Unbroken Continuation

This atrocity survived 12 years of Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and it would hardly have been ended by Hillary Clinton or Kamala Harris, so expect another 25 years of it. Carol Rosenberg writes:

In a major blow to the U.S. case against Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man accused of plotting the Sept. 11 attacks, a military judge ruled on Friday that the prisoner’s confessions to F.B.I. agents were not voluntary and cannot be used against him at trial.

Prosecutors have described Mr. Mohammed’s interrogations in 2007 at the U.S. Navy base in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, as the government’s most crucial evidence in the long-running death-penalty case.

The ruling, just before the 25th anniversary of the attacks, could further delay the start of a trial if prosecutors decide to appeal to reinstate it. Aging survivors and families of victims have said they worry they may never see a final resolution to the case.

Just this week, the judge set a trial date of June 5, 2028.

Mr. Mohammed is accused of being the mastermind of the hijacking attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Pennsylvania and the Pentagon.

He was brutally interrogated by the C.I.A. in secret overseas prisons after his capture in 2003 and held incommunicado until his transfer to Guantánamo in 2006. Prosecutors excluded statements from those interrogations from the case.

But the trial judge, Lt. Col. Michael Schrama, went further, concluding that Mr. Mohammed’s subsequent interrogations in 2007 at Guantánamo were also inadmissible.

“The prosecution has failed to prove by a preponderance of the evidence that Mr. Mohammad’s statements to the F.B.I. were voluntarily given,” Colonel Schrama wrote in the conclusion of his 45-page ruling, which was not immediately released to the public but whose unclassified contents were confirmed by several lawyers who had seen it.

Colonel Schrama cited several factors, including an “unbroken continuation of the C.I.A.’s psychological conditioning and severe coercion” at the time of Mr. Mohammed’s questioning at Guantánamo in 2007.

He also found that F.B.I. agents intentionally failed to explicitly tell Mr. Mohammed that he had a right to be silent and to consult a lawyer, and that what he told them could be used against him at a trial.

The question of the taint of torture has hung over the case for years.

Defense lawyers had argued that Mr. Mohammed was essentially conditioned by the C.I.A. through torture coupled with years of isolation and solitary confinement to later tell the F.B.I. what they wanted to hear. He was not allowed to consult a lawyer until long after he had confessed and was charged.

Colonel Schrama has yet to rule on the confessions of two other defendants in the Sept. 11 case, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi. An earlier judge, Col. Matthew McCall, threw out the confessions of Mr. Mohammed’s nephew, Ammar al-Baluchi, who is accused of helping some of the 19 hijackers with finances and travel arrangements.

A different judge, Col. Lanny Acosta, suppressed the confession of the defendant in the U.S.S. Cole bombing case, Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, in an explicit finding that he had been tortured by the C.I.A. His death-penalty trial in the 2000 attack, which killed 17 U.S. sailors, is scheduled to start in October.

The Sept. 11 case has been mired in pretrial proceedings since arraignment in 2012. Over the years, four other judges gathered evidence on the question Colonel Schrama decided on Friday. An earlier judge found a fifth man, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, mentally incompetent to stand trial, a condition the defendant’s lawyer blamed on torture.

The Secretive World of Guantánamo Bay

Sept. 11 Torture Case: The trial for four men accused of conspiring in the terrorist attacks could begin in June 2028, according to an order issued by the military judge. Prosecutors had asked for an earlier start.

Prisoner With No Lawyer in Death Penalty Case: The episode at the war court alarmed death penalty lawyers, who argued that the judge had a duty to suspend the proceedings to protect the rights of the defendant.

U.S.S. Cole: The Army judge in the bombing case ordered the prosecution to do its “due diligence” in providing defense lawyers with any evidence the U.S. government might have “regarding Iran’s role” in the attack off Yemen 25 years ago. President Trump has said Iran was “probably involved.”

