On Wednesday 17 November US time, Alexander Macris published “Trump at the Rubicon”. The article became a reference document among the most hardcore Trump supporters in the weeks leading up to the Capitol attack of January 6, 2021. I reproduce it here for historical and archival purposes:

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Trump at the Rubicon: How the Insurrection Act and Militia Act empower Trump to cast the die

Alexander Macris
macris.substack.com
Wed, 18 Nov 2020 02:02 UTC

In the closing days of 50 BC, the Roman Senate declared that Julius Caesar’s term as a provincial governor was finished. Roman law afforded its magistrates immunity to prosecution, but this immunity would end with Caesar’s term. As the leader of the populares faction, Caesar had many enemies among the elite optimates, and as soon as he left office, these enemies planned to bury him in litigation. Caesar knew he would lose everything: property, liberty, even his life.

Caesar decided it was better to fight for victory than accept certain defeat. In January 49 BC, he crossed the Rubicon River with his army, in violation of sacred Roman law, and began a civil war. “Alea iacta est,” said Caesar: The die is cast.

In the closing days of 2020 AD, the American media has declared that Donald Trump’s term as president is finished. As the leader of the deplorables faction, Trump has many enemies among the elite irates, and as soon as he leaves office, these enemies plan to bury him in litigation. Bill Pascrell, the Chairman of the House Ways & Means Subcommittee on Oversight, has officially called for the prosecution of President Trump for “government crimes” following his term in office. In his thirst for vengeance, Pascrell has made it clear there will be no Nixonian escape by pardon:

Donald Trump, along with his worst enablers, must be tried for their crimes against our nation and Constitution. Any further abuse of the sacred pardon power to shield criminals would itself be obstruction of justice, and any self-pardons would be illegal.

Like Caesar, Trump now must fight for victory or lose everything. Come January 2021, will Donald Trump decide to cast the die and cross the Rubicon? He might.

The same people who warned us that Trump is worse than Hitler will now scoff: “Donald Trump is no Caesar!” That’s true. Trump is in a much better position than Caesar was.

Unlike Caesar, Trump can cross the Rubicon legally. He need violate no sacred law. He has all of the legal power he needs to act and win. Congress has given it to him. All he needs to do is invoke the Insurrection Act.

Invoking the Insurrection Act

During the 2020 summer protests and riots, commentators on both the Left and Right argued about whether Trump would use the so-called Insurrection Act against the crowds. Strangely, no one seems to be considering the fact that Trump could use it now.

The history of the Insurrection Act dates back all the way to 1797, and the legislative record is so long and tortured that it’s woeful to contemplate. Suffice to say that in the 21st century, the Insurrection Act has been pleasantly re-titled “The Enforcement of the Laws to Restore Public Order Act” and codified in four sections of the US Code:

• 10 USC § 251 Federal Aid for State Governments
• 10 USC § 252 Use of Militia and Armed Forces to Enforce Federal Authority
• 10 USC § 253 Interference with State and Federal Law
• 10 USC § 254 Proclamation to Disperse

Of the four provisions, the most recent and the most powerful is 10 USC § 253, which was written in 2006. This is the one that liberal pundits always forget to mention when they blab about Posse Comitatus and governors. It reads:

The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it-

1. so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
2. opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.

That’s powerful language! Consider:

• The authority is vested solely in the President. He does not need the invitation of state governors to intervene, nor does he need the approval of the Supreme Court. Older provisions of the Insurrection Act required either a governor or a judicial proceeding to authorize its use, but these limits were purposefully removed by Congress in § 253.
• There is no time limit on the President’s activities. Older versions of the Insurrection Act limited the use of force to brief periods of time and then required legislative approval. Those limits, too, are also gone.
• The President is allowed to use any means that he (and again, he needs no one else) considers necessary. This includes using the armed forces (which enables him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act) and using the militia (which we’ll discuss in more detail below).
• The President’s ability to use force isn’t restricted to actual rebellion or insurgency. He can act against merely unlawful combinations and conspiracies. To be clear: If the President decides that a conspiracy has deprived people of a right and believes that authorities fail or refuse to protect the right, he can send in the troops.

