514268336189 > accessed 15 March 2025. [4] See eg Harrison Pitt, ‘Diversity, Not Multiculturalism, Is the Problem’ ( The European Conservative , 6 April 2024) < https://europeanconservative.com/articles/commentary/diversity-not-multiculturalism-is-the-problem/ > accessed 15 March 2025. [5] See ‘Konstantin Kisin Says Rishi Sunak Isn’t English’ ( YouTube , 20 February 2025) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y4_P9IMe5vw > accessed 15 March 2025. [6] Compare Jenrick’s reticence with TS Eliot’s summation of English culture, quoted in Clarke (n 1) 90: ‘It includes all the characteristic activities and interests of a people: Derby Day, Henley Regatta, Cowes, the twelfth of August, a cup final, the dog races, the pin table, the dart board, Wensleydale cheese, boiled cabbage cut into sections, beetroot in vinegar, nineteenth-century Gothic churches and the music of Elgar. The reader can make his own list’. Can he any longer? [7] Roger Scruton, England: An Elegy (Pimlico 2000) viii-ix. [8] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, ‘Jubilee 1977’ (2022) 44(11) LRB < https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n11/robin-bunce-and-paul-field/jubilee-1977 > accessed 15 March 2025. [9] See The Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain. The Parekh Report  (Profile Books 2000). [10] Robin Bunce and Paul Field, Darcus Howe: A Political Biography  (Bloomsbury 2015) 243-4. [11] Quoted in ibid 2. [12] At < https://www.channel4.com/programmes/white-tribe/on-demand/26974-001 > accessed 15 March 2025. [13] The work of photographer Martin Parr traces a similar trajectory—compare The Non-Conformists  (Aperture 2013), black and white photographs from the 1970s of traditional and religious life in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire, with The Last Resort  (Dewi Lewis Publishers 2009), 1980s colour snaps of Merseyside’s working-class seaside resort New Brighton. What distinguishes Parr from Howe is that the former has since managed to find great joy and beauty in postmodern kitsch and consumerism, albeit without entirely dispelling the suspicion of an underlying mockery. [14] Here, a yet stronger standard is applied than the infamous ‘Tebbit test’, which required of immigrants support for the English cricket team to qualify as sufficiently integrated. [15] Quoted in Anne-Marie Fortier, ‘Multiculturalism and the new face of Britain’ (2003) < https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/fass/resources/sociology-online-papers/papers/fortier-multiculturalism.pdf > accessed 15 March 2025. [16] Slavoj Žižek, ‘From Western Marxism to Western Buddhism’ ( Cabinet , Spring 2001) < https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/zizek.php > accessed 15 March 2025. [17] Miri Davidson, ‘Sea and Earth’ ( NLR Sidecar , 4 April 2024) < https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/sea-and-earth > accessed 15 March 2025. Compare in a similar vein ‘Great Replacement’ theorist Renaud Camus’s denial that he is a ‘nationalist’, drawing on Orwell’s distinction in ‘Notes on Nationalism’ (1945) between patriotism—a wholly defensive posture, believed deeply but without any wish to ‘convert’ others—and the aggressive imperialism of nationalism, as embodied by Nazism. See Renaud Camus, ‘May be the word “nationalist” does not have exactly the same meaning in French and English. In French a Nationalist is somebody who thinks that his nation is the most important thing in his life, who cherishes the army and everything national, who thinks his country is better than all the other countries, etc. That is not at all my case […]’ ( X , 18 April 2025) < https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913326907246231593 > accessed 14 October 2025; Renaud Camus, ‘Voilà. Thank you, Sir.’ ( X , 19 April 2025) < https://x.com/RenaudCamus/status/1913501782967230720 > accessed 14 October 2025. [18] Geoffrey Pearson, Hooligan: A History of Respectable Fears  (Macmillan 1983). [19] Nor is Howe innocent in this respect, given his nostalgic contrasting of the atomized capitalist structures at the turn of the millennium with supposedly tighter-knit local communities in the 1960s. See Jon Lawrence, Me, Me, Me: The Search for Community in Post-war England  (Oxford University Press 2023) for a possible corrective. [20] Narinder Minhas, ‘Look on the white side’ Guardian (London, 10 January 2000) < https://www.theguardian.com/media/2000/jan/10/channel4.broadcasting > accessed 17 March 2025. [21] Quoted in Camilla Schofield, ‘In Defence of White Freedom: Working Men’s Clubs and the Politics of Sociability in Late Industrial England’ (2023) 34(3) Twentieth Century British History 534. Compare Mary Ellen Chase’s 1937 suggestion that the ‘Englishman has no objection to foreigners’ provided that ‘they remain what they are and do not attempt any approximation to him’—quoted in Clarke (n 1) 95. [22] Bunce and Field (n 10) viii-ix. [23] See Roger Scruton, On Hunting: A Short Polemic  (Yellow Jersey 1998). [24] ‘Let’s Be Reasonable’ (2004) 27(9) Third Way 18-9 or at < https://highprofiles.info/interview/darcus-howe/ > accessed 17 March 2025. [25] Quoted in Gustav Jönsson, ‘George Orwell Was a Temperamental Conservative and Ideological Radical’ ( Jacobin , 22 October 2023) < https://jacobin.com/2023/10/george-orwell-class-britain-spanish-civil-war-nineteen-eighty-four > accessed 17 March 2025. For an equally evocative duality, consider Howe’s modification of CLR James’s statement that ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian’ to ‘Darcus Howe is a West Indian and he lives in Britain ’—quoted in Bunce and Field (n 10) 1. [26] Benjamin Schwarz, ‘Marxists against wokeness’ ( Spiked , 28 September 2018) < https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/28/marxists-against-wokeness/ > accessed 20 March 2025; Ralph Leonard, ‘CLR James rejected the posturing of identity politics’ ( UnHerd , 11 October 2018) < https://unherd.com/2018/10/clr-james-rejected-posturing-identity-politics/ > accessed 20 March 2025. [27] See Rachel Cunliffe, ‘The “Boriswave” problem’ ( New Statesman , 11 February 2025) < https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/2025/02/the-boriswave-problem > accessed 20 March 2025. [28] Christian Joppke, Immigration and the Nation-State: The United States, Germany, and Britain  (Oxford University Press 1999) 100. [29] See Dan Evans, ‘Reform won’t save Britain’ ( UnHerd , 19 March 2025) < https://unherd.com/2025/03/reform-wont-save-britain/ > accessed 20 March 2025. [30] See John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880-1939 (Faber & Faber 1992). [31] Bunce and Field (n 10) 5. [32] Rhodes Napier, ‘No to Fraser Nelson, no to Steve Laws: towards a “third way” on British national identity’ ( Pimlico Journal , 25 March 2025) < https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/no-to-fraser-nelson-no-to-steve-laws > accessed 5 April 2025 [33] See Carey (n 30) and especially Pearson (n 18) for countless examples of this. [34] Reform UK, ‘Our Contract with You’ ( Reform UK Policy Documents , 2024) 22 < https://assets.nationbuilder.com/reformuk/pages/253/attachments/original/1718625371/Reform_UK_Our_Contract_with_You.pdf?1718625371 > accessed 25 March 2025. [35] Carl Benjamin, ‘This is what the world looked like before mass immigration, widespread racial and gendered guilt activism, and before bankers had totally screwed the economy for their own gain. People were just allowed to be themselves, and they did fun, wholesome things for their own sake’ ( X , 20 January 2024) < https://x.com/Sargon_of_Akkad/status/1748688352365228139 > accessed 25 March 2025. The video is now missing as the initial poster’s account has been suspended, but the replies make the content clear enough, and a screenshot of the original can be provided on request. [36] ‘E’ [Elijah Schaffer], ‘White culture is beautiful. This is what they hate. Save it at all costs’ ( X , 24 December 2024) < https://x.com/ElijahSchaffer/status/1871377665166569937 > accessed 25 March 2025. [37] ‘The General’, ‘White Culture’ ( X , 3 November 2024) < https://x.com/1776General_/status/1853100332768714923 > accessed 25 March 2025. Now, there is nothing wrong with André Rieu—my grandparents watched his New Year’s concerts on TV with enthusiasm—but there is no small irony in presenting such a middlebrow, commercial endeavour as a cultural climax. As one X   user commented, himself seemingly a proud neo-reactionary: ‘This is not white culture. This is Andre [sic] Rieu, he presents a bastardized kitsch variant of classical music to tasteless boomers. Idiot’. [38] Sam Adler-Bell, ‘The Music Man: Trump’s kitschy nostalgia is the point’ ( Intelligencer , 20 October 2024) < https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trumps-town-hall-dj-set-was-perfect-for-his-nostalgic-fans.html > accessed 25 March 2025. [39] See Aris Roussinos, ‘Could Anglofuturism liberate Britain?’ ( UnHerd , 25 January 2025) < https://unherd.com/2025/01/could-anglofuturism-liberate-britain/ > accessed 4 April 2025; Lucien Chardon, ‘Why post-liberalism failed’ ( Pimlico Journal , 18 March 2025) < https://www.pimlicojournal.co.uk/p/why-post-liberalism-failed > accessed 4 April 2025; Alan Macfarlane, The Origins of English Individualism: Family, Property and Social Transition  (Basil Blackwell 1979). [40] Quoted in Jean-Francois Drolet and Michael C Williams, ‘From critique to reaction: The new right, critical theory and international relations’ (2022) 18(1) Journal of International Political Theory 37. [41] See Franco Berardi, ‘The obsession with identity fascism’ < https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo3.htm > accessed 4 April 2025; Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015).