Cuban Deportees: The long, circuitous journey of dozens of Cuban men who were designated for deportation from the United States last year but instead taken to a prison at the U.S. base at Guantánamo Bay ended when they were repatriated to Cuba.

A Curious Collaboration: An unlikely collection of portraits has given the public its only glimpse inside the U.S. military prison at Guantánamo Bay.

Doctor Gratiae

An Augustinian Pope is exactly what the Church needs at this time, and exactly what the grace of God has given Her, explains my latest contribution to Catholic365.

Democratic Socialists of America, Indeed

The DSA has many serious failings, but as long as you did not actually call it by the S-word, although sometimes even if you did, then the United States has always been rather good at the thing itself. The only America that anyone now alive can remember is the land of big municipal government, of strong unions whose every red cent in political donations buys something specific, of very high levels of co-operative membership, of housing co-operatives even for the upper middle classes, of small farmers who own their own land, and of the pioneering of Keynesianism in practice.

In stark contrast to our own Premier League, the National Football League maintains the equal sharing out of ticket and television revenue, and there is still the hard salary cap for players, as well as the very extensive welfare provision. The Green Bay Packers have a not-for-profit model of community ownership that has had to be banned from spreading for fear that it would otherwise prove so popular. The Packers have never moved out of a Midwestern city of only 107,395 people as of the 2020 census. The National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball more than do their bit, too.

America still had enough Faith, Flag and Family by the 1980s to restrain neoliberal economics then and subsequently. We did not, so we could not. Comparing their giant sporting interests to ours makes the point. God Bless America. Games that still commonly began with the Lord’s Prayer, and which invariably began with the National Anthem, could never become what their counterparts had become here in a country where many people probably no longer knew the words to the Lord’s Prayer and where most people now alive had probably never known all of the words to the National Anthem.

That is the America that long led the world in protecting high-wage, high-skilled, high-status jobs, both against the exportation of that labour to ununionised, child-exploiting sweatshops, and against the importation of those sweatshops themselves. The main thing missing was universal public healthcare. But Obamacare is less Socialist than the scheme that was proposed by Richard Nixon, who also supported the Universal Basic Income, as did Milton Friedman.

A Victory For Common Sense

Alistair Gray and Julie Steinberg write:

Flat owners fighting to replace expensive or unresponsive management companies in their blocks have won a case in the UK’s highest court that strips freeholders of a powerful tool to derail resident-led takeovers.

The Supreme Court on Thursday ruled in favour of a group of London leaseholders who were prevented from taking control of their building’s management due to a minor technicality.

Property lawyers said the precedent-setting decision, which overturns an earlier judgment from the Court of Appeal, should facilitate other “right to manage” attempts by residents unhappy with how their blocks are run.

The case is part of a wider legal and policy battleground over the feudal-era leasehold system, which affects most flats in England and Wales. The regime has been criticised for exposing flat owners to high service charges and shoddy repairs.

The right to manage, introduced in 2003, gives leaseholders powers to remove the freeholders’ management company, but lawyers said the process could be costly and onerous for flat owners.

In the case before the Supreme Court, an attempt by leaseholders at Cresta Court in west London to seize management control was thwarted because they failed to send “invitation to participate” paperwork to one resident, who had recently purchased the flat.

Formal records of the property transfer were unavailable due to Land Registry backlogs.

Even though the resident supported the takeover, the freeholder claimed the missed paperwork meant the entire process was legally void.

Its lawyers argued that residents seizing control of a building amounted to a forced transfer of property rights, so strict compliance was required.

Property tribunals heard the dispute initially and sided with the leaseholders, but the Court of Appeal last year agreed with the freeholder that the right to manage claim was invalid.

A panel of five Supreme Court judges, including president Lord Reed, on Thursday overturned that decision, ruling that minor technicalities should not invalidate takeover attempts.

“There is no reason to assume that the [right to manage] scheme was intended to provide for the draconian sanction of invalidity of the claim notice for every procedural breach,” they said in a summary of the judgment.

