eurealist.co.uk

Joining up the Dots to see Mr Monnet`s Dream

Almost as soon as I had posted that Richard North, “is un-assailed in at looking behind the meaning of any EU statement or document on any EU related subject, instantly getting to the heart of the matter and clearly explaining the ramifications of this or that policy” I notetice this evedence if any were needed that there is not one thing that is happening with our goveremnet that does not have a clear explination if looked at from an EU perspective.

Just to remind ourselves, the idea behind the Monnet Method was that “Europe would become united without realising it, as common projects would lead European states to pool their sovereignties”.

So we need to observe the dots, and join them up to see the whole picture, this requires a basic understanding of what is happening, which can be gained by looking at EU proposals and then waiting for the signs to appear that those proposal are being implemented. So when our British defence Minister makes a statement that he is going to institute changes to the formation of the British armed forces we are already armed with the knowledge that the EU is intending to implement plans to deploy rapid reaction “battle groups” in international danger zones. The groups, each consisting of 1,500 troops, are scheduled to be deployable by 2007. Dr North takes up the story Here

I do not often find cause for complaint about Dr North’s views, he is after all one of most knowledgeable and the clearest thinkers on EU matters to be found anywhere, and certainly on the internet he is un-assailed in at looking behind the meaning of any EU statement or document on any EU related subject, instantly getting to the heart of the matter and clearly explaining the ramifications of this or that policy.

The Tories have been offering us some policies on the EU which up to know have proved to be based more on wishes than actually holding any hope of fulfilment were they in the unlikely event to win the next election.

But as will be seen By Dr North’s post this may be about to change because of the commission’s decision not to enforce the Stability pact France and Germany have in effect taken back the power of their economic control into their own hands, thus the argument is extended that as they have broken the treaties with impunity Britain can also repatriate control of its fishing waters,

I suggested that The French and Germans do not have to take any initiative to ignore the Stability pact, they just ignore it. On fishing we would have to initiate a physical defence against any country that decided our declaration was against the treaty. So the thing could come to a head quite quickly. I wondered if that thought had been considered.

Another commenter phrased this in a much better manner “They are different, in the sense that the Spanish are not sailing into Germany, dropping nets and hauling up government money, thereby increasing the budget deficit. So the solution to the German budget deficit would not involve boarding and sequestering the vessels of other nations. But we may have to do that to solve our fish deficit”.
Dr North said “This has indeed been considered… as well as many other things. Watch this space”.
This could be interesting, because if he has had a hand in preparing the argument, I can be fairly certain that it will be air tight, so I will indeed be watching this space.

EU Referendum

When is it permissible to break EU treaty obligations with impunity? In its leader today the Daily Telegraph gives the answer: when it is the stability pact and the culprits are France and Germany.

This is on the back of its report in the business section, announcing that the commission is to let France and Germany off the hook. It has abandoned efforts to punish France and Germany for breach of the stability and growth pact, offering to turn a blind eye to abuse of EU spending rules – something which, incidentally, we picked up last Sunday.

According to the Telegraph, Joaquin Almunia, the newly appointed economics commissioner, has bowed to the political reality, and agreed that sanctions procedures against the eurozone’s two biggest economies would now be dropped. “Given the action taken by France and Germany, it would appear that no further steps are required at this point,” he said.

In its leader, the Telegraph very much labours the point, that it is the two states that insisted on the stability pact to curb excessive state spending which have now exceeded its maximum budget deficit (three per cent of GDP) for three years running.

It takes to task the French who “do not even bother to disguise the lamentable state of their public finances”. With Gallic sang-froid, they cheerfully admit that their deficit will again break the rules next year.

And, asks the Telegraph, will the commission fine the miscreants, as it is obliged to do under the pact? Not likely, it says, once again answering its own question. Brussels bent the rules a year ago to suit the Franco-German axis, and it is content to do so again. This amounts to a de facto repatriation of fiscal sovereignty to the nation states. So the stability pact is now as dead as a dodo, and even less lamented.

In marking its passing, however, the Telegraph fails to an make the obvious and important point. What this affair underlines is that, for all their legal content and framing, treaties are essentially political constructs. Unless there is the political will to make them work, and the signatories agree to be bound by them - not just at the point of signing or ratification, but through their life – they are so much waste paper.

This is something the people who spend their hours pouring over the minutia of treaty texts – the people whom we used to call “barrack-room lawyers” – so often forget. And this has enormous implications for the UK, not least if that unlikely event transpires – the Conservatives win the general election.