A statue tumbles and, with an almighty splash, sinks below the water. Those responsible cheer with joy. Onlookers are captured in a range of emotions: confusion, rage, wonder. What is taking place? Is this an anti-historical act of violent vandalism, or the liberating removal of a relic of the colonial era, an enduring reminder of oppression?   When Black Lives Matter protesters in Bristol toppled the statue of the merchant and slave trader Edward Colston in June 2020, it was not merely iconoclasm but an ‘iconoclash’, a concept discussed by the French philosopher Bruno Latour. In cases of iconoclasm, Latour notes, the act of breaking is unambiguous, its motivations and contexts clear. In iconoclashes, on the other hand, ‘one does not know, one hesitates, one is troubled by an action for which there is no way to know, without further enquiry, whether it is destructive or constructive’—or, for that matter, both.[1]   In the weeks following Colston’s felling, protests continued in cities across the UK and the US. This clash played out over social media and the periodical press as the world tried to work out what exactly it had witnessed. No consensus emerged. At least on the surface, the debates seemed to turn on the ambiguous axis of ‘history’. Following damage to the statue of Winston Churchill in Parliament Square, Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned what he saw as attempts to ‘edit or censor our past’ and ‘pretend to have a different history’. Across the Channel, French President Emmanuel Macron promised that ‘the Republic won’t erase any name from its history’.[2]   On the other side of the disagreement, the Museum of London expressed its support for removing a statue of the slave-trader Robert Milligan at London’s West India Docks, associating the monument itself with an ‘ongoing problematic regime of white-washing history’.[3] Similarly, the British journalist Ian Cobain pointed out that the misrepresentation and erasure of historical reality has been a ‘habit of the British state for decades’, most evident in the illegal concealment and destruction of hundreds of thousands of records evidencing its colonial barbarisms.[4] Advocates for retention and for removal point the finger at each other, trying each other for crimes against the past. No surprise, then, that Professor Richard J Evans’ treatment of the subject in the New Statesman was titled ‘The history wars’.[5]   Yet Clio, the Greek muse of history, stands to one side of this symmetrical standoff, confused and, one imagines, more than a little offended. In this conflict, the stakes are not historical but above all iconographic, representational. These are not the history wars but rather the image wars, into which the past has been hastily and rather clumsily press-ganged. Only by recognising this and dispelling the projection of ‘history’ can a path out of this impasse be traced. Statues aim not to memorialise history but to escape from it, striving to transcend contingency and reach the universal. Yet under the conditions of secular modernity this attempt has become futile. The logic on which it rests is riddled with contradictions and incoherencies. Ultimately, if cultural memory is to regain legitimacy, it will have to take the opposite approach, focusing on suffering rather than ‘success’, the mass over the individual.   *   Statues are in and of themselves historical artefacts, but their subjects are extrinsic to history. Historicity is not suddenly conferred if a sculptor chooses to fashion Churchill’s face rather than any other individual’s. Calls to take down statues therefore signify not an assault on the past ‘itself’, as suggested by Johnson and Macron, but justified opposition to a particular conception of it. Juggernauts of Churchill, Colston, Milligan, and the like stand as icons of a model of the past which holds individual subjecthood and action in the highest acclaim. The individuals elected as prime movers are elevated above faceless socioeconomic forces. Overwhelmingly, they are white, male, and upper-class. The Victorian essayist Thomas Carlyle pioneered this approach in a series of lectures from 1840, grouped together in print under the title On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History . Carlyle concluded that ‘the history of the world is but the biography of great men’.[6] Although the historical profession has largely overturned this false and discriminatory view of the past, the public are yet to do the same.   The literal concretisation of historical figures into statues epitomises deceptive attempts to reduce history to a shallow agent of culture. Statues do not preserve but annihilate the past. They remove their objects from the course of history and enlist them as representatives of an ahistorical culture. Change over time is the essence of history, but culture aspires above all to stability and constancy, so that it can entrench itself within individuals. As the German philosopher Theodor Adorno repeatedly sought to show, this hunger for permanence can have disturbing consequences. In the 1960s, he diagnosed within the post-war German population an alarming case of ‘verdinglichtes Bewusstsein’ (‘reified consciousness’). For Adorno, this malaise is characterised by a blindness, intentional or otherwise, to ‘all insight into one’s own contingency’ and to the ultimate contingency—and therefore changeability—of the world at large.[7] In the earlier work  Dialektik der Aufklärung  (1947), written with his friend Max Horkheimer, Adorno expressed this idea in an unrelenting aphorism: ‘all reification is a forgetting’, an erasure of history in the form of an unquestioning acceptance of the present.[8]   Recent insistence on the immutability of statues, along with outlandish attempts to ensure it, strongly suggest that the symptoms identified by Adorno persist today. June 2020 saw men in baggy jeans and camouflage jackets gather around a statue of the writer George Eliot in Nuneaton, ostensibly in its defence. One of these ‘defenders’, an army veteran, informed reporters without a hint of irony that ‘I’m purely here to protect our history’.[9] The content of this undifferentiated ‘history’, its twisting and turning contingency, is rendered utterly irrelevant. History becomes a scapegoat, a hollow justification. The statue itself is exposed as a simulacrum, parading the deceptive appearance of the historical but possessing nothing of its substance. In a case yet stranger, Ashbourne in Derbyshire saw a racist bust of a black man’s head moved under mysterious circumstances from the town centre to a secret location, suspected to be the garage of a local Conservative councillor.[10]   These cases are revealing precisely because of their absurdity, which drags the cultural logic of reified consciousness to its perverse and dangerous extremes. Here, a morbid fear of change reveals itself, reminiscent of the underlying assumption of Christian providentialism that ‘everything is as it should be’. Items of the utmost insignificance are hastily made into religious icons whose violation is a mortal sin. In particular, they come to resemble secularised acheiropoieta . Acheiropoieta  are Christian icons, generally of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, believed to have come into being miraculously, without human involvement. The corresponding perception of statues as immaculate conceptions of history is quickly shown to be inaccurate. After removing Colston’s statue from the Avon, the museum M Shed discovered within it a furled 1895 edition of Tit-Bits  magazine, with the scrawled names of the statue’s fitters.[11] It is hard to imagine a better illustration of appealing to the bulwark of history whilst refusing to peer beneath its bronze façade.   *   Statues are problematic and contested for reasons that extend far beyond the individuals they represent. Firstly, they attempt to smuggle individuals out of history, allowing them to escape their own time. Then, building on this, they contrive to ensure reverence and hero-worship for them. As the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously observed, ‘the medium is the message’. Reverence is not an emotion about which one hears a great deal nowadays. It is associated above all with the religious, with veneration and sanctity. Crucially, it is an emotional state which functions only when it is unqueried and accepted as absolute, without deconstruction or interrogation.   When it is undertaken, this interrogation delivers alarming results. No coherent moral calculus or set of ‘rules and regulations’ can justify reverence. No clear ethical boundary can be drawn which, if overstepped, would prevent one’s memorialisation. Take the example of Churchill. Much of the discussion around his ‘worthiness’ for preservation as a statue has concentrated on the extent of his racism. Defenders argue that his undeniably racist views and actions were justifiable in context, whilst critics like Professor Priyamvada Gopal stress that Churchill’s stance on race was actually ‘deeply retrograde even for his time’, such that ‘even his contemporaries found his views on race shocking’.[12]   Professor Gopal is correct, but unfortunately this is irrelevant in this context. Even engaging on the terms of retrospective moral evaluation means being drawn into a dangerous and abyssal logic, which presupposes a coherent moral calculus according to which ‘worthiness to remain’ might be established. Discussing the moral facts of any individual’s life is only useful here if we believe there is a genuine possibility of establishing whether they were a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ person. Framed in the most extreme terms, we could imagine a tribunal aimed at determining whether a person’s opinions and actions crossed a clear moral threshold, sorting the sheep from the goats. Such thought experiments are, of course, absurd, and their parallels with a kind of divine judgement are no coincidence. They function only if the body making the judgement has both perfect moral knowledge and complete access to a person’s life and thoughts. Yet the fundamental prerequisites for this hypothetical tribunal are the same as those that would be needed to indict Churchill’s character. They are also the same as those necessary to sustain the reverence for which the statue form calls.   The ideal of any society is that its moral structures remain constant for such a long time, or are enforced with such completeness and efficacy, that they begin to appear absolute and extrasocietal, their contingent emergence having been masked and repressed. As this takes place, morality is de-historicised, extricated from the skein of time. Consciousness becomes reified, in line with the emphasis of providentialism on preserving existing states of affairs. Only under these conditions—in which an unquestionable transcendent standard is established and allowed to reign—can reverence be deserved and heroism possible. It is for this reason that Christian sainthood is irrevocable. Nonetheless, the Catholic church did carefully vet all candidates until the time of Pope John Paul II. It employed a genuine ‘Devil’s advocate’ and enforced a pre-sanctification waiting period of 50 years after the individual’s death, during which any untoward information about them ought to come to light.   Sainthood is, however, a decidedly pre-modern phenomenon. So too is heroism, in the form of Herculean labours, military leadership, or charismatic state formation. No longer can reverence be sustained by religious or teleologically nationalistic metanarratives. The speed and chaos of life in the twenty-first century does not admit of such lasting simplicity. As early as 1967, the French thinker Guy Debord argued that a decisive shift had occurred: social life in its authentic form had been superseded by its virtual double, a spectacle of pure representation.[13] This shift obliterated any chance of heroism in its established form, but the hero survived as an icon on the screen or a series of pixels on the television, continuing to exist only as an unreal representation. Building on Debord, the Italian philosopher Franco Berardi in his text Heroes  traced the consequences of this disappearance into the virtual, finding them to be no less than murderous. Berardi writes of school shootings and murder sprees as tragic occurrences ‘at the threshold where illusion is mistaken for reality’.[14] Discussing 2011’s Utøya massacre, the Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgaard writes similarly that the perpetrator Anders Behring Breivik ‘acted like a figure in a computer game, but the act of heroism he thought he was performing, and the carnage he brought about, did not belong to the world of images’.[15]   The world of images, connected with the world of numbers and the world of profits, is also a means of transcending and escaping historical reality, a world with neither past nor future. A statue stands in a public square, an avatar floats on a screen. As the former becomes impossible, the latter pervades society ever more deeply. One can be toppled, the other cannot.   *   Despite all of this, the need for cultural memory to be represented in some concrete form remains strong. Discussions are already underway as to whose statue should replace that of Cecil Rhodes in Oriel College, Oxford.[16] The philosopher Alain LeRoy Locke, the first African American elected to a Rhodes Scholarship, is an understandable suggestion. Nonetheless, as we have seen, the dangerous incoherence of statues is intrinsic to their form and cannot be overcome simply by choosing a preferable subject. Is there an alternative? Supplementing existing monuments with contextual plaques enumerating the misdeeds of their subjects creates an unbearably perverse tension. A critical statue is a contradiction in terms. Rather, we must look towards a means of commemoration which is not celebratory but fundamentally negative: the memorial in its true form. Recognising that one person has suffered at the hands of another presents its own challenges and complexities, but is fundamentally legitimate. Its tether to reality is unbroken. Pain and death bear a visceral authenticity which society, for all its efforts, can never fully extinguish.   Where memorials are established, they must be porous, offering the possibility of fluid interaction with the public. The German conceptual artist Jochen Gerz is right to suggest that ultimately ‘the places of remembrance are people, not monuments’.[17] The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, for example, is imbued with a distinct, personal significance by each mourner who looks upon it. Gerz’s Monument Against Fascism in Harburg, developed with Esther Shalev-Gerz and initially erected in 1986, took a more direct approach to interactivity. The Monument invited Harburg’s residents and visitors to commit to opposing fascism by inscribing their names on a 12-metre-high stele, which was then lowered into the ground until it disappeared. In doing so, it embodied a concept of remembrance in stark opposition to unchanging statues, embracing and encoding its own violation and historicity. It served as mirror and conduit, rather than opaque fortification.   Achieving real change in the symbolic representation of memory will not be an easy task. A 1957 competition announced by the International Auschwitz Committee to design a monument for the end of the Auschwitz-Birkenau rail track led to such difficulties that no memorial could be agreed upon. The English sculptor Henry Moore, who chaired the competition’s jury, was forced to admit that only ‘a very great sculptor—a new Michelangelo or a new Rodin— might have achieved this’.[18] This, as James E Young observes, is an ‘extraordinary statement’, since Moore ‘seems to concede that the project was doomed from the start, that none on the jury could imagine a winner, that, hypothetically, there might be no winner’.[19] Jochen Gerz, striving for a way out of this apparent dead end, turns Moore’s admission on its head. He invites the public to be the architect of its own memory, constructively and destructively. At the site of the now-sunken tower, a sign offers hopeful realism: ‘In the end, it is only we ourselves who can rise up against injustice’. Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel (eds), Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art  (The MIT Press 2002) 16. [2] Boris Johnson, ‘It is absurd and shameful that this national monument should today be at risk of attack…’ ( Twitter , 12 June 2020) < https://twitter.com/BorisJohnson/status/1271388181343145986 > accessed 18 March 2021; Reuters Staff, ‘Macron says France won’t remove statues, erase history’ ( Reuters , 14 June 2020) < https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-france-macron-stat/macron-says-france-wont-remove-statues-erase-history-idUSKBN23L0QP > accessed 18 March 2021. [3] Museum of London, ‘Robert Milligan statue statement’ (9 June 2020) < https://www.museumoflondon.org.uk/news-room/press-releases/robert-milligan-statue-statement > accessed 18 March 2021. [4] Ian Cobain, ‘Lying about our history? Now that’s something Britain excels at’ Guardian  (London, 18 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [5] Richard J Evans, ‘The history wars’ The New Statesman  (London, 17 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [6] Thomas Carlyle, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History  (first published 1841, Yale University Press 2013) 41. [7] Theodor Adorno, Erziehung zur Mündigkeit, Vorträge und Gespräche mit   Hellmut Becker 1959 bis 1969  (Suhrkamp Verlag 1970) 104. Translation the author’s. [8] Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialektik der Aufklärung  (first published 1947, Fischer Verlag 2007) 244. Translation the author’s. [9] Aaron Robertson, ‘Defenders of a George Eliot statue had no idea what they were doing and I’m here for it’ ( Literary Hub , 16 June 2020) accessed 18 March 2021. [10] Archie Bland, ‘How “racist” bust “hidden by Tory councillor” divided Derbyshire town’ Guardian (London, 12 June 2020) < https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/jun/12/ashbourne-derbyshire-racist-black-bust-tory-councillor-petition > accessed 18 March 2021. [11] M Shed, ‘After careful cleaning and drying we found someone had handwritten the names…’ ( Twitter , 11 June 2020) < https://twitter.com/mshedbristol/status/1271124618091401216 > accessed 18 March 2021. [12] Priyamvada Gopal, ‘Why can’t Britain handle the truth about Winston Churchill?’ Guardian  (London, 17 March 2021) < https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/mar/17/why-cant-britain-handle-the-truth-about-winston-churchill > accessed 19 March 2021. [13] See Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle (first published 1967, Rebel Press 1994). [14] Franco Berardi, Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide (Verso 2015) 5. [15] Karl Ove Knausgaard, The End  (Vintage 2019) 839. [16] See Ann Olivarius, ‘Rhodes must fall, but who should stand in his place?’ Financial Times  (London, 15 June 2020) < https://www.ft.com/content/336d57a8-fb23-4ec8-8333-bb8e6bc36c98 > accessed 18 March 2021. [17] Jochen Gerz, ‘Rede an die Jury des Denkmals für die ermordeten Juden Europas’ (14 November 1997) < https://jochengerz.s3.eu-central-1.amazonaws.com/Rede-an-die-Jury-des-Denkmals_Jochen_Gerz.pdf > accessed 18 March 2021. [18] Henry Moore quoted in, for example, Jonathan Huener, Auschwitz, Poland and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979 (Ohio University   Press 2003) 157. [19] James E Young, The Texture of Memory: Holocaust Memorials and Meaning  (Yale University Press 1993) 135.

