Dr Robin Douglas Profile picture
Sep 13, 2020 7 tweets 2 min read Read on X
Braverman was hauled over the coals for this at the Bar Council meeting yesterday.

People who aren't lawyers might not immediately realise how badly this process has been corrupted, so let me try to explain.

#Brexit

/1
If the Government wants to make use of external barristers, it has a system of "panels" (or lists) of people who are approved for this purpose.

Braverman will know this because she used to be on one, although of course she was only on one of the lower ones.

/2
At the top of this system is Sir James Eadie QC, the First Treasury Counsel, who takes on the Government's most important cases. He is one of the leading lawyers in the country.

If you watched video footage of the Miller cases, you might recognise him.

/3
Yet Ms Braverman decided not to instruct Eadie on this matter.

Or any other of the panel counsel.

This goes against the normal rules, and raises the question: why not?

/4
The counsel whom she *did* instruct are an unimpressive bunch.

Richard Ekins is a zealous supporter of the Govt to the point of being a bit of a crank about it. An Oxford academic lawyer, he has never fought a single case in court and has publicly advocated breaking the WA.

/5
Richard Howell is a very junior barrister (first year) who worked for Vote Leave and is a mate of Dominic Cummings.

I haven't come across Guglielmo Verdirame, but I understand that he too is on record as a political supporter of Brexit.

/6
So Braverman bypassed the normal system. Not least, she bypassed Sir James Eadie QC, a man at the top of the profession whose role it is to do this stuff.

In favour of people who are... er, not at the top of the profession. But *are* politically partisan and know Cummings.

/End

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More from @Robin_C_Douglas

Nov 19, 2024
In 1865, Catholic bishops in the USA asked the Vatican how they should respond to the growth of the Fenians, an Irish nationalist organisation, among Irish Americans

The Vatican's seemingly bizarre response was that the Fenians were occultists who were trafficking with Satan

/1 Image
On the face of it, the question posed by the growth of the Fenians was straightforward: did Catholic doctrine, which permits rebellion against tyranny, allow Irish nationalists to take up arms against the British?

But Vatican officials were concerned with another issue.

/2
Clerics in Rome looked at the Fenian movement through a different lens - not that of a Catholic nation fighting for freedom against a foreign empire, but that of the struggle of the conservative Catholic order against the rise of modern liberalism.

/3
Read 11 tweets
May 31, 2024
This image has been circulating today.

It is of interest to me as a specialist in religious history.

It takes us into some dark places - places which have nothing to do with supporting the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people.

A thread. Image
(Let me say at the outset that my purpose here is not to refute the claims made in the graphic. I am taking them to be obviously false. My interest is in the deeper thought structures that underlie the textual and visual rhetoric.)
At its simplest, we are dealing here with *oversystematisation* - a tendency that some people have to join everything that they like/dislike into a single mass. This goes with a totalising worldview, so you tend to find it among radicals such as Christian fundamentalists:
Image
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Read 20 tweets
Apr 5, 2024
Since the Reverend Father Calvin Robison is on my timeline again, here is a thread on the strange and colourful underworld of clergy that he belongs to. Image
There is a certain kind of man - and it is almost always men who do this - who hankers after the status and trappings of a traditional clergyman but either can't persuade a normie church to ordain him or can't be bothered to study for the necessary number of years.
It is a morbid version of the same instinct that impels some people to get involved in cosplay or Freemasonry.
Read 26 tweets
Apr 4, 2024
This post caught my attention. I was a teenager in the 90s, and I was caught up in these issues in my own life.

I generally avoid posting about this subject, but I'm going to take the risk of doing it on this occasion.
The trivial and obvious answer as to why there were ~0 trans kids back then is that the conceptual and practical mechanisms to transition didn't exist. I remember one magazine article about people who would now be called non-binary ("androgynous" was the term used). That was it.
I was that person. If the possibility had existed, I would have declared myself non-binary.

It didn't, in those days. If I'd tried it at school, I would have got my head kicked in. If I didn't even admit to being bisexual, I *certainly* wasn't going to tell anyone about *this*.
Read 13 tweets
Jul 22, 2023
Antizionism before Zionism

A thread following on from comments that I made on another thread about how conspiratorial antizionism predated the actual start of the Zionist movement.
Zionism gets going in earnest in the 1880s, and Theodor Herzl publishes "Der Judenstaat" in 1896

By this time, theories of Jewish conspiracy are rife in Europe. They originate from older conspiracy theories about the Freemasons which were devised after the 1789 French Revolution
But Jews only really come to be plugged into the Masonic conspiracy theories in the 1860s (although there are attempts to do so before then - including, perversely, by Benjamin Disraeli in the 1840s and 50s).

Organised political antisemitism then gets going in the 1870s and 80s.
Read 18 tweets
Apr 29, 2023
The Wisdom of Jolyon Maugham KC

A thread of quotations from Jollers' new book.
The law "is the sluice gate through which the river of humanity flows".
"The hand of a good lawyer holds the mightiest pen. Its stroke can enlist the power of the State."
Read 21 tweets

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