Category Archives: remainers

LADY HALE, PRESIDENT OF THE SUPREME COURT AND FEMINIST ACTIVIST

LADY HALE, PRESIDENT OF THE SUPREME COURT AND FEMINIST ACTIVIST

Many lawyers and constitutional commentators have pointed out that Lady Hale, the President of the Supreme Court, who delivered the Judgment in the proroguing of Parliament case, and her colleagues in the Supreme Court, invented a completely new basis on which “Proceedings in Parliament” would be dealt with by the courts.  They completely ignored the legally and constitutionally correctly traditional Judgment of the High Court.  
I thought however that it was worth highlighting Lady Hale’s comments that were reported approvingly in the Sunday Times on September 29th under the headline of “Take the right partner to be supreme at law” by Nicholas Hellen.  He writes about Lady Hale and her political views from a speech that she made at the launch of “Cambridge Women in Law” in which he says that she “spent an hour dispensing her thoughts on how women can succeed in the male dominated world of the judiciary”. 
The article reports Lady Hale as saying:- “When I came to Cambridge, I knew it was a privilege.  I bet every woman in this room knew it was a privilege to be here.  But I was surrounded by men who thought they were entitled to be here.  And that is one of the things that we still have to go on fighting against.  The male sense of entitlement.”
She spoke of loosening the grip of the “quadrangle-to-quadrangle-to-quadrangle boys”.  A reference to a man who goes from a public school to Oxbridge and then to the Inns of Court “we haven’t got the history of people of our sex doing the job for generation after generation”, she told the audience. 
Hale said:- “Feminism is believing in equality, equality for women and the validity of women’s experiences.  That is how I define feminism. 
Men can be feminists too and there are lots of them and there are loads of women who aren’t.  Those are probably the people that we most have to contend with rather than men because they are in many ways the real problem rather than men.”
She also spoke of sometimes lacking in confidence, and talked of how Gina Miller, the businesswoman and campaigner who brought the case to the Supreme Court, dressed to help give her the confidence to fend off “people’s bigoted assumptions”. 
Hale suggested that this was a metaphor, “throwing light on this problem that women generally lack confidence”. 
The article finishes by saying that Lady Hale has asked Mary Arden, who has joined the Supreme Court:- “I have asked her please, please when I retire, would she keep up the good work”. 
Whatever you think of Lady Hale’s views, the one certainty it seems to me is that she is demonstrating yet again where on the spectrum her political values come from.  So she is vividly demonstrating that the Blairite creation of the Supreme Court has worked well from its creator’s point of view in entrenching Blairism into the Constitution.  It also vividly demonstrates the general effectiveness of the Left’s “Long March through the Institutions”. 
What do you think? 

CLEARING THE WEEDS IN THE POLITICAL GARDEN

CLEARING THE WEEDS IN THE POLITICAL GARDEN

As any gardener knows, the first thing you have got to do in sorting out a flower bed that has become choked with weeds is to remove all the weeds and cut out any of the dead flowers etc. in order to make it worthwhile digging in your fertilizer or compost and planting your new plants.
This is the sort of stage that we have reached with our Parliament, which is now stuffed, in both the Commons and the Lords, with people who are not merely unpatriotic, but are actually anti-patriotic and are hostile to the very idea of our Nation.  They are Internationalists and Multiculturalists. 
For our national politics to flourish we need to see such weeds removed from our political flowerbed and also all the deadwood and old decayed plants as well, so that we can have a fresh and more honest and a patriotic revival!
In this sense it is welcome to see that Boris Johnson’s Government has had the guts to withdraw the Whip from all those Conservative MPs that betrayed the trust that had been placed in them by voting against Boris Johnson this week.
Even better was seeing Amber Rudd resign form Cabinet and the Conservative Party in response. She is the classic career-minded entryist who, in ideological terms, is a Liberal Democrat Remainer, Multiculturalist, Globalist, but could see that her career prospects would be better if she badged up as a Conservative.
These people were all elected on the ticket of implementing Brexit and, as ‘Conservatives’ were expected to be loyal, not only to their manifesto mandate, the country, but also to their Party Leader.  They proved disloyal on all counts.  They have no place to be remaining in our Parliament and it will be good to have them all thrown out of Parliament come the next General Election.
As for those who have crossed the floor to join other parties, they have gone fully beyond the pale and so will have to stand or fall come the next General Election with their new party rosettes on.  Let’s see what their local electorates make of them then!  I suspect none of them will be re-elected.
Less visibly, our Left-wing biased media has been more coy about reporting the movement of Labour MPs to the Liberal Democrats.  The latest one being Luciana Berger. 
Looked at from the point of view of purging our politics of the corrupt old ideologically meaningless “broad church” Establishment parties of Labour and the Conservatives, both of these developments are to be welcomed.   
We need to move to a politics where its voters can rely upon a party label to tell us much of what is in the political tin, as we would expect to be able to do if we were buying tinned food.  
If an ordinary trader made a business out of putting labels of baked beans on tins of peas, they could expect to be prosecuted under the Trades Description Act.  We urgently need something similar with our politicians to enable us to hold them to account if they fail to deliver on what they promised when they were standing for election.
I notice that those MPs that betrayed their electorates often talk about Edmund Burke’s idea that he was “a representative” of his electorate rather than his electorates “delegate”.  It is however worth remembering that, despite that explanation sounding quite grand, in fact at the next election, when he had proved himself to be unwilling to do what his electorate wanted him to do, he lost his seat! And quite right too! 
We need to move away from the bogus pretences of so-called “Liberal Democracy”, where undemocratic elites hide behind the pretence of democracy.  I think that we need to move instead to a proper functioning “Popular Democracy” where politicians are expected to live up to focussing on doing what is needed to be done to deliver the Will of the People. 
What do you think?