Then, we will see the commitment to repatriate the CFP come to the fore, and the barrack-room lawyers will immediately cry that this cannot be achieved for, if we do it unilaterally, we will be hauled up in front of the ECJ and fined zillions of euros. The response now is ready made – just like France and Germany were hauled so severely punished for breaching the Growth and Stability Pact?

Further to my recent post Bill of Rights I have received an e-mail with a link to a site The Anglo Saxon Chronicle that takes takes up the final paragraph “If we wish to remain free, we may well have to repeat the struggles of the past to see it off again, but as in the past it will be a long drawn out struggle because once Roman Law takes hold it does not easily relinquish power.”

Which takes further the concept of Britain’s common law rights and explains some of the legal principals behind them and their self-protecting attributes, so that we can always as a final recourse make claim to them to return the power of our own Government into the hands of the people.

Our system of Government is quite complicated, because it relies not on a written Constitution, but on the common law that is the law that grew naturally out of those early days, when we began to associate with our neighbours, it relies on basic concepts which are self-evident and does not rely on a codified system that has been written down, it is if you wish a movable feast. It has been made mainly by judges who have used existing laws as a base for their decisions, often relying on the earlier judgments of others to form their own opinions, with a safeguard always available to the people who form part of their own government and legal system.

The concept that we are only ruled by our agreement is central to the whole basis of our laws it is not just an empty political dream the very basis of our system draws heavily on that concept.

We decide who will make our laws we decide who will be our king we decide if the laws our law makers initiate are acceptable to us, because we are central to those powers. Without the willing cooperation of the people our system simply would not work.

Integral to out freedoms is the ability to change our governments, to be tried by a jury of our peers, who have the power to overturn a law by not convicting anyone if they feel the law is unjust.

All of these principals are at present under attack, as our governments continue to try to draw all powers to themselves, the power to elect our law makers is undermined by the party system when the party managers get together and decide not to offer alternatives at an election as has been the case over the EU all main parties are offering the same thing and that is membership of the EU, it does not matter what we want in that case because which ever party we vote for will produce the same result. The right for the people to have a say in our laws in the courts is being undermined by the present moves to deny the right of a jury trial, the right of a jury to overturn a law by not convicting is under threat the Auld report, suggests The defendant should no longer have an elective right to trial by judge and jury that that juries have no right to acquit in defiance of the law or in disregard of the evidence thus removing our participation in our own laws.

It may be inconvenient for these who wish to rule us, to have their laws questioned in court, but unless they wish to change our whole system of law, then they do not have a choice.
Of course that is exactly what is being attempted, Parliament is taking powers they should not have, they are installing laws which force their rules and remove our rights to object. What they are doing is to attempt to destroy our basic common law rights to rule ourselves.

The basis of the British system of government is a closed loop:
• the People are sovereign;
• their sovereignty is represented by the Monarch whom they, the People, choose;
• the Monarch, as head of the Government, oversees the work of the Government;
• the Government governs the People.
(The Government thus governs the People with the consent of the People.)

At the coronation, the Sovereign is acclaimed as the choice of Parliament acting for the People, and the coronation oath, whose continuous history can be traced to the time of the Confessor, and whose development embraces the Magna Carta, confirms that the Sovereign’s authority is itself subject to the Law (and thus all authority delegated from the Sovereign is subject to the Law).
Without the Monarch, Parliament cannot legislate, for although the Royal Assent is given by the three Lords Commissioners for the Monarch, that Assent has first to be authorised by the Monarch. While it is true that the full authority of the Monarch as Sovereign may be attained only with the Three Estates of the Realm assembled in full Parliament, the Monarch will always retain the Royal Prerogatives: to dismiss the prime minister; and to dissolve the Parliament. We have a balance; we have a closed loop; we have a sovereign people.

This is opposed by the Roman System when the parliament has all the power and allows the people only those powers it wishes. But those rights are granted by parliament and are always under the control of parliament. A glance at the EU Charta of Fundamental Rights will show that it grants its citizens the right to life, the right to marry, the right to own property, the right toa fair trial, etc.

We in Britian already have these rights by birth and our government’s job is nothing more than to protect those rights, that is what elect and pay them for in the first place, it is not within their power to refuse to honour those rights, or to remove those rights or to give away the powers we loan to them in order that they may protect our rights, to a higher authority. By so doing,by trying to subvert the rights of Englishmen our government have abdicated and are an illegal government, and we have every right to remove them.

The Guardian has an article pointing out the hazards the introduction of this central data base will hold for our freedoms, I am impressed that Henry Porter the journalist who wrote the article has pointed out on of my fears with a lot of this intrusive legislation we are seeing from the present administration but that we with we cannot predict the nature of future governments.

