Category Archives: Politics

The General’s Son, by Miko Peled; and The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, by Ilan Pappe

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Summary: on the original sins of Zionism

 In 1967 General Mattityahu Peled, who, as head of logistics of the Israeli Defense Forces, was one of the architects of the Israeli victory in the Six Day War, investigated an atrocity.

Peled had heard from a Palestinian prisoner how IDF soldiers in Gaza had massacred over 30 unarmed civilians, including a 13 year old boy and an 86 year old man. After they were shot the IDF drove a bulldozer back and forth over the bodies until they were unrecognizable. 

Peled, an Arabic speaker, went personally to Gaza to find out what happened and met the families of the victims. Afterwards he wrote a report to the Israeli government warning them about the moral degradation that the illegal occupation of Palestinian territories would bring and how atrocity would become a commonplace if it was allowed to continue. 

Peled’s son, Miko, reckons now that this was probably the decisive moment in his father’s life that transformed him from soldier to committed peace activist, something he remained for the rest of his life, a mantle taken up, in spite of incredible suffering, by both Miko and his sister, Nurit. 

But perhaps Matti Peled should not have wasted his breathe with his warning to the Israeli government. Because as Israeli historian Ilan Pappe explains in depressing detail in his book, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, atrocities of the sort Matti Peled uncovered in Gaza – atrocities of the sort that Israel continues to perpetrate year in, year out, including in its genocidal post October 7th operations in Gaza – were part of the DNA of Zionism from when Israel was but a glimmer in David Ben Gurion’s eye. 

Prior to the founding of the state of Israel Ben Gurion and the cadre of Zionists that he gathered around him to be his closest political and military advisors, drew up detailed plans for the expulsions of the indigenous people of Palestine so they could realise their sectarian dreams of a Jewish state. They recognized from the outset that mass murder and terrorism would be intrinsic to this project. 

With the UN vote to partition Palestine they put their plans into bloody action. Deir Yassin was the pattern, not an aberration. 

On visiting the aftermath of one ethnic cleansing operation by the Haganah, the forerunner of the IDF, Golda Meir was reminded of the Eastern European pogroms that had terrorized her own family from their home. But, aside from this momentary lapse, she otherwise remained comfortable with her role as a war criminal.  But Pappe wonders how a mere three years after the Holocaust its survivors could inflict such barbarity on fellow human beings.

Pappe’s forensic analysis of the war crimes of Israel and the fundamental racism of Zionism has, of course, drawn criticism from other Israelis – the sort who benefit from apartheid in Israel and the West Bank and who celebrate the genocide in Gaza.

But, like Miko Peled, Pappe is on the right side of history. As the world increasingly sees Israel for the rogue terrorist state that it is, Peled and Pappe explain why it is as it is, and plot a path towards the inevitable end to apartheid there.

Both Pappe and Peled represent the enduring voice of conscience in the midst of atrocity. They are advocates of a common humanity in the face of prejudice and sectarianism. In the end it is this humanity that will always triumph over apartheid.

Letter to British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak

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Summary: on returning a honorary OBE

16 April 2024

Dear Prime Minister

In 2017 I was awarded an honorary OBE in recognition of my services to the eradication of slavery. I am now returning this as it is something which I can no longer, in good conscience, keep.

On 15 April 2024, your government refused to provide protections for the victims of modern slavery from your unconscionable “Rwanda scheme”. Over the past months you, as Prime Minister, have acquiesced in attacks on the European Convention on Human Rights by members of your parliamentary party. These, along with the UK’s bipartisan position on Gaza, have put into sharp focus how British policy now distinguishes between people whose lives it values, and those whose lives it disdains. 

These represent a fundamental repudiation by the UK of the principles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They are a rejection also of an enduring British human rights tradition stretching back to Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce, and Mary Wollstonecraft, and a longer tradition of rule of law that stretches back to Magna Carta. 

As such they send to the whole world a message that the UK rejects the core bases of human rights and rule of law upon which progress in human dignity, including anti-slavery action has been based for hundreds of years. This can only impede the anti-slavery struggle and embolden other governments who seek to systematically abuse the rights of their subjects and citizens, including  by the facilitation of their enslavement. 

I hope that you will yet find it in your heart to alter course and embrace and defend these British traditions of human rights and rule of law rather than sacrifice them to some ill-judged populist crusade.