Applause in the executive boardroom. Hands pound backs, mouths twist into smiles. A round man with a stain of indecipherable grease on his shirt collar rises to speak, gesturing inanely at an electronic display. His hands twitch with glee as he highlights data points and maps out forecasts. ‘Returns for this quarter are exceptional, a threefold uptick on last year. Our customer base has expanded markedly. Any number of substantial brand deals. And a few bookings of particular extravagance brought in half a million single handedly. Simply put, they’re dropping like flies’. Uproarious cheer breaks out once more. They had indeed sown a good harvest. Fulfilling their customers’ most neurotic requests gave the assembled board members and lesser functionaries a perverse satisfaction. In a sense, they did genuinely care. But this care was delightfully finite. After the moment of successfully facilitated self-termination, it could freely evaporate. The business model at Blaze of Glory™ ensured that client relationships never lasted too long. It had all begun with Dignitas. Geographical localization of euthanasia laws created an inevitable concentration of demand. Desperate and despairing men and women flocked to Switzerland and Belgium in the hope of outpacing the future. But something strange happened. The allure of death began to take a hold beyond those ‘expected customers’—the terminally ill, irrecoverably deformed, or incurably paedophilic – and exert an almost inexorable pull on the rest of society. Its rapturous theatricality, devil-may-care vibe, and (above all) resplendent finality proved appealing to those wishing to retroactively cement their social status or claim Warhol’s promised fifteen minutes of fame. Minor mutilations did the rounds on social media—for a time, the ‘Stigmata Challenge’ dominated TikTok—but for the real deal, the whole hog, dedicated corporations sprung up, boutique experiences which promised an extinction like no other. Centuries of media satirising bourgeois decadence promptly exited the sphere of fiction. It was a matter of months before four Chinese businessmen found themselves sat in a French villa around a fine wooden table, loaded with all manner of delicacies: quail eggs, dripping churros, a trough of bœuf bourguignon, a monumental Yorkshire pudding drenched in the thickest gravy, consuming and devouring and fucking their brains out with three supine street urchins and a buxom schoolmistress until they slowly wound up dead, gorged with fat and cream atop the table lengthways, faithful to the good old Grande Bouffe down to the smallest detail. Newspaper obituary columns burst their banks and were replaced by dedicated magazines. Martyrdoms were orchestrated with such conviction that sanctification seemed almost guaranteed; terror attacks dropped accordingly. Advertising slogans commanding people to ‘Die doing what you love!’ (or the even less savoury ‘Go out with a bang’) brought hordes of lascivious old men to the doors, swallowing handfuls of Viagra as they waited for their chance to expire as close to the moment of orgasm as possible. Countless weddings were called off after stag nights got out of hand. Television channels offered a round-the-clock programme of self-murder, a source of envy and inspiration in equal measure. This was more than an industry. Suicide had become an art, an ecstatic unity of swansong and encore. It was the chance to be, in death, all which one had not been in life. Enough. That is, I think, enough atrocity for the moment, sufficient verbal bombast. Carry on like that much longer and my thought experiment won’t have any legs to stand on. Since that’s all it is, a thought experiment, a little game to play with myself and string out in words. Think of the untapped riches that remain, from psychologizations of the workforce to population crises, government interventions to ideological counterblasts, here in particular the scope is almost endless, with pleas for a return of suicide to its former authenticity, teenage nihilists unable to cope with the realization of their nocturnal insincerities, class strugglers pressing for the industry’s nationalization and lamenting its domination by the rich, even in death the poor can’t get themselves heard, on and on it goes! Yet at the same time it goes nowhere, nowhere at all. What do I know of suicide? What, indeed, do I know of the world beyond its reconstitution as a mass of tensions and forces, concepts given tortuous names and flagellated in writing? What will this achieve? What, in short, is my right? Seek to reduce your guilt by attempting to include others within it. Turn to critique. And generalise. Raise the conceptual stakes as high as possible. The influence of a writer like Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace seeps out of the above sketch like mustard from an over-filled sandwich. The same over-stylized form and sprightly ironic tone, the same central motif of a contradiction or minor perversity magnified and drooled over ad absurdum . Spellbound by form, that glossy coat and empty shell. The prose is infected by the same sickness as its protagonists. In this respect, at least, it tells us something we already know, without hinting at the possibility of change. It appears as a monument to the inescapability of our condition. In face of such impotence, we have no choice but to laugh. We revel in it. Infinite Jest is the brick-sized proof of this; Foster Wallace observed that he set out to write a sad book and ended up with a funny one.[1] After that, he set out to write a boring one and pathetically succeeded. And then, at the age of 46, he killed himself. (DeLillo lives on, thrashing out works of increasing mediocrity.) Blame modernity: perhaps it isn’t possible to write a sad book any longer. Here, there is no tragedy, only farce. Theodor Adorno took a dim view of representational art. For him, it inevitably involved the possibility of sadistic identification on the part of the ‘audience’; even the ‘sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment’.[2] Years later, conservatives argued that kids playing violent video games would learn to associate happiness with violence, and we all laughed at them. But the issue runs deeper than this merely representative function; the status of art itself appears dangerously entangled with its offering of enjoyment. I exit a cinema showing of Schindler’s List thinking ‘what great art I have just been privy to’, caught in a terminal spiral of self-satisfaction and fawning praise for Stephen Spielberg. W. H. Auden admitted that no single line of his managed to ‘save a single Jew’, since ‘poetry makes nothing happen’.[3] Art imposes itself over the reality it seeks to depict. This is the ambivalence of aestheticization, the trapdoor lurking in the movement from reality to art to audience, in the fundamental artificiality of everything which secures art’s necessary difference from the world. Friedrich Nietzsche wrote that ‘poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them’.[4] The lyric poet who confines himself to the nooks and crannies of his own swollen consciousness is a minor offender. Autofiction is arrogant and indulgent, but it knows its place. That Karl Ove Knausgaard’s My Struggle series, the most notorious project of this kind, resulted in nothing more than an angry uncle and some mundane Norwegian family drama makes clear that the exploitation at work here is trivial. Far more shameless is the appropriation of the suffering of others—thousands, millions, impersonal and uncredited—as grist for the aesthetic mill. Look above: suicide isn’t the point. What the piece wants to articulate is a certain feeling for the grotesque nature of modernity. But suicide is traduced, forced to play along in this garish masquerade. ‘The Sunday edition of the Kärtner Volkszeitung carried the following item under “Local News”: “In the village of A. (G. township), a housewife, aged 51, committed suicide on Friday night by taking an overdose of sleeping pills”’.[5] So begins Peter Handke’s novella Wunschloses Unglück ( A Sorrow Beyond Dreams ); it is his mother who has taken this overdose. Here is no dissimulation; the quoted banality of a regional newspaper report drives home the act’s horrific reality. This is not to say that Wunschloses Unglück is anti-literary. Handke notes that ‘as usual when I am engaged in literary work, I am alienated from myself and transformed into an object, a remembering and formulating machine’—writing as self-reification, mechanisation of the mind.[6] The artist has the privilege of separation from the world, they can write or paint themselves out of a situation and look upon it anew as something transfigured. In the case of Handke, egoistic abstraction is, however, necessarily bound by a filial adherence to the facts of his mother’s life and death. All the same, an unavoidable step is taken by the translation of experience into language, wrestling bodies and minds in motion into the inky strictures of text. For this, form is required – the true engine of prose, that which generates its meaning. Indulgence and alienation loom in this choice also. Selfishness is the inevitable outcome. Claire-Louise Bennett protests that ‘experimental’ prose is not experimental for her , but honest, the product of a background which does not correspond to the literary mainstream.[7] She makes much of being, along with Ann Quin, a working-class female writer who deploys decidedly unusual prose forms in her attempts to make sense of the world. Quin killed herself, in 1973, at the age of 37. Bennett recounts, in Checkout 19 , finding a corpse hanging from a tree on a visit to Yorkshire.[8] This may or may not be relevant. Formally, writing appears the opposite of suicide. It is the affirmation of life—even if only one’s own. But is not suicide also an act of self-authoring? Why else would we leave suicide notes? The critic often strikes me as a kind of cuckold, jerking off in the corner of the literary dancefloor. But ‘creative’ writing itself bears an essentially masturbatory character. Events, people, and feelings are co-opted in the interests of stimulating the self, fantasised about at length, and carefully fiddled with before being splurged onto the page. Autofiction, merely the most explicit variety of this, becomes autoeroticism. The same is true of reading and reception: the way in which I’m able to take such joy from a perceptive line of thought or sublime turn of phrase, without it having the slightest impact on my social or political behaviour; the impotence of the beauty I detect within argumentative and aesthetic forms alike, their incisive and interlocking geometries, motivating no single scrap of action aside from buying and reading yet more books to bask on my shelves and dehydrate in the desert sun. The miracle involved in this is that such an apparently selfish activity can not only sublimate the writer’s dysfunctional emotions but also resonate for others. Bernard Mandeville thought that private vices generated public virtues.[9] The more a decadent aristocracy gambled and luxuriated, the more money circulated, allowing all and sundry to reap the rewards. Self-consciously virtuous action could hope for no such inadvertent benefit. The Dutchman’s model is more applicable to aesthetics than economics. Through some perverse transubstantiation in the mind or on the page, the selfish scribbles of those deluded enough to call themselves writers generate a universal benefit. A scrap of daily suffering leavens and nourishes. They slice their own wrists so all can drink. ------- P.S. A retrospective confession: ‘Keep trying, try everything. And if all else fails, say that it is an essay’ (Kurt Tucholsky).[10] Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA . [1] Cf. Stephen Burn (ed), Conversations with David Foster Wallace (University Press of Mississippi 2012) 55. [2] Theodor Adorno, ‘Commitment’ (1974) I/87-88 New Left Review 85. Originally published in German as ‘Engagement’ in 1962. [3] Auden quoted in Beth Ellen Roberts, ‘W. H. Auden and the Jews’ (2005) 28(3) Journal of Modern Literature 87. [4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Jenseits von Gut und Böse. Vorspiel einer Philosophie der Zukunft (first published 1886, Reclam 1988) §161. Translation the author’s. [5] Peter Handke, A Sorrow Beyond Dreams (first published 1972, Farrar, Straus and Giroux 1974) 3. [6] ibid 5. [7] Cf. Moore Institute, ‘Experimental Fiction: Rob Doyle and Claire-Louise Bennett’ ( Youtube , 25 November 2021) < https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PJaHD6mHKdc > accessed 22 June 2022. [8] Claire-Louise Bennett, Checkout 19 (Penguin 2021). [9] Cf. Bernard Mandeville, The Fable of the Bees (first published 1714, Penguin 1989). [10] Ignaz Wrobel [Kurt Tucholsky], ‘Die Essayisten’ Die Weltbühne (28 April 1931) < https://www.textlog.de/tucholsky-essayisten.html > accessed 22 June 2022. Translation the author’s.