The article fininshes thus:

This is a chilling prospect, and we should ask ourselves whether we’re willing to trust the government with such power. Has the prime minister’s behaviour before and after the release of the September WMD dossier been so scrupulous as to suggest that his government would not in extremis abuse such an instrument? Did Mr Blunkett’s respect for the traditions of liberty and free speech suggest that we could have had complete faith in him? What about his successor? Let us hope that he is more able to weigh the likely benefits against the undoubted loss of liberty.

Simply working on the evidence in the serious organised crime and police bill, I suggest that the restriction of defendants’ rights, the curbs on protest and the measures relating to arrest are enough to conclude that the government’s aim is to increase the power of the state at the expense of civil liberties. Yet the real concern must be not with Blair, with what Blunkett did or even what Charles may do, but with future governments, the nature of which we cannot predict.

We may fret about illegal immigration and improper use of the NHS, but the national identity register, which will include adults’ fingerprints and an electronic scan of the face or iris, as well as date of birth and address, is the tyrant’s ideal means of control. This is presumably why other English-speaking countries have rejected compulsory schemes backed up by penalties.

If we are to accept this sinister legislation, which will cost upwards of £3bn, we should know that it will be a matter of time before a government insists that the unique key to every adult’s genetic profile be included on the card. With that would come a data bank of every individual’s DNA to be accessed by God knows whom, with God knows what terrifying purpose. Later versions of the ID card might carry a chip called a radio frequency identification (RFID), which can be read from a distance. Thus anyone carrying a card who passes a sensor will give away their position.

This is not science fiction. RFID technology is being tested for US passports, and the British police are covertly monitoring an individual’s movements with analogous technology on motorways.

We must not imagine that respect for individual liberty is innate to the British establishment. With this bill, the government is attempting to change for ever the relationship between the individual and the state in the state’s favour. Those who treasure liberty must not let it pass

Bill of Rights

Yesterday after the announcement of The Law Lords ruling that the indefinite detention of foreign suspects without charge or trial in Belmarsh prison breached their human rights; I was tempted to ask on another Blogg if the Law Lords were concerned about human rights why they did not use British civil rights to challenge the government. Of course the answer is obvious, the Law Lords were responding to a case brought under the ECHR, this has nothing to do with our own basic civil rights.

However I did receive an answer to the question from another commenter on the site who said:
Habeas corpus has been suspended many times. For instance, it was suspended in the eighteenth century as a precautionary measure against both Jacobites and revolutionary republicans. In the twentieth century it has been suspended in connection with Irish terrorism. It is not part of some sort of immutable British Constitution (as it is in the US and as I wish it were here).

While in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution the Convention Parliament declared in the Bill of Rights that ‘the pretended power of suspending the laws or the execution of laws by regal authority without consent of Parliament is illegal’, it’s important to note that laws could still be suspended WITH the consent of Parliament, as is the case today. The Bill of Rights was more concerned with establishing once and for all the privileges of Parliament than the rights of individual citizens(as one should expect from an act passed in the late seventeenth century, well before the conceptualisation of human rights).Also, it’s important to remember that no Parliament can bind the actions of future parliaments. Essentially, if Parliament says something is all right, then it is all right.

This led me to think about the history of our Common Law rights, because I have always understood that our civil rights were a basic right of British people, and have been since the beginning of any form of government in Britain. The results of my investigation follows, but there is an argument often advanced that there is no British Constitution and Parliament may make any law it wishes both arguments are wrong. Although many MPs and even some professors of law will not agree they can only make a contrary argument by stopping the backward clock at a destination of their choice and building their argument forward on that basis.

I will start from the premise that English Law evolves by a process of general adherence to convention and precedent, until parliament or a court alter aspects of it, at which point a new precedent is set. This can be done at any time, and new precedents can likewise be reversed at any time.

This is basically the supremacy of Parliament argument, which combined with the notion that no Parliament can bind the actions of future parliaments, creates an argument that nothing defends the British people from a despotic government.

Yet the British system of Government has survived for over a thousand years and has been the yardstick against which many other Constitutions not least the American Constitution have been measured?

The answer is that of course there is no right of Parliament to make any law it wishes or change any existing law by simply making a new one in its stead, there are such laws that do not fall into the category of Parliamentary law these are not within the power of Parliament to change, and without a revolution they will stand as the basic law of this country for ever. These Laws form the basic backbone of our system of government and legal system.

