eurealist.co.uk

A reasonable précis of the arguments, Mr Booker is a little wrong on the Justice Laws ruling, which was that firstly there was a hierarchy of acts of parliament and secondly “constitutional statutes” could not be changed by implication.

Government officials across the land will have heaved a sigh of relief last week at a High Court ruling by Mr Justice Andrew Collins, which gives them the power to impose arbitrary penalties on the public without having to justify them in a court of law.

Robin de Crittenden is the Walsall pensioner who challenged the right of councils and private companies, under the 1991 Road Traffic Act, to impose parking penalties without giving motorists any right to argue their case in court. Mr de Crittenden, supported by campaigner Neil Herron of the Metric Martyrs Defence Fund, argued that this was in breach of the 1689 Bill of Rights, which lays down that all “fines and forfeitures” before conviction in court are “illegal and void”.

The implications of this case were enormous, because not only are 7 million of these fines imposed each year on motorists, but other branches of government have in recent years exploited the same system by introducing automatic penalties for a range of offences, such as the late return of forms or taxes.

Mr Justice Collins cut through all this confusion by the simple device of ruling that a “penalty” is not a “fine” or “forfeiture”. No matter that the dictionary defines a fine as “a monetary penalty”, a forfeit as “a fine” or “penalty” and a penalty as “a fine”, the good judge clearly belongs to the Humpty Dumpty school of lawmaking, based on the principle “When I use a word it means just what I choose it to mean”.

Not only does this ruling retrospectively save councils tens of million of pounds, it also vastly increases the powers of officialdom to levy penalties for anything that offends them, by taking away the citizen’s right to challenge them.

Maybe David Cameron has a point in claiming that we need a new Bill of Rights, because clearly the old one, on the say-so of Mr Justice Collins, has just been chucked in the bin.

Yet it is only four years since Lord Justice Laws found the “metric martyrs” guilty on the grounds that certain Acts of Parliament, including the Bill of Rights and the European Communities Act, were “constitutional statutes” so fundamental to our law that they could not be subsequently overruled.

In “Feeding the European fantasy” Dr Richard North continues his devastating series of attacks on the MOD defence equipment plans. Which are leaving our troops massively under-equipped for their mission.: What has happened, though, is that the MoD – under successive governments – has taken its eye of the ball. Obsessed with the idea of constructing a mean, lean, high-tech army, with shiny new toys to impress the European “colleagues”, it has neglected the here and now, and the immediate needs of our present-day armed forces, engaged in the messy, bloody counterinsurgency operations for which it is singularly ill-equipped.

This obsession with shiny high-tech toys – and the prestige they bring - is also another fatal weakness of the MoD and the warring tribes within the armed forces.

Dr North’s long campaign is eventually filtering through to the MSM but as usual it is with little real understanding;

So much for the toys, but what about the political implications? These are graphically put by the Telegraph leader which cites Liam Fox, the shadow defence secretary, who told the Commons yesterday, the cost of succeeding could be very high, but the cost of failure would be intolerable. At stake, he says, is the future of both Afghanistan and Nato, under whose aegis the campaign is being waged.

This theme is amplified by Con Coughlin in an op-ed but, like so many, he misses the point. The Army itself, he writes, might be suffering severe overstretch through a combination of underfunding by Gordon Brown’s Treasury and Tony Blair’s messianic willingness to commit forces to resolve the world’s ills…

No, Mr Coughlin, with the MoD committing £14 billion to FRES, having spent £166 million on its battlefield limousines for Ruperts, having spent £1 billion on Storm Shadow, and billions more on other grandiose European projects – not least committing £30 billion to the Eurofighter - you cannot say there is any underfunding. The real problem is that the Army is suffering from the cumulative effect of bad procurement decisions, which started under the Conservatives’ watch but are currently being driven by the Blair government’s obsession for European defence integration.