John Bercow

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Brexit Unfolded: How No One Got What They Want (And Why They Were Never Going To) by Chris Grey

"World Economic Forum" Davos, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, game design, global pandemic, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, lockdown, non-tariff barriers, open borders, post-truth, reserve currency, Robert Mercer

Postponement of the meaningful vote With it now abundantly clear that it would lose the meaningful vote itself, after just three of the scheduled five days of debate the government suddenly took the unusual step of ending the debate and announcing that the vote would be deferred to an unspecified date. It was described by the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow – who was to play a significant role in the months to come – as ‘deeply discourteous’ to MPs. In the meantime, the government committed to go back to the EU to seek ‘further reassurances’ on the central issue of the backstop. Two days after postponing the meaningful vote, Theresa May faced another vote, this time one of no confidence in her leadership amongst Tory MPs, instigated primarily by the Brexiters.

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Other preparations were subject to hundreds of government gagging orders. Whether this was to prevent alarm at how far-reaching the plans were or ridicule of their feebleness was, by definition, impossible to know. The phrase ‘Bercow’s bombshell’ joined the list of Brexit jargon. It referred to the ruling by Speaker John Bercow that MPs couldn’t be asked to vote twice on the same proposition, which therefore precluded a third meaningful vote. This was widely reported as resurrecting some arcane rule from the 1700s. In fact, it merely confirmed what had been custom and practice since then. What was noteworthy was that Theresa May had sought to break with custom and practice.

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And whilst the damage would certainly have been greater had he refused to send the letter, some had been done anyway, as Green had said. There was now an established pattern that could only intensify the sense that the Brexit process in general, and Johnson’s leadership in particular, was pulling the country ever further from the norms of liberal democracy and the rule of law. The other immediate question was whether Speaker John Bercow would allow a fresh meaningful vote on Johnson’s deal to be held on Monday, as Rees-Mogg had stated. Or would this, as had happened with Theresa May, be treated as an attempt to get MPs to vote twice on the same motion? The answer turned out to be the latter, to the outrage of Brexiters in Parliament and the country.

Why We Get the Wrong Politicians by Isabel Hardman

affirmative action, Boris Johnson, crowdsourcing, deskilling, Donald Trump, gender pay gap, housing crisis, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, old-boy network, Russell Brand

MPs had been chortling at someone else, but their giggles punctuated his first sentence, which was ‘My father died of cancer.’ He then added, to shamefaced silence from those opposite him, that his mother and sister had also died of cancer. The collision between question and behaviour elsewhere in the Chamber couldn’t have been worse. John Bercow, the Speaker of the House, frequently upbraids MPs for their behaviour, claiming that the public despises PMQs for its childishness. There is evidence that bears this assertion out. YouGov polling conducted for this book following the Prime Minister’s Questions session on 22 February 2017 found that only 2 per cent of adults surveyed had watched the session in full, while just under a third said they hadn’t watched this particular session but had watched PMQs before, and 54 per cent said they had never watched it.

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A better form of question is the urgent question, in which a minister is summoned to the House by a backbench MP or an opposition frontbencher on a specific matter. Such is the battle for power in Parliament that nervous governments will often organise statements on something that has gone wrong in order to avoid being humiliated by a UQ, or appearing reluctant to face scrutiny. This system fell by the wayside until John Bercow became Speaker, whereupon he seized on the opportunity to make the government as uncomfortable as possible by granting hundreds of urgent questions. He has helped Parliament become a little more threatening to the government. Ministers sometimes try to dodge urgent questions by sending their juniors to answer them.

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In Britain, voters back a party with a programme for government, and it is therefore reasonable to expect that the government should be able to deliver what it has promised without the ‘losers’ – the opposition – being able to intervene. In the US, if both houses of Congress are dominated by the president’s opponents, then he becomes a ‘lame duck’, unable to deliver anything particularly radical. There are other problems besides the legislative deadlock that critics of the American system cite. Speaker John Bercow is fervently in favour of strengthening Parliament, but very cool on the idea of a full separation of powers. When I asked him about this, he explained: ‘I think that the case would have to be made quite strongly as to why it is or how it would be that we would be better served if ministers were not directly and immediately accountable to the House . . .

