Glen Newey

Week two of the Olympics, and British wins in boats, the velodrome and the Olympic stadium offer a feel-good moment. For some of ‘us’, the first person plural always induces a certain ‘Gott mit uns’-type queasiness, and the thought that the scope for identification between sinewy athletes and the British viewing public, sofa-stranded and bloated, is a bit tenuous. Still, as the economy continues to crap out, we blear-eyed viewers learn we care more than we ever thought about pukka equitation or the mysteries of luffing (‘Oh no! Saskia’s failed to trim her spinnaker!’). Daily Mail-reading immigration-haters whoop heartily over the successes of Christine Ohuruogu and Mo Farah, and rouse themselves from the sofa to dance ‘the Mobot’.

In 2009, Elmer and Chastity Weebles, a Christian couple from Hackensaugh, New Hampshire, had their infant son marked with the stigmata of Christ. During the operation the feet and hands of eight-day-old Mercey Weebles were impaled with ordinary kitchen skewers by a medically unqualified pastor known to the Weebleses. Secularists lobbied to have the couple arraigned on charges of assault. But the DA’s office declined to file charges against the Weebleses, arguing that to do so would violate the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. The NH attorneys were backed by Deputy Governor Dirk Lopov-Iacioppa, touted as a future presidential hopeful, who proclaimed: ‘I do not want Hackensaugh to be the only county in the United States in which Christians cannot practise their rites.’

In his Treasury Select Committee evidence yesterday, Paul Tucker, deputy governor of the Bank of England, denied nudging or winking to Barclays over the Libor rate. Whatever the semiotics, warning signs over Libor were already plain long before Tucker’s supposed nictation in October 2008. Minutes from November 2007 of the Bank’s money markets liaison committee meeting show its members were already exercised, eleven months before the exchanges between Tucker and Bob Diamond at Barclays, over lowballing Libor prices: several expressed concern that ‘Libor fixings had been lower than actual traded interbank rates’. The oversight regime resembles a dead chameleon, stuck on orange, while the system goes critical.

‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception,’ Carl Schmitt famously wrote in Political Theology. Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution, which so excited Schmitt, invested the president with emergency powers. After they came to power in 1933, the Nazis duly got president Hindenburg to use article 48 to annul constitutional rights in the wake of the Reichstag fire. Executive fiat survives intact in today’s democracies. In the UK, Orders in Council persist as executive powers with the force of primary legislation, exercised under the royal prerogative – they were used in 2004, for example, to overturn a court ruling that the forcible exile of Chagos islanders was unlawful.