And the law won: Boris Johnson’s latest defeat

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence on Economist Radio. I'm your host, Jason Palmer. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world. It used to be that there were very few economists actually involved in making the world's economic policies. We examine a new book that shows how they rose to prominence and how they were overconfident and underprepared when they got there. And we spend time with some Chembanguists in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The rapidly growing religious sect has quite a preoccupation with the End of Days, but its members seem to be rather cheerfully embracing it. First up, though, It was yet another stunning twist in the Brexit story. Yesterday, an unprecedented ruling by Britain's highest court dealt a crushing blow to Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Mr. Johnson acted illegally when he suspended or proved Parliament for five weeks.

The court is bound to conclude, therefore.

That the decision to advise Her Majesty to parrogue Parliament was unlawful because it.

Had the effect of frustrating or preventing the ability of Parliament to carry out its constitutional functions without reasonable justification.

The suspension sparked enormous uproar in August.

MPs on all sides were pretty angry about this because they suspected that the reason he was sending them home was to avoid further scrutiny of his plans for Brexit.

John Peat is our Brexit editor and.

MPs since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister have been suspicious that what he wants to do is engineer a British departure from the European Union without further discussion in Parliament and probably without a deal at the end of October.

In yesterday's judgment, the court's president, Lady Hale, said Mr. Johnson had frustrated Parliament at a crucial time.

The effect on the fundamentals of our democracy was extreme.

The ruling was met with cheers from members of the opposition Labour Party who were attending their annual conference as Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called for his opponent to Resign.

And I invite Boris Johnson, in the.

Historic words, to consider his position.

And become the shortest serving Prime Minister there's ever been.

With the prorogation now void, Parliament gets back to work today. But what happens now? Will Britain still leave the European Union? As Mr. Johnson has said, do or die on October 31st.

This is a devastating setback for Boris Johnson. He's had many setbacks, losing his parliamentary majority, losing many members of his own party in Parliament. And now he's been told by the Supreme Court ruling unusually unanimously, that his suspension of Parliament was unlawful because the Supreme Court basically said they did not believe it was happening just to prepare a new legislative agenda. They think that what he was doing was trying to avoid further scrutiny of the executive by Parliament. And they said that's not democratic. Boris Johnson has been very critical of the decision of the Supreme Court, but he has said with some reluctance that he will observe the law. Obviously, this is a verdict that we will respect and we respect the judicial process. I have to say I strongly disagree with what the Justices have found. I don't think that it's right, but we will go ahead and of course Parliament will come back.

Well, as you say, he has faced defeat after defeat. What does that mean for him in the short term? Is he going to resign?

I don't think Boris Johnson is the resigning type. And he does seem very bent on fulfilling what he said when he became Prime Minister, which is to deliver Brexit.

But I mean, can he deliver Brexit? What does this ruling say about his ability to deliver Brexit? The deadline relentlessly approaches.

He's getting closer to the deadline, which is the end of October. I think this ruling makes his life harder, which he acknowledged. He referred to people who are putting up barriers in the way of delivering Brexit. Clearly, the claimants in this case are determined to try to frustrate that and to stop that. I think it'd be very unfortunate if Parliament made that objective, which the people want delivered. More difficult. But we'll get on. He is still having negotiations with European Union leaders in the run up to a European summit in mid October, where he hopes to find an agreement that can turn into a deal that is ratified by Parliament. But there are a lot of obstacles in the way and Parliament has made clear through legislation that it is determined to stop him doing what he has threatened to do, which is to leave at the end of October, even if he has no deal. I think he's going to find it very difficult to do that because of what Parliament has done.

And what about the prospects for a deal? I mean, those obstacles are the same as they've been for months. And, you know, even one of his top aides called negotiations with Russell's sham. Is there a prospect of a deal?

I think there is a prospect of a deal. At the moment, doesn't look very likely, but the EU would like a deal. They want to have this problem sorted out. They want Brexit to be done. They don't want to have to spend months or even years continuing to negotiate with difficult British governments. And Boris Johnson has shifted some of his red lines a little over the last month or two. He started just by saying he wanted to remove entirely this reference to something called the Irish backstop, which was an insurance policy to avoid a border in Ireland. He's now negotiating on how to amend that rather than remove it. I just think there is a long way to go and there is not much sign of movement in the eu, and they do not think that Boris Johnson is prepared to shift enough themselves. So right now, I would say the prospects of a deal are not looking great.