Mark Foxcroft, partner at law firm Devonshires, said the Court of Appeal’s decision had “created a powerful tool for landlords” to invalidate residents’ attempts to gain control of their building management.

He said: “Technical challenges to right to manage claims by landlords — especially in larger blocks — have been on the rise. This clarity from the Supreme Court, without doubt, makes such challenges much less likely in the future.”

Harry Scoffin, founder of campaign group Free Leaseholders, said: “The Supreme Court has delivered a victory for common sense by siding with captive leaseholders seeking to exercise their statutory right to manage so they can gain rightful control of their homes, money and lives.”

But he said there was more to be done, including lowering the threshold to 20 per cent for the proportion of residents needed to successfully mount a takeover.

“Right to manage still requires leaseholders to perform somersaults, most absurdly through the requirement for 50 per cent upfront membership of an RTM company, which punishes those in big blocks, retirement homes, buildings where freeholders own flats, or where there are many uncontactable or overseas owners.”

What Are They Trying To Hide?

George Greenwood writes:

Open justice is meant to be a key part of the British constitution. In a truly open society, it is not good enough for justice to be merely done, it must also be seen to be done. The free press plays a key part in this. Without professionals to report on the work of the courts, to explain its arcane processes to the public, and to hold those in judicial office to account for how they exercise formidable powers to deny liberty, the principle means little.

But today journalists are being denied the ability to perform this role effectively. The relationship today between reporters and the judicial system is fundamentally broken. And it is a lack of transparency that is at the heart of this breakdown. In short, the problem is the British judicial system is set up for a world where a court reporter can physically attend hearings at most courts on most days. In such a world, the analogue nature of the courts was less of a problem, as there was always someone able to review listings daily to identify cases in need of urgent third-party oversight, and to keep communities informed about what was going on in their local courts. While far from perfect, the system worked well enough. The most important cases were covered, and at least some obvious miscarriages of justice were identified and ultimately, due to this press attention, overturned.

But two developments have made this old way of doing things unworkable. Cuts to the number of local journalists due to crippling financial challenges facing the sector mean there are fewer and fewer people able to attend proceedings. The short-sighted clickbait model adopted by some local outlets has left many of their remaining reporters unable to attend courts. Most court days now take place without a reporter in the building, especially outside the south east. One must now be very lucky or very determined to spot a case that might be of wider interest.

But, crucially, the courts have also failed to keep up with modern technology, retaining arcane processes that have no place in a modern justice system. An inexplicable proportion of their work still takes place on paper. Under the current system, there is no way for outsiders to search criminal court cases by keyword or even defendant name, making it extremely difficult to track the progression of a case through the criminal courts. The system for civil cases is not much better.

Court listings are put up with little warning, and with ongoing organisational crises owing to a backlog of cases, short-notice changes can allow key hearings to slip through the system without proper scrutiny. It is not clear that, on any meaning of the word, such a system can be described as “open”. Even when you do manage to spot a case in time, there is no automatic ability to access court records, even for live cases.

One must make an application to the court clerks, who are often poorly trained in open justice rules and often deny routine requests, or require time-consuming formal hearings for a judge to make decisions on a case-by-case basis even on the most basic of applications. This is despite the right to certain documents in theory being automatic.

It is bad enough if one is covering a live case. As an investigative journalist, I tend to work on historic cases, and access to that material is significantly worse. In 2024, I was following the trail of an MP, James McMurdock, who, the Daily Mail reported, had been imprisoned for assaulting a former girlfriend. He claimed in his response he had “just pushed her”.

One does not tend to go to prison for that, so I wanted to dig further into what exactly happened and asked for the findings of the judge in that case. Despite the open justice principle, officials declined to release the information without a full-blown hearing. It took five months to get hold of a simple statement of reasons for the conviction totalling 50 words. Even then, it took the assistance of The Times legal team and an external barrister.