In blunt terms, Congress has given the power to President Trump to proclaim:

“I, President Trump, have determined that a conspiracy has deprived 70 million Americans of their right to vote and that the other authorities are refusing to protect this right. I therefore order the suppression of this conspiracy by any means necessary.”

And with that, Trump will cross the Rubicon.

Horror and Denial: He Shouldn’t! He Wouldn’t!

If you are of libertarian leanings, you are likely to feel horror: “Why on Earth did a free republic vest so much power into one man?”

You should feel horror. The Romans required a Senate vote to appoint a Dictator with emergency powers, and that Dictator served a strict six-month term limit. In America, we’ve given the President the right to decide when he should become a Dictator and for how long he can retain his emergency powers.

This was certainly unwise; but it is done. “Game over, man.” The power has been given. The power can be used. And it probably will be used if the Democrats continue on their foolish campaign to seek vengeance on Trump.

If you are in the grip of normalcy bias, you are likely to be in denial: “Trump wouldn’t dare! The US Armed Forces would remove him from office! The troops wouldn’t respond to his call!”

Pompey said the same about the Roman legions. He was wrong. He was so wrong, in fact, that his decapitated head ended up in a stylish gift box presented to Caesar as a present when he landed in Egypt. Don’t be Pompey.

Now, I don’t expect beheadings (just helicopters) but I do expect that the US Armed Forces would obey Trump’s orders. Although he is not popular with the Pentagon, Trump remains popular with actual soldiers, especially with white middle-class men who make up a disproportionate number of the infantry, armor, pilots, special forces, and other combat arms. (His support among law enforcement personnel is even higher. The men with guns love Trump.)

But let’s assume the Armed Forces are paralyzed, split, or neutral. If so, Trump still has millions of troops available: The militia.

Calling Up the Militia

The militia is defined by 10 U.S. Code § 246:

(a) The militia of the United States consists of all able-bodied males at least 17 years of age and… under 45 years of age who are, or who have made a declaration of intention to become, citizens of the United States and of female citizens of the United States who are members of the National Guard.

(b) The classes of the militia are —

• (1) the organized militia, which consists of the National Guard and the Naval Militia; and
• (2) the unorganized militia, which consists of the members of the militia who are not members of the National Guard or the Naval Militia.

This is, again, an incredibly powerful piece of legislation. Put into plain English, and ignoring a few minor exemptions (postal workers, etc), Trump commands an unorganized militia consisting of every able-bodied man between the ages of 17 and 45. The men don’t need to be in the National Guard. They don’t need to be veterans. They don’t need to be anything except 17 to 45 and able-bodied.

Remember that 10 USC § 253 grants the President the power to use the militia to take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress conspiracy. The militia is statutorily defined to include the unorganized militia.

Therefore, when you combine 10 USC § 253 with 10 USC § 246, the President can call on every able-bodied male age 17 to 45 to take any means he deems necessary to suppress the conspiracy to deny Americans their voting rights.

How many men is that? With 328M Americans, 50% of them male, and 40% of them between 18 and 45, that’s 65M militia members.

Organizing the Unorganized

When Trump calls up the unorganized militia, how does it get organized? What Federal statutes, regulations, and case law govern what happens next? The answer… Well, there isn’t one.

“The Citizen-Soldier under Federal and State Law“, a lengthy law review article published in 94 W. Va. L. Rev (1992), reviewed all of the available statutes, regulations, and case law relating to the use of citizen-soldiers. Turns out, there’s not much about the unorganized militia. In fact, in the entirety of the 20th century, there has only been one case:

In 1946 Virginia Governor William Mumford Tuck issued a call to the state’s unorganized militia to come to the aid of the state and to quell a labor dispute.

Let’s quickly look at what happened. According to the Encyclopedia Virginia, the crisis began when the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union announced that its members would strike against the Virginia Electric and Power Company unless its demands were met by a deadline of April 1, 1946.

At the time, “Virginia law divided its militia into four classes: the National Guard, the Virginia Defense Force, the naval militia, and the unorganized militia. This latter unit hypothetically consisted of all able-bodied males between the ages of sixteen and fifty-five who could be summoned by the governor if needed.” (Virginia law thus mirrored 10 U.S. Code § 246.)