Marcus did not know what to expect. The man with whom he had spoken on the phone made little sense. A number of names had been mentioned, people he had never heard of, and at times Marcus thought the voice on the other end of the line must have been speaking in a foreign language, unfamiliar noises which were sometimes guttural and heavy and sometimes airborne and breathy, and sometimes somewhere in the middle. All he had been able to make out was a time and address, which he scribbled down in his pocket notebook, a present from his mother. He mentioned the phone call to his colleagues at the firm afterwards and they had laughed and told him to ignore it. Marcus got the impression that they knew the precise identity of the caller; they cast each other and him a withering glance, one of exhaustion with acts of naïve moral charity. This glance and all it contained failed to dissuade Marcus. It was his first year working as a tree surgeon, a job he had obtained thanks to no small hardship on the part of his mother. School had not been for him, and he had left glad to see the back of the place but with the impression of stepping out into a great black void, a world which held precious little for him. He enjoyed being at home with his mother, helping around the house, tending the allotment down the road. Whilst he worked the family’s small plot, the world came alive and spoke to him in a voice he could understand. It radiated an energy which he greedily harvested, inhaling dirty gulps of wisdom. When rain fell, he lay there and felt dirt turn to mud underneath his skin, droplets pitter-pattering against one cheek as the other pressed down into the soil. In the corner of the allotment stood the carapace of an old oak tree. From time to time, Marcus would crawl into its cyclopic orifice, mummified in a cocoon of bark, and summon thoughts of regrowth. After a while, the tree would be whole again, his twisted legs rooted deep and gorging themselves on water, his rigid torso elephantine and stark upright, his fractal of arms and digits craning outwards to a thousand ripe eyes enthralled by a feast of light. Each time, Marcus murdered this resplendence. He had no choice. When the hollow birthed him into the sunken night, he would feel a death within him and hear a groan of ancient mortality reverberate between his bones. He could sustain but one being at a time. Marcus found himself winding his way along a country lane, towards the address he had been given on the phone. Bordering the lane was a ribbon of deep-set and seemingly impenetrable hedgerow, adorned with protuberant knuckles of red. Tarmac soon gave way to gravel, gravel to agitable dust, and a thatched cottage came into view. Densely packed behind strabismic windows Marcus could make out piles upon piles of books, blotchy embossed spines of deep burgundy and myrtle. Reading had always been a struggle for him; his aptitude for languages extended only to those of nature, of incremental growth and seasonal change. Words on the page seemed too deeply engraved, too inarguably fixed and unamenable to care. In the instant between Marcus opening his van’s door and stepping out onto the shoddy earth, the cottage’s occupant had appeared outside and was waiting expectantly for him. This transition was noiseless. It was as if the occupant, a bald and elderly man of slender proportions but penetrating gaze, had intangibly passed through his wooden door. Marcus hollered an abrupt greeting and gestured to the logo glaringly emblazoned on the van behind, as if to assure him that the visit was legitimate and well-meant. The man, whose name he would later discover was Reginald, remained silent until Marcus had almost reached him. Then, softly, he spoke: ‘Would you show me your hands?’ The request’s ambivalent innocence captivated Marcus. Its tone was that of an infant, yet it lacked any hesitation. It was conscious of its own importance but would not deign to insist. Marcus’s hands rose and presented themselves, palms up, to Reginald, who fixated upon them as on a ritual totem or unearthed relic. His mien was that of a primitivist artist stopped dead, undone in all pretensions by a deep-set nobility tantalizing close and yet utterly alien. Darting eyes inventoried their particularities, caressing each crease, mentally untangling the knot of palm lines. Each grope for understanding teetered on wonder’s precipice. The older man’s eyes widened, and his breathing deepened. After a time, Reginald took Marcus’s hands in his. These were immaculate, as if smoothed to marble over decades by the desert’s swirling sands. They were luxuriously, almost grotesquely unblemished. Conjoined with Marcus’s torn and callused digits, they evoked a coupling of the sacred with the profane. Suddenly, the old man broke off and, in a manner now sprightly and invigorated, pulling books from shelves, grandly gesticulating at framed images, almost dancing now upon his feet, indicated for Marcus to follow him inside. Marcus understood little of what was said, but he picked out names, names which evidently bore weight and yet floated, floated daintily through the room, weaving and darting between the stacks of books as if making for the exit, as if possessed of a life of their own, yet dragged inexorably back in by Reginald’s orbit, by his intimate need for them and them for him. Names like Calvino, like Petrarch, like Havemann, Joyce, Gass, like Améry or Handke, Swinburne, Enzensberger, or De Quincey, names which meant nothing to Marcus, nothing at all, yet whose pace and structure and rhythm, whose atmosphere, entranced him. Behind this cosmos of names hung a painting, a painting of a large room, large and empty, devoid of furniture, chopped in half at the waist as if looked down upon, empty that is save for three men, prostrate on their knees with their arms extended before them, their heads bowed and tilted, their hands hard at work, for they are scraping the floor, hard at work scraping the floor, and the product of their labour is curled around them in ringlets like snakeskin. Reginald finally halted and drew breath, but the atmosphere which now thronged throughout the room survived his voice. It seemed to take on mass and effervescent direction, carrying the two men out of the backdoor and into the garden. Here Marcus set about to work, unbidden, unable to hold himself back. His hands grew into tools, his fingers became sharp and incisive, tweaking and upending, his palms moulding and sifting through material. He held nothing, it was part of him, it was all part of him. And as he worked Reginald read, perched in a rocking chair which tumbled gently back and forth, his fingertips resting against the delicate gold lettering of the work’s spine, his thumb and forefinger darting forward to turn each page, his voice – his voice breathing magic into every word, magic which poured into Marcus’s ears as he worked. The young man bathed in these words, they supported him like a hammock tied between two trees, and though still he could make neither head nor tail of most sentences they upended him all the same. The saplings tilted their nascent trunks in hope of finding the voice, and the sun itself leaned back and listened as it sliced its way through the sky. In this ecstasy, this synaesthetic rapture, Marcus laboured deeper into the garden. Beyond the saplings, the hedgerows, the beds of flowers, he emerged into a glade. At the centre of this clearing stood – and here his spine tingled with sublime excitement – the carapace of an old oak tree. It could not be the same as that in the allotment, but to Marcus it seemed a homecoming nonetheless. Down on hands and knees he went, pulling himself inside, the dead and dying wood coyly scratching his skin, until he was sealed within, his thoughts focused on one end: resurrection. Spurred on by the undulation of Reginald’s voice, its variant speed and rhythm, as if he were a shaman summoning up some forest sprite or more ancient chthonic brute, this came quickly. In what felt like a matter of instants, this symbiosis of word and plant and man was complete. From his sumptuous vantage point, Marcus surveyed the garden, the house, the small smooth figure of Reginald, a smile woven across his face, his hands still clasped around the book from which he was reading. The sun was setting by now, leaving him alone in the sky. When night fell, he saw the old man rise from his rocking chair and re-enter the cottage, which also settled into sleep. The idea of returning to his prior state, of slaughtering what he and Reginald had wrought, was a sin too great for Marcus to consider. The intermingling was too narrow, the metamorphosis irreversible. He was a stylite and this tree his pillar. It was with the contentment of radical and unremitting self-sacrifice that he finally rested. The next morning, he awoke to music. Raindrops dabbled against his branches. Reginald’s words rang loud and clear. Their harmony left nothing to be desired. Jack Graveney   Jack Graveney has recently begun a PhD in History at the University of Cambridge. He previously graduated with Distinction from the MSt in Intellectual History at the University of Oxford, and with a First Class with Distinction from Cambridge’s BA in History and German. His work has been published in The Germanic Review , German Life and Letters , Epoché Magazine , The Oxonian Review , CJLPA , and the Cambridge Review of Books . Jack is Managing Editor of CJLPA .