I was eventually able to report that McMurdock was jailed for repeatedly kicking his girlfriend, not just pushing her. But as any good journalist knows, the time taken to report this from the original Mail story reduced its impact – a direct result of needless judicial intransparency.

There is an obvious solution to the court transparency crisis, and that is proper digitalisation and public access to unsealed proceedings, and a rationalisation of the application system. But this has not happened in a meaningful sense. In some cases, there have been regressive steps.

A few years ago, a company called Courtsdesk received an initial licence to begin collating and sharing magistrates’ court listing records with journalists and other third parties who have a professional need. This was a gamechanger. It finally allowed meaningful case tracking, historic research into previous court appearances by keyword, and broader analysis of what actually happens within the business of the courts across cases, and this benefited academics, researchers and investigators far beyond just journalists. The Times was able to use this information to track serious defects in the government’s electronic tagging systems, with violent criminals not properly tagged for months, as evidenced in the magistrates’ court appearance notes.

But this was too good to be true. The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) reverted to type and revoked Courtsdesk’s licence over concerns that the service had “used AI” to process some of the records it held, it claims, in breach of its licence. The AI in question was used to experiment with redacting needless victim information from their records to help protect victims.

The US makes court records public by default

Journalists were, and remain, locked out of the system. There remains a black hole in the interim where a system that had been used for public-interest reporting has simply been shut off. At the time of writing, these licensing issues have yet to be sorted out, and we have no idea when we might get access once more. What makes this so depressing is that there is simply no good reason for it to work this way. The US, which has a similar common law system to the UK, makes most of its court records public by default. Federal court records are contained within a system called PACER. If a court document is not specifically sealed by a judge, anybody with an account can download copies for 10 cents a page.

While records at a state level can sometimes be less comprehensive, they are often just as transparent. This makes it possible for journalists to not only easily report on cases, but to track trends, identify judges who misuse their powers, and have a powerful source of official documents that show what is going on in society. There is simply no reason, other than the MoJ and judicial intransigence, for us not to have a similar system here.

The cost of such a system would be minimal, and the creation of a single point of truth for court records, with officials having the ability to deem a document either public or sealed, could save millions in the long run, compared to the current disaster zone of a fragmented system. Such transparency is not simply a nice to have. We are in the midst of a crisis of faith in democracy because of widespread disinformation.

Seeing state failure across the board, trust in government is falling, and that has opened a Pandora’s Box of conspiracy, from the manosphere to the far left, that has made established fact a contestable arena. The best cure for conspiracy is transparency wherever possible as a balm for speculation. Not being able to pull up basic transparency records fuels questions about what those in power must be hiding.

Without meaningful transparency, nefarious actors can more easily spread messages that government is covering up foreign grooming gangs, or that “two tier” policing is official policy. It is perhaps no surprise that the lack of detailed public records about the trial of Lucy Letby has created a cottage industry of speculation about her innocence, at significant harm to the families of her victims.

But crucially, a breakdown of effective transparency is most important because it makes miscarriages of justice that upend the lives of its victims more likely. Major scandals, such as the wrongful prosecutions during the Post Office affair, might have been overturned more quickly if there was meaningful access to the prosecution records across the cases, allowing the common trends to be more easily spotted.

To rebuild the relationship between the judiciary, the press, and the public at large, the government and the judicial authorities must open up the courts for the 21st century and make court documents easy to access through a common electronic platform.

If people have only a theoretical, not a practical, right to see justice be done, it is no wonder they begin to suspect what those in positions in authority get up to. As we have seen a refusal to show one’s working is already having serious consequences for the state of our democracy.