Two days before the strike deadline, Governor Tuck “unilaterally decreed that all IBEW employees were summarily drafted into the unorganized militia and ordered, on pain of court-martial, to continue at their jobs.” Shortly thereafter, the dispute was resolved and questions as to the constitutionality of Tuck’s actions were left unresolved. However, the next month, US President Harry S. Truman “used a similar tactic in threatening to draft into the U.S. Army railway workers whose union, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, was calling for a nationwide strike; as in the VEPCO affair, the two sides reached a settlement at the eleventh hour.”

So in the only recorded instance in the last 100 years, an unorganized militia was called up, drafted, and ordered to perform particular duties on pain of court-martial, unilaterally by a governor, without any other legislative action, new statute, or court order. And rather than condemn the governor, the US President thought this idea was so awesome he used it himself the next month on the federal militia.

With no apparent limits whatsoever, the Insurrection Act combined with the Militia Act isn’t just a blank check; it’s a blank check book. Apparently our government can call on its citizens to do whatever it wants! I would protest this, but I’m currently on lockdown.

The Balance of Forces

Let’s return to our earlier assumption that Trump has invoked the Insurrection Act and then used it to call up the militia. Let’s continue to assume that the US Armed Forces are either paralyzed with indecision, split in their loyalties, or opting to stay neutral, and just look at the militia. So who is going to fight?

Now, no matter what the law says, not every eligible militia man would respond to Trump’s call. But it seems likely there’d be a large number who did respond, and an even larger number of noncombatant supporters. Right now, 70% of Republicans don’t think the election was free and fair. If Trump calls on the unorganized militia to save the Republic from voter fraud, a militia will come.

So too would an anti-militia or resistance. In fact, lots of people who are willing to fight are fighting on the streets already. It seems likely that if Trump crosses the Rubicon, he will trigger a civil war, just like Caesar triggered a civil war.

When Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he had only one legion against the might of Rome. What would Trump and his opponents be able to muster?

Let’s assess the balance of forces. Trump’ voters consisted of 58% of 98M white men; 55% of 98M white women; 36% of 30M Hispanic men, 28% of 30M Hispanic women, 20% of 22M black men, and 9% of 22M black women.

Meanwhile, the demographics of gun ownership in the US are as follows: 48% of white men own a gun, while only 24% of white women own a gun, 24% of non white men, and 16% of non-white women.

Assuming that women largely don’t fight (which is the historical norm), the balance of forces looks like this:

• 98 million white men x 58% Trump voters x 48% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 11 million white gun-owning Trump militia
• 36 million Hispanic men x 30% Trump voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 1 million Hispanic gun-owning Trump militia
• 22 million black men x 20% Trump voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 0.4 million black gun-owning Trump militia
• 98 million white men x 42% Biden voters x 48% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 8 million white gun-owning anti-Trump resisters
• 36 million Hispanic men x 70% Biden voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 2.4 million Hispanic gun-owning anti-Trump resisters
• 22 million black men x 80% Biden voters x 24% gun owners x 40% 18-45 = 1.7 million black gun-owning anti-Trump resisters

This basic math suggests 12.4 million potential Trump gun owners and 12.1 million potential anti-Trump gun owners.

However, it’s likely the odds would stack more favorably to Trump. Although only 39% of Americans are Republicans, gun owners are actually 64% Republican. In other words, those who own guns are disproportionately Republican by a factor of 1.64! If we replace the percentage of Trump voters with the percentage of Republican gun-owners, then the balance of forces changes to 17.6M pro-Trump and 6.9M anti-Trump.

3% of Americans fought in the Continental Army during the Revolution. If 3% respond to the call for the militia, that would mean between 450,000 to 700,000 militia and 210,000 to 450,000 resisters. To put that in context, there’s only 60,000 soldiers in the Infantry Branch of the US Army.

Of the militia who do respond, those on Trump’s side will be much better trained. As noted earlier, the military’s combat arms are disproportionately white, with the infantry being 79% white and only 9% black. Since the United States has now been at war for 20 years, there are millions of combat veterans, and the vast majority of those who fought as infantry are likely to be on Trump’s side. Likewise, the vast majority of LEO veterans seem likely to fight on Trump’s side, if they chose a side.