IS THE REMAINER CASE BROUGHT IN SCOTLAND LEGALLY VALID IN ENGLAND?

IS THE REMAINER CASE BROUGHT IN SCOTLAND LEGALLY VALID IN ENGLAND?
I should start by saying that I am an English Solicitor and not a Scottish one. 
Scotland has a very different legal system to England. Theirs is based upon Roman Law and not on English Common Law.  I am therefore not qualified to answer this important question as a lawyer – with regard to what approach the Scottish courts will take.
However I would say that the Act of Union 1707 is key to understanding which court has the best claim to jurisdiction over our Parliament.  Have a look here (especially at Article 22) >>> http://rahbarnes.co.uk/union/union-of-1707/union-with-scotland-act-1706/
Then I would suggest also having a look at the Judgment in the Gina Miller case where the  Supreme Court refers to the appeals from Scotland, Wales and from Northern Ireland (in paragraphs 126 to 151) >>> https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2016-0196-judgment.pdf
The combined result of these legal authorities is that the Parliament of the “United Kingdom of Great Britain” which was created by the Act of Union 1707 is one in which the Scottish Parliament was merged into the English Parliament.  The (British) Parliament then continued on the same English constitutional basis as before.  Thus it is English constitutional practice which is the applicable constitutional law and not the ancient Scottish one.
This is also made very clear by the whole basis of the rest of the Gina Miller Judgment in which the Supreme Court relied heavily on pre-Union exclusively English legal precedents to explain and to analyse how the (British!) constitution works. 
So I would expect the challenge to Boris Johnson to fail in the Scottish courts to the extent that there is any attempt to rely on Scottish constitutional law.  If it does not fail there then it should fail in the Supreme Court. 
An additional legalistic reason why this case should fail is that it is seeking a declaration on something that at the moment is merely theoretical (or ‘moot’) and is not challenging an actual decision that has been taken.

BORIS, THE RESCUER OF BREXIT? (OR JUST THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY?)

 

BORIS, THE RESCUER OF BREXIT? (OR JUST THE CONSERVATIVE PARTY?)

We now live in a country where if you rely on the mainstream media for your information then you will be misinformed!
A good example of this was all the hype about Boris’ Government being dominated by hard-lined Leavers.  The longstanding Eurosceptic MP for Wokingham, Sir John Redwood, put us straight on that with this tweet:-
“There has been much misleading comment masquerading as analysis about the nature of the new Cabinet.
There are just two members who voted against the Withdrawal Agreement on all three occasions it came forward, and three who voted against it on two of the three occasions.
There are fourteen who voted Remain plus the Chief Whip.
The big majority of the Cabinet supported Mrs May’s Withdrawal Agreement, and some  were particularly vocal in urging others to do so.”
Boris of course has been a breath of fresh air in whacking Labour all over the court in the parliamentary tennis match.  Boris does also talk a good line in positivity and also of getting us out of the EU by the 31st October “do or die”.  He is also claiming that he is not going to call a General Election before the delivery of Brexit.
Despite this assurance Boris’ behaviour is sounding rather like preparations for a General Election.  The new Leader of the House, Jacob Rees-Mogg, dared Remainers to pass an Act of Parliament revoking the Article 50 Notice.  This may well be part of a strategy to trigger a General Election on the ticket of trying to get Brexit “over the touch line”. 
If so, it should be remembered that all the Tory Remainer rebels, the Gaukes, the Stewarts the Letwins, the Grieves, etc., will get re-elected if the Conservatives do well because there will not have been time to purge them from standing.  An early General Election, whilst good for getting Conservative candidates re-elected, may not help in the slightest with the parliamentary difficulties over Brexit. 
I do think one of the litmus tests of whether or not Boris’ Government genuinely is willing to allow a ‘no deal’ Brexit, is whether or not they show an interest in supporting our “Defend Brexit” case. 
To my knowledge Jacob Rees-Mogg has been spoken to about the Brexit case by at least three people, as well as, of course, being general knowledge amongst Conservative MPs because of the House of Commons Library’s briefing.  It wasn’t therefore a surprise to see in this video clip that Jacob Rees-Mogg knew about the case >>> 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2tJSpncXmE&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR05UCTJJIwej1VXkIFFKGe8dFhyBQfM8OAIn30E-4fhRmNltXMRnNNOW3k
What was interesting, however, was to see somebody who is not a lawyer trying to make out that he had some information about the case’s chances of success!
Jacob Rees-Mogg’s comments were particularly disingenuous when you consider that he was very happy to talk about his colleague, Bill Cash’s case, which has never actually been a case at all, let alone had any merit, since no proceedings have actually even been issued and it would now be too late to do so. 
So his answer isn’t in fact about whether our case has any merits, his answer is instead indicative of what the Conservative Government under him and Boris are thinking of doing with the case. 
If the real intention of Boris’ Government was to get the UK Out of the EU with ‘no deal’, then not defending our case would be the easiest way to achieve that for them.  It would not then be possible for Parliament to block either the case or thus Brexit.  It would also not be possible for Parliament to legislate to prevent it.  It would simply be declared as the law by the court, at which point there would be nothing that any of the Remainer Establishment figures could do about it.  If that outcome does not suit Boris’ Government that must be because they have some other agenda. 
My suspicion is that their agenda is simply to bolster the Conservative Party’s position in a General Election to be announced.  This could be perhaps in October to take place in November when the clocks have gone back.  It is then dark when people return from work. This will dramatically reduce Labour’s advantage in having an estimated a quarter of a million canvassers. 
I may be proved wrong, but if so, I would expect the case to be given a fair wind by Government. 
Let us see what happens!