Yours faithfully

Dr Aidan McQuade 

Dirty Linen: The Troubles in my home place, by Martin Doyle

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Summary: An outstanding portrait of the pity of war

Margaret Yeaman has never seen her grandchildren. She lost her sight on 15 March 1982 when a no-warning car bomb exploded close to her workplace in Banbridge, County Down, causing splintering glass to lacerate her face. 

Margaret’s story, of being in the “wrong place at the wrong time” is just one amongst many that Martin Doyle explores in his book, Dirty Linen. The book also takes exception to that “wrong place, wrong time,” line. So many of the people whose stories Doyle recounts were just doing their jobs, providing for family and community, or just trying to have a bit of craic. It was the paramilitaries who were in the wrong place at the wrong time for these ordinary people.

Some will still argue that atrocities such as the ones recounted in this book were necessary to advance justice in the North of Ireland. But as Margaret and people like her tell their stories of how their families were devastated by violence, these should bring shame to that notion: as if the British government was ever going to be moved to change policy by Paddies butchering Paddies on the country roads of Ireland. It’s why they introduced “Ulsterisation” to begin with.

Dirty Linen is, in part a memoir, and Doyle gives an honest accounting of his experiences coming of age amidst such carnage, including the miserable abuse he sometimes suffered as a young Catholic in that religiously mixed part of County Down. 

This book could also act as something of an introduction to the art of the North of Ireland. As literary editor of the Irish Times, Doyle is able to draw upon the work of so many writers and artists, from Seamus Heaney to F E McWilliams and Colin Davidson, to help him give voice to the depth of the human tragedy that the Troubles represented.

But, as a result of Doyle’s sensitive interviews with Margaret and people like her, his book is also an exemplary work of journalism and a deeply important contribution to understanding the history of the Troubles. It offers an unflinching portrait of the pity of war by exploring the trauma and courage of the victims of both loyalist and “republican” paramilitaries. 

Some of those victims whose stories Doyle explores also became perpetrators, or at least sympathetic to the idea of revenge. But so many more refused to become as twisted as those who mutilated them and their families. Instead. they often begged for no retaliation and strove for forgiveness, or at least toleration. Theirs are stories that are so much more heroic than anything that could ever be written about the paramilitaries who pressed the triggers or planted the bombs.  

If this was all that Doyle did, then the book would be a marvel. But his painstaking accumulation of detail across the book also builds a picture of the pervasiveness of collusion between British state forces and the loyalist Glenanne gang. Perhaps other writers and researchers have done similar work. But I have not read such a convincing indictment of the breadth of British collusion anywhere else. So, if you want to understand why the British government is so keen to stop Troubles era criminal investigations, read this book.

At a time when the Troubles seem to be giving rise to some exemplary non-fiction, Doyle’s book could well stand out as a classic. 

 

Thomas Cromwell: a revolutionary life, by Diarmaid MacCulloch

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Summary: sure what are a few dead human beings when you consider cultural influence?

Undoubtedly the greatest of Peter Seller’s Inspector Clouseau films is A Shot in the Dark. In it Clouseau falls in love with a murder suspect, housemaid Maria Gambrelli, played by the luminous Elke Sommer. Even when apprehended holding a set of bloody hedge clippers that have been used to kill yet another victim, Maria drifts through the film with an ethereal innocence, somehow untouched by the squalidness and violence that surrounds her. 

Perhaps bizarrely, it was Maria Gambrelli that I was most reminded of by Diarmaid MacCulloch’s portrait of Thomas Cromwell, such is the sympathy and indulgence that MacCulloch affords him. Maria, of course, was not a murderer, whereas Cromwell was. But for MacCulloch, this is not the most important thing about him.

Rather it was Cromwell’s role in the establishment of Anglicanism that for MacCulloch is the most significant thing about his career. For this, he almost forgives the occasional burning of a Protestant heretic or the public dismemberment of a Catholic, and such killings are skated over with considerable blink-and-you’ll-miss-them rapidity.

MacCulloch argues that Cromwell’s Protestant convictions were genuine. Hence his role in the dissolution of the monasteries, a vast act of cultural vandalism amongst other things, was not just the legalised theft of their property for the crown. It was also an effort to advance the reform of religion in which he truly believed. In this vein, for MacCulloch Cromwell’s greatest lasting achievement was obtaining an authorised translation of the bible into English. 

