by Sebastian Millbank, The Critic
Britain recently woke up to the startling revelation that Keir Starmer now knows what a woman is. How does he know? Because a court told him. According to Sir Keir “A woman is an adult female, and the court has made that absolutely clear. I actually welcome the judgment because I think it gives real clarity.” This change of heart could be read as an act of political opportunism in the face of fast-changing public attitudes, but the way the Prime Minister framed the shift was telling. It seemed to speak of a man who had outsourced his rationality and morality to the legal system, patiently waiting for “clarity” to descend from on high, rather than making his own mind up.
Certain elements of the British character — eccentricity, ambition, courage, stoicism — have withered away, whilst English civility, scepticism and legalism have been taken to unhealthy extremes. We are terrified of confrontation, relativists about truth, and obsessed with impersonal authority. The result of this new national character is a culture that venerates procedure over principle and prudence.
The English legal system, historically, was rooted in both of these things. The rational application of laws assumed an overarching moral order, derived from Christian theology, and an underlying foundation of common sense and natural reason. The “reasonable man” is the fundamental unit of British civil order, rendering law and politics rational and humane by tethering it in the world of everyday life.
That world is gone, and we find ourselves instead subject to the rule of inhuman, irrational strictures. Rather than fitting law and regulation to human reality, we twist our lives to fit the dread dictums of bureaucracy. Instead of the human person we have homo economicus, and instead of the reasonable man, we have the procedural man.