The Oathkeepers, a hundred-thousand-strong organization made up of military and law enforcement veterans and personnel, has already stated that it will refuse to recognize a Biden presidency. “We’ll be very much like the founding fathers. We’ll end up nullifying and resisting,” said founder Stewart Rhodes.

The founding fathers resisted, of course, with guns.

This Is Not a Drill

Meanwhile, those in the grip of normalcy bias still think that the ‘nuclear option‘ is for Trump to ask the state legislatures to appoint some electors to the college. Using legislative ballots isn’t the nuclear option. It’s barely a grenade. The nuclear option is Insurrection Act and the Militia.

Left-wing media is a parade of ostriches marching heads down in the sand. “Trump will lose in a landslide!” Wrong. “Trump has already lost!” Wrong. “There is no evidence of fraud!” Wrong. “Civil War could never happen!” Wrong. Maybe it won’t happen. The future is unpredictable. But it really, really could happen.

If I had told you last November that in the next 12 months the US would endure the worst pandemic since Spanish Flu, AND the worst depression since the Great Depression, AND the worst Constitutional crisis since the Civil War, AND the worst civil unrest since the summer of 1968, AND an unprecedented nation-wide lockdowns that led to the end of sports, bars, restaurants, movies, in-class attendance at school, and commuting to work, AND that it would culminate in the World Economic Forum announcing a Great Reset to the global economy to lock in this new normal, would you have believed me? No, you’d have laughed me off as a tinfoil nutjob. Yet here we are.

To repeat a statistic from earlier: 70% of Republicans think that the most recent election is illegitimate. In a functioning democracy, if 70% of the second-largest political party in the country thinks an election has been stolen, the elites come together to cooperate to investigate and restore legitimacy in the eyes of the voters.

In the US, that’s not happening. Instead, an enormous machine, consisting of tech oligopolies, liberal media, watchdog groups, and partisan activists, is doing everything it can to silence and suppress the dissenters. Simultaneously, this same machine is making enemy lists and actively declaring that when it wins, it will be taking vengeance, against Trump, against everyone who helped him, and against everyone who voted for him.

This is not a drill. This is where we are. If Trump is standing on the banks of the Rubicon, it’s because the leftist machine has purposefully widened the Rubicon River until it reaches his feet.

Clear-headed left-wingers — if there are any left — need to step in and deescalate the threats against Trump and his supporters, and listen to 70 million Americans clamoring for fair and fraud-free voting. There is still time.

Otherwise, as another great military leader put it, “when on death ground, you must fight.”

Update (1230AM 11/20/20): This afternoon, Trump’s legal team made serious allegations of election fraud in the Presidential election and indicated their intent to pursue these allegations in as many as 10 states. In response, Democrat thought leaders have declared the litigation efforts to be an attempted coup, begun a #sedition hashtag on Twitter, and written op-eds demanding felony charges against the entire legal team for treason — a legal team led by one of the nation’s most respected prosecutors and mayors in history! Taking the position that litigating before the Supreme Court is sedition is a perfect example of purposefully widening the Rubicon River until it reaches Trump’s feet.

Well, I suppose I haven’t been very active around here recently. Most of my writing now is on the Hat Tip, my fortnightly newsletter. If you haven’t signed up yet, please do!

Recent newsletters covered:

• Trump Media, RightForge and why the alt-tech stack wants its own Internet
• A sceptical look at ‘injection spiking’

For the Tel Aviv Review of Books, I looked back at Israel’s approach to fighting the coronavirus pandemic:

Fighting Covid: The Israeli Doctrine

I was also quoted this week in the New Statesman’s cover story, “How Strongmen cling to power” by Jeremy Cliffe. The piece as a whole is great and worth a read.

https://www.newstatesman.com/world/2021/11/how-strongmen-cling-to-power

Recently I’ve been writing mostly at The Hat Tip. If you’re interested in a weekly newsletter which usually includes a long article as well as a few bits and bobs, sign up. Paying subscribers get additional content, but the weekly newsletter is free.

Subscribe now!