BREXIT CASE APPEALED TO THE COURT OF APPEAL

BREXIT CASE APPEALED TO THE COURT OF APPEAL

Here is the Order of Mr Justice Spencer:-

It certifies that our Application is “Totally Without Merit”.  This is, on the face of it, totally mystifying, as it is obvious that the case is clearly at least“arguable”!
The explanation however lies in the relevant Court Rule which was developed in 2016.  This was supposedly to stop unmeritorious immigration claims clogging up the system.
Here is the text of the Totally Without Merit Appeal Rule:-
“Judicial review appeals from the High Court
52.8
(2) Where permission to apply for judicial review ….. has been refused on the papers and recorded as being totally without merit in accordance with rule 23.12, an application for permission to appeal may be made to the Court of Appeal.
(4) An application under paragraph (2) must be made within 7 days of service of the order of the High Court refusing permission to apply for judicial review.
(5) On an application under paragraph (1) or (2), the Court of Appeal may, instead of giving permission to appeal, give permission to apply for judicial review.
(6) Where the Court of Appeal gives permission to apply for judicial review in accordance with paragraph (5), the case will proceed in the High Court unless the Court of Appeal orders otherwise.”
We have however appealed in time to the Court of Appeal and here is our “Ground of Appeal”:-
“The learned judge erred in law by finding that it was unarguable that there was not a Prerogative or a statutory power to agree to an extension of the period between notification and withdrawal of a Member State by Article 50 of the TEU.”
We now wait for a single “Lord Justice of Appeal” to rule on the case.  That will probably be another wait of several weeks!

FACEBOOK AGAIN REVEALS ITS PRO-REMAIN POLITICAL BIAS


FACEBOOK AGAIN REVEALS ITS PRO-REMAIN POLITICAL BIAS

Some time on Thursday last week Facebook “Disabled” my “Personal Profile”.
The first I knew about this was when I tried to sign on to check if I had had any messages. I was then told that the account had been “Disabled”. 
Here is exactly what the text said:-
“Your account has been disabled
For more information, or if you think your account was disabled by mistake visit the Help Centre”
For more information about our policies please review the Facebook Community Standards.  If you think your account was disabled by mistake please contact us.”
I of course thought that that must be wrong and therefore went to their next page which said:-
“Why was my account disabled?
Your account has been disabled for violating Facebook’s Statement of Rights and Responsibilities.
Our Policies
One of Facebook’s main priorities is the comfort and safety of our members.  The following are not allowed on Facebook:
·       Support for a violent and/or criminal organization or group
·       Credible threats to harm others or the promotion of self-destructive behaviour
·       Targeting other individuals on the site
·       Hate speech or singling people out based on race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sex, gender, sexual orientation, disability or disease
·       Graphic content including sadistic displays of violence against people or animals and depictions of sexual assault
·       Selling recreational or pharmaceutical drugs
Learn More
After looking carefully at that page I was able to see that there was some element of an appeal process, so I clicked onto the link they provided and got a page which only told me to send them a PDF of my passport or other ID.
So all I was able to do in response to my Profile being “Disabled” was to send them an image of my passport to confirm my identity!
On Friday I received a response saying that the ID Team couldn’t help with any appeal!
Which is absolutely hopeless.
At that point I thought Facebook’s procedures for appeals were completely inadequate and didn’t even remotely approach the basic “Rules of Natural Justice”.  I therefore sent off an email to every Facebook email address that I had got. 
Here is my email to them:-
“Dear Sir
I have tried to log in to my above profile and your system asked me to submit an ID check.  There is no proper detail of any reason why this happened nor a clear appeal process just some generic items which can’t be relevant to me.
I am currently a candidate standing in an election here in England and I have already done your double identity check for political figures and advertising so you should be aware.
Here in the UK it is a crime under the Representation Of the People Acts for candidates to be slandered so I would politely ask you to sort this out and restore my profile or I shall get the police involved tomorrow.”
In reply I did get this answer:- 
“Hi Robin,
Thanks for your report.  We’ll review the information you provided and get back to you when we have an update on your report.
In the meantime, you can review our Community Standards to learn more bout what is and isn’t allowed on Facebook:
https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards?ref=cr
We appreciate your patience.
View updates from your Support Inbox:  https://fb.me/1FCup0kANUMY5ok
Thanks,
The Facebook Team
At the time of writing this blog, I have not received any substantive response explaining either why they have done it or what they are going to do about it.
I, in common with many other EU Parliamentary candidates, did receive a visit from the police advising us on security and so have received contact details of the officer who is responsible for dealing with political crime. I have therefore started the process of reporting this matter to the police, since Facebook would seem to interfering in an election which could well amount to a criminal offence.
The police have acknowledged that they are now investigating Facebook’s actions.
I shall wait and see what the police will do about this before considering my civil options against Facebook, which at the least would seem to amount to a breach of contract and may well be at least an implicit defamation in wrongfully disabling my profile.
Facebook’s actions call into question what exactly this is all about. 
I should explain that I have had my profile up on Facebook for at least 10 years (although I now of course cannot check exactly when I signed up!).  In all that time I have not been banned or warned of a ban for anything that I have ever posted up.  That is quite simply because I have not posted up anything that is even remotely against Facebook’s so called “Community Values”, nor even of questionable taste.
Furthermore I would say that as far as my profile is concerned I had not actually posted up anything new on my profile for quite a few days.  Also I hadn’t posted up anything else, other than updates about the case which I as a solicitor and Chairman of the English Democrats, am bringing against the Government (to get a Declaration that, as a result of our Notice expiring, we were Out on the 29th March!). 
In addition Facebook is well aware of my being involved in politics as a few months ago they had written to me to ask for me to sign up to what they describe as something along the lines of ‘double identity verification’ for political figures which would then allow me to place political adverts.  I had done this and I had also placed a few political adverts.
So the situation is my profile has been disabled and this has happened in the context where I have only been posting information up about the case. 
I had not even posted up very much about the English Democrats and myself having stood in the EU elections.  That is of course because the primary reason for standing in the EU elections was to publicise the case. 
Since what I am aiming to achieve with the case is that a Declaration that were actually already out and that therefore these elections are null and void. 
In response to this activity Facebook has disabled my profile without notice and without giving any explanation as to why they have behaved in this way and without providing a proper appeals process! 
Could this have anything to do with Facebook’s internationalist/globalist agenda and of their appointment as a Director of Nick Clegg of the “Bollocks to Brexit” Liberal Democrats?
Go figure!