On a sunny day in June 2025, I visited the celebrated writer Hwang Sokyong at his home in Gunsan, South Korea. Years spent investigating the history of state-sponsored torture had led me through Mr Hwang’s fiery accounts of the fight for democracy in South Korea,[1] and my despair over the deterioration of law in the United States led me to his doorstep. When he opened the door, and I introduced myself as ‘the Guantanamo lawyer’, he first beamed, then said, ‘I was just watching the violence in Los Angeles on the news’.   The comment made me flinch. There was little surprise in his voice, unlike the breathless tone of the US media in describing events that have been foretold for decades. We Americans are now surprised when military are deployed to quell political protests;[2] indignant when surveillance expands beyond Muslim communities;[3] shocked that concentration camps could be opened on the mainland despite the continuing existence of Guantanamo.[4] ‘History is a conflict between the pain of memory and the ease of forgetting’, said Mr Hwang. Sometimes, watching from Gitmo, it feels like Americans have been programmed to party through the suffering of others, and then forget because we felt no pain.   Guantanamo Bay is a rough place, where a few minutes under the sun will cover your neck in sweat and fill your nostrils with dust, and odd birds, or insects, of varying sizes will scurry away as you trudge towards your damp lodgings. When on the island, we become hyper-focused on the blaring injustice there. Each transgression by the guards, each untreated detainee illness triggers fury. Our clients were ‘dropped in the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean’,[5] but unlike Hamilton, some of them never made it out. America forgot about them, so we lawyers harness our anger to keep reminding the world. Vulture on top of a utility pole near the detention zone at Guantanamo Bay. From Guantanamo, we have watched democracy recede on the mainland for over two decades, with the same anger. Even the tortured men at Gitmo comment on issues like the targeting of Black Americans and the impunity of US police,[6] and the erosion of free speech or religious rights when their expression is politically inconvenient.[7] Masked ICE agents may disappear your school nurse, but as long as the autumn brings pumpkin spice everything, surely things are not that bad?   ‘Each generation feels tempted to choose comfort over responsibility’, said Mr Hwang, ‘ Forgetting is easy, compromise is tempting, and isolation is comfortable’. Sitting in his sun-filled library, it was hard to imagine him wrestling with demons during his years of imprisonment. Because of our culture of forgetting, it is also hard to imagine going to jail for opposing the sort of acts now being perpetrated by the US government, as he did. ‘Were there times when you could not speak or write?’ I asked, thinking of his torture. He did not hesitate. ‘Yes, there were times when the weight of fear or grief was too heavy. After friends were executed or after nights of interrogation, I sometimes felt paralyzed’. He paused while we sipped from our cups. ‘But it never lasted long. Silence visited me, but it could not stay. Memory broke it open again. The dead would not let me rest’.   Whose deaths will keep us awake? I’ve seen former clients die after release from Gitmo, from injuries we inflicted on them.[8] Drones under Obama decimated families; one of my clients was a young girl who came to DC to ask for justice after a drone blew up her grandmother in Pakistan.[9] None of these ‘foreign’ deaths disturbed most Americans. The brutal murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor galvanized many,[10] but by the end of 2020, the protests had stopped short of achieving real reform, although ‘BLACK LIVES MATTER’ was now painted prominently in front of the White House.[11]    But we should lose sleep even before killings begin here at home, right? With friends, I circulated a letter to Columbia University alumni in March 2025, furious at the school authorities for facilitating the persecution of students. Many signed, but some law school alumni were incensed. ‘So you support Hamas terrorists’, they messaged, referring to Columbia students Mahmoud Khalil and Ranjani Srinivasan, sidestepping all facts and law.[12] Several formerly dear friends, now among the leadership of their powerful law firms, stayed silent. They would not sign; they had tee times scheduled. One of them said, in earnest, ‘We’re so grateful for the work that non-profit lawyers are doing right now’.   ‘Were you angry with people who did not speak out back then? Are  you angry?’ I asked Mr Hwang, about the persecution of the 1980s. This was the real reason for my visit: I needed to know what was forgivable, decades later. I needed to know from an elder that my anger might be productive, that we could still prevent the worst excesses of fascism in the US. ‘Silence is betrayal’, he said. ‘Words alone cannot change the world, but without words, no change is possible’.   He went on, animated by my own barely-concealed agitation. ‘I lost friends, I lost family, I lost years of my life. But I never lost my conviction that the truth had to be spoken. It is the difference between carrying silence like a stone and carrying memory like a torch. One crushes you, the other lights the way’.   The tremendous irony of our culture of forgetting is that the memory of the internet—the tool that destroyed our attention span—is infinite. In 1985, the book Gwangju Diary , an eyewitness account of the 1980 massacres in Gwangju, was published under Mr Hwang’s name. The now-credited author was a student named Lee Jae-Eui, but Mr Hwang was already a famed writer, had participated in the Gwangju uprising and compilation of accounts, and was willing to assume the danger of backlash. The book was officially banned, but secretly distributed throughout South Korea, and later relied upon to establish the crimes committed by the government in Gwangju.   Just forty years later, very little such toil is necessary to preserve memory of atrocities. The CIA’s internal account of my client Ammar al Baluchi’s torture at the black sites is available by quick internet search,[13] but some of the same techniques are now used on detainees at Alligator Alcatraz.[14] Graphic photographs from the US military’s massacre of innocents in Haditha, Iraq, were published online by the New Yorker,[15] a war crime forecasting the recent renaming of the Department of Defense as the ‘Department of War’.[16] Instead of risking our lives to preserve memory, we now risk our democracy for the luxury of forgetting it.   And we forfeit our own dignity. Dignity, recalled Mr Hwang, sustained South Korean activists until democratization. ‘That’s why even after defeats, the movement always returned. You cannot permanently suppress a people who know their worth. And it’s a lesson I hope younger generations never forget: democracy begins with dignity’. Watching famous technology CEOs pay obsequious homage to the White House amidst a nationwide crackdown on their customers’ right to freedom of expression, I question where, exactly, the end of dignity might be.[17]   Alka Pradhan with Hwang Sokyong.   The day after my meeting with Mr Hwang, I attended the opening of the National Museum of Korean Democracy in Seoul, based in the preserved Namyeongdong interrogation and torture center.[18] Of the museum, Mr Hwang mused, ‘A democracy without memory is like a tree without roots. It may stand for a while, but it cannot endure the storms’. It took about forty years after democratization for the Namyeongdong facility to be turned into a memorial—justice is a work in progress in South Korea, but it will be built on memory. Walking through the room where a young student protestor was waterboarded to death in the name of ‘anti-communism’, I think of the US government’s excuse of ‘terrorism’ to justify dismantling the rule of law.[19] I think of the migrants newly transferred to Guantanamo in February 2025,[20] twenty-three years after the facility’s opening. And I wonder how long it will take us to remember to remember.   The National Museum of Korean Democracy, formerly Namyeongdong interrogation facility, upon opening in June 2025. ICE vehicle at Guantanamo Bay, April 2025. Alka Pradhan   Alka Pradhan is a human rights lawyer practicing at Guantanamo Bay and before the International Criminal Court. Her writing does not reflect the opinion of the Department of Defense, and even less the ‘Department of War’. Special thanks to Professor Hyunah Ahn of Kunsan National University, for her generosity and skill in providing interpretation. [1] See eg Hwang Sokyong, The Prisoner: A Memoir  (Sora Kim-Russell and Anton Hur tr, Verso 2021); Hwang Sokyong, The Guest  (KJ Chun and M West tr, Seven Stories Press 2005); Hwang Sokyong, Mater 2-10  (Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae tr, Scribe Publications 2023). [2] Rebecca Schneid, ‘Trump Has Deployed Troops at Home Like No Other President. Here is Where He’s Sent Them’ ( Time , 11 August 2025) < https://time.com/7308904/dc-national-guard-trump-troops/ > accessed 18 September 2025. [3] Jessica Katzenstein, ‘The High Costs of Post-9/11 Mass Surveillance’ ( Costs of War , 26 September 2023), < https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/papers/2023/surveillance > accessed 18 September 2025. [4] Hatzel Vela, ‘Families and immigrant detainees allege “horrible” conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”’ (9 July 2025), < https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/families-immigrant-detainees-allege-horrible-conditions-alligator-alca-rcna217743 > accessed 18 September 2025. [5] Lin-Manuel Miranda, Hamilton: An American Musical  (Grand Central Publishing 2016). [6] ‘Systemic racism pervades US police and justice systems, UN Mechanism on Racial Justice in Law Enforcement says in new report urging reform’ ( UNOCHR , 28 September 2023) < https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2023/09/systemic-racism-pervades-us-police-and-justice-systems-un-mechanism-racial > accessed 18 September 2025. [7] ‘USA: Free speech on campus needs to be protected, not attacked, say experts’ ( UNOCHR , 25 July 2024) < https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2024/07/usa-free-speech-campus-needs-be-protected-not-attacked-say-experts > accessed 18 September 2025. [8] ‘Former Guantanamo Detainee, Hunger Striker Emad Hassan, Dies at 45’ ( The New Arab , 2 August 2024) < https://www.newarab.com/news/former-guantanamo-detainee-emad-hassan-dies-oman-45 > accessed 18 September 2025. [9] ‘Pakistani Family Urges US to End Drone Strikes’ ( Dawn , 30 October 2013) < https://www.dawn.com/news/1052706 > accessed 18 September 2025. [10] ‘Breonna Taylor: Protesters call on people to “say her name”’ ( BBC News , 7 June 2020) < https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-52956167 > accessed 18 September 2025. [11] AJ Willingham, ‘Washington, DC paints a giant “Black Lives Matter” message on the road to the White House’ ( CNN , 5 June 2025) < https://www.cnn.com/2020/06/05/us/black-lives-matter-dc-street-white-house-trnd > accessed 18 September 2025. [12] Leila Fadel, Taylor Haney, Arezou Rezvani, and Kyle Gallego-Mackie, ‘“Citizenship won’t save you”: Free speech advocates say student arrests should worry all’ ( NPR , 8 April 2025) < https://www.npr.org/2025/04/08/nx-s1-5349472/students-protest-trump-free-speech-arrests-deportation-gaza > accessed 18 September 2025. [13] Julian Borger, ‘CIA black site detainee served as training prop to teach interrogators torture techniques’ Guardian  (London, 14 March 2022) < https://www.theguardian.com/law/2022/mar/14/cia-black-site-detainee-training-prop-torture-techniques > accessed 18 September 2025. [14] Peter Charalambous and Laura Romero, ‘“It’s like you’re dead alive”: Families, advocates allege inhumane conditions at “Alligator Alcatraz”’ ( ABC News , 14 August 2025) < https://abcnews.go.com/US/youre-dead-alive-families-advocates-allege-inhumane-conditions/story?id=124645763 > accessed 18 September 2025. [15] Madeleine Baran, ‘The Haditha Massacre Photos That the Military Didn’t Want the World to See’ ( The New Yorker , 27 August 2024) < https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/in-the-dark/the-haditha-massacre-photos-that-the-military-didnt-want-the-world-to-see > accessed 18 September 2025. [16] Harlan Ullman, ‘U.S. Department of what? Are you serious?’ ( UPI , 10 September 2025) < https://www.upi.com/Voices/2025/09/10/department-of-war-Hegseth/8911757437560/ > accessed 18 September 2025. [17] Rebecca Falconer, ‘Big Tech elite lavish praise on Trump at White House dinner’ ( Axios , 4 September 2025) < https://www.axios.com/2025/09/05/trump-tech-dinner-ceo-zuckerberg-musk > accessed 18 September 2025. [18] Yoon Min-sik, ‘Symbol of tyranny breathes new life as museum of pro-democracy movement’ ( The Korea Herald , 21 May 2025) < https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10492540 > accessed 18 September 2025. [19] Anna Meier, ‘What Does a “Terrorist” Designation Mean?’ ( Lawfare , 19 July 2020) < https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/what-does-terrorist-designation-mean > accessed 18 September 2025. [20] Maia Davies, ‘Trump sends first migrant detainees to Guantanamo Bay’ ( BBC News , 5 February 2025) < https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy0p1ykxyzjo > accessed 18 September 2025.