MacCulloch makes a case that Cromwell was a complex figure, and that the depth of this complexity is obscured by an absence of sources: many of his papers were likely destroyed by his servants when he was arrested.  So, Cromwell was not wholly the monster that some of his actions might suggest. Government in Tudor times, for which Cromwell had a prodigious flair, was, after all, a bloody business and, Cromwell’s sainted Catholic antagonist, Thomas More, did not have clean hands either.

But there is a danger of whataboutery here. Just because everyone else was doing it, we should not casually excuse the horror in which a person was implicated. Amongst other atrocities, Cromwell played a pivotal role in the judicial murder of Anne Boleyn and those falsely accused of being her lovers. 

Dozens of other Catholics and “heretics” – Protestants who Henry VIII and Cromwell regarded as too extreme – followed. MacCulloch reckons that Cromwell’s introduction of parish registers to record baptisms, deaths and marriages was a way of identifying Anabaptist “extremists”. This was part of a broader intelligence system in which the theocratic government of which Cromwell was a central part, monitored and condemned people for crimes of conscience alone. 

Cromwell’s bloody trail continued right up to his own judicial murder. This was engineered by high officials jealous of his influence. They were empowered to act against him by the king’s fury at his role in arranging Henry’s fourth marriage to Anne of Cleves. For some reason, the diseased and festering Henry found that he could not manage to have sex with her. So, fortunately for Anne the marriage was never consummated, and a quiet annulment was arranged.

Taken in their totality, when considering Cromwell’s achievements in government and religion he must be seen as a major figure in British history. But there is a saying in the Talmud: “He who saves one life, saves the world entire.” In recognising the scale of his influence, for good and ill, in the making of the modern world, it is remiss to downplay the countless little domestic worlds that Cromwell helped condemn to the fires of fanaticism in the course of Henry’s monstrous reign. 

Empireworld, by Sathnam Sanghera

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Summary: an elegantly written exploration of the contemporary impact of the British Empire on the world.

Empireworld, Sathnam Sanghera’s follow up to his brilliant, Empireland, expands on the theme of that earlier work, exploring the impact of the British Empire beyond Britain’s shores. 

Sanghera does not cover everything. If he did he would still be writing. But also, as he acknowledges, there are some subjects which have been so comprehensively dealt with that he feels he has little new to add.

The history he does recount here is a mixture of the thematic – for example, the role of botany in Empire, and the imperial and anti-imperial history of British NGOs – and geographic – for example, Nigeria and Mauritius. His discussion of anti-slavery is a mixture of the two, with a principle focus on Barbados and the West Indies.

The result is engrossing, illuminating, and on occasion engagingly contentious: For example, is the anti-slavery image “Am I not a man/woman and a brother/sister?” so clearly a patronising and racist one as he seems to conclude? The anti-racist sports people who have adopted the pose in recent years have shown it can be now, as many interpreted it at the end of the 18th Century, a sign of fraternity rather than subservience.

Across the book Sanghera shows how every idea carries with it the seed of its own opposite: racism and slavery generated anti-slavery and anti-racism; imperialism gave rise to anti-imperialism. This leads to a very complex history, allowing the discernment in some places of many positive legacies of Empire – rule of law, parliamentary democracy, tea – alongside many negatives – partition, civil war, corruption, impoverishment. 

This complexity leads Sanghera to be careful in his conclusions, seeking with this book to promote nuance, understanding, and dialogue, rather than judgement. 

This is a hugely laudable objective, particularly for a country that needs to recognise, as Sanghera rightly notes, that other peoples’ – foreigners! – perspectives on Empire are vital for a proper understanding. 

One such foreign perspective that Empireworld put me in mind of, was the 1916 speech from the dock by the great Irish anti-slavery activist and anti-imperialist, Roger Casement, who observed, “For [the English Establishment], there is only “England”; there is no Ireland; there is only the law of England, no right of Ireland; the liberty of Ireland and of an Irishman is to be judged by the power of England.“

For Ireland, one could substitute the name of any country of Empire. Empire was positive for subject peoples if it was in England’s interest. If it was not, then, as Sanghera describes, they could be starved, enslaved, shot with dum-dum bullets or subject to any other expedient or abuse that the British government chose to mete out.