Labour MPs began their move against Jeremy Corbyn partly because they were worried about a snap General Election in October or November, called by new Prime Minister Boris Johnson to strengthen his mandate, taking advantage of the weak Labour party to increase his small majority. The other consideration is that the short time until the election would make it impossible for Momentum to deselect Labour MPs and select far-Left replacements.

First Hilary Benn was fired by Jeremy Corbyn in the middle of the night after expressing his concern with Corbyn’s leadership. Then a significant chunk of the Shadow Cabinet resigned while the Parliamentary Labour Party prepared a vote of no confidence in Corbyn’s leadership of the PLP. Shadow ministers kept resigning, all explaining that they didn’t feel Mr Corbyn could win a general election and calling on him to go. Labour in the Lords announced it would no longer follow the Labour whip, essentially declaring independence. Yesterday, 172 of Labour’s 230ish MPs voted that they have no confidence in Jeremy Corbyn as leader. Only 40 voted to support him, a mere 17% of the Parliamentary Labour Party. And now members of half-complete new Shadow Cabinet, appointed on Monday, have also begun to resign.

No Confidence

Any leader with any decency, honour or common sense would, now, resign. Mr Corbyn cannot fill a shadow front bench. He cannot lead Labour in Parliament.

And this means Jeremy Corbyn cannot become Prime Minister, because the UK is a Parliamentary democracy, and the Prime Minister becomes Prime Minister by commanding the confidence of the House of Commons. If there was a general election in October and Labour somehow won 400 seats, Jeremy Corbyn would only have the confidence of some 200 of them. He wouldn’t be able to govern. He wouldn’t be able to fill a Cabinet either. Ultimately, in those circumstances, another Labour MP would be forced to form a Government.

But this is all if there’s an October 2016 election. Only 48 hours ago, everyone thought that this was more likely than not. Since then, though, both Boris Johnson and Stephen Crabb, two of the leading candidates to be the next Conservative leader and PM, have both said they wouldn’t seek an early election, meaning that the Parliament could be allowed to run on to May 2020.

Jeremy Corbyn has not resigned. Jeremy Corbyn still says that he’s not planning to resign. He insists that he will only be ousted by a leadership challenger defeating him in a contested election which he expects to win.

I’m not sure that he’ll find a campaign so easy as the first time. It’ll likely be a head-to-head against one candidate, either Tom Watson or Angela Eagle, with the whole soft left, Blairites, Brownites and Spellarite old right united behind them. But the election will come down to competing membership drives between the Corbynites and everyone else, and ultimately I think that Corbyn has the edge.

So let’s play it out. If Jeremy Corbyn faces down his leadership critics and either avoids or wins a leadership challenge, what happens next?

Jeremy Corbyn still won’t have the confidence of his colleagues

Winning another leadership election, or holding on without one, magically mean that the 170+ members of the Parliamentary Labour Party will have confidence in him or his leadership. That bridge is burnt. Mr Corbyn faces four years leading a party with only 40 allies to send on to TV shows to defend him,

Jeremy Corbyn’s front bench will be hugely overworked

The normal size of the Opposition Front Bench is something like 75 MPs, shadowing Secretaries of State, Ministers and Parliamentary Under-Secretaries and Parliamentary Private Secretaries. They need to be in the House of Commons for ministerial Question Times, debates and statements by their opposites. They need to propose amendments to legislation. They need to lead for the opposition at Westminster Hall debates.

Outside of Parliament, they have to represent their policy areas at conferences, think-tank events and Party commissions. They have to appear on the news when their policy area is in the national eye.

Jeremy Corbyn only has 40 MPs — including himself — who voted to express confidence in his leadership. It’s become clear that he will not be able to appoint a full front bench team, and will force shadow ministers to double-up on jobs. His office is briefing that he might reduce the size of the Shadow Cabinet.

But these 40 brave souls will be chronically overworked, and struggle to fulfil their parliamentary and political duties. The Official Opposition will spend four years operating at half-strength at best, without being able to rely on planted questions among friendly backbenchers.

He’ll be too busy trying to oust his own MPs

Corbyn’s team have been busily briefing that there will be ‘consequences’ for the MPs that don’t back him. He is widely expected to reform the party rules to give the membership control over party policy (rather than the current system of a Policy Forum and annual Conference) and make it easier for activists to deselect centrist MPs.