On 12 January 2022, there was an attempt to destroy, or at least damage, the statue of Prospero and Ariel installed outside the BBC’s Broadcasting House in London, on the grounds that its sculptor, Eric Gill, was a ‘paedophile’. A petition has been launched on the website of the left-wing petition organiser, 38 degrees, calling for the removal of the statue. At the time of writing (February 2022), it has nearly reached its target of 3,000 signatures. Save the Children has withdrawn its recommendation that one of the many type-fonts developed by Gill—Gill Sans—should be used in its publicity material. In the course of the media response to the attack, Gill was described as a ‘known paedophile’ who ‘sexually abused his two eldest daughters’[1] and ‘a monster, a depraved paedophile who abused his daughters and others […] a man who committed horrific sexual crimes’.[2] The Wikipedia entry on Gill has a section on his ‘sexual crimes’. The 38 Degrees petition reads: Please sign to demand that the BBC remove the sculpture depicting a naked child, created by known paedophile Eric Gill, which is above the main entrance of BBC Broadcasting House. Gill had an incestuous relationship with his sister, sexual relationships with two of his pubescent daughters and even his family dog. The BBC likes to think a naked boy submissively leaning into the raised leg of a wizard is simply a metaphor for broadcasting. To the BBC Eric Gill was a major British artist rather than a child and animal abuser. Why is this important? I believe that the BBC would regain some credibility with their reputation, if they were seen to act upon the image of a naked child created by a known pedophile. It will show that they do not approve of the crimes committed by their past stars, Savile, King, Hall and Harris and show that they don’t condone anybody who carries out child abuse . [3] Comments left by signatories include: ‘To have a sculpture made by a pedo outside a building that harbers [sic] pedos is a disgrace to decent normal people. pull down the statue and also the building the BBC is a disgrace to the British people’; ‘The BBC are a disgrace from savil to hall and all the other monsters they helped. the pedos statue want smashed into a million bits and the building burnt to the ground’; ‘Because it’s absolutely grim mate, how is there a child penis on a sculpture of all things?? We don’t even celebrate some of our greatest heroes yet we apparently support wizards and pedos, no thanks I’ll stick to dungeons and dragons’.[4] The controversy, such as it is, turns on whether it is right to admire work done by a depraved monster (‘Eric Gill’s crimes were unforgivable, but his statue is blameless’[5]; ‘Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?’[6]) and, if it is, whether such work should not be shown in a more discreet setting, perhaps adorned with some sort of explanatory text. There seems to be little disagreement over whether or not Gill can be characterised as a ‘paedophile’—‘a man who committed horrific sexual crimes’.[7] I developed an interest in Gill through my interest in the French Cubist painter, Albert Gleizes. Both Gill and Gleizes were in correspondence with the Ceylonese metaphysician and writer on traditional art, Ananda Coomaraswamy. Both were fond of quoting Coomaraswamy’s well-known dictum: ‘An artist is not a special sort of man but every man is a special sort of artist’. Neither Gill nor Gleizes knew each other but Coomaraswamy grouped them together with himself and the American engraver (friend and correspondent of Gill) Arthur Graham Carey as people assumed to be ‘mediaevalists’, though of course that wasn’t how he saw it himself. He preferred the term ‘traditionalist’.[8] I set about reading Gill and was impressed by his general philosophy on the nature of work and art, which could perhaps be summarised in the opening two paragraphs of his essay from 1918, Slavery and Freedom : That state is a state of Slavery in which a man does what he likes to do in his spare time and in his working time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please himself. That state is a state of Freedom in which a man does what he likes to do in his working time and in his spare time that which is required of him. This state can only exist when what a man likes to do is to please God.[9] DH Lawrence, who disliked Gill’s prose in general (‘Crass is the only word: maddening like a tiresome uneducated workman arguing in a pub—argufying would describe it better—and banging his fist’), nonetheless, and despite the mention of ‘God’, found ‘more in those two paragraphs than in all Karl Marx or Professor Whitehead or a dozen other philosophers rolled together’.[10] Gill’s life and work was a long protest against everything that ‘art’ has become in our own time. He recognised and vigorously asserted the principle put forward by William Morris that ‘art’ is just another word for work well done; he successfully established the kind of rural community life which provides the best conditions for such work; he recognised that the function of his own art form—sculpture—was inseparable from religion and that indeed all art, which is to say all work, can only realise its highest value if it is done in a spirit of worship; he detested the business spirit and mechanised production, always asserting the importance of the human over the economic. All that brought him very close to the thinking of Albert Gleizes, who also distrusted ‘art’, emphasised the importance of craftsmanship, tried (with much less success than Gill) to establish a communal way of working and living, and believed that painting and sculpture had lost their way with the Renaissance and its imitation of the external appearances of nature. Both Gleizes and Gill liked to quote the dictum of Thomas Aquinas (also favoured by Coomaraswamy): ‘Art imitates nature not in its effects but in its way of working’. It seemed to me, reading Gill, that, like Gleizes, he was one of the necessary voices of the twentieth century. The Autobiography , in particular, struck me as one of the most delightful books I had ever read. I was therefore upset when, just at the moment that I was discovering him, his reputation as a moral thinker was trashed with the publication of Fiona MacCarthy’s biography.[11] The book was published in 1989 with a great deal of publicity, including a special TV programme on Gill and an article in The Independent colour supplement, all pursuing the theme that startling revelations were to be found in it concerning sexually aberrant behaviour with his daughters, at least one sister, maybe two, and even the family dog. It is a theme hammered home by the Introduction. Gill is presented as a ‘tragic’ figure riven by contradictions between his fine religious and social ideal and his disorderly life and passions: He was taken very seriously in his day. At his death, the obituaries suggested he was one of the most important figures of his period, not just as an artist and craftsman but as a social reformer, a man who had pushed out the boundaries of possibility of how we live and work; a man who set examples. But how convincing was he? One of his great slogans (for Gill was a prize sloganist) was ‘It All Goes Together’. As I traced his long and extraordinary journeys around Britain in search of integration, the twentieth-century artistic pilgrim’s progress, I started to discover aspects of Gill’s life which do not go together in the least, a number of very basic contradictions between precept and practice, ambition and reality, which few people have questioned. There is an official and an unofficial Gill and the official, although much the least interesting, has been the version most generally accepted.[12] She refers to ‘the smokescreen Gill himself and others so determinedly erected’ and affirms boldly: ‘At least I can be confident that Gill was not what he said he was. The Autobiography is full of obfuscation’.[13] And yet this is not at all the impression that is conveyed once we get into the substance of the book. Indeed, even the Introduction itself makes it plain that, whatever the details of his sexual activity, no-one who came into contact with him could be in any doubt that he regarded sex as a matter of immense importance, of endless wonder and delight and that he was, or seemed to be, completely lacking in any inhibitions on the subject, that he expected the same of all the others around him. I don’t myself share that attitude and, for the sake of the ideas that he had in common with Gleizes, I regret that he had it. But I can’t accuse him of ‘obfuscation’ on the matter. Having made this accusation, the Introduction continues: In earlier years Eric Gill had alighted on and promulgated in his own version Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Hindu doctrines of the erotic elements in art. Later on, at Ditchling, with the same conviction, he began propounding a complicated theory, or succession of theories, in which sexual activity is aligned to godliness, in which the sexual organs, far from their conventional depiction as the source of scandal, are ‘redeemed’ by Christ and ‘made dear’. It is a very radical and interesting theory, where Gill challenges Christendom’s traditional confrontation of matter and spirit, and indeed his theory is justified in part, at least for connoisseurs of art, by the wonderful erotic engravings of that period. But one senses something frantic in the zeal with which Gill exfoliated his passion, in contexts likely and unlikely, and in his evident enjoyment of the waves of consternation which followed, particularly from the monasteries.[14] When she comes to discussing the Autobiography she herself quotes, with evident relish, the wonderful passage in which Gill recounts his first discovery of the joys of masturbation:[15] But how shall I ever forget the strange, inexplicable rapture of my first experience? What marvellous thing was this that suddenly transformed a mere water-tap into a pillar of fire, and water into an elixir of life? I lived henceforth in a strange world of contradiction: something was called filthy which was obviously clean; something was called ridiculous which was obviously solemn and momentous; something was called ugly which was obviously lovely. Strange days and nights of mystery and fear mixed with excitement and wonder—strange days and nights, strange months and years.[16] Not much sign of ‘obfuscation’ there! Nor in the passage which she quotes with equal enthusiasm in which Gill describes the beauty of the flowers of the field as a magnificent display of sexual parts designed to entice for the purpose of procreation.[17] And accordingly invites us to see our own genitalia, male and female, as our most precious ‘ornaments’.[18] She makes the remarkable, almost perverse, observation that: ‘Gill the patriarchal figure surrounded by what at times seems dozens of his children and his grandchildren, is also a scene of pathos, fertility run wild, the all-too-logical conclusion of his “let ‘em all come” theories’.[19] She is referring to a passage, again in the Autobiography , when at the time of their marriage Gill and his wife, Mary (or Ethel as she was before her conversion to Catholicism) agreed not to bother with contraception: ‘“Always ready and willing” was our motto in respect to lovemaking and “let ‘em all come” was our motto in respect of babies’.[20] But they only had three daughters as well as one adopted son. Gill came from a family of thirteen children and he and Mary may well have wanted more but after a series of miscarriages they knew it was not to be. The ‘fertility run wild’ was the fertility of their daughters. Is Gill to be blamed—assuming it is a bad thing—for that? She says that she has ‘come to see Gill as a rather tragic figure’, because of the contradiction between his role as a model English Catholic ‘paterfamilias’ and his unruly sexual appetite.[21] What is astonishing about Gill, however, and this book confirms it, is the apparent absence of any such contradiction. Gill had sexual relations with his housekeepers, with female colleagues, the wives of his friends, his sisters (or at least one sister), and even his daughters. Yet the book gives little evidence of the ill-feeling, tension, and jealousy which such behaviour should normally have provoked. It is as if the normal rules don’t apply, and at one point, MacCarthy (following one of Gill’s Dominican friends) asks: ‘Was Gill honestly entitled to the privilege of innocence? Had he really been unaffected by the Fall?’[22] The question is an interesting one, given that Gill believed in the Fall and Fiona MacCarthy, one assumes, does not. In fact, the whole prurient glee with which the media establishment has swooped on Gill’s sexual misdeeds is interesting. In theory, sexual innocence should be an easy matter for those who do not believe that the sinfulness of sexual passion has been revealed by God. Yet here is a man who is apparently incapable of feeling sexual guilt and whose sexual activities seem to have caused no lasting damage to anyone, and Fiona MacCarthy tries to persuade herself that he was unhappy, tragic, eaten up by contradictions, even though all the evidence she gives proclaims the contrary. While MacCarthy thinks that there should have been a tension between Gill’s sexual activity and his Catholicism, Gill maintains that the two were mutually complementary. She tells us about a visit Gill paid with his then protégé, the Welsh writer and artist, David Jones, to a certain ‘big fat man with a taste for true pornography […] The walls of his flat in Lincoln’s Inn Fields were almost papered over with pornographic postcards. At the sight of these, Gill turned to David Jones, saying: “If I were not a Catholic, I should have been like this”’.