eurealist.co.uk

It was the executive that used the three line whip and rewrote the rules to use the guillotine to push this through parliament.

Richard Laming is abusing democracy when argues that Stuart Wheeler is abusing the Constitution of the UK by issuing a legal action to force the Prime minister to stand by his personal and his party’s commitment to hold a referendum on the EU treaty.

It would be far too easy to attack Lamming on a personal level because of his commitment to the EU, our membership of which has done more to abuse the British Constitution than anything else in the past thirty years. But that would not achieve much other than making me feel a lot better.

But it is strange that some people are quite prepared to ignore the constitution when its suits them, but then call on it to oppose challenges to their view.

Do we have a constitution of this country that says nothing more than the House of Commons may do anything it forced to do by the executive? Including subcontracting the powers we have invested in it? If we have such a constitution it is no more than a constitution for dictatorship.

The British Constitution is a set of stops and balances between the different parts of our government, the elected House of Commons has usurped nearly all of these powers and those in turn have been usurped by the parties and by the executive which now protects itself with the cliam that Parliament is sovereign. Parliament might be but NuLabour and Gordon Brown are not, and neither is the House of Commons. But Parliament being sovereign cannot dispense with its own sovereignty, as the concept of Parliamentary Sovereignty is only an expression of the people sovereignty over parliament.

As much as Lamming might like to twist things the Prime Minster was elected on a clear mandate to allow a referendum on the EU Treaty and we have two NuLabour dominated committees both agreeing that this treaty is substantially the same as the one on which a referendum was promised.
It is interesting that Lamming tries to deflect the European Scrutiny report and the Foreign Affairs committee report both of which said the Lisbon Treaty was substantially equivalent to the Constitutional Treaty, by arguing that votes taken against separate clauses prove that neither committee actually meant what they put in their reports. And Mr Wheeler will not therefore be able to call either of the reports in support of the pro-referendum case.

Lamming says that Mr Wheeler is attempting to undermine the parliamentary process, but does not consider the use of a three line whip to defeat the referendum clause, as undermining parliamentary process, or that parliament has already conceded the point that it is no longer sovereign and has already conceded the point that parliamentary action can be subject to judiciary review.

In any event Brown is hiding behind parliament, the letter Wheelers solicitor sent to Brown was quite clear that that he is challenging Brown over his refusal to allow a referendum, after he has clearly promised that he would, and his excuse being that Lisbon is fundamentally different from the Constitution. In this respect both of the reports are important pointers to the veracity of Browns claim.

Lamming is being less than open when the argues that “it is the legislature, not the executive, that has the power to bring the treaty into UK law and also to convene a referendum, and the legislature has decided in favour of the former but against the latter.”

It was the executive that used the three line whip and rewrote the rules to use the guillotine to push this through parliament.

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abusing democracy, Stuart Wheeler, Richard Laming, Lisbon Treaty
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