LEADING REMAINER ADMITS SYSTEMATIC LYING TO THE PUBLIC

LEADING REMAINER ADMITS SYSTEMATIC LYING TO THE PUBLIC 

LEADING “LIBERAL” TORY CONFIRMS HIS ELECTIONS BASED UPON SYSTEMATIC LYING TO THE PUBLIC

Matthew Parris, the former Conservative MP who has made many bigoted remarks about Leave voters, has just published the article below, in which he admits systematically lying to the public throughout his political career in order to get himself elected and also he admits deliberately acting in such a way to undermine popular democracy. 

In reading his damning confession it is worth remembering that, not only are there others in the Conservative Party, such as Ken Clarke, Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve and indeed Theresa May, by whom I suspect very similar confessions could also have been made, but also there are many within the Labour Party whose conduct I suspect is exactly the same. 

This kind of behaviour is wholly par for the course amongst elitist Westminster British Establishment supporters of “Liberal Democracy”!

Here is the article:-

Why I don’t, never have, and never will trust the people – by Matthew Parris (former Conservative MP)

It was late, and a friend and I were left to talk Brexit. He’s a keen and convinced Tory Brexiteer MP but to stay friends we have tended to steer off the topic. This, however, felt like a moment to talk.

The conversation taught me nothing about Brexit, something about him, and a lot about myself and the strain of Conservatism I now realise I’m part of — and which is part of me. Oddly, then, this column is not really about Brexit, but about trusting the people. I don’t. Never have and never will. Our conversation forced me to confront the fact.

My friend knows well enough why I’m a Remainer, but guessed correctly that I’ve puzzled about why he isn’t. I had not quite expected what I heard. He understands business and finance and is good at facts and figures, so I’d supposed his wish for a ‘clean’ Brexit would be all about the economic advantages. He’s a firm believer in individual choice, too, so I had supposed he would dwell on the need to ‘take back control’.

No doubt he holds to these strands of the Leave argument — but talking to me he hardly mentioned the practical benefits of Brexit. No, there was something else that seemed to drive his anxiety that we leave the EU. Otherwise, he said: ‘I just worry about our democracy, respect for our constitution and the effect that a betrayal of the 2016 referendum result would have on the people who voted for me and our party last year.’

He returned to this repeatedly, and I saw that he was sincere. As a democrat, and a Conservative who owed his position in Parliament to a little piece of England that he came from, that he knew, that knew him, and whose electors’ minds and feelings he had come to understand over the years, my friend felt with a quiet passion that he must not break his word to them, must not slither away from undertakings that had been given.

He felt the same about the electorate nationally, the British people’s trust in the Conservative party, and their confidence in politics itself. He felt, in short, conscious of an unseen bond between parliament and people, and fearful of the wider consequences should it be broken.