This principle remains true to this day, it seems to me, for Scotland and the North of Ireland, the last vestiges of Empire.

Sanghera does not discuss Ireland, or Scotland, much in this book. But he does not have to. There are plenty of others who have and continue to do so. Instead, Empireworld is another superb study of frequently unacknowledged and unexplored history. A visit to Kew is never going to be the same again. 

Empireland, by Sathnam Sanghera

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Summary: a gripping and elegantly written survey of the bloody British empire and its echoes in the present day

Between 1845 and 1854 the population of Ireland was halved through starvation – over a million people died – and forced emigration. The English like to refer to this horrendous period as the “Irish Potato Famine”. This suggests the blame for the cataclysm lies with Irish people’s bizarre and somewhat comical taste for spuds, rather than upon callous government policy that thought the death of hundreds of thousands of Irish people a price worth paying for British profits in the agricultural free market.

Paradoxically Sathnam Sanghera sticks with this nomenclature in his exceptional book Empireland. This book both elucidates many of the other atrocities upon which the British Empire was built, and explores the imprint that sustained bloody exercise in pillage still leaves upon contemporary British society. The term “potato famine” is part of that imprint.

There is an echo in this book of Tom Holland’s Dominion, which explores how Christian thought – such as the ideas of human rights and secularism – has so fundamentally shaped European civilisation that the origins are now generally unknown and almost unnoticed.

The British empire brought nothing so positive as human rights to the UK let alone the rest of the world. Rather it became, for much of the world a byword for bloodshed and impoverishment. But the British – in marked contrast to those societies that were on the receiving end of their colonial project – are startlingly ignorant of what Empire entailed or of its repercussions through time. Few British people now have heard of the murderous British suppression of the Sepoy rebellion of 1857, let alone of the sacking of Tibet in 1903 – even though some of the extremely valuable loot once showed up the BBC’s Flog It while Sanghera was writing this book.

And yet the consequences of all that bloodshed is with us at every turn. The British Museum is stuffed with art treasures, such as the Benin bronzes, stolen in the name of Empire. London’s position as a major financial centre is a consequence of the preferential trade terms and punitive tax regimes that the Empire imposed on subject peoples. British xenophobia towards migrants is a contemporary manifestation of the racism of Empire. The presumption of the British ruling class that the rules – whether relating to human rights, trade or public health lockdowns – that apply to others should not apply to them are also echoes of the political economy of the Empire.

Indeed, Brexit may be regarded as the inevitable consequence of the racist logic that underpinned the British Empire: having no more colonies to pillage, the British Establishment instead decided to loot the UK.

Sanghera’s book is a superb and important introduction to this inglorious period of British history and its reverberations into the present. It is elegantly written, accessible, and vital for anyone who wants to understand better why Britain finds itself in its current morass.

I just which he would quit it with his talk of “potato famines”.

How shall we fail thee, comrades? Part 2

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Summary: Basic innumeracy is at the heart of Labour’s intolerance of independent thought in its ranks

The UK’s electoral system is a gerrymander. The population of England is broadly centre-left when one amalgamates the 2019 votes of Labour, the Lib-Dems and the Greens. In spite of this the Conservatives have a massive majority in parliament. This sort of systemic anti-democracy sparked a civil rights movement in the North of Ireland in 1968. However the English continue with their bovine acceptance that this is the best electoral system in the world, because it’s English, just as many still believe that the British response to Covid was “world-beating” irrespective of how many corpses pile up.

Currently so egregious has been Tory government over the past decade, Labour looks set to go into the next gerrymandered UK general election with a poll lead sufficient to overcome the bias in the electoral system. Their confidence is heightened by a dubious belief that their message is cutting through to Scottish voters, that they should know their place in the UK rather than having the audacity to seek their rightful place as an independent nation in the European Union.

The prospect of victory makes the Labour leadership sanguine about the need for electoral reform or electoral alliances. It also seems to be a factor in the party’s increasing intolerance of independent thought, of the voices that suggest that the party’s policy on Brexit is as believable as unicorns, and the party’s attitude to electoral reform and electoral alliances smack of hubris.