[23] Again, Gill complained about his brother whose marriage was breaking up that ‘Brother Max is so virtuous by nature and so stupid and muddle-headed […] that he prefers to cast M. adrift and break up the home (thus depriving his children of all that home implies) rather than have a love affair to go to confession about’.[24] The same attitude to acknowledging sin is found in the Autobiography , in which he proclaims it as a privilege, an assertion of one’s pride in being a man and thus capable of sinning.[25] One has the feeling that having a good sin to confess was all part of the fun (one of his confessors, incidentally, was Fr John O’Connor, thought to have been the model for Chesterton’s Father Brown. That must have made things easier). He develops an argument that Catholics, confident in their membership of the True Church, can afford to take a lighter attitude to life than Protestants and agnostics, who continually have to prove themselves.[26] And, especially towards the end of his life, MacCarthy tells us, new visitors to Pigott’s, the last of the rural artistic communities he founded, had to pass through a sort of initiation test in which Gill held forth to them about Christ’s genitals which, given that He was the Perfect Man, could be assumed to have been of a goodly size. While he was receiving instruction to enter the Church in 1913, he was working on a life size marble replica of his own phallus. One feels a certain sympathy for MacCarthy. He ought to have been a neurotic and unhappy soul. It somehow seems unjust that he wasn’t. MacCarthy argues in support of her view that he was a tragic figure, that ‘a chain of destructiveness began at Ditchling, not long after his conversion to Catholicism. Perhaps a part of his tragedy is that he was both ahead of his times and behind them. His urge to experiment with social conventions, especially the prevailing sexual mores, became more obviously and more painfully at variance with the Gills’ accepted role as the ideal Catholic family, the public demonstration of fidelity and cohesiveness’.[27] In fact, Gill’s life at Ditchling Common, at Capel-y-ffin, and at Pigott’s (the three rural craft communities he founded or co-founded after his conversion to Catholicism) was astonishingly creative, not just for his own work but for his ability to attract and train loyal followers and apprentices, bringing out their own creative capacities. Of course there were immense problems, and it is quite believable that he was crushed by his workload, his financial responsibilities, and his despair at the direction in which political events were moving in the 1930s. But anyone who knows anything about the difficulties of maintaining his kind of life, and of holding such communities together, will be impressed by his achievement, especially remembering that, unlike Ruskin, Morris, Carpenter, or Ashbee, he had no inherited wealth. All his ventures were financed only by his own work. The main evidence for Gill’s ‘destructiveness’ is his quarrel with his former close friend, the printer, Hilary Pepler. But though MacCarthy discusses this at some length and tells us that there is a long correspondence on the subject, she doesn’t in my view quite come to grips with it. Was it, as she hints in the Introduction, prompted by jealousy because his eldest daughter Elizabeth had fallen in love with Hilary’s son, David (whom she eventually married, against her father’s opposition)? Or did his opposition to this affair spring from an already established rift with Pepler, which he attributed to questions of finance and also (a major part of the account in the Autobiography ) to his complaint that Ditchling was more and more taking on the character of a Catholic tourist resort. This would seem to be confirmed by his withdrawal to the—at the time—nearly inaccessible Capel y Finn. MacCarthy’s account of the joyous arrival at Capel and the subsequent life there (and a couple of years later when the whole menagerie moved again to Pigotts, near High Wycombe in the Chilterns) hardly fits the idea that it was a ‘chain of destructiveness’. Gill, MacCarthy says, was both ahead of his times and behind them. Presumably it is as a sexual libertarian that he was ahead of the times, and as a Catholic family man, who loved being surrounded by children and grandchildren, that he was behind. But Gill’s sexual libertarianism is utterly different from the unhappy obsessions of modern society. He lived in a different world from that of William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr, Peter Greenaway, or Tom Sharpe. What is so striking about post-war sexual permissiveness, chronically so in the case of pop music (David Bowie, Lou Reed, Ultravox, The Smiths, Prince), is the carefully cultivated atmosphere of misery and degradation that surrounds it. There is a feeling of the obsessive scratching of an itch, knowing that it will only make the wound deeper. Compare them with Gill, in a passage from the diaries which I have taken at random from MacCarthy’s book: C.L. [the discretion is my own—P.B.] came in and I drew her portrait. We talked a lot about fucking and agreed how much we loved it. Afterwards we fondled one another a little and I put my penis between her legs. She then arranged herself so that when I pushed a little it went into her. I pushed it in about six times and then we kissed and went into lunch.[28] Gill, incidentally, was a strong opponent of artificial contraception. It is a curious thing that, while he had three daughters by his wife, he does not seem to have had any children outside marriage. I think we can safely assume that he would have accepted responsibility for them if he had. MacCarthy gives what might be the answer in her account of his exchanges with Dr Helena Wright, well-known as an adviser on sexual matters and advocate of contraception. After telling her ‘You are entitled to believe in and work for a matriarchal state. Men are equally entitled to resist it’, he continues: ‘I believe in birth control by the man by means of:– (1) Karetza. (2) Abstinence from intercourse. (3) Withdrawal before ejaculation. (4) French letters’ but ‘I don’t think 3 and 4 are good. I don’t think abstinence from orgasm is necessarily a bad thing. It depends on the state of mind and states of mind can be cultivated’.[29] ‘Karetza’ is a form of sexual activity without orgasm. Gill, as we know, did not practise abstinence from intercourse. Karetza may also explain the willingness of the most improbable women to have sex with him. They didn’t take it very seriously. But this brings us to the question of sexual relations with his daughters. Considering the impact her revelations have had on Gill’s reputation, MacCarthy’s attitude, expressed in the Introduction, is surprisingly casual: There is nothing so very unusual in Gill’s succession of adulteries, some casual, some long-lasting, several pursued within the protective walls of his own household. Nor is there anything so absolutely shocking about his long record of incestuous relationships with sisters and with daughters: we are becoming conscious that incest was (and is) a great deal more common than was generally imagined. Even his preoccupations and his practical experiments [sic. She only mentions one—P.B.] with bestiality, though they may strike one as bizarre, are not in themselves especially horrifying or amazing. Stranger things have been recorded.[30] Well, yes, certainly, stranger things have been recorded. But, she continues: ‘It is the context which makes them so alarming, which gives one such a frisson. This degree of sexual anarchy within the ostentatiously well-regulated household astonishes’.[31] But what is truly astonishing is the change of mood that occurs at the end of her introduction: ‘No one who knew him well failed to like him, to respond to him. And his personality is still enormously arresting. In his agility, his social and sexual mobility, his professional expertise and purposefulness, the totally unpompous seriousness with which he looks anew at what he sees as the real issues, he seems extremely modern, almost of our own age’.[32] But maybe she is wrong about ‘our own age’ catching up with Gill’s ‘sexual mobility’. At least if the man chipping away at the BBC’s Prospero and Ariel can be taken as representative of our age. Indeed, in an article written for The Guardian she suggests that ‘Gill in 2006 would no doubt be in prison’.[33] The only deeds she records that could have landed him in prison are of course his sexual relations with his two eldest daughters, Elizabeth and Petra. This takes up one paragraph in MacCarthy’s book: For instance in July 1921, when Betty was sixteen, Gill records how one afternoon while Mary and Joan were in Chichester he made her ‘come’, and she him, to watch the effect on the anus: ‘(1) Why should it’, he queries, ‘contract during the orgasm, and (2) why should a woman’s do the same as a man’s?’ This is characteristic of Gill’s quasi-scientific curiosity: his urge to know and prove. It is very much a part of the Gill family inheritance. (His doctor brother Cecil, in his memoirs, incidentally shows a comparable fascination with the anus.) It can be related to Gill’s persona of domestic potentate, the notion of owning all the females in his household. It can even perhaps be seen as an imaginative overriding of taboos: the three Gill daughters all grew up, so far as one can see, to be contented and well-adjusted married women. Happy family photographs, thronging with small children, bear out their later record of fertility. But the fact remains, and it is a contradiction which Gill, with his discipline of logic, his antipathy for nonsense, must in his heart of hearts have been aware of, that his private behaviour was at war with his public image—confused it, undermined it. Things did not go together. There is a clear anxiety in his diary description of visiting one of the younger daughter’s bedrooms: ‘stayed ½ hour – put p. in her a/hole’. He ends almost on a note of panic, ‘This must stop’.[34] The paragraph begins ‘For instance […]’, and in the Guardian article I quoted earlier MacCarthy says that ‘during those years at Ditchling, Gill was habitually abusing his two elder daughters’ so we must assume that these are not the only examples. But, so far as I know, this paragraph is all there is in the public domain, the sole basis on which Gill has been characterised as a ‘paedophile’ (MacCarthy gives no examples of sexual relations with any others among the many young teenagers and children in Gill’s circle). We’re not told if these two incidents are typical, if similar things occurred frequently, if these are particularly bad cases, or if there is worse. Nor are we told, in the second case, if, when he says ‘This must stop’, it did stop, or if this is—or isn’t—the only case of penetration occurring. In 2017, the Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, which has a very important collection of his work, put on the exhibition Eric Gill—The Body , designed to face up to this embarrassing part of its legacy. This might have been an opportunity to explore the Diaries further, but it does not appear to have been taken. Instead, the assumption was that all that needed to be known was known. To quote an account prepared by Index on Censorship: ‘awareness of this aspect of his biography is widespread and has been fully discussed and debated’.[35] The approach was to invite visitors to the exhibition to respond to the works—many of them naked bodies, lovers embracing, detailed studies of male genitalia—in light of the knowledge that they were done by a man who abused his daughters. According to a statement by the Museum director, Nathaniel Hepburn: This exhibition is the result of two years of intense discussions both within the museum and beyond, including contributing to an article in The Art Newspaper in July 2015, hosting #museumhour twitter discussions on 22 February 2016 on ‘tackling tricky subjects’, a workshop day with colleagues from museums across the country hosted at the museum with Index on Censorship, and a panel discussion at 2016 Museums Association Conference in Glasgow. Through these discussions Ditchling Museum of Art + Craft feels compelled to confront an issue which is unpleasant, difficult and extremely sensitive. It has by no means been an easy process yet we feel confident that not turning a blind eye to this story is the right thing to do. This exhibition is just the beginning of the museum’s process of taking a more open and honest position with the visitor and we already have legacy plans in place including ensuring there will continue to be public acknowledgement of the abuse within the museum’s display.[36] It was a delicate exercise. There were consultations with charities helping survivors of abuse, there were two writers in residence, helplines, and support literature for people who could have been adversely affected by the content of the show. The sculptor Cathie Pilkington was co-curator and had a little exhibition of her own, based around a wooden doll Gill had made for Petra when she was four years old. In its atmosphere of high seriousness, it was all a far cry from MacCarthy’s summing up of the life at Ditchling, where the cases of misconduct she describes occurred – she says there's no record of them occurring later: It was not an unhappy childhood, far from it. All accounts, from the Gill and Pepler children, the children of the Cribbs and the other Ditchling families, so closely interrelated through the life of the workshops and the life around the chapel, verge on the idyllic. Simple pleasures, intense friendships, great events – like the annual Ditchling Flower Show and the sports on Ditchling Common, with Father Vincent, as timekeeper, stopwatch in hand; followed by a giant Ditchling children’s tea party. There were profound advantages in growing up at Ditchling. But the children always felt – this was the price of self-containment – that it was other people who were odd.