I did not say much, because I could see he meant it; and what he meant was not really the kind of assertion one can confound with counter-argument or counter-assertion. It was about weighing things and, the scales being within his own breast, the way the scales tipped was for him just a fact, and undeniable.

But for me they tip differently; and for me too that is a fact, and undeniable. I lay in bed that night thinking about this; and my conclusions follow. As I’m not running for office I shall not pull punches.

Tories like me, and I think we used to be in the majority, see good governance as an effort to live with democracy rather than to an effort to live by democracy. It is why we were so chary about referendums in the first place. We are wary of the populace and instinctively hostile to the instincts of the mob. We see the popular will as a sometimes dangerous thing, to be handled, guided, and on key occasions (and subtly) thwarted.

We know, however, that the people’s will cannot be overlooked. We see it as a corrective to the over-mighty and a warning to those who govern not to lose touch with popular feeling. But at the idea that the people should dictate the policies of government on a daily basis, we shudder.

Our kind of Conservatism is either in temporary abeyance, or going permanently out of fashion — I do not know which. Its decline since the middle of the 20th century has been so gradual as to mask its extent over time. At the beginning of that century it was possible for Arthur Balfour to remark: ‘I have the greatest respect for the Conservative party conference, but I would no more consult it on a matter of high policy than I would my valet’ without this being thought anything but wit; today its utterance would end a political career.

When I first went into politics, initially as a researcher, in 1977, it was commonplace among us Tories to see and describe ‘the will of the people’ not as our mentor but as a rock to be navigated. Capital punishment and judicial flogging were very popular with the public. The hanging debate at party conferences was an annual nightmare for our leading spokesmen, but I never heard it suggested, even by colleagues who supported the return of these punishments, that we should bring them back because the people wanted it.

As for colleagues opposed to both, our challenge was to find ways of ducking the issue. Once I became an MP, I did so by voting for the principle and against the practice. This subversion of democracy (in Theresa May’s phrase) caused me embarrassment, but not a second’s guilt. Sod democracy: hanging was wrong.

In the late 1970s, we Tories were painfully aware that popular feeling opposed any confrontation with the trade unions, but we believed this would prove necessary. Our response was, so far as possible, to tiptoe round the issue during the 1979 general election. We succeeded. Among ourselves we talked cheerfully about subterfuge. The Britain of 1979 and 1983 most emphatically did not vote for a massive confrontation with the coal miners. We made sure the electorate was never asked.

Even today, of course, politicians can and sometimes must dodge the popular will, and they know it. But who now dares say these things? And what today we do but no longer dare say we do, tomorrow we may not dare do. Tory paternalism is in long, slow retreat. People like me will stay where we are, increasingly exposed as our friends melt back. But what the heck.

Here is a link to the original article>>> https://www.spectator.co.uk/2018/12/why-i-dont-never-have-and-never-will-trust-the-people/

Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved

In the heats of the Brexit battle between the elitist and undemocratic Remainers and the few Brexiteers in Parliament there is an occasional glimpse of the wider constitutional implications.  The article below on the Conservative Home website, which describes itself as “the home of Conservatism”, is such a glimpse and deserves wide circulation. 

 

Those who support what Professor Matthew Goodwin of Kent University is calling “National Populism” will, like me, support unconditionally the idea that our People are the ultimate sovereignty. 

 

Supporters of so-called “liberal democracy” may talk about popular sovereignty, but they want it channelled through systems which prevent the majority of the People’s Will being even expressed, let alone enacted. 

 

A good example of that mind-set is the Right Honorable Ken Clarke MP who regularly says that the EU Referendum was merely an opinion poll, which is only “advisory” for MPs, rather than an expression of popular sovereignty which must be put into effect by the political system to be legitimate.  In short you could say that liberal democracy is in effect an open conspiracy against popular democracy! 

 

Once we are clear about that division we populist democratic nationalists can be more focussed and consistent in our attacks on the short-fallings of the British Political and Media elites in their attempts to shelter behind the ornate structures of British Liberal Democracy. 

 

Below is the article.  What do you think?

 

Jonathan Clark: Brexit has reopened two constitutional conflicts which must be resolved

 

The British have, typically, little interest in constitutional law. Unlike the French, who regularly rewrite their constitution in revolutions or attempts to prevent revolutions, the British tend to assume that little changes and that all is well. Alas, the constitutional problems accumulate nevertheless. Dominic Grieve was right in a recent Commons debate to say that there are areas of the British constitution that need clearer definition. But what exactly are they? Why is the Brexit question so difficult to resolve through the familiar Westminster machinery?

 

The big issues of constitutional conflict are so fraught because they happen in legal grey areas, in which agreement and definition have never emerged. Today there are two such major areas, though many minor ones.

 

The first is the question of sovereignty: where does ultimate authority reside? It is many centuries since any significant number of people claimed that it resided with the person of the monarch alone. But the decline of that image was followed by the growing popularity of another, ‘the Crown in Parliament’, that is, the monarch, the Lords and the Commons acting together. This image never went away, but was upstaged by the doctrine of the lawyer A. V. Dicey (1835-1922) that ‘Parliament’ (meaning, increasingly, the House of Commons) was sovereign. Yet from the Reform Bill of 1832 into the 20th century, successive rounds of franchise extension strengthened another old idea, that the ultimate authority lay with ‘the People’, however defined.