Mandatory re-selection or easier deselection drive extremism in politics, as we’ve seen in the USA, where the primary system benefits extreme candidates versus moderates. It forces MPs to focus on appeasing their most extreme local elements rather than representing their broad constituency. It makes local politics much nastier. And it’s the holy grail of the Labour Hard Left, who want to purge out the current Parliamentary Party and replace the MPs with more ideologically-suitable candidates (which means the sort of people who sold me newspapers at university).

So 80% of Labour MPs will be fighting selection battles against their party leadership. If they lose, then the Labour Party will run someone else in that seat. Until then, many of these MPs will face Momentum protests outside their offices and harassment on social media. Some might decide to stand as independents. Some of them will win as independents, and others will split the vote and Labour will lose. Some of the new candidates, lacking the incumbency advantage of a sitting, locally-popular MP, will lose Labour seats it would otherwise have won.

All of this will also need attention from the leadership. Momentum can’t do it all. Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell will have to travel to the constituencies to promote their challengers. It’s another major distraction to the business of opposition.

The Government can ignore him

Every Prime Ministers’ Questions, Corbyn will stand up and challenge Boris or Theresa or whoever it is, but every week all the PM will have to say is

“the Right Honourable Member can’t even command the confidence 20% of his own Members. He needs to do the honourable thing for his party and his country and resign”

And that’s that. The same will apply to his Shadow Cabinet, to his policy initiatives, to anything. Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership of the Parliamentary Labour Party is over, and he will be easily brushed aside in the national debate.

He’ll be a national joke

Worse, though, is that Jeremy Corbyn will morph from the honest, honourable kind man of the public imagination into a national joke.

I never bought into the myth of honourable Corbyn, seeing how he twisted and lied and obfuscated during the leadership campaign, and how he’s intimidated and threatened his Labour colleagues in the last year. But any trace of that image will disappear.

It’s hard to emphasise how important resignation is to the British genius. It’s part of what it means to be British. When you lose, you resign. When you win, but not by enough, you resign. When you’ve lost the confidence of your boss, your colleagues or your employees, you resign. Britain, for all of the criticism of a culture of blaming others, has a culture of taking responsibility and leaving with dignity. David Cameron resigned. Margaret Thatcher resigned after winning a majority of her MPs’ support but not a big enough majority. Tony Blair agreed to step down after a letter from just 17 MPs. That’s the British way.

In Corbyn, people will see a small, stubborn man unwilling to accept the reality of his situation; a ‘leader’ without followers, organising rallies about how great he is while his party withers. People might like Corbyn. They might even blame the PLP for a week or two. But after a while, all the public will remember is that the Labour Leader is the person who failed but didn’t take responsibility and didn’t resign.

PMQs will become a weekly torture. Mock the Week will make the Corbyn zombie leadership a constant joke. He’ll enter British cultural slang. ‘Corbyn’ will forever mean a leader without followers, a delusional refusal to accept reality, destroying one of the UK’s great political parties in a tragic murder-suicide. It will enter the political lexicon alongside Lansbury, Eden and Duncan Smith as examples of failed leadership.

This will last for FOUR YEARS

And all of the above will carry on for four years. Four years of a Shadow Cabinet of 40. Four years of deselections, reselections, protests and rallies and threats. Four years of the Tories being able to laugh in the faces of the Official Opposition in Parliament and of the country laughing and despairing of Jeremy Corbyn in newspaper columns, TV comedy and even down the pub. Four years in which to kill off the Labour Party.

If Jeremy Corbyn stays on — whether he wins another leadership election or whether he avoids a challenge — this is the picture.

Even Jeremy Corbyn is human, despite what his more-ardent fans might insist. Nobody would be able to withstand this. The psychological strain of becoming a national joke while destroying the political party to which you’ve given your life would be unbearable.

Right now, in the heat of the EU aftermath with the resignations still fresh, maybe he’s digging in with his closest advisers. Perhaps the Chilcott report will buy him a few weeks. Maybe he could even make it through the summer recess. But the idea of Jeremy Corbyn remaining the leader of the Labour party is now ludicrous.