The Life and Loves of a He Devil: A Memoir by Graham Norton

Desert Island Discs, Downton Abbey, Haight Ashbury, John Bercow, Russell Brand, Stephen Hawking, white picket fence

I sort of enjoy random nights like this where you have no idea who you might meet. I took my friend, Roger, and we got lucky, spending most of our time chatting with Daniel Radcliffe and the rugby star, Ben Cohen, who was there with his lovely wife, Abbie. Happily we manage to avoid the Speaker of the House of Commons, John Bercow, and his wife, Sally. I had always assumed that John was slightly saddled with the embarrassment of being married to Sally but, that night, I discovered they truly do deserve each other. John got up to read the citation for an award winner and for some reason best known to himself, spoke for forty minutes.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

Towards the end of 2013 he agreed another donation to Cambridge University and, in a series of events called the Days of Ukraine, opened trading on the London Stock Exchange and visited Parliament with his wife. ‘We are grateful to Firtash Foundation and all individuals who helped this to happen. We are also grateful to the Chairperson of the Foundation, Lada Firtash, who put all her energy and dedication in the implementation of this project,’ said John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons, according to a curiously ungrammatical Group DF statement. ‘The fact that we are hosted at the British Parliament, and that its Speaker came in person to greet us, demonstrates how important our country is to the UK,’ said Firtash in the same statement. In a photograph of the occasion Bercow and Firtash are shaking hands, while Lord Risby – as Richard Spring has been known since he was elevated to the House of Lords – leans slightly forward in the background, hands clasped around a highball glass, with the kind of rapt smile you’d see on the face of a proud father watching his son pick his way through a piano recital.

Drugs 2.0: The Web Revolution That's Changing How the World Gets High by Mike Power

air freight, Alexander Shulgin, banking crisis, bitcoin, blockchain, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, cloud computing, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, death of newspapers, Donald Davies, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, drug harm reduction, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, fiat currency, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, frictionless, fulfillment center, Haight Ashbury, independent contractor, John Bercow, John Gilmore, John Markoff, Kevin Kelly, Leonard Kleinrock, means of production, Menlo Park, moral panic, Mother of all demos, Network effects, nuclear paranoia, packet switching, pattern recognition, PIHKAL and TIHKAL, pre–internet, QR code, RAND corporation, Satoshi Nakamoto, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, trade route, Whole Earth Catalog, Zimmermann PGP

‘He was last seen between 3–4 pm Sunday afternoon (February 12) at a free/squat party located on 1 Lea Valley Road near Chingford,’ his friends wrote on Facebook. His body was found in a nearby canal on 14 March.9 After the government ban was announced in late March that year, Sally Bercow, the wife of John Bercow, speaker of the House of Commons, tweeted, ‘Mexxy is a legal high that is, er, no longer legal. And now we’ve all heard of it, demand will rocket.’ And with that, the research chemical scene was at the heart of British political life, reported upon in Middle England’s tabloid of choice, the Daily Mail, and tweeted about by the wife of the Speaker of the House of Commons.10 In every major city in the UK and many small towns there were people buying new, untested and powerfully psychoactive chemicals marketed as legal highs, with no indication of what the drug was, what it did, or how it should be taken.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

“It was really good at going into detail of things like what was happening at the European Council. It was pretty nerdy. Which appealed to me.” The group’s headcount hovered around 20 Conservative MPs and a handful of Eurosceptic peers. Members included a number of Tories who would later be branded as sell-outs for their opposition to a hard Brexit: John Bercow, Oliver Letwin, David Gauke.17 Their ethos was less ‘Brexit do or die’ and more ‘what do the latest reforms to the Common Agricultural Policy mean for British farming?’ Conservative Eurosceptics did have one notable success in these wilderness years: they convinced David Cameron to make his ill-fated pledge to give British voters a say on EU membership.