The Spycops Inquiry Should Finish The Job

Imran Khan KC writes:

In June 2013 Peter Francis, a former Metropolitan police officer, broke a 20-year silence about the role he had played in surveilling the family of Stephen Lawrence in a documentary jointly made by The Guardian and Channel 4’s Dispatches programme. Two years later, thanks in part to the programme, the Home Office established an undercover policing inquiry, commonly known as the spycops public inquiry, to shed light on the scale of surveillance of activists and trade unionists. That inquiry is now under threat.

Francis had served in the Special Demonstration Squad (SDS), a Met unit founded in 1968 whose officers lived for years at a time inside political and campaigning organisations under false names.

In the months after Stephen Lawrence’s murder in 1993 Francis had been deployed to pose as an anti-racist campaigner. His superiors pressed him to find “dirt” that could be used against the Lawrence family and their supporters. Stephen’s mother, Doreen, told The Guardian and Channel 4 that nothing she had heard since her son died had topped the revelation that police had been spying on her while she grieved. She had always suspected the police were watching. She never had proof. 

The Lawrences were not an isolated case. Justice campaigns and trade unionists across the country were also monitored.

At least 139 officers adopted fake names, pretending to be political activists, to spy on people between 1968 and at least 2010. Dozens of anti-racist campaigners, family members of victims of police violence and leftwing activists have been surveilled by police.

Suresh Grover, whose Monitoring Group stood behind many of these victims of police surveillance, has told the inquiry that the suspicion directed at Black campaigners was rooted in racist stereotyping. Complaints from Black communities were treated as a public order threat in a way that identical complaints from others were not.

The government has justified the consultation they launched on 16 July into the future of the inquiry on the grounds that it has gone on for more than 11 years and cost £137m. The figures are accurate but their explanation is missing.

Applications for anonymity and restriction orders, the vast majority sought by police officers, have slowed down this inquiry. Litigation over cover names, and a persistent unwillingness among former officers and their commanders to say what they did has also hampered the process. The Met, which ran the SDS, made the inquiry slow and expensive. The same government department that funded and served the squad now cites the inquiry’s slowness and expense as reasons to cut it short.

Despite a push to wind up the inquiry, it is still producing revelations about the conduct of England’s police forces. Just last year, it revealed that an undercover officer, James Thomson, who had deceived two women into intimate relationships, was suspected of fabricating an elaborate plot to link an anti-foxhunting activist to a gun that he told managers the activist intended to collect in France.

Before the inquiry, Thomson’s managers admitted that in order to protect the SDS, nothing was done either about his intimate relationship with women he was surveilling or his possible fabrication of evidence. The unit, it seemed, trumped almost anything.

The inquiry also exposed numerous instances in which managers appeared to have knowledge of undercover officers having had sexual relationships that continued long after undercover deployments ended, in one case even after the announcement of the inquiry.

Another shocking discovery from the inquiry is that the Met spent £2.5m hiding an officer – John Dines – from his former lover, going as far as to relocate him from New Zealand to Australia for that purpose.

For the spycops scandal to be possible courts had to be misled. Officers were arrested alongside activists, appeared in court under false names and in some cases gave evidence under them without the court being told.

Surveillance was not limited to political activists and victims of racist violence. The Met’s own investigation concluded that special branch and the security services fed material to construction companies that blacklisted more than 3,000 workers suspected of being members of trade unions.

More instances of misconduct may come to light in the future, which is all the more reason to keep the inquiry running. The consultation is scheduled to end on 20 September, but there is still time to write to the Home Office to make sure that the government knows your views.

An inquiry that was set up because the state spied on the parents of a murdered child should not be closed down because the state has heard enough about itself. Doreen Lawrence has been told for 33 years that the truth is coming if she will wait just a little longer. She – and other victims of spying – have waited long enough. The inquiry should finish the job it was given.

The Herd Moves

I do like UnHerd, wherein Jennifer Kavanagh writes:

When John Ratcliffe, director of the CIA, visited Moscow earlier this week, he reportedly warned Russian officials against attacks targeting European neighbours. The surprise trip amplified already widespread fears across the continent that Vladimir Putin, frustrated with the lack of progress in Ukraine, would soon expand his war and “test Nato” with a strike aimed at Europe.

