eurealist.co.uk

Europhobia has an excellent post on ID Cards
The problem(s) with ID cards

Everyone I’ve spoken to recently has been doing the same old “if you’ve done nothing wrong…” arguments, usually followed by the “so what’s the big deal?” line. Normally, after a five minute rant, I manage to convince them that this is one of the most intrusive and unpleasantly fascistic laws this country has yet seen, that it’s the first step down the slippery slope to genetic databases and every dystopia ever envisaged.

But usually what gets them is “what? I’ll have to pay eighty-five quid for this thing?”
Continues …

Telegraph | Opinion | Howard preferred ridicule to being thought soft on terror:

Until Michael Howard flunked the test yesterday and forced his reluctant frontbench Tory colleagues to endorse the looming multi-billion-pound ID card fiasco, the Tories had at least one promising vote-winning issue for next year’s election campaign.

A question could have been put to the electorate along these lines: do you think that government has become over-mighty in the past eight years; and, if so, do you want to have to get into the car with your wife or husband and drive to the police station, stand and queue while your car is clamped outside, submit to a reading being taken of your iris or fingerprint, provide a signature sample and your home address, and then write out a cheque to the government for £170?

You might have a couple of children at university - that’ll be another £170 for them - and don’t forget the ageing parents, for they are not exempt either. Those parents might be of an age when they can get cranky and refuse to submit to some silly jobsworth, but be careful. If they refuse to allow their details to be stored on the new identity databank, they will be liable for a £2,500 fine. And if an elderly relative has to be moved into a nursing home, don’t forget to tell the Home Office or you may be liable for a £1,000 fine.

One of the characteristics of the ID card Bill that makes it recognisable as a piece of New Labour legislation is that it creates 31 new powers for the Home Secretary, seven new civil fines, and eight new criminal offences.
Snip

“It is not difficult to see how this ID card scheme could become New Labour’s defining fiasco. People will resent the cost and the intrusion, but the serious trouble could come when the police are required to enforce it in areas with high Muslim populations, where many might prefer not to register. The Government and the Conservatives seem blithe about what this might do for race relations in this country.

The Tories have failed to see that this debate is about much more than a piece of plastic. It is about our attitude to government, and its attitude to us. I would not expect New Labour to understand that point, but if the Tories do not understand it either, there is no point in someone like me voting for them any more.

In selfish terms, I was relieved to see Michael Howard take the easy way out and endorse ID cards, because it freed me of any sense that I should have to vote for his party. No longer will I have to profess enthusiasm about Tory policies, or pretend that I see the green shoots of a Conservative revival.

For the first time I shall vote for the Liberal Democrats, because they do understand that the identity card debate is about the just role of government, and I suspect tens of thousands of instinctive Conservatives will do the same next year.”

The Constitution will not change anything aliened with the EU is not a State or put the other way “The EU is not a State and the Constitution will not change that fact” is a complete fabrication and anyone, no matter how high in government circles who tells us that, is to put it bluntly is lying through their teeth.

This Constitution repeals all the existing EC/EU treaties from the Treaty of Rome to the Treaty of Nice and then founds or establishes quite a new EU, based on its own Constitution. Legally, constitutionally and politically this new European Union would be quite different from the existing EU.

The new EU, founded on its own State Constitution, in fact becomes a new European State in the world community of States. With virtually all the essential features of a State, in which the existing Member States are reduced to the constitutional status of regions or provinces.

Simultaneously the EU Constitution becomes the fundamental source of legal authority within Europe, supplanting the Constitutions of the Member States as the ultimate source of legal power. The EU Constitution becomes part of our Constitution and will not be amendable except with the consent of other countries. This is therefore the most decisive step ever in the near-60-year-old project of European integration, aimed at turning the EEC/EC/EU into a fully-fledged State, a superpower in the world.

In international law a Treaty is a contract or agreement between independent States, the High Contracting Parties, as equal sovereign partners. A Constitution is the fundamental law of a State, setting out its institutions of government, how it makes its laws, determines its policies and actions and relates to other States. This treaty will only be a treaty until the Constitution comes into effect. From then on it is the Constitution we will be bound by and will have to obey.

“Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” states: “This Constitution establishes the European Union.” As the European Union already exists as an intergovernmental cooperation between its Member States established by the 1992 Treaty of Maastricht, what this Treaty-cum-Constitution proposes is an EU that would constitutionally, legally and politically be a fundamentally different thing from the EU we are at present members of.

The Constitution gives the EU now established on the basis of its own Constitution, legal personality and a distinct corporate existence for the first time. Hitherto the EU has had no legal existence apart from its Members.

The Constitution changes this. Legally and constitutionally it makes the new EU separate from any of its individual Member States, just as Germany is a separate state from Bavaria or Brandenburg, the USA from Virginia or California, and Canada from Ontario. This is the most essential constitutional step for those who seek to turn the EU into a State, an international actor in its own right for the first time. Article I-6 then provides that “The Constitution and law adopted by the Institution of the Union in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the law of the Member States.” Thus the proposed Constitution of this new EU overrides and is superior to the Member States’ national
Constitutions, potentially in all areas of public policy; for the EU Constitution does not seek to reserve any governmental area permanently from EU control. The central issue concerning the EU Constitution is this:

Which Constitution takes precedence, the European one or the national? That after all is the central question of politics: Where do power and legitimate authority lie? The “Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe” is clear. The new EU State and its Constitution will be paramount,

The Constitution reapplies the existing body of EU law, some 100,000 pages of it, as if it were made under the constitutional primacy of the Constitution established by the new Treaty. Simultaneously it transfers some 40 further areas of government policy or national decision from the Member States to the new Union, centralising them in the Brussels Institutions.

This is no longer a question of States “pooling sovereignty” in some limited areas of government, the better to attain certain agreed purposes. “Pooling sovereignty” was always a misleading term anyway, aimed at disguising from the public the reality of what was happening. The legal concept of sovereignty has nothing to do with international power or economic weight. It refers to the exclusive right of a State to make its own laws, and consequently of its people consequently
to govern themselves. It is therefore no more possible to “pool” sovereignty than it is to be half-pregnant! But in so far as people believed that EU membership involved some such pooling, the Constitution’s provisions now show the unreality of that. Under the Constitution the sovereign powers of the European Union would be vested in European Institutions, the EU Council, Court, Commission and Parliament, which are given legal supremacy over the laws and sovereignty of the Member States. The EU and its Institutions would become our new sovereign. We would all, for the first time, become legally bound as direct citizens of this new legal entity.

One can only be a citizen of a State. Under the Constitution we would legally become citizens of the new European Union, not just as an honorary title, an adjunct to national citizenship, as under the Treaty of Maastricht, but with rights and obligations direct to the European institutions rather than through our national institutions. Article 1-10 provides: “Citizens of the Union shall enjoy the rights and be subject to the duties provided for in the Constitution.”

From An Important Analysis from Ireland on a Grave Day for European Democracy by Anthony
Coughlan, who is an economist and Senior Lecturer Emeritus in Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin.

So we can clearly see that the statement “The EU is not a State and the Constitution will not change that fact” is very far from the truth it will in fact change everything because it changes the very basis of the EU.