We have all been in Zoom meetings like Handforth Parish Council – authority can do strange things

What is authority? From where is political power legitimately drawn?

In the now viral video of the Handforth Parish Council Environment and Planning Committee meeting can be heard echoes not merely of Julie’s still ongoing personal phone call, but of the oldest question in political philosophy.

The conch of intellectual inquiry has been passed down long millennia of human history, from Aristotle to Hobbes, from Rousseau to Rawls, without ever finding itself pressed against the lips of anyone with a certain answer.   

Is man’s natural freedom exchanged for legal protection, which can then be extracted from the standing orders, as read and understood by a very shouty man called “Aled’s iPad”, who appears to have brought his dad along as some kind of hired muscle, but without teaching him how not to point the camera of said iPad up his very hairy nostrils?

Or, does authority, ultimately, still reside in the mouse finger of Jackie Weaver?

Might in the end, is right, argued Thucydides through The Melian Dialogue. You may be an aggressive, patronising, old bully like council chairman Brian Tolver, and you may very well imagine you have the right to shout, “stop talking!” at anyone whose voice you do not wish to hear. 

But there is precious little you can actually do about it when that finger is brought down with stunning finality upon the “remove” button, and you are booted into digital oblivion.

The nation’s favourite video of the moment asks these questions clearly. “You have no authority here, Jackie Weaver, you have no authority here,” asserts Tolver, to the delight of the back of his ally Barry Burkhill’s head, in the final death throes before his forcible ejection. (Thankfully Burkhill would turn to face the camera for a later peroration, having temporarily mistaken the occasion for an audition on The Voice.)

Whatever is to be found in the standing orders, well, there is, in any democracy, the last court, that of public opinion, and its verdict on Tolver appears unanimous.

Even the savage young boys of Golding’s Lord of the Flies worked out that a shell would have to be passed to whomever wished to speak, and that person must be listened to, if all-out anarchy were to be avoided.

In that sense the Handforth Zoom carnage immortalises the giant backward leaps to which we have all been subjected in the last miserable twelve months.

On Zoom, whomever shouts the loudest is heard. There is, at least until the remove button is deployed, precious little the rest of the council committee can do to stop old Tolver from shouting, “stop talking, stop talking, stop talking.” Each time the software deems his is the voice that must be heard.

We’ve all been there. On Tuesday mornings, The Independent’s politics team get together for a short quiz. Should the question be easy, the bragging rights will go to whomever steals the digital mic by shouting the answer the loudest. I am ashamed to admit that on one occasion, the words, “Gary Puckett and the Union Gap” were screamed at sufficient volume in my own house as to wake a sleeping baby on a different floor.  

One gets the sense that Tolver is not altogether used to being silenced in this fashion. One wonders if he will have watched the full footage, and noted that the meeting becomes constructive and generally pleasant at the precise moment he is removed from it.

Whether there is to be any comeuppance for his now world famous rudeness will be a matter for the voters of Handforth, if they can be bothered, but they probably can’t.

All systems of representative democracy are far from perfect. Tolver is hardly alone in evidently imagining he can do or say whatever he likes, because very often, people can. In politics, like almost nowhere else, an idiot lands in the right place and they’ve got a job for life.

Handforth Parish Council might be remembered as one of the lighter moments of the pandemic, even if it is a truly abject display of misogyny and (attempted) bullying.

Eventually, when an inquiry starts looking at how the UK death toll came to be so stupefyingly high, it will certainly conclude that the government didn’t lock down as quickly as it could or should have done, on at least one occasion explicitly against the advice of its own scientists.

It may choose to look at how it came to be that the prime minister was, to a certain extent, held over a barrel by a thin cabal of unimaginable clowns in his own parliamentary party.

Desmond Swayne MP, to take but one example, thinks lockdowns don’t work – and said as much for almost a year. He also boasted about covering his face in boot polish to attend a fancy dress party as James Brown. But his view must be taken into account. Though the number is impossible to quantify, people have actually died to appease his towering stupidity.

Handforth isn’t all that far from Altrincham, whose MP, Graham Brady was interviewed by the BBC on Friday morning. There he was, still arguing, even now, that lockdowns don’t work, that actually, infections go up when you keep people apart, and down when you don’t. One hundred and ten thousand dead, including several hundred of his own constituents, but still can’t bring himself to admit he might have been wrong.

On whose “authority” does he speak? Well, his constituents’, technically, but it’s the most technical of technicalities.

Most political philosophers, on the subject of power and authority, ultimately come to a form of the same conclusion. That people give up a small portion of their personal power to the state in return for the enforced protection of what remains.

But most people also tend to forget that the transaction never actually occurred. Power tends to be taken from people by force, with the philosophical justification tending to come after.

Thomas Hobbes, for example, didn’t publish Leviathan as a way to convince his fellow Englishmen to come together, and journey to the promised land where life was no longer nasty, brutish and short. He did so because there was a civil war on, and he wanted to please the king, who had already helped himself to the liberty in question.

Power is political. Authority is natural. As one suspects Brian Tolver is about to find out, the standing orders of general, civilised human life do not confer upon anyone the authority to be rude, bullying, demeaning, patronising and abusive.

The court of public opinion will always be there to pass verdict on that kind of behaviour. And he’s certainly not the only politician with a terrible day coming up in front of that particular jury, and very soon indeed.