And what about the sort of increasingly noticeable subtext here that Mr. Johnson projects, that he's trying to. To deliver the will of the people and he is instead being thwarted by all sides?

I think that is going to be the big sort of issue for the next few weeks. And Boris Johnson has been Prime Minister only since the end of July. And in a sense, he's been campaigning ever since he became Prime Minister because he knew, as others have said, that there is quite likely at some point to be another election. He's lost his parliamentary majority, he can't control the agenda of the House of Commons. The logical thing to have then is an election to sort out who should be in charge of the country. And I think what he's doing, as he gets thwarted by Parliament and now by judges, and what he wants to do is trying to set up an election on the basis that he will be the people's champion, determined to deliver what the people voted for, which was Brexit in June 2016, against the establishment Parliament, the judges and others who are trying to block him. And that is a sort of classic populist message for an election. It might work. It's worked in other countries. Boris Johnson is quite popular. Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Opposition, is unpopular, but it's a big gamble. The Liberal Democrats are doing quite well, The Brexit party is doing quite well. So the chances of the Conservatives winning an outright majority don't look very high.

And so do you think yesterday's Supreme Court ruling makes that general election significantly more likely in the near term?

As Boris Johnson gets blocked from doing what he wants, the odds on a general election happening must be going up. He tried to call an election a few weeks back. He was unable to do so because he couldn't get the two thirds majority of MPs that is required to dissolve the House of Commons and hold an election. The Leader of the opposition, Jeremy Corbyn, has also said he wants to have an election, but he keeps saying not yet. At some point, I think he will have to shift his position, probably after the October 31st Brexit deadline has been extended. So I think this autumn or early next year, an election is coming.

John, thank you very much for coming in.

Thank you.

There was a time when economists were held in almost universally low esteem by serious policymakers. In the 1950s, America's Federal Reserve didn't employ many of them, and they were kept in the basement together with the surplus furniture and the rats. But in the decades that followed, the profession managed to claw its way out of the basement and to extraordinary influence. A new breed of economists radically reshaped the modern world. And a new book by the journalist Binyamin Appelbaum called the Economists Hour says they have a lot to answer for.

Binyamin Applebaum is an editorial writer for the New York Times. He's someone who knows a lot of economists, has gained a lot of credibility with him.

Ryan Avent is our economics columnist.

And so it's been really interesting for him to write this book that is a pretty damning indictment of what the contributions of the economics profession have been to policy over the past half century or so.

And what does that narrative look like? How did the economists get out of the basements?

In the sort of 50s and 60s, this revolution began to build. And some of it was about the leadership of a few really influential economists, people like Milton Friedman, who were really good at evangelizing on behalf of their ideas. And some of it was there was an increasing appetite for what these economists had to say. And so bit by bit, you had economists creeping their way into positions of power.

And when they got there, what kind of changes did they enact?

From the 70s until the 2000s, and this is the period that Applebaum calls the Economist's Hour, you had this kind of policy revolution. People may have heard it referred to as the neoliberal revolution, a period during which a lot of the government interventions that had accumulated over the first part of the 20th century were pushed back or at least halted. So you had huge reductions in tax rates, especially for people earning large incomes. You had a lot of deregulation. You had a lot of privatization. Governments in Britain, for instance, were selling off a lot of state assets and things of that nature. You had this idea that antitrust was no longer a big deal and that companies should be free to merge and get bigger, and that competition would sort it all out. And so it was this whole wave of things, the idea being that this would raise growth rates, make everyone better off and so on. Some of these changes did have benefits. If you look at what happened with the airline industry, deregulation made flights much more accessible, much cheaper. But I think there were a lot of side effects, including quite a few that economists didn't anticipate.

What kinds of side effects? What do you mean?