 

From 1973, when the UK joined the EEC, it slowly became evident that the answer was ‘none of the above’: ultimate authority lay with Brussels. Parliament rubber-stamped increasing amounts of secondary legislation from an evolving super-state. In 2019, departure from the EU would remove that layer of command. This prospect inevitably reopens an old debate, which had never really been settled: was Parliament or the People finally supreme? Its re-emergence reminds us that Dicey’s doctrine of parliamentary sovereignty was the opinion of one commentator only. That opinion partly corresponded to contemporary practice, partly not.

 

Today, the tide is everywhere running in the opposite direction. Deference and duty daily fade; the key word everywhere is ‘choice’, and this means the choices of the many, not just the few. The transformation of communications places steadily more power in the hands of a steadily more educated, better informed ‘People’. But this trend has been matched by another, seen across the West in recent decades and at all levels: in increasingly complex societies, the executive has everywhere grown more powerful vis-a-vis the legislature. Political scientists have largely ignored this tide, but it has swept forwards nevertheless. It means that two powerful social forces now collide. Across western democracies, ‘ordinary people’ find means of complaining that they are ignored by elites who ‘just don’t get it’; elites decry ‘populism’ and exalt the opinion of ‘experts’, expressed to within one decimal point in forecasts of outcomes 15 years hence.

 

This collision reopens a second, equally old, question. What is a Member of Parliament: a delegate, or a representative? Edmund Burke famously outlined the case for the second: MPs, once elected, represent the nation as a whole; they owe the nation their best judgment; they are in nobody’s pocket. But another idea is just as old, and equally honourable: MPs are sent to Westminster by their electors to redress the electors’ grievances, and are accountable to them. Against Burke, we can set another intellectual, Andrew Marvell, MP for Hull in 1659-78, who was paid by his constituents and regularly reported back to them. Understandably, Burke’s high-sounding doctrine proved the more popular among MPs. But after he framed it, his constituents in Bristol threw him out for favouring Irish commercial interests over theirs, and he represented thereafter only his patron’s pocket borough.

Both ideas in their pure form are unacceptable. But how the balance between the two is to be struck can never be quantified or defined, and a crisis like the present makes the impossibility of a definition clear. ‘The People’ voted by 52 to 48 for Leave, and a larger percentage now says ‘just get on with it’; but about five-sixths of the House of Commons are for Remain.

 

Among Conservative MPs, something under 100 are evidently for Leave; of the other 200 or so, over half are on the Government payroll in one capacity or another, and more would like to be. So profound a dissociation between elite and popular opinion is rare. Worse still, public opinion polls and the growing practice of referenda quantify the problem as never before; the issue is easily expressed in binary terms (Leave or Remain); and the arguments have been fully rehearsed. Other countries show similar problems of relations between the many and the few, but in the UK these are brought to a focus. Since the constitution has failed to resolve them, public debate is full of expressions of elite contempt for the ignorant, prejudiced, xenophobic, racialist populace on the one hand; of popular contempt for the self-serving, condescending, out-of-touch Establishment on the other.

 

Before 1914, Conservative peers making technical points over a budget were manoeuvred by Lloyd George into a constitutional confrontation that could be memorably summed up as ‘Peers versus the People’. In this clash, the peers could only lose. Now, the Remainers have been manoeuvred into a constitutional confrontation that, if it goes much further, will be labelled ‘Parliament versus the People’. In such a conflict it can only be Parliament that will lose. In that event, the damage would be considerable.

 

These great questions of constitutional definition are seldom solved; rather, the issues are defused by building next to them a new practice. The present challenge is to accommodate that new arrival in the political arena, the referendum, and to turn it into a clearly specified, moderate, and constructive institution, as it is in Switzerland. Those concerned about daily policy should think again about a subject, once salient in university History departments but now everywhere disparaged: constitutional history.

>>>https://www.conservativehome.com/platform/2018/12/jonathan-clark-brexit-has-reopened-two-constitutional-conflicts-which-must-be-resolved.html

 

Is David Lammy the supreme Remainiac clown?

Is David Lammy the supreme Remainiac clown?

David Lammy has recently written about his idea that Brexit being the Will of the People is “bollocks”.  Here is what he posted on the 27th July:-

David Lammy

27 July at 16:36 ·

Why the government’s “will of the people” Brexit mantra is bollocks:

1. Vote Leave cheated.
2. It was based on lies e.g. £350m for NHS.
3. Only 37% of the electorate voted for it.
4. Scotland & London voted against.
5. 69% say Brexit is going badly.
6. Public supports a #PeoplesVote.
7. Brexit threatens peace in Northern Ireland, which also voted against.
8. Russia interfered and influenced the result.
9. The referendum was advisory and non-binding.
10. The government has no mandate for Chequers or No Deal – the only options left on the table.

Here is what I have to say in reply to him:-

1. “Vote Leave cheated” – No they didn’t.  The fact of the matter is that the main “cheat” was by Remain, as the Electoral Commission has recently reported, with the £9m mailshot by the Government of their dodgy leaflet. 

