THE RULE OF LAW IS PARAMOUNT

AMONG THE MANY STUPID acts carried out by New Labour during its period in office, signing  us up to the European Human Rights Act in 1998 was perhaps the most disgraceful example of a free nation voluntarily giving away the one momentous characteristic of its sovereignty – the right of democratically elected MPS to enact laws without such laws being undermined by a foreign power.

            But this is just what the last Labour government did; and by doing so enfeebled our judicial system, and made our parliament’s legislative activities subject to decisions made by Strasbourg judges.

            The only meaningful function of a parliament is to repeal and create laws. Government polices and promises require the stamp of parliamentary process for them to be enacted, and once that process is complete, new laws become part of our everyday lives. Thus, in such a manner, has this country functioned for centuries, creating a stable society where parliament has always had the final say.

            However, now our laws are being challenged by an outside foreign body that  has sovereignty over our judicial machinery including parliament, thus bringing into question the whole purpose of going to the polls and voting. For if we have forfeited our right to make our own laws and see them enacted without interference; then why indeed should we vote at all?

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE, Lord Judge, has just given a talk in Jerusalem on this very subject. Quite rightly, Lord Judge points the finger of blame at the politicians who effectively signed  away our independent law making ability. He points to the fact that whenever a judge makes a decision that runs contrary to common sense as well as public opinion, it is because our judiciary are obliged to enact it. They do not create laws, only use them when sentencing.

            We have seen uncountable examples of judges making decision that have enraged the general public. But those decisions are invariably based upon the obedience the judges owe to the EU’s Court of Justice. In the words of Lord Judge ‘The words “human rights” are sometimes described in language which might suggest they stand not for the noblest ideals, but, using polite language, as woolly nonsense,’  but such decisions, ‘must be applied whether we judges in the United Kingdom agree with them or not’.

            What is happening is that our national laws – the laws we elect our politicians to enact, are being overruled by non-elected bureaucrats (for want of a better word).

            The latest example of this European hegemony over our ability to govern ourselves was the issue of voting rights for prisoners. Europe said we must have them and the Strasbourg judges have given Britain until August to obey their ruling: which left the majority of the British public rightly outraged at such a demand.

            The European Court of Human Rights stands above English law and frustrates all common sense. Yet we seem to be trapped within its ambit without the ability to break free. It is as if we are chained by gravity to forever obey its remit. For no politician of the three main parties will offer the people the opportunity to break free from its influence. Even the arch Europhile Kenneth Clarke has come forward to say the Human Rights Act needs reform – but stops at modification.

           

WHEN WE GO TO VOTE we expect our votes to mean something. We elect 640 MP’s whose £65,000 salaries plus expenses are paid for out of general taxation. For this we expect them to govern and pass laws that their manifestoes’ promise.

            If they prove unable to make such laws work because of any kind of displacement          brought about by a willingness to forfeit their powers of law making through a signature on a piece of paper; then why should we vote for such a neutered institution as the British Parliament?

            The last government left our parliament much weakened by this one act alone: but as we know there were many more to follow. New Labour sought to chain this country to Europe. Our national sovereignty was seen as nothing more than an imperial throwback by these modern men and women who were now in control of a party that once represented the working class, but now sought to entice, via immigration,  new and various ethnic minorities to replace them with; which will no doubt, in another piece, bring us on to another of New Labour’s stupid acts.

            Like Europe, uncontrolled immigration  was seen by New Labour as an opportunity to keep the Labour Party afloat after the decline of socialism and the working class politics it represented.

            But our laws are what makes us what we are as a people. They should remain our property and no one else’s. Whether considered by the rest of the world as either good or bad matters little. Laws are what gives us our identity as a nation and should be in the control of no other body, than we the people.

            It is indeed an outrage that the laws we pass can be subjected to the inspection and censorship of an outside body, whether elected or not. It is we the people who pick our representatives to govern us and enact the laws they promised us in their manifestoes; without interference from foreign soil.

           

I BELIEVE THAT THE LAST GOVERNMENT of this country did real harm to its sovereignty, and it did so deliberately. For how could it have been otherwise, considering the intelligence of the Blairite New Labour assemblage that governed us from 1997- 2010.

            New Labour sought ultimately,  not to keep this country as a country, but a mere district/province of Europe. As part of this process of creating a Federal States of Europe, Tony Blair, early in his premiership, signed both his party and his nation up to the European Human Rights Act in 1998. An act that in itself removed legal sovereignty (the embodiment of any democracy) from the country he was prime minister of.

            I find it almost beyond belief that a people could so calmly hand over its legal sovereignty to an outside force so benignly without any form of  physical opposition from them. We have indeed (or so it appears) gone quietly into that dark goodnight.

            The rule of law is paramount and should be in the ownership of democratic nations to determine. Once we freely, without objection, allow foreign laws to trespass over our own creations, then we are without national identity, whether we be Irish, Scottish, Welsh or English. We become mere vassals of something called a Federal European Union which discounts all national identity and seeks to drown us in all things Europeans.