E P Thompson, Geoffrey Cox, the Rule of Law & the ‘Freeborn Englishman’.
The former Tory Attorney General Geoffrey Cox has said that he cant vote for Boris Johnson’s Internal Market Bill because of the damage that its proposal to break international law would do to the UK’s reputation
Cox is a Brexiteer and this is a intra-ruling class dispute but matters can often open possibilities of wider challenges to the status quo.
Cox has recent form on the matter as well
On 26th January 2019 then the Tory Attorney General Cox tweeted a link to an excerpt from a speech that the late marxist historian E P Thompson (1924-1993) made at the History Workshop Conference at Ruskin College Oxford in late 1979.
Thompson was attacking what he saw as the mechanical marxism of Louis Athusser and his, then, British supporters.
He said in part:
History is a cultural form within which we fight and many have fought before us. Nor are we alone when we fight there for we are historians because we know that the past is not dead, inert, and confining, but is strong with energies which can brought once again to our side.”
Thompson, unusually for marxists at that time was a supporter of the rule of law, not that of Tory Attorney Generals but of what he termed after William Cobbett ‘The Freeborn Englishman’.
We can speculate although not be certain about the precise Brexit related point Cox was making, but for a leading Tory MP to reference E P Thompson 25 years after his death was perhaps interesting in itself.
Thompson himself was less enthusiastic about Attorney General’s in general than Cox seems to be about socialist historians. He wrote in the London Review of Books (Subduing the Jury, 4th December 1986)
It was left to the incoming Conservative Attorney-General to regularise the procedures of jury-vetting by a Practice Direction, to introduce a few emollient formalities, and to lower the profile of the issue so that it is now accepted as ‘normality’. It can be seen that this is not a party-political question. No one can be accused of partisan zeal. ‘Ensuring the proper administration of justice’ is a consensual duty in which Lord Hailsham and Labour’s Attorney-General Sam Silkin laboured alongside each other, while the pupating leadership of the SDP (then in Mr Callaghan’s Cabinet) averted their faces – or perhaps did not. All have shared in the work of ‘strengthening the jury system’ by diluting the unanimous verdict, removing offences to summary jurisdiction, limiting the challenges of the defence, and extending the scrutiny of the panel by the prosecution (with the aid of police information-storage of a miscellaneous and uncontrolled kind).
He might however also be concluded that both E P Thompson and Geoffrey Cox are strongly interested in the practice of the law…
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