Supreme Court II & Italy!

TALKING POLITICS

Catherine Carr

News, News & Politics

4.7 • 2.5K Ratings

🗓️ 25 September 2019

⏱️ 45 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

A packed episode: we catch up with Catherine Barnard on the Supreme Court's unanimous decision against prorogation and we discuss what's going on in Italian politics. Plus we explore the links and differences between the two, from fears of an election to the role played by presidents and monarchs. Boris, Berlusconi, Baroness Hale and politics on the beach: it's all here! With Lucia Rubinelli and Chris Bickerton.

Talking Points:

Is it surprising that the Supreme Court’s judgement was unanimous?

There’s a strength in unanimity—it also makes it harder to attribute political motives to individual judges.
This is only the beginning of what could be a series of contentious judgments, but because the decision was unanimous, it’s hard to read the room.

The Supreme Court didn’t want to get into motive… or monarchy, so it focused on the effect of prorogation.

If the power to prorogue were unlimited, it could be used for unconstitutional purposes.
But Parliament did have an opportunity to hold the government to account and it chose not to.

Are there parallels between what’s going on in Italy and the UK?

The government has broken down, and the opposition is scared of an election. Both Johnson and Salvini are polling at around 30% and facing divided oppositions.
But in Italy, the opposition has behaved very differently. Despite extreme contempt for each other, Renzi and De Maio are in coalition.
This is in part because of Mattarella, the President, and the EU.

Does going into coalition with Renzi mark the end of 5 Star’s anti-establishment credentials?

They might go forward with a new leader, Di Battista, who is more left wing.

Renzi is trying to position himself as a Macron-like figure.

The dominant feature of Italian politics is fragmentation: if you can get even 5-10% of the vote, you can be the kingmaker.
Renzi thinks he can sweep up Berlusconi’s voters.
But unlike Macron, Renzi isn’t an unknown entity. And the next election might be fought in the midst of a recession.

Further Learning:

Upcoming Events:

On 5 Oct. David, Helen, and Chris Brooke will be LIVE in London. Tickets here!
And on 16 Oct. David and Helen will be LIVE at Cambridge Junction with Ayesha Hazarika. Get your tickets here.

And as ever, recommended reading curated by our friends at the LRB can be found here: lrb.co.uk/talking

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello my name is David Ronson and this is Talking Politics. We were going to talk about Italy today and then something happened in the Supreme Court yesterday.
0:14.0	So we're going to talk about that and we're going to talk about Italy and we're going to talk about what connects them if anything does.
0:21.0	Talking Politics is brought to you in partnership with the London Review of Books which is celebrating its 40th anniversary for the next few months with an unimprovable offer.
0:35.0	Get a year's subscription and a limited edition LRB tote bag for just 40 pounds by using the URL lrb.me forward slash birthday.
0:52.0	So I'm delighted that Catherine Barnard is back with us for the follow up.
0:57.0	LRB and LRB are here to and we'll get their views on the connection between Italy, Supreme Court, Brexit, everything.
1:05.0	So Catherine, we talked about this last week. By the weekend, perhaps it wasn't a total surprise.
1:10.0	How the judgement went, there were kind of smoke signals coming out. I think a lot of people were surprised it was unanimous.
1:16.0	I think I was surprised it was unanimous. We used surprised.
1:20.0	With hindsight, no, it makes a lot of sense it's unanimous. For the reason that one strength, unity is strength, to it avoids anyone from being picked off.
1:32.0	There's always been a fear about a repetition of daily males, enemies of the people.
1:37.0	And three, it says to the public that you can't say our judge X is a known remainder, judge Y is a known Labour supporter.
1:47.0	It's very difficult to say that all 11 have particular anti-Brexit views and therefore having a unanimous decision sends up considerable force.
1:57.0	So I'm going to put the counter-argument just for the sake of it.
2:01.0	Given that the judgement was on what were called the fundamentals of democracy, that was a key part of what was in there.
2:08.0	If you got 11 people together, you wouldn't get 11 to agree on the fundamentals of democracy.
2:13.0	So I can see why for the reasons you say unanimity is a kind of strength, but it could also look like a kind of contrivance.
2:20.0	And it is striking also in this case, there have been four judgments, two one way, two the other.
2:24.0	So there is a division of opinion. But in each case, the judgement was unanimous.
2:29.0	So judges never disagreed with inter-case, they've only disagreed between courts and hearings.
2:35.0	Is it partly because in this case they had the full evidence and indeed they had the full range of arguments on both sides and the government case was just blown out of the water?
2:44.0	I mean, would that be the other way to put it?
	...

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