This seems to be what is behind the the heave to expel Neal Lawson – and others – from the Labour party for having the temerity to support the ideal of electoral alliances and, by implication, recognising the futility of voting Labour in a constituency when there is negligible prospect of a Labour victory in a first-past-the-post election.

UK Labour has never properly backed the introduction of proportional representation in Westminster elections. Even when the PR-lite “alternative vote” system was offered to the UK electorate a decade ago, many Labour leaders grumbled that it was “too complicated.” It is difficult to conclude that basic innumeracy is not a major factor in this.

Every other country in Europe has PR. Scotland and Northern Ireland have it for elections for their devolved government structures. Mayoral elections in England have previously used the alternate voting system. Why do so many in the UK’s political elite think such a system is too complicated for the English electorate?

Truth is, you do need a basic understanding of fractions and decimal numbers to be able to fully understand most systems of proportional representation. You know: the stuff you were taught in primary school, shortly after “one plus one equals two.”

But more fundamentally, the two major British political parties continue to support FPTP because it suits them. It guarantees the Tories the lion’s share and Labour, who know their place, get the occasional sniff of the leavings.

Given the utter incompetency and cynicism of the current Tory government, Labour can perhaps be reasonably confident of winning the next UK general election. But, given that Labour has swallowed whole the poisoned pill of Boris Johnson’s Brexit, the Tories can also be confident this may well be a one-term Labour government as Labour’s promise to “Make Brexit Work” is shown up for the ludicrous fantasy that the Tories already know it to be.

Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, by Maggie Haberman

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Summary: portrait of a fascist as a fat man

The character of Biff Tannen in Back to the Future is based on Donald Trump: bullying, lazy, greedy, misogynistic. Confidence Man traces the original Biff’s career from the corrupt world of New York real estate to the American presidency.

It is a depressing story, but, in hindsight, seems almost inevitable now. Because, enabled by his overweening sense of entitlement and his daddy’s money, Trump has one talent that Biff lacked. As the title of Haberman’s absorbing book suggests, Trump has the instincts of a grifter. Like Giovanni Ribisi’s character in the short lived, but highly entertaining, series, Sneaky Pete, it is Trump’s instinct every time he is caught in one lie to double down with another, to meet every attack with a counter attack, and, where possible, to get his retaliation in first. 

According to Haberman Trump was once told, “You’re really very shallow.” “Yes” he agreed, “that is my strength.”

Everything is a transaction to Trump in a zero sum game. For him to win there must be a loser. Love, selflessness, compassion, empathy are meaningless to him. Haberman reports Former White House chief of staff, retired Marine General John Kelly, describing Trump as “the most flawed person” he had ever known. 

Yet enough Americans confuse Trump’s brand of sociopathic narcissism with strength to vote to award this revolting human being with the Presidency.

Not that Trump ever understood the role he had won in a constitutional system. Again and again in this book he is described as unable to comprehend why he is not permitted to do the unlawful. How he yearns for the unconstrained power of a Putin or a Hitler. Nevertheless even corralled by the law and the constitution, Trump and his acolytes still managed to do more damage to the concept of “government of the people, by the people and for the people”, than the entire Confederate army.

Haberman’s fine book is not just an explanation of Trump but also a warning: given the chance again this bloated fascist will reek further chaos.

Apeirogon, by Colum McCann

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Summary: a desperately sad but hopeful perspective on Israeli Apartheid and the illegal occupation of Palestine

Rami Ethanan, a graphic designer, and Bassam Aramin, a scholar, are friends. They have a lot in common. Both are smokers. Both are former combatants. Both understand the deep, moral corrosiveness of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. Both understand that peace requires people to talk to each other and try to understand each other’s point of view. Both are the fathers of murdered children: Rami’s daughter, Smadar, was murdered by Palestinian suicide bombers; Bassam’s daughter, Abir, was murdered by Israeli soldiers.

Apeirogon is the story of how, in particular, these two men have sought to advocate for peace by building mutual understanding. But it ranges even more widely, into the lives of their families, including their murdered daughters, and into the cultural and political history of Israel and Palestine.

(From the Guardian)

I finished this book just before Israel launched its latest series of child-killing attacks on Gaza. As usual, in such situations, American politicians are to be found on social media congratulating themselves for the US military support to Israel that allows its leadership to launch such attacks on Gaza with impunity. Such politicians find the slaughter of children with rockets, and American journalists with bullets, much more palatable than the murder of children by suicide bombers. But that is the logic of the US’s military alliance with what the Israeli human rights organisation, B’Tselem, has called an apartheid state.