No Such Thing as Society by Andy McSmith

"there is no alternative" (TINA), anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bob Geldof, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, call centre, cuban missile crisis, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, Farzad Bazoft, feminist movement, fixed income, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, friendly fire, full employment, glass ceiling, God and Mammon, greed is good, illegal immigration, index card, John Bercow, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, light touch regulation, Live Aid, loadsamoney, long peace, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, old-boy network, popular capitalism, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, Sloane Ranger, South Sea Bubble, spread of share-ownership, Stephen Fry, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban decay, Winter of Discontent, young professional

They restated that the club’s policy was: ‘An end to New Commonwealth and Pakistani immigration, a properly financed scheme of voluntary repatriation, the repeal of the Race Relations Act, and the abolition of the Commission for Racial Equality; particular emphasis on repatriation.’2 The committee chairman was the Conservative MP for Billericay, Harvey Proctor, and the committee secretary in 1981–3 was a student activist from north London, John Bercow, who many years later became Speaker of the House of Commons. (Sir Ronald Bell, that articulate voice of white middle-class rectitude, was no longer there to speak for the Monday Club, having died suddenly in 1982, in his Commons office, while having sex with a woman who was not his wife.) Bercow cut his ties with the Monday Club in February 1983, when he concluded that some of its members were racist.

How to Be a Liberal: The Story of Liberalism and the Fight for Its Life by Ian Dunt

4chan, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, bounce rate, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Cambridge Analytica, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, classic study, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, experimental subject, fake news, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Growth in a Time of Debt, illegal immigration, invisible hand, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, Mohammed Bouazizi, Northern Rock, old-boy network, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, recommendation engine, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Steve Bannon, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, zero-sum game

Almost overnight, some of the most respected and experienced politicians on the British centre-right were removed from the parliamentary party. One of the Vote Leave government’s first moves was to suspend parliament. On the morning of 28th August 2019, with just two months to go until the Article 50 deadline, the prime minister initiated a prorogation. The Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, branded the move a ‘constitutional outrage,’ but he was powerless to stop it. In the early hours of 10th September, for the first time in the modern era, parliament was suspended against its will. Once again, the liberal system fought back. Miller took another case to the Supreme Court, amid more death threats and racial abuse.

Not Working: Where Have All the Good Jobs Gone? by David G. Blanchflower

90 percent rule, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Albert Einstein, bank run, banking crisis, basic income, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Black Swan, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, business cycle, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, Clapham omnibus, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, declining real wages, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, driverless car, estate planning, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, full employment, George Akerlof, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Growth in a Time of Debt, high-speed rail, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, Jeremy Corbyn, job satisfaction, John Bercow, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, meta-analysis, moral hazard, Nate Silver, negative equity, new economy, Northern Rock, obamacare, oil shock, open borders, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Own Your Own Home, p-value, Panamax, pension reform, Phillips curve, plutocrats, post-materialism, price stability, prisoner's dilemma, quantitative easing, rent control, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Ronald Coase, selection bias, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitor (SSRI), Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, universal basic income, University of East Anglia, urban planning, working poor, working-age population, yield curve

It was unclear why, after two and a half years of negotiating, she thought she could get more in an evening. The Sun’s colorful headline on her return was “EU Leaders Tell PM to Get Stuffed.” After two failed attempts to get May’s deal through Parliament, less than two weeks before the UK was meant to leave the EU at the end of March 2019, Speaker John Bercow announced that he would not allow a third vote on the withdrawal agreement without substantial changes. Bercow’s decision was based on an official parliamentary rule book that was first published by Thomas Erskine May in 1844 that says you can’t keep voting on the same bill hoping you will get a different result.

Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem by Tim Shipman

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, centre right, Clapham omnibus, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, drone strike, Etonian, eurozone crisis, fake news, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, high-speed rail, iterative process, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Kickstarter, kremlinology, land value tax, low interest rates, mutually assured destruction, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, open borders, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ronald Reagan, Snapchat, Steve Bannon, working poor

It is hard to fault the desire to put Britain at the front of the queue to influence the new president and secure a post-Brexit trade deal, but in the coming months such eagerness began to look like an error. The idea of a state visit by Trump attracted the threat of mass protests at home. On 6 February, the Speaker of the Commons, John Bercow, announced that he would be ‘strongly opposed’ to Trump giving an address in Parliament’s Westminster Hall, an honour accorded to Barack Obama but one that had not been offered to Trump. In March a fresh row erupted when Sean Spicer, the president’s press secretary, repeated a claim made by an analyst on Fox News that GCHQ – the British intelligence listening station – had been used by the Obama administration to spy on Trump Tower.