What is an ‘executive fiat’?
As Parliament was closing down this week, speaker John Bercow said the five-week prorogation was an act of “executive fiat”. An executive fiat is not a businessperson’s car, as that marque is an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (“Italian car factory of Turin”). But there is an Italian connection, since “fiat” is also Latin: a subjunctive meaning “Let it be done”.
For its importation into English we can probably thank the fourth-century priest St Jerome: his Latin translation of Genesis (in what became known as the Vulgate Bible) made famous the phrase “fiat lux”, for “let there be light”. Since the 17th century in English, then, a “fiat” has been a kind of God-like authorisation or decree, which creates a new reality by its utterance.
Many things in modern life are done by fiat: fans of Bitcoin, for example, distrust what they call “fiat money”, or actual money, since it is in effect created out of nothing by banks. The Tory party, too, has long been on a fiat fiesta: from 2015 it has used great numbers of statutory instruments to bypass parliamentary scrutiny. Perhaps the humiliated PM’s new populist slogan will be “Fiat Brexit”.