The asymmetric nature of the warfare between Israelis and Palestinians is very much on display with the latest Israeli attack on Gaza. In prison, for throwing a dud grenade at an Israeli patrol, Bassam realised that responding to Israeli violence with violence, even if only stones, plays into the hands of those who want to sustain the occupation: it allows them to portray Israeli violence and theft as defensive, and the Palestinians as less than human. As a result of this realisation Bassam became committed to the ideal of non-violence.

Rami, recognising the common humanity of Palestinian and Israeli families who had suffered similar losses to his own, came to his own realisation that the status quo offered no real security for Israelis either. His wife, Nurit, a distinguished academic and peace activist, had understood this much earlier: with enormous courage she explicitly and publicly blamed the racist and militaristic policies of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the death of her daughter.

Apeirogon reminds us that as well as the meat-headed terrorists in the high echelons of government and the military, Israel and Palestine also have thousands of people like Rami and Bassam: people committed to non-violence, human rights and dialogue as a path towards justice.

For success such activists need international support. Yet the US and Europe fail utterly to do this, privileging Israel with arms and trade rather than compelling the dialogue that is essential for any meaningful peace to be forged.

Apeirogon is an extraordinarily important book. It is a tribute to the thousands of (asymmetrically) marginalised Palestinians and Israelis who have sought to build peace and fraternity through dialogue and understanding rather than acquiesce in violence. How many more children will be slaughtered before their path is recognised as the only truly viable one?

Photo by Sarah Lee for the Guardian

Stories of the Law and How it’s Broken; and Fake Law, by The Secret Barrister

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Summary: the UK’s process of becoming a rogue state explained

The Secret Barrister’s first book, Stories of the Law and How it’s Broken, described the contemporary criminal justice system in England and Wales and how years of underfunding have left it dangerously unfit for purpose. Fake Law looks at the law more widely and examines how populist politics, dishonest journalism, and increasing authoritarianism in government have led to a wholesale assault on ordinary people’s most basic rights.

Taken together these two books are an elegantly written primer of key elements of UK law and how it is practiced. However they also represent a searing indictment of the ongoing assault on the fundamental tenets of rule of law in the United Kingdom.

Take, for instance, that perennial bug bear of the English Far Right, the Human Rights Act. The Secret Barrister describes in some detail how, to take just one example, the victims of the serial rapist, John Worboys, were only able to obtain any remedy for the appalling police failings in the case that left Worboys free to assault other women, due to the Human Rights Act. This piece of British law allows citizens to hold the government to account for its failings. Hence it draws particular ire from those who believe that ministers and other public servants, such as the police, should not be accountable before the law.

As the Secret Barrister points out, it is untrue that the UK has no constitution. This, they note, is scattered through diverse pieces of legislation stretching back centuries. Fundamental to the UK constitution is the supremacy of parliament. This does not mean the “supremacy of government”. Government is also meant to be accountable under the laws set by parliament, and it is the role of the courts to publicly administer these laws, including whether the government is acting in accordance with them.

This is pretty fundamental to how the UK is meant to work. But findings of government unlawfulness, such as with the Tory government’s plans to withdraw from the EU without primary legislation, or Boris Johnson’s unlawful attempt to prorogue parliament, have drawn particular venom. For example the vile Daily Mail infamously declared judges “enemies of the people” for just doing their jobs. And parliamentarians and government ministers from both Labour and the Tories, some of them, like Harriet Harman and Dominic Raab, qualified lawyers, have wilfully misrepresented due process and demanded removal of citizens’ human rights protections because, they think, it plays well with sections of the electorate: “There go the people. I must follow them because I am their leader.”

The resulting political climate has allowed the government to advance their programme of reducing the human rights protections, and access to justice, of some of the most vulnerable in society, and limiting the power of the courts to scrutinise government incompetence and abuse.

The Secret Barrister’s books should be required reading for every individual who has the temerity to put themselves forward for elected office. While some of them struggle with the big words, the rest of us should read them to get informed and stay angry about the sustained assault on rule of law that is being perpetrated before our very eyes by the authoritarians who currently dominate the UK’s parliament and government.