US and its gun lobby

I had an exchange recently with a friend from US who had lamented President Trump’s proposal to arm teachers to control, as Trump sees it, the deaths of children killed in schools. She pointed out that teachers would leave their jobs if required to be armed. (I won’t discuss here the twisted logic of such an arm-teachers scheme: it is surely only comprehensible by a few of the more twisted of US intellects?)

 

Trump’s response was surely not that of a mature person? No one should have a gun, save for very good reason, in the first place. Guns should be banned; or at least their use should be heavily regulated (as they are in most countries which regard themselves as civilised).

 

My friend replied that US people would not accept that: ‘That’s never going to fly in the US. It’s in our Constitution. The key here will be which arms we have the right to bear; and under what conditions?’

 

So why not change the ‘constitution’ and teach US people that killing is wrong? ‘The means of killing should be taken away from people’ I suggested. Ah, ‘easier said than done, said my friend’. And yet, in 1865 the constitution was changed to deal with slavery….

 

This is all so basic. People in civilised countries stopped carrying swords and daggers more than two centuries ago; and yet in US most people – I believe – are entitled to carry guns. (I even find it odd that in eg France police and customs officers carry guns: that would never be allowed in England.) Guns provide a means far more lethal than swords to kill each other. You can kill at much further away with a fire-arm than with a dagger.

 

US claims to lead the free world; yet US people carry guns around to kill each other with in a way which to most of us is truly primitive. It gets worse. Success for some US persons – such as their President – is judged by how much money you can amass. Materialism is everything. Greed defines you. Yet it is said that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to get to heaven. In other societies art, music and intellectual achievement are measures of success, for many. US people, relative to their number, have a modest number of artists, composers, intellectuals, scientists and law reformers. The state of its religion is about where European societies were in the mid-1800s.

 

Compared to many other modern societies, US is a primitive country to be sure: governed by materialism and regulated by private gun-laws. And to ban or regulate guns is ‘Easier said than done’ said my friend. That was probably what many people said in (say) 1800 of slavery. In England slavery was said not to exist at common law (Somersett’s case) in 1775. Trade in slaves was abolished in 1807 and it was formally banned throughout the colonies in 1833. In US it was banned in 1865, though segregationist tendencies subsisted – still subsist, under Trump? – for a long time.

 

If the US can ban slavery in 1865, why can it not ban guns now; or at least severely regulate their use (as is the case with the rest of us)?

Tom Paine: of monarchs, presidents and the cult of personality

Rule of law is king

 

Various reasons over the past three months have sent me back to Tom Paine’s clear political ideas. They help to answer such disparate issues as the fight between Parliament and the courts over who is responsible for EU withdrawal; the need for more clarity over who rules the United Kingdom (so long as it remains ‘united’): Parliament (legislature) or the government (executive); and the mindless adulation which political characters as wide apart as President’s Trump and Putin on the one hand and Jeremy Corbyn on the other have attracted. The main purpose here is to explain why the cult of personality – of anyone, not just the three characters in the previous sentence – is primitive. It harks back to medieval times (and much earlier). Oliver Cromwell tried to rid this country of it; but unlike Gideon (see below) he succumbed; though he clung to ‘Protector’ as his title. The evils of cult are well illustrated by Tom Paine.

 

‘Monarchy’ means rule by one person. It is associated with hereditary monarchs; but it could as easily be applied to any system which concentrates a disproportionate amount of power in one person: a President, a prime minister, a party leader. It is the nature of their rule and the power they wield (eg choosing their group of adherents (cabinet)) which defines the extent of mon-archy (rule by one), not their constitutional trappings.

 

Paine was brought up a Quaker. His philosophy is none the worse for that. You don’t have to be a Christian to see that ‘Love thy neighbour’ should be the basis for any left wing political philosophy. Whether it was what a Jewish carpenter’s son said, or is part of the next development from an earlier system of Jewish law (the Ten Commandments) does not really matter. It is the political philosophy distilled in parts of the Bible which counts.

 

In his 1776 pamphlet, Common Sense, Paine illustrates his dislike of kings and the hereditary system by the Bible story of Gideon. When asked to be king by the Jews, Gideon ‘in the piety of his soul replied: “I will not rule over you neither shall my son rule over you, the Lord shall rule over you”’. And Paine develops this: Gideon was not turning down the honour. He denied the right of the people to give it.

 

If in the 21^st century you replace Paine’s ‘Lord’ with the rule of law; and recognise that, as does the Miller Brexit case, it is the law not politicians which rule, then a constitutional equilibrium begins to emerge. As Paine said: ‘The law is king; not the king law’. It is a short adjustment between these two stand-points to say that the rule of law is law; and that the rule of an individual – literally a ‘monarch’: prime minster, president, party leader, duke or duchess – is wrong and must not be the law. Rule by one person in the 21^st century – especially after our experiences of dictators in the 1930s and early 1940s – must be anathema.

 

Rule by the 21

 

So what is the alternative? Paine examines the earliest societies and points out that government is a ‘necessary evil’. It should be equality ruling freedoms (liberty) in the interests of society (fraternity/sisterliness) – but that is for another day. Government must be by a selected body – the ‘elected’, as Paine calls them – for the whole body – the ‘electors’. Society then works towards a true commonwealth as the Levellers would have understood the term.

 

In a way we have that elected body already, surely? Yes and no. We have a representative body (with some form of proportional representation it could be more representative). We still have the personality cult of a prime minister, who personally chooses his or her cabinet and all her ministers; and as we have seen with Mr Corbyn, he weeds out anyone who does not agree with him. Compare Atlee’s cabinet where all ‘wings’ of the Labour party worked together to produce the most effective modern government this country has probably ever known.

 

I would have the country elect the MPs (broadly as now). A majority of MPs (say, if the same system persists as now, a party) chooses 21 MPs from a list of those willing to be chosen. That 21 (‘cabinet’: a random odd number: it could be 17 of 23 (no more I suggest)) chooses the heads of government departments and other ministers. All the 21 chose, it is not left to one mon-archical figure (as now). The ‘cabinet’ then meets as regularly as need be to run the country; and at its first meeting it chooses a chair. If possible – this needs thinking through – the chair would be re-elected every few months (three to six, say); and there would be no president, or prime minister, or leader (no il duce: leader in Italian from which comes our duke).

 

I am sure if Paine had guessed that his beloved New Englanders would one day combine with other USA people to elect Trump as president, he would have kept his Gideon idea and have warmed to my cabinet rule idea. He would have rejected the idea of one president or leader.