Pay day!

For lawyers that is. The grun is delighted to report that:

Scottish judges rule Boris Johnson's suspension of parliament unlawful 

Lawyers acting for 75 opposition MPs and peers argued Johnson’s decision to suspend parliament for five weeks was illegal and in breach of the constitution, as it was designed to stifle parliamentary debate and action on Brexit.

The Government intends to appeal 

Meanwhile, the EC is under new management and is already extending its ambitions:

The European commission’s incoming president has been pilloried for giving the EU’s most senior official on migration the job title “Protecting our European Way of Life”...Sophie in ‘t Veld, a Liberal MEP who also works on migration law, said the decision was misguided and urged Von der Leyen to withdraw the title. “The very point about the European way of life, is the freedom for individuals to choose their own way of life,” she said. “We do not need a commissioner for that, thank you very much....The commission will also have vice-presidents in charge of, “A Stronger Europe in the World”, “Europe Fit for a Digital Age” and “Democracy and Demography”...The fuzzy aspirational titles contrast with the outgoing commission, which uses prosaic factual terms, such as “foreign policy and security” or “digital single market”.

Elsewhere, G Monbiot delivers a penetrating critique of neoliberalism and says:

Neoliberalism is the ideology developed by people such as Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman. It is not just a set of free-market ideas, but a focused discipline, deliberately applied around the world. It treats competition as humanity’s defining characteristic, sees citizens as consumers and “the market” as society’s organising principle. The market, it claims, sorts us into a natural hierarchy of winners and losers. Any attempt by politics to intervene disrupts the discovery of this natural order. [hence the European Court of Justice] ...It was embraced by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan and most subsequent governments. They sought to implement the doctrine by cutting taxes, privatising and outsourcing public services, slashing public protections, crushing trade unions and creating markets where markets did not exist before. The doctrine was imposed by central banks, the IMF, the Maastricht treaty and the World Trade Organization. By shutting down political choice, governments and international bodies created a kind of totalitarian capitalism.

Any (!) readers will notice that the EC is included in the list but in an odd way -- 'the Maastricht treaty'. It gets more apologetic. Monbiot argues that 'neoliberal ultras [in the UK Government], and Brexit is a highly effective means of promoting this failed ideology.' An even more masterful matador manoeuvre ends the piece:

the professor of political economy Abby Innes argues, neoliberalism has reached its Brezhnev phase: “ossification, self-dealing, and directionless political churn”. Like Leninism, neoliberalism claims to be an infallible science. Its collision with the complexities of the real world has caused political sclerosis of the kind that characterised the decline of Soviet communism. As a result, “the only way to complete this revolution today is under cover of other projects: Brexit is ideal”.

So neolibs, having driven the Maastricht Treaty, now move on to UK nationalism to avoid bureaucratic stagnation? But not French or German nationalism or is that next? Monbiot has to defend this view by saying:

[Johnson] rages against red tape, but the real red tape is created by the international trade treaties he favours, that render democratic change almost impossible, through rules that protect capital against popular challenge, and shift decision-making away from parliaments and into unaccountable offshore courts (“investor-state dispute settlement”). This explains the enthusiasm among some on the left for Brexit: a belief that escaping from the EU means escaping from coercive trade instruments. In reality, it exposes us to something even worse, as the UK enters negotiations with the US, holding a begging bowl.

The BuzzFeed article on investor-state dispute settlement is indeed alarming, although focused on US dealings with dodgy plutocrats in Central American or Middle Eastern states. I could see no comment on the EC, and certainly not any support for the view that the EC would protect us from this development, if anything can.  Maybe it will prefer its own unelected legal bodies to do the job?

So --much to agree with, of course, but what a strangely selective target.Is the EC going to prevent ossification with its belief in infallible government? Has it eased market forces and protected trades unions? Does it stand against totalitarian capitalism? Monbiot just seems to  prefer European neoliberalism to US neoliberalism.

It's far worse than Monbiot thinks. There are no simple alternatives to neoliberalism  and the only issue is whether international legal and political federations of capitalists will be worse than their existing networks and connections. Difficult choice -- but I'm for removing that additional 'European' protective layer of bureaucratic rationalism and its sad social liberal ideology.