REMAINERS ARE TRAPPED BY THE RESULT OF THE GINA MILLER CASE
One thing that is all too obvious when trying to deal with any part of Government these days is the striking degree of incompetence. This may well be the result of the selection for jobs by multi-culturist, PC tokenistic, tick-boxing rather than by trying to select the best people for the job?
There is also, of course, the vast and casual waste of taxpayers’ money!
One of the less remarked upon things is the huge volume of unnecessary, overly prescriptive, complicated and downright ineffective legislation that Parliament passes. It seems to be all too prevalent that the qualification for being in our legislature is to be utterly incompetent in dealing with any matter relating to the Law!
I remember a few years Lord Phillips of Sudbury, the Lib Dem Peer who had been a high quality solicitor in private practice, retired from the Lords saying that he thought the whole thing was pointless when our State is now passing over 10,000 pages of legislation every single year?
The result of this deluge of legislative verbal diarrhoea is that it is no longer possible for anyone to know the law, let alone for any citizen to know where they stand as against the State. The whole legal system has been swamped and is a muddle.
In a way nothing is better as an example than the latest twittering amongst the twitterati about whether Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty could be revoked and thus keep the UK within the EU and block the EU referendum.
This is a typical example of our political class’ incompetence. There are of course two bodies that have jurisdiction on deciding this. One is Parliament. All the commentators who are Remainers were gleeful about Gina Miller’s case being taken up to the Supreme Court where there was a ruling that Parliament had to legislate in order for the Government to be legally able to serve the Article 50 notice (https://www.supremecourt.uk/cases/docs/uksc-2016-0196-judgment.pdf . Bizarrely they are now claiming that Parliament by mere resolution could overrule the effect of that Statute! This is a basic error, not only of law, but of the constitution, since it is elementary that no Parliamentary resolution can override a statute.
In the circumstances the only way in which Parliament could overturn the Article 50 notice Act (European Union (Notification of Withdrawal) Act 2017) would be by a further Act of Parliament.
So we have the amusing and delightful situation where Remainer MPs are trapped by the Miller case, whereby they cannot undo the Article 50 Notice at this end of the process without a further Act of Parliament.
Realistically this is politically impossible and would probably be ineffective in any case for reasons which I will explain below.
The other jurisdiction and body which would determine whether a revocation of the Article 50 Notice was valid is the European Court of Justice. Whatever the EU Commissioner might think, or the Council of European Union Governments or the EU Parliament think, the final word would be with the European Court of Justice. That decision would probably take 5 years during which the situation of the UK would be in a permanent state of uncertainty.
This Twitter stream has all been brought on by the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, confirming what was logically obvious, which is that the default position on whether there is a deal is that there is no deal.
Given that the EU has set itself up to be as difficult as possible in this negotiating process, they always made it very likely that there would be no deal, but the Remainers seemed to think that they were going to have some opportunity to decide whether or not whatever was offered was going to be sufficient. David Davies confirmed that in the event that Parliament rejected whatever deal was offered, then the effect would be that there was no deal.
Since David Davis is likely not to be bringing back very much in the way of a deal anyway we now have massive inertia tending towards no deal from both the EU side and from the UK side.
Fortunately the effect of no deal isn’t at all what the Remainers are saying. It is simply that we go into the normal world trade on free trading terms and on a WTO basis, just like most of the other countries that trade perfectly successfully with the EU.
The EU for their part also go onto the same WTO terms with us. Since the balance of trade for the last 30 years has been more or less constant in their favour it is right to say that the EU will lose more than we will. Our Government receipts from their payment of tariffs is likely to be much greater than the EU’s receipts from our tariffs. Our profligate and wasteful Government might even be able to pay its way with a balanced budget, at least for a little while, based upon these extra receipts!