So a few things happened. And Applebaum links these trends to the economists having this influence over policy. You had a big rise in inequality. You had a big increase in concentrated corpor corporate power. So when governments started worrying less about antitrust issues, companies merged a lot more. They got a lot bigger and began to dominate their particular corners of the market. Now, one thing that economists didn't really expect was that the size of these companies wouldn't be mitigated by competition. You know, some of the economists who were pushing this idea that mergers were okay believed that competition would find a way. You had this economist, George Stigler, who said that competition is a tough weed, not a delicate flower. But as it turns out, companies are pretty good. Good once they got big at shielding themselves from competition, and so they were able to squeeze wages for workers and abuse their market power in other ways. And then, you know, I think the things that the policies were supposed to do didn't necessarily occur. So there was supposed to be a big increase in growth and in productivity. Those things didn't happen. The reductions in tax rates were supposed to not generate big deficits because faster growth was supposed to lead to higher tax revenues. That didn't happen. And so there was a lot of bewilderment among economists and increasingly angry anger among working people as this all unfolded.

So the way the story sounds, it was some ideas of economists that were in the ascendancy, in part because they were supported by the people who might benefit from them. I mean, is it the case that the economists had their hour because people who could benefit from those policies saw to it that they did?

I think that's an important point. So in Applebaum's book, he very much takes the angle that these changes all flowed from economists, and economists bear most of the responsibility for them. I think it's important to understand that there was a lot of diversity of opinion within economics. There were people who thought that a lot of these things were bad ideas. Part of the reason that the particular policies became influential that did was because they appealed to people who were powerful. You had the synergy between a group of free market economists like Friedman and others, and wealthy businessmen and wealthier individuals and people of a more conservative disposition who had been frustrated with New Deal politics and the encroachment of the government. And they sort of helped each other achieve this broad shift in the direction of policy.

But if we take them as a class as sort of disinterested social scientists, they must surely have seen the way that these things were playing out. I mean, did they think that the promised growth that they were getting was good enough to offset the bad effects that they were seeing?

Well, when it comes to things like growth, you can believe that policy changes that you favor take quite a long time to unfold. I do think, though, that economists were blind in a lot of ways to some of the dynamics that were unfolding around this whole event. They were probably not curious enough about why rich benefactors were throwing money at their institutions and giving them grants and things like that. And then I think also they were just overconfident. There just wasn't a lot of intellectual preparation within the field for the possibility that all these ideas might more or less flop. And so I think that takes us to the place we are now where a lot of economists are losing influence in centers of power. And you have these non economic ideas associated with economic nationalism, things like that, coming to the forefront.

But why isn't the response a change to some of the fundamental theory? If we continue to take this as a social science, then, you know, you need to change your hypothesis and run new experiments.

No, the theory itself isn't changing very much. Instead, what you're seeing is a lot of empirical work which is taking data and saying we thought the world worked this way. It seems like maybe we were wrong. So let's really focus on understanding what's actually happening and then maybe we can try to come up with new explanations. And then I think also you are seeing more willingness within economics to go back and listen to those voices that were marginalized during this neoliberal period. So there, you know, there is a shift within economics taking place. But I think where we are now is that economics is probably going to have to spend a little time in the wilderness because they've lost public credibility after this whole episode.

Back to the basement.

Back to the basement for a bit. Yes.

Ryan, thank you very much for your time.

Thank you, Jason.

Earlier this month, Binyamin Applebaum spoke to our US economics editor Sumaya Keynes on Money Talks, the economist's business and economics podcast. Mr. Applebaum talked about the wide ranging influence of economists, including when several persuaded the American government to scrap the draft. They instead wanted to tempt recruits with higher wages. They thought it would lead to a more professional fighting force, but they didn't reckon with the unintended consequences.

On the one hand, you did get a more efficient armed force. On the other hand, it used to be the case that wars were acts of national purpose and that they at least potentially engaged every man of a certain age in that national purpose. Today, war is basically a line of business for the United States. We pay a certain number of people to fight, they've volunteered to do it. And for the most part, Americans feel willing and able to tune that out. And I think there's a good argument that that has contributed to our ability to sustain sort of long running, low intensity conflict around the world.

For more, search for Money Talks wherever you get your podcasts. Religious sects that believe a day of reckoning is soon to come are typically, well, all doom and gloom. Our Central Africa correspondent, Olivia Ackland, has been spending some time with Chembanguists, a growing denomination in the Democratic Republic of Congo for whom doomsday is no cause for despair.