The risks of escalation between Europe and Russia are real and rising. But the prevailing narrative — that Putin sees a window of opportunity to undermine Nato’s credibility — misunderstands the drivers of that escalation. Retaliation and insecurity, not aggression, are the biggest causes of confrontation between Europe and Russia today, and reassurance, not military pressure, is the only way to stop it.

Concerns that long-standing tension between Russia and Nato’s European members would spiral out of control have gained momentum this summer, as Western support for Ukraine has increased and Russia’s hybrid war campaign has intensified. In European capitals, drone incursions into frontline states and cases of suspected Russian sabotage — such as mysterious explosions at munitions plants that support Ukraine — are seen as signs of Putin’s aggression. European leaders accuse Moscow of probing to find Nato’s weaknesses and planning a future invasion of European territory.

But this is almost certainly a misreading of Russia’s intentions. From Putin’s perspective, Europe is a direct combatant in its conflict against Ukraine rather than an innocent bystander. After all, it is European money, and in some cases weapons and technology, that are fuelling Ukraine. In this context, Moscow views its own military activities as retaliation and even self-defence against an increasingly malign European bloc, not provocation. Moscow does not aim to test Nato’s resilience but to impose costs on Europe, just as the continent’s proxy war is imposing costs on Russia.

Russia’s military operations against Europe over recent months have a tit-for-tat nature. European countries stepped up their seizures of Russian vessels, so Putin announced plans to reciprocate by seizing European ships in Pacific waters. Britain announced its drones had been used in Ukrainian deep strikes and that it would give Ukraine access to advanced missile technology, and Russia indicated British military targets would be fair game.

To argue that Russia understands its own military actions against Europe as reactive is not to justify them, but rather to explain their motivation. The fact that Russia seeks to punish Europe for its support for Ukraine shows it is acting largely out of insecurity. Russia might still pose a challenge to Europe. Still, it is a very different and more tractable challenge than an aggressive and risk-accepting Russia ready to launch an unprovoked attack.

Most importantly, if Russia is reactive and sees Europe as a threat, it may still find reasons to avoid a full-blown conflict, providing space for an off-ramp. First, there is the question of resources. With its own military still tied up in Ukraine, the costs of a second war in Europe are likely prohibitive. Europe’s own assessment is that Russia’s military loses more people per month than it can replace through recruitment. Any sustained military action directed at Europe would further drain Russian finances and pull personnel and equipment away from what is Russia’s priority, achieving Putin’s aims inside Ukraine. Furthermore, if conflict with Europe escalates too quickly, this could force Russia to end its campaign in Ukraine before its goals are met.

Second, there is always the question of how the US would respond to any attack on Europe. Trump has raised doubts about America’s commitment to Nato’s Article 5. But if Moscow is even a little bit unsure about Washington’s intentions, it may refrain from any action that might pull the United States in — even an American military weakened by the Iran war could cause great damage to Russia.

Fundamentally, Russia does not want a war with Europe. But miscalculations will remain possible, especially if the root causes of the current escalation spiral are not addressed. If Moscow’s military action toward Europe is indeed retaliation for support to Ukraine, the best way to prevent further escalation would be to end that conflict as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, a peace deal still seems a long way off.

A more realistic alternative would be serious investment in Europe-Russia dialogue, not about Ukraine, but on de-escalation in surrounding regions. The two sides could set red lines, offer mutual reassurance, and communicate clearly about actions that would trigger kinetic responses.

Many in Europe are opposed to opening such a channel, seeing dialogue as a reward. But in the current context, with the US (Europe’s security guarantor) running low on munitions, pragmatism must come before principles. Neither Europe nor Russia can afford more war right now.

