Mob rule applies when there is no legal system, or the legal system is ineffectual.

Plato (427-347BC) and Aristotle (384-322BC) both argued for a rule of law to bind rulers to just principles. Charles de Montesquieu (1689-1755), in pre-revolutionary France,  proposed that the legislature, executive and judiciary must be separate, to best maintain the rule of law in circumstances that are always complex and shifting. I wish these political thinkers were here today to consider how the rule of law can apply to transnational corporations, which operate across multiple jurisdictions and are thus not controllable by any nation state.

When corporations can buy lawmakers and judges, thus undermining the independence of both the legislature and the judiciary, the law is seriously weakened. In developing countries, corporations and the free trade rules imposed by their client body, the World Trade Organisation, can impede the impartial functioning of the legal system, as in Guatemala, to give one of several possible examples. In states that have imploded into chaos, like Somalia,  or which have been deliberately constructed and then deconstructed, like Iraq, the rule of law has been squashed by the law of the gun.

Guatemalan newspapers — who employ some very brave journalists — report mob beatings and lynchings and frequent assassinations. Each year about one Guatemalan in 2,275 is murdered within the country.* The legal system is corrupt and slow, and cannot begin to hold powerful corporations and organisations to account.

Here in the UK the judiciary is still notionally separate from the legislature, but is in danger of becoming a tool of government, as the Chilcot Inquiry on Iraq is showing in relation to the opinion whether the US/UK invasion of Iraq in 2003 was legal or illegal. If the judiciary becomes the pawn of the legislature, we can say goodbye to the tripartite governance advocated by de Montesquieu as essential for a just nation.  At the international level, corporations can walk all over the nation states in which they do business. Do we want a similar free-for-all within the state as well as above the state? As resources become scarcer (see ‘Empty Plates Tomorrow’) the rule of law could be the only just defence against a violent free-for-all in the competition for survival.  The desperate gangs in post-earthquake Haiti, using their machetes to scythe their way  through crowds to  grab food and drink, give us a Hobbesian** preview of how alarming life can be when raw power is the determinant of individual surival.

*The population of Guatemala is about 14.02m but probably about 1.1m are resident in the USA, mainly as illegals, leaving 12.92m or so within Guatemala. The homicide rate is 43.97 per 100,000 persons, according to nationmaster.com.

**Thomas Hobbes, 1588-1679, English philosopher who regarded life as intrinsically solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.