Ironically, the only thing that could save him now is a leadership challenge. An identifiable enemy, a new campaign, a new target and dynamic could buy Corbyn some time. But even if he won the campaign and got his famous ‘mandate’, he’d be right back where he started because none of the dynamics above would have changed.

And so now we wait. Hours, days or weeks, but Jeremy Corbyn will resign because his other options are much worse.

Thanks to Jay Stoll who pointed out that some MPs had started to worry about what happens if there’s no 2016 election. Originally published on Medium

I’ve been reading the fascinating judgment(pdf) that today resulted in Tower Hamlets Mayor Lutfur Rahman being removed and barred from office and his election being voided.

The judgment is long but well-written and genuinely interesting. It covers a lot of ground specific to Tower Hamlets – internal Labour party splits, vote-tampering and personation, and the use of public funds to bribe Mr Rahman’s supporters.

The ruling also dealt with another element of English law that hasn’t been tested in court for a long time – that of undue spiritual influence in an election.

The Representation of the People Act 1983 s115 says that:

(2) A person shall be guilty of undue influence [on an election] —

(a) if he, directly or indirectly, by himself or by any other person on his behalf, makes use of or threatens to make use of any force, violence or restraint, or inflicts or threatens to inflict, by himself or by any other person, any temporal or spiritual injury, damage, harm or loss upon or against any person in order to induce or compel that person to vote or refrain from voting, or on account of that person having voted or refrained from voting;

This provision was originally passed to stop Roman Catholic clergy controlling Irish elections in the 19th Century by threatening their congregations with hellfire, but it has been repeately re-enacted and the Rahman ruling finds that it’s still in force.

The Rahman judgement (para 160) notes

…there is a line which should not be crossed between the free expression of political views and the use of the power and influence of religious office to convince the faithful that it is their religious duty to vote for or against a particular candidate. It does not matter whether the religious duty is expressed as a positive duty – ‘your allegiance to the faith demands that you vote for X’ – or a negative duty –‘if you vote for Y you will be damned in this world and the next’. The mischief at which s 115 is directed is the misuse of religion for political purposes.

The judgment goes on to fine Lutfur Rahman had broken this law by working with Muslim clerics who urged Muslims to vote for him.

This all sounded a bit familiar, and then I remembered why.

 

In 2012 George Galloway stood as a candidate in the Bradford West by-election. Bradford West is a majority Muslim seat. In the course of campaigning, Mr Galloway made the following comments to a largely-Muslim audience:

 

“I believe in the Judgment Day — not all of you do.

I believe that one day we will have to answer to the Almighty for what we did and what we did not do with the life that God gave us.

And I just say this and I ask you to say it, especially to other religious people:

how will you explain, on the Last Day, that you had a chance, on 29 March 2012, to vote either for the guy who led the great campaign against the slaughter of millions of people in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere — you could have voted for him — but instead you voted because of village politics for a party which has killed a million Iraqis?”

 

This certainly sounds like a spiritual threat to people who might vote Labour.

According to Andrew Gilligan, at another rally on the same night Mr Galloway said:

“I’m a better Pakistani than he [my opponent] will ever be. God knows who’s a Muslim and who is not. And a man that’s never out of the pub shouldn’t be going around telling people you should vote for him because he’s a Muslim. A Muslim is ready to go to the US Senate, as I did, and to their face call them murderers, liars, thieves and criminals. A Muslim is somebody who’s not afraid of earthly power but who fears only the Judgment Day. I’m ready for that, I’m working for that and it’s the only thing I fear.”

 

 

A letter claiming to be from Mr Galloway was delivered to many houses in the constituency in the days running up to the election echoing these themes.

 

 

Should the 2012 by-election result in Bradford West have been voided like the Tower Hamlets result? I’m not sure. In the Rahman case it was Muslim clerics doing the spiritual influencing. Here it’s the candidate himself, who is not a Muslim religious authority. But it’s also a much starker and more straightforward spiritual ‘threat’ than the Rahman case.

It’s too late now, of course, with Parliament dissolved and another election underway. But Mr Galloway might have to campaign rather more carefully following the Rahman judgement.