And Richard Johnson writes:

In the years between the 2016 Brexit vote and eventual departure from the European Union in 2020, a debate raged in Britain as to how the new relationship with the bloc might take shape. Effectively, the debate boiled down to the trade-offs between political sovereignty and the economic benefits of free trade. It’s therefore interesting to see the same arguments being made about America’s current trade war with Canada. The dispute over tariffs has seen Mark Carney choose between economic efficiency — conceding to Trump’s demands — or political sovereignty — rejecting Trump’s demands. But have Brexit’s Remainers changed their tune over Canada?

Many of those who voted Leave were prepared to accept a degree of increased trade friction with the EU in exchange for greater freedom over policies affecting the British public. But, for many on the Remain side of the argument, sovereignty was an illusory concept. What mattered were the economic benefits of exchange with the EU. Sovereignty was expendable. Increased economic output from lower trade barriers mattered above all else. The former Bank of England economist Danny Blanchflower memorably declared, “You can’t eat sovereignty”.

So, when it came to the Brexit negotiations, many commentators who had voted Remain took the view that Britain should do whatever necessary to retain frictionless trade with the EU. If that meant sacrificing sovereignty, it was an easy price to pay because national sovereignty, in this day and age, wasn’t real, anyway.

This attitude manifested itself in the 2018 withdrawal agreement, which would have placed Britain in a customs union with the EU. Britain would have been required to accept the EU’s external tariff policies, but would have little say on them. The British government would be prohibited from showing any preference to its domestic industries or pursuing economic policies which adversely affected European economies.

Ultimately, the Brexit deal that was agreed in 2019 only applied such conditions to Northern Ireland. Sensible commentators told us that it was essential that Britain internally divide itself in this way; otherwise, there could be violence in Ireland. Throughout the negotiations with the EU, the spectre of political violence was raised as a threat against the British government should it seek to assert the territorial integrity of its own national boundaries.

So, how curious it is now to read the commentary from Remain-inclined commentators in the wake of the trade standoff between the US and Canada. The Trump administration has told Canada that to secure special, low-tariff access to US markets, it must accept the external tariffs that apply to other countries. Canada must also limit its “Buy Canadian” practices. Trump has deployed all kinds of threats, attracting much criticism for his sabre-rattling.

Mark Carney has stood firm. He has said these impositions go too far. To agree to an external tariff set by the US would be to compromise an integral part of Canadian sovereignty. He refuses to accept American terms of the trade deal and will opt for mutual tariff barriers on goods that had hitherto been items of free or low-tariff trade.

Carney has admitted that it “will raise costs and reduce choice for Canadians”. But he has taken the view that protecting key aspects of Canada’s policy autonomy is more important than lower consumer goods prices and less red tape with the US, its largest trading partner. Polls show the Canadian public supports him.

These arguments may strike some British observers as rather interesting, given that Carney appeared to take a different view when he was governor of the Bank of England. Likewise, commentators who once suggested that “sovereignty” was some kind of Right-wing fantasy are now praising Carney for standing up for Canadian sovereignty against the US. Many such examples can be found in The Guardian. Jonathan Freedland once denounced British Leavers as suffering from a “sovereignty delusion” but has praised Carney’s “defiant patriotism” against Trump. Rafael Behr diagnosed a “syndrome: a Brexit model that makes a sacred principle of sovereignty” from which the gains were “nil, while the costs are mounting”. He has since criticised the Trump administration’s “protection racket”, adding that “the price is paid in sovereignty”. Earlier this week, the Guardian leader heaped praise on Canada for “fighting for its sovereignty while the US appears to be fighting for cheaper goods”.

This contrast suggests that some commentators have not been arguing from a point of principle but instead from a kind of motivated reasoning, depending on the ideological valence of the actors involved. The script across so much of the commentariat seems to be this: if the EU does something, it’s good and fine, while those who resist it are nasty or deluded. If the Trump administration does something, it is wicked and idiotic, but those who resist it are heroic and virtuous. The public debate deserves better arguments than these.