[37] Among the ‘frequently asked questions’ prepared for the exhibition, there was this: Isn’t it true that Gill’s daughters did not regard themselves as ‘abused’? They are reported as having normal happy and fulfilled lives and Petra at almost 90 commented that she wasn’t embarrassed by revelations about her family life and that they just ‘took it for granted’. Aren’t we all perhaps making more of this than the people affected?[38] The quote comes from an obituary of the weaver, Petra Tegetmeier, which appeared in the Guardian : A remarkable aspect of those liaisons with Petra is that she seems not only to have been undamaged by the experience, but to have become the most calm, reflective and straightforward wife and mother. When I asked her about it shortly before her 90th birthday, she assured me that she was not at all embarrassed—‘We just took it for granted’. She agreed that had she gone to school she might have learned how unconventional her father’s behaviour was. He had, she explained, ‘endless curiosity about sex’. His bed companions were not only family but domestic helpers and even (to my astonishment when I heard about it) the teacher who ran the school at Pigotts.[39] The Museum’s reply to the question was as follows: Elizabeth was no longer alive when Fiona McCarthy’s book was published, and those who met Petra certainly record a calm woman who managed to come to terms with her past abuse, and still greatly admired her father as an artist. I don’t think that we should try to imagine her process to reaching this acceptance as we know too little about her own experiences. So, although we are told that ‘we know too little about her own experiences’ the idea is reaffirmed that ‘her past abuse’ was a problem she had to come to terms with, despite her own statement that it wasn’t. A certain disquiet about the position of Petra in all this is expressed by some of the people involved in the project. One of the writers in residence, Bethan Roberts, wrote a short story about her called ‘Gospels’, which was posted on the Ditchling Museum website but now seems to have disappeared. The other, Alison Macleod, commented: Yes, the biography is upsetting disturbing in part and there was clearly a history of abuse that is without question. But it is made slightly more complex by the fact that the two daughters [who] were abused said they were unembarrassed about it, not angry about it, loved their father, and didn’t give the response that perhaps I’m imagining, or some people expected them to give – to be angry about it and condemn their father’s behaviour. They didn’t. So maybe they have internalised their trauma, but you could say that that response is almost patronising to the two women, the elderly women who were very clear about what they felt, so it goes into a loop of paradoxes of riddles that you cannot really ever solve.[40] The resident artist, Cathie Pilkington, carved a series of heads based on the doll Gill had made for Petra and labelled them ‘Petra’. Steph Fuller, an artistic director of the Museum who said that she had been on the outside of the project but ‘recruited while the show was on’ felt uneasy about this: The real legacy issue, which I am grappling with at the moment, is that the voice that was not in the room, was Petra’s. She was very front and centre as far as Cathie’s commission was concerned, but there is something about how the work conflated Petra with the doll and being a child victim, that I’m a bit uncomfortable about actually. There is lots of evidence of Petra’s views about her experiences, and how she internalised them, that was not present at all anywhere. It is easy to project things on to someone being just a victim and Petra would have completely rejected that. In terms of legacy how we continue to talk about Gill and his child sexual abuse and other sexual activities which were fairly well outside the mainstream, I think—yes acknowledge it, but also—how? I am feeling my way round it at the moment. There are plenty of living people, her children and grandchildren who are protective of her, quite reasonably. I need to feel satisfied that when we speak about Petra, we represent her side of it and we don’t just tell it from the point of view of the abuser, to put it bluntly. If it is about Petra, how do we do it in a way that respects her views and her family’s views?[41] According to Rachel Cooke, who was brought in as a sort of resident journalist, Pilkington had commented on the doll: ‘This is a very potent object. It looks to me just like a penis’. She continues: Her installation, central to which are five scaled-up versions of the head of Petra’s doll (one decorated by her 11-year-old daughter, Chloe), will explore different aspects of Gill’s practice, and the way we are inclined to project his life on to his work, sometimes in contradiction of the facts: ‘The tendency—if there is a picture of a figure—is to chuck all this interpretation on it […] it can’t just be a beautiful drawing or a taut piece of carving. But sometimes it is. Where, I’m asking, is Petra in all this? There are aspects to her life apart from the fact that her father had sex with her’.[42] Exactly. Though I for one was left wondering how exactly her installation—a sort of doll’s house full of little knicknacks including the doll’s heads—contributed to our understanding that Petra and Elizabeth were something other than just victims of sex abuse, and that there was more, much more, to their relation with their father than the sex. A catalogue was produced.[43] Apart from Cathie Pilkington’s installation it consisted largely of highly representational life drawings, including some of his studies of his friends’ (male) genitalia. Material that will appeal to the ‘art connoisseur’ for whom Gill expressed such lofty contempt. It leaves me wishing that he had taken Thomas Aquinas’s instruction to imitate nature in its way of working not in its effects—the renunciation of post-Renaissance representational art—more seriously, as Gleizes did when he advanced into non-representational art, an art that Gleizes claimed might eventually be worthy of comparison with the non-representational art of the oriental carpet.[44] Rachel Cooke quotes Fiona MacCarthy saying: She has watched in ‘dismay’ as the fact of Gill’s abuse of his daughters has grown to become the thing that defines him. ‘My book was never a book about incest, which is what one would imagine from many hysterical contemporary responses’, she says. ‘It was a book about the multifaceted life of a multi-talented artist and an absorbingly interesting man’. As people demand the demolition of his sculpture in public places—the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, Prospero and Ariel at Broadcasting House—she asks where this will end: ‘Get rid of Gill, but who chooses the artist with morals so impeccable that they could take his place? […] I would not deny that Gill’s sex drive was unusually strong and in some cases aberrant’, she says, ‘but to reduce the motivation of a richly complicated human being to such simplification is ludicrous’. Reducing art to a matter of the sexual irregularities of the artist, she believes, ‘can only in the end seriously damage our appreciation of the rich possibilities of art in general’.[45] MacCarthy’s book is impressive and enjoyable and does indeed give a good account of the ‘multifaceted life of a multi-talented artist and an absorbingly interesting man’. I have no problems with the mention of sexual relations with Elizabeth and Petra, which are unquestionably part of the story. But the book was sold vigorously and no doubt successfully on the basis of the scandals it revealed. That may have been the responsibility of the publisher, but MacCarthy played this element up in her Introduction, which has an atmosphere all its own and may well have been the only part most of the reviewers bothered to read. The result is that, as she says, ‘the fact of Gill’s abuse of his daughters has grown to become the thing that defines him’.[46] I have no idea why the man who attacked Gill’s statue or the people who have signed the 38 degrees petition have felt so strongly on the matter. It may well be that they themselves suffered some sort of abuse in their childhood, and I can hardly blame them for their feelings confronted with the work of a man whom they know, simply and exclusively, as an abuser. The more so when the BBC’s own ‘culture editor’ characterises him as ‘a monster, a depraved paedophile who […] committed horrific sexual crimes’. But it also needs to be understood that different kinds of sexual activity can cover a wide variety of feelings and reactions on the part of both ‘perpetrator’ and ‘victim’, and that a blanket categorisation that would throw Eric Gill and his relations with his daughters (unquestionably very loving independently of the sexual side) into the same category as Jimmy Savile and his relations with his victims doesn’t contribute very much to our understanding of what it is to be human. Peter Brooke Peter Brooke is a painter and writer, mainly on interactions between art, politics and religion. He has a PhD from Cambridge on ‘Controversies in Ulster Presbyterianism, 1790-1836’ (1980) and he is the author of the major study of the Cubist painter, Albert Gleizes: Albert Gleizes, For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 2001). [1] Kate Feehan, ‘Man scales BBC Broadcasting House and spends four hours destroying sculpture by paedophile artist Eric Gill’ Daily Mail (12 January 2022) < https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10395493/Hammer-wielding-activist-scales-BBCs-Broadcasting-House-starts-destroying-Eric-Gill-sculpture.html >. [2] Katie Razzall, ‘The Artwork vs the artist’ BBC (13 January 2022) < https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-59972806 >. [3] Trevor Stanski, ‘Remove BBC Statue by Paedophile Eric Gill’ (2021) < https://you.38degrees.org.uk/petitions/remove-bbc-statue-by-paedophile-eric-gill >. [4] ibid. [5] Andrew Doyle, ‘Eric Gill’s crimes were unforgivable, but his statue is blameless’ The Spectator (16 January 2022) . [6] Rachel Cooke, ‘Eric Gill: can we separate the artist from the abuser?’ The Observer (9 April 2017) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/apr/09/eric-gill-the-body-ditchling-exhibition-rachel-cooke >. [7] I should say that the use of the word ‘paedophile’ as a synonym for ‘child molester’ seems to me to be an abuse of language. To characterise someone who wants to rape children as a ‘paedophile’ is rather like characterising someone who wants to burn books as a ‘bibliophile’. [8] I discuss Gleizes’s relations with Coomaraswamy, with a glancing reference to Gill, in my essay ‘Albert Gleizes, Ananda Coomaraswamy and “tradition”’, accessible on my website at . I am the author of the major study of Gleizes: Peter Brooke, Albert Gleizes: For and Against the Twentieth Century (Yale University Press 2001). [9] Eric Gill, ‘Slavery and Freedom’, in Art Nonsense and other essays (Cassel and Co Ltd & Francis Walterson, 1929) 1. [10] D.H. Lawrence, ‘Eric Gill’s Art Nonsense’ Book Collector’s Quarterly (no XII, Oct-Dec 1933) 1-7, quoted in Malcolm Yorke, Eric Gill, Man of Flesh and Spirit (Constable 2000) 48-9. Yorke goes on to quote Gill saying that Lady Chatterly’s Lover ‘states the Catholic view of sex and marriage more clearly and with more enthusiasm than most of our text books’. [11] Fiona MacCarthy, Eric Gill (Faber and Faber 1989). The book was republished in 2017. [12] ibid vii-viii. [13] ibid x. [14] ibid xi. [15] ibid 20. [16] Eric Gill, Autobiography (The Right Book Club 1944) 53-4. [17] MacCarthy (n 11) 290. [18] Gill (n 16). [19] MacCarthy (n 11) xi-xii. [20] Gill (n 16) 132. [21] MacCarthy (n 11) x. [22] ibid 214. [23] ibid 212. [24] ibid 287. [25] At least that is how I interpret the passage in the Autobiography , 223-7. [26] Gill (n 16) 164. [27] MacCarthy (n 11) xi. [28] ibid 262. [29] ibid 261. [30] ibid viii. [31] ibid. [32] ibid. [33] Fiona MacCarthy, ‘Written in stone’ The Guardian (22 July 2006) < https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2006/jul/22/art.art >. [34] MacCarthy (n 11) 155-6. [35] Julia Farrington, ‘Case Study—Eric Gill/The Body’ (15 May 2019) < https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-case-study/ >. [36] Nathaniel Hepburn, ‘Eric Gill / The Body: Statement from the Director’ Index On Censorship (7 May 2019) < https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-statement-from-the-director/ >. [37] MacCarthy (n 11) 154. [38] ‘Eric Gill / The Body: Q&A for visitor services’ Index On Censorship (7 May 2019) < htps://www.indexoncensorship.org/2019/05/eric-gill-the-body-qa-for-visitor-services/ >. [39] Patrick Nuttgens, ‘Unorthodox liaisons’ The Guardian (6 January 1999) < https://www.theguardian.com/news/1999/jan/06/guardianobituaries >. [40] Julia Farrington, Case Study (n 35). [41] ibid. [42] Cooke (n 6). [43] Nathaniel Hepburn and Catherine Pilkington, Eric Gill: the body, with Catherine Pilkington, Doll for Petra Ditchling Museum of Art and Craft, Exhibition catalogue (29 April-3 September 2017). [44] Unpublished ms note in the Gleizes archive formerly kept at Aubard. [45] Cooke (n 6). [46] MacCarthy (n 11).