The system of controls on spending are in any case politically motivated and amorally illegitimate attempt to stitch up the result.  Any minor breaches of the expenses rules are of no significance as regards the outcome.  Personally I think Remain’s concerted campaign between the various entities that were campaigning for Remain are a much clearer instance of breaking the spending rules than the piffling instances that have been brought against the Leave campaigns by an Electoral Commission that is rapidly becoming a byword for bias.  See >>> https://brexitcentral.com/priti-patel-dossier/

2. “It was based on lies e.g. £360m for NHS” – For any Remain campaigner to claim that the Leave campaign based itself on lies is a breath-taking hypocrisy, given the absolute blatant nonsense that the Remainers talked about the catastrophe that would be Brexit and misusing the machinery of government in order to produce such nonsense.  In fact the £360m a week for the NHS is a good political figure to use because it is justifiable and it usefully triggered idiots like David Lammy into arguing about the exact number of pounds that was going to the EU, whilst revealing to the public that even the Remain campaign accepted that it was a vast number of millions.

The political usefulness of the claim was to trigger Remainers to argue about the detail. The factual defensibility is that the £360million is the total going to the EU per week. The rebate comes back with strings attached so it couldn’t be spent on the NHS. The NHS point is therefore key to the defensibility of this claim.  So far as England is concerned the rebate goes almost all to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in what is known as the EU ‘Conduit Effect’ so an English Nationalist could remove the NHS element of the claim and just add the expense of belonging to the EU to the £49 billion plus per year cost to English taxpayers of being in the Union of the UK.

3. “Only 37% of the electorate voted for it” – For David Lammy to make anything of that when no elected government has ever received the votes of 37% of the electorate, just shows the extent of his idiocy.  Since Parliament voted, including David Lammy, for a referendum in which this result would be decisive, his argument is not so much boll@cks as bullsh1t!

4. “Scotland and London voted against” – Is there any relevance to this comment?  So far as London is concerned London remains part of England which voted overwhelmingly to leave.   
So far as Scotland is concerned I am more than happy for them to make something of it and become independent.  The only relevance to his comment might be a definition of who the “People” are?  So far as I am concerned the only “People” that I am interested in are the English nation. England was and remains overwhelmingly in favour of Brexit. 

5.  “69% say Brexit is going badly” – Given the ridiculous incompetence, dishonest and lack of patriotism of the Conservative Government I agree they are making a mess.  If you follow my blog then you will have seen that I am rather licking my lips at the prospect of seeing the dying body of the Conservative Party circled by hungry vultures! 

6. “Public supports a #peoplesvote” – No they don’t.  We have already had a People’s Vote and that is it.

7.  “Brexit threatens peace in Northern Ireland, which also voted against” – I don’t believe that Brexit does threaten any peace in Northern Ireland.  One of Theresa May’s many mistakes was to get involved in commitments over Northern Ireland which she was never going to be able to deliver, given that she is dependent upon the DUP following her ludicrous decision to have a General Election when she didn’t need it. 

As an English nationalist I am more than happy for Northern Ireland to either become a separate independent state or to join with Southern Ireland.  In any case what opinion polls do show is that most English people would prefer to lose Northern Ireland rather than lose Brexit.  I would certainly agree with that opinion!

8.  “Russia interfered and influenced results” – Ridiculous nonsense for which there is no evidence of any actual influence.  Given our history it is utter hypercritical of British politicians to complain about outside interference.  Blithering on about this is probably however a measure of Remainer desperation!

For a well written and thoughtful  explanation of the result read >>>> https://quillette.com/2018/08/03/britains-populist-revolt/

9.  “The referendum was advisory and not binding” – Given the way that the British constitution is fitted together that remark, from a legalistic point of view, would have to be true of almost any democratic input. The issue is about legitimacy of the Establishment.  If the mask drops and the Establishment proves that voting doesn’t achieve anything, the only sensible future recourse is to the natural way of settling disputes i.e. force. 

10. “The Government has no mandate for Chequers or no deal – the only options left on the table” – I agree that the Government has no mandate for Chequers but it certainly has a mandate for “no deal”.  The mandate is, and it is a mandate from both political parties which also campaigned on this at the last General Election, to implement Brexit in full and unequivocally.  Personally I will be very happy with a “no deal” outcome. 

More generally I think David Lammy falls into the category of the type of Leftist that is simply not a democrat and therefore rather likes the internationalist, multi-culturalist, statist elitism of the EU.  So I am not surprised that he is on the side of remaining in the EU at all costs and of welshing on the Labour Party’s manifesto in the last election previous commitments to an in/out referendum.  David Lammy is not only thick but also dishonest. 

The perfect illustration of David Lammy’s intellectual initiative is shown in his staged appearance on Celebrity Mastermind where he was thrown as many soft balls as possible to try and build him up but he still flunked it! 

Here is the priceless link to Lammy’s lamentable Mastermind performance. 

The 13-Point Mastermind:- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWwyVQ2IQuE▶

Enjoy!

ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?

 
ARE THE CONSERVATIVES MAKING AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE ERROR OVER BREXIT?
It is commonplace amongst political commentators that the voting public is not interested in politics and does not spend much time thinking about it.  In fact the best example of how this has been explained that I have come across over the years was a commentator who said that the public only see politics out of their “peripheral vision”.  If somebody actually manages to get the public to look directly at them then politically that is a game changer. 