One such law is the Bill of Rights 1688/9 it is a Constitutional statute it is not an ordinary law, to change or repeal a Constitutional statute you must actually put before parliament an act specifically with the intention of changing the Statute. The Bill of rights to date has not been changed it has been amended but those amendments did not disturb the basic rights within the Bill of Rights, the first amendment was the Act of settlement 1701 which was legislation governing the succession to the English Crown. It was passed in 1701 as an amendment to the English Bill of Rights it did not change anything other than the the line of sucsesion of the Monachy. Then againg the Act of Union 1707 between England and Scotland which amongst other provisions included a restatement of the Act of Settlement 1701.

The full title if the Bill of rights is “An Act for declaring the Rights and liberties of the Subject and settling the Succession of the Crown”

There is also the Act Establishing the Coronation Oath, 1689 which is important in this debate because it clearly creates a defence of our basic rights in perpetuity, as each succeeding monarch must take the oath to maintain those rights.

The practice and right of Habeas Corpus was settled practice and law as far back as Magna Carta 1215 and was thus a fundamental part of the unwritten common ‘law of the land’ and was expressly recognized by Magna Carta. The Habeas Corpus Act 1679 only codified existing common law practice.

The Bill of Rights states publicly what were then taken to be self-evident freedoms, it did not mention “The Habeas Corpus Act” but did mention “laws and liberties of this kingdom, so that the same for the future might not be in danger again of being subverted” so it was quite clear that Habeas Corpus was included in Laws and Liberties although it had only been codified by parliament 10 years previously it was self-evidently part of the basic rights.

The Bill of Rights is based on a concept of permanence and declares that any actions taken against its principles are null and void. In fact Both Magna Charta and the Declaration of Rights specifically reject any attempt to amend or abolish them.

Bill of Rights “Provided that no charter or grant or pardon granted before the three and twentieth day of October in the year of our Lord one thousand six hundred eighty-nine shall be any ways impeached or invalidated by this Act, but that the same shall be and remain of the same force and effect in law and no other than as if this Act had never been made”.

Now we approach the question of whether the Bill of Rights in its entirety still stands that is answered because according to The House of Lords “Desuetude” (repeal by lack of use) is unknown to English law, so it must still be on the statue books and must still be relevant to the present day.

In 1913 it was ruled that the Bill of Rights still stood, and the Crown could not justify any infringement of its provisions.

This in fact was confirmed on 21 July 1993 when the Speaker of The House of Commons issued a reminder to the courts. Betty Boothroyd said: ‘There has of course been no amendment to the Bill of Rights…the house is entitled to expect that the Bill of Rights will be fully respected by all those appearing before the courts.’

The authority of the Bill of Rights was re-affirmed in a House of Lords judgement in November 2001.

An attempt was made to repeal Magna Charta in 1969, when the Statute Laws (Repeal) Act was passed. It repealed Edward 1’s Confirmation of the Great Charter Act of 1297 - but it did not repeal Magna Charta itself. The legal position, a repeal of a statute which gives effect to common law does not repeal the underlying common law itself. The original common law remains untouched.

If parliament could be held to have repealed Magna Charta it could also be held to have acted unlawfully in that, by definition, parliament must have exceeded its powers on that occasion.

The point that the Parliament that brought in the Bill of Rights was itself illegal is quite pertinent because the parliament declared “Whereas the late King James the Second, by the assistance of divers evil counsellors, judges and ministers employed by him, did endeavour to subvert and extirpate the Protestant religion and the laws and liberties of this kingdom; by so doing they were in fact taking back those rights and liberties which James II had subverted. When the parliament invited The Prince and Princess of Orange to take the throne that was only on the understanding that they would protect those same rights and liberties, So the Bill of Rights was in fact not an act of parliament but a settlement treaty.

A further point the bill of rights removed forever the divine rights of Kings; it did not create a divine right of Parliament.

This is now becoming an important issue, because all of the problems associated with the claim of rights 1628 followed by the civil war and then the bill of rights 1689 were in fact all about the divine right of kings, which is another term for code napoleon i.e. the king has all the power and decides the law. This was set against the Anglo Saxon common law which is the people are ruled by themselves. One is top down the other is bottom up, we in Britian have been fighting for our rights under Common Law since William the Conqueror brought back Roman Law in to this country in 1066, that was why we had Magna Carta, The claim of Rights, the Bill of Rights etc. Now we are seeing again an attempt to bring Roman Law back into this country. If we wish to remain free, we may well have to repeat the struggles of the past to see it off again, but as in the past it will be a long drawn out struggle because once Roman Law takes hold it does not easily relinquish power.