Kimbanguists are a division of Christianity. They believe that all of the terrible things happening in Congo are preparing them for the end of the world. So the Ebola virus, which has infected over 3,000 people, or all of the conflicts that's sort of ravaging the east of Congo, that is preparing them for the end of time.

So aside from the fact that the day of doom is sometime soon around the corner, what else do the combanguists believe?

The combanguists must adhere to this very ascetic lifestyle. They're not supposed to drink alcohol. They're not supposed to smoke. They're not supposed to listen to a lot of pop music in Congo which is deemed obscene or has rude lyrics. Interestingly, they can't sleep naked in case God summons them to him at night. They have to be clothed and decent. They are very sort of puritanical and anti gays or anti homosexuality. And they have a very rigid praying routine. They have to pray Eight times a day, they have to wake up three times during the night to pray. And every Sunday, they attend nine hour long church services. Also, for the Kimbangras, music is a very important component. It helps them to connect with God. And they're famously musical. There's an amazing orchestra in Kinshasa called the Kimbanguist Orchestra. They practice every Thursday night. I went to see them rehearse, and they were very good.

And so is this a new sect or has this been around for a while?

So it started in 1921, which was when this man, Simon Kebangu, allegedly performed his first miracle. So he was living in this little hilltop town in central Congo during the Belgian colony. A woman came to him with her sick relative, and he managed to revive her. She was very ill and she was almost dead, and he managed to heal her. And then people from all over Congo started turning up in his town, trailing their sick relatives, asking to be healed. And he apparently raised people from the dead, gave the blind back their sight, and various other astonishing miracles. The Belgian colonizers were threatened by his popularity, and so they put him on trial for subverting peace, even though he never did anything violent, nor did he encourage violence. And he was thrown into prison for 30 years. And he died in prison. The Combanguas believe that the spiritual leader is actually the embodiment of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit first came to conquer Congo in the body of Simon Kibangu, and now apparently inhabits the body of his grandson, who's called Simon Kibangu Kiangani.

And how popular is it as a religion?

It's very popular in Congo. So it's about 10% of the population. And considering there are 85 million people, that's a lot. There are now 22 million Kimbangoists around the world. They're also in neighboring countries, Angola, Congo, Brazzaville and Burundi. And the Congolese diaspora have also established Kimbangoist churches in other places around the world, like Brussels, London and Toronto.

So you say that the religion is growing in popularity. Why do you suppose that is? What do you think the appeal is for new converts?

Kimbangras believe that they're going to be saved. A lot of people in Congo are living in poverty alongside war and disease. So the idea that the end is coming and you will be saved is actually quite a positive one. People are sort of cheerfully marching towards the end. The Kambangrists stress the importance of having a black prophet who's come to save the African people. The particular Kimbangoist Reverend that I spoke to said that Jesus was sent to earth, rejected and killed. So God sent another messenger to another part of the world. And Simon Kibangu was welcomed by the Congolese, but then actually imprisoned by the white man, which is interesting. Doomsday is coming. But Simon Kibangu came to tell the African people that they'll be saved.

What are the services like then? It's presumably not all doom and gloom then.

So I went to one in Goma, which is where I live, and I turned up and I was wearing some trousers, which they gave me a disapproving look, and I was handed a wraparound skirts, because women aren't supposed to wear trousers in church. The Kimbangwus were dressed in these immaculate green and white uniforms which symbolize hope and purity. One very embarrassing moment, I was with a friend and we were introduced to the whole congregation. We had to go up and make a speech and say thank you for welcoming us into the church, which was quite embarrassing because as we went up, the orchestra started playing and we had to sort of do a bit of a jig.

It sounds as if you've had quite a positive experience, in fact, that the Kimbanguists are having quite a positive experience. I mean, would you go back?

I'm not sure I'd go back in a huge hurry. As I said, the services are nine hours long, so it's quite a long thing to commit to on a Sunday. But it was fascinating. It was interesting to see.

Olivia, thank you very much for your time.

Thanks very much, Jason.

That's all for this episode of the Intelligence. If you like us, give us a rating on Apple podcasts and you can subscribe to the economist@examiner.com radiooffer 12 issues for $12 or 12 pounds. See you back here tomorrow.