So this means that the current parliamentary parties of the British Political Establishment and, in particular, the Conservative Party, which I want to talk about in this article, have lived their whole careers, up until the Brexit vote, in at most the peripheral vision of the voting public.  This has always meant that as long as politicians are looking as though they are going to say the right things whenever they come into view in the public’s peripheral vision, the public’s gaze flicks away from them and they are allowed to get on with it unchecked.

It is because of this lack of attention that the public does not hold Establishment Politicians properly to account and does not put any serious effort into thinking critically about the politicians that are being elected.  This is the situation in which the current generation of parliamentarians have grown up and in which they have developed their careers.

So if, for example, you take Theresa May, she is a politician who has basically been able to get away with lying about what she stands for throughout her whole political career.  Thus in order to get selected by the Conservative constituency party, any Conservative MP who is not genuinely a Eurosceptic has had to lie to claim that they are a Eurosceptic otherwise they would not get selected by the predominantly Eurosceptic Conservative Party membership.   Once selected, in order to get elected, they have had to continue lying and pretending that they are Eurosceptics, because in most Conservative seats they would not get elected if they said that they were Europhiles. 

Theresa May, for example, when she became Home Secretary, on any objective basis she did an appalling job of being Home Secretary. On almost every promise that she and the two Conservative Governments that she got elected but she failed to deliver on almost any of the policies that had been promised.  The most glaring of which of course is on immigration, where they were elected on promises to keep immigration down to the “tens of thousands”.  In fact, she presided over the biggest influx of mass immigration in the history of England, with, in her last year as Home Secretary, more immigrants arriving in that one year than had come to England in the entirety of the thousand years before 1939!

However whenever the public’s political vision flicked over her, there she was saying that was what she wanted to try and achieve a dramatic reduction in mass immigration.  That was enough to satisfy the public so that their gaze moved on and so no critical analysis was brought to bear in holding her accountable for her actual lack of achievement!

This current generation of parliamentarians might have continued to live out their whole political careers just as previous ones had done, without there being a moment where the public would be willing to make any effort to properly hold them to account.  That would however have been without the Brexit vote! 

As a result of the EU referendum on leaving the EU, the public, for the first time in at least a generation, really focussed on a political question and gave an unequivocal answer based upon the largest turnout that has occurred for decades.  The unequivocal expectation of voters was, and is, that the public’s decision would be implemented.  This is where trouble has occurred for our dishonest and deceitful Remainer MPs, who had comfortably expected to be allowed to continue making decisions that suited them and their agendas without any proper accountability to the electorate for the rest of their careers. 

Theresa May is just one of those parliamentarians who had expected to be able to carry on lying her way out of any inconvenient situation. 

It is in that context that she has dishonestly conducted her own hidden Brexit policy which she unrolled to the startled gaze of her Cabinet colleagues at Chequers. 

Theresa May’s Chequers’ proposal is not only completely contrary to the public’s expectations following the Brexit vote, but is also directly contrary to Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech about her “red lines” when she was still repetitively chanting “Brexit means Brexit”.  Now the public is turning its eyes towards Theresa May and is focussing and so is noticing that she is a dishonest and incompetent Remainer, who is, in Jacob Rees Mogg’s words “a Remainer who has remained a Remainer”.  This is despite the public’s vote and despite her pledge to implement it in her otherwise ill-judged General Election manifesto.

This leaves me somewhat torn between two conflicting feelings! 

For the country, and as a patriot, I think that what Theresa May is trying to do is a travesty and a terrible missed opportunity, but as the Leader of what The Times newspaper was kind enough to call an “insurgent party”, I cannot help but relish the prospect that the parliamentary Conservative Party led by Theresa May could well be now heading irrevocably in a direction in which the public will clearly see that the leadership of the modern Conservative Party is composed of dishonest, incompetent, and unpatriotic Europhiles.

When the public truly realises what the modern Conservative Party leadership stands for, I think it likely that the public will regard them as unfit to hold Government Office ever again. 

It may well be that many of the seventy plus per cent that Professor Sir John Curtice of Strathclyde University has identified as being “Leavers” who have been voting Conservative will decide not to come out to vote for the current alternative Establishment party (i.e. Corbyn’s Labour) but that does not mean that they will vote again for a Conservative Party that has so clearly and now noticeably betrayed the trust that was placed in them. 

The purging of the Conservatives from being a Party of Government is the first step required for a reconstruction of our national politics. 

We need a politics more in line with the two opinion blocks of real voters.  These are for the patriotic, anti-mass immigration, pro-Brexit, pro-traditional values and pro-welfare and NHS nationalists.  Against this block is the internationalist, pro-EU, anti-patriotic, liberal values, pro-mass immigration, individualistic cosmopolitan block. 

The current mishmash of views is one in which the Establishment parties are at cross purposes with most voters.  Most of us like some of what Labour has to say and also some of what the Conservatives have to say but we don’t like all of what either of them have to say.  So, at the moment, voters have the awkward and unappetising choice at elections of having to choose between the least worst party, rather than being able to choose a party they actually fully agree with.  Changing that ladies and gentlemen would be a reform of our politics well worth seeing!