Thread by @KesterRatcliff

A highly deserved demise:
"these elections have only confirmed that the Conservatives are heading for the electoral equivalent of the Chicxulub asteroid impact (except this time one or two dinosaurs might survive)" conservativehome.com/2024/05/05/goo…

If the "Conservative" party (actually constitutionally destructive cynically amoral nihilists) is finished in the next 4-5 years and the LibDems take their place as the main right of centre party in the UK, that'd be a very good thing for the UK and its influence on the world.

We also need electoral system reform and a properly codified constitution. 'Codified' doesn't have to mean treating it like it's sacred and valuing it literally more than life. It can be continually updating and improving. But it should have stronger constraints on the executive.

And it should include making it constitutionally unlawful to get parliament's permission for an advisory referendum with an ordinary 50% majority standard and then to treat it as if it was a binding plebiscite and using a 3.78% margin to change something so fundamental as Brexit.

If it was up to me to draft the constitution, I'd start with article 1 of the German Basic Law and make it even more explicitly emphatic that state authority is secondary to the natural facts of inherent human dignity and universal human rights, and absolutely not vice versa.

I'd explicitly limit 'national interest' to be secondary and particular within the whole context of universal human rights and infinite responsibility in the sense defined by Levinas. I'd define the legal philosophical logical order between levels of law, incl the case of borders

Re. Borders - the human right to free movement should be generally the starting point. Restrictions on free movement should have to be justified reasonably in order to fairly balance different valid human rights claims, without discrimination by nationality or iow. coloniality.

Border procedures should be basically about time place and manner of crossing, not about keeping people who we've participated in impoverishing or forcibly displacing out. And even in cases where we haven't negatively contributed to people's motivations to leave their countries,

basically we shouldn't be restricting people's rights to free movement around the planet without a good reason for it. Public health protection by limiting epidemic spread is a valid reason for slowing down or checking people have made a reasonable effort to not infect others.

Stopping persecutors from following refugees is a valid reason for border checks. Triaging needs and resettlement and socio-economic integration capacity while the former are much larger than the latter is a fair reason, if we're also working on reducing that disproportion.

If we faced our fair share of responsibilities for politically militarily or economically* forcibly displaced people consequential on our foreign policies, we'd soon realise we need to be more responsible earlier to prevent more forcible displacements. (*See ICESCR 1966 art.2.1.)

Conserving fundamental constitutional and cultural principles which give a society cohesion and adaptive stability is a valid and genuine political priority. But the "Conservatives" we have now are actually devoted to doing the opposite.

A good way for a principled conservative successor party to start would be to focus on campaigning for and setting up well a civil constitutional commission to repair the damage done by Brexit & its associated political period and to prevent any such damages ever happening again.

Another constitutional issue we need to clarify is the relationship between macroeconomic and political hierarchies. The notion that capitalism and democracy are inherently congruent because both value 'freedom' is utterly insane.

It involves actively ignoring population structure (hierarchical clustering) and treating 'society' as if it were merely an aggregate of individuals, so that idealistic rhetoric about individual(istic) economic freedoms is magically assumed to scale up linearly and fit society.

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