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| Articles Britain Betrayed Again The Difference and Practical example Britain Betrayed AGAIN by Politicians WE employ to Represent OUR best interests BLAIR MAY SIGN. BRITAIN WON'T says MARK DANIEL in the Western Morning News The sneakiness, the deceitfulness, the deliberate, devious chicanery demonstrated by the government on Tuesday is beyond belief. No administration, surely, can remain in power which so abjectly and brazenly cheats those who employ it into giving away all that is rightfully ours. On Monday, the relatively innocuous European Convention on Human Rights, a non-EU convention accepted by all the countries of Europe, was incorporated into British law. This gave British courts the right to judge on human rights cases in the UK where formerly such cases must be heard in Strasbourg. Some of us, who prefer freedoms to rights, balked and flinched, but, in the end, we have been living with the Convention for fifty years. It could not do that much harm to have British rather than foreign judges deciding British cases... There was a nation-wide advertising campaign, paid for by the taxpayer, featuring a poem by an 11 year-old boy in order to show that the European Convention on Human Rights was apolitical, innocuous, friendly. Jack Straw appeared on television with the Magna Carta, asserting that this was nothing more than its natural successor. On Tuesday, just twenty-four hours later, Downing Street announces that the government has no further objection to the European Charter of Fundamental Rights, an iniquitous document which renders British judges impotent and which transfers ultimate power over every aspect of our lives to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg, on the grounds that the charter is "a valuable document" and that it does "not assert new legal rights". The Charter will now be signed by Britain in Biarritz next week. In short, the Human Rights Act, transferring power to British courts, was a sham, intended only to ease the transference of power to Luxembourg, and the advertising campaign, paid for by the taxpayer, was an implement of political purpose, intended to lull the electorate into confusing the Convention and the Charter and permitting the nation, in ignorance, to take its greatest step yet towards total integration in a super-state. The Charter of Fundamental Rights is, simply, an imperialist document. It is defined by the Commission as 'the central element of a process giving the European Union a constitution'. Its adoption would see the greatest ever transfer of power to make choices over social and economic policy from elected politicians to unelected judges ever seen in Britain. Under the Charter, EU judges will have scope to reinterpret many of the rules and directives already laboriously negotiated in order to suit the needs and requirements of the British people. It will introduce the hobbling over-regulated corporatist system which has sapped the strength of the European economies over the past decade. It will undo all the good work of Mrs Thatcher in ensuring free trade. It will, theoretically, and therefore almost certainly, be used to interfere in every aspect of our lives, and its provisions will soon be enforceable by Europol, the armed police force, immune from prosecution, which is currently being equipped, formed and trained. Even Andrew Duff, a Liberal democrat MEP who is serving as a 'rapporteur' on its drafting, has described the plan as 'representing everything Britons do not like.' And the hope of the government is plainly that at least half of the silly electorate will not know the difference between this threat to our freedoms and the Convention. The deception has been managed 'softly softly'. When debated by EU heads in December, it was agreed that the Charter would be a 'political statement' rather than a legally binding document. As late as March, Tony Blair was calling for a 'showcase' that would not transfer jurisdiction outside the country. The document to which the government now has no objection is no showcase. It is Europe's magna carta, an historic and disastrous constitution whereby Britain hands over the right to self-governance. Unlike Magna Carta, it contains the infamous and iniquitous Article 53, which states that the EU itself is free to violate the 'Fundamental Rights' of the people if it should be in the interests of the EU to do so, or, as Sir John Fortescue summed it up, "That which pleaseth the prince hath the force of law." This article can never and must never be a part of our law. It has already been used in the case of Bernard Connolly, a senior Commissioner who quite rightly blew the whistle on the corrupt European Commission in his book, 'The Rotten Heart of Europe'. Connolly was sacked, pleading his right to freedom of speech, but the Courts deemed that the interests of the Community overruled that right. In short, the EU imposes restrictions and obligations upon everyone save itself. Unlike Magna Carta, the Charter also proscribes various political views and parties. Under its provisions, for example, "xenophobe" (undefined, but could that mean eurosceptic?) parties will be effectively banned. Unlike Magna Carta, which is an entrenched and irrevocable bill, not an act of parliament, and which is fundamental to common law, which presumes our freedoms and rights save where they are proscribed as interfering with another's freedoms, the Charter presumes to grant us freedoms and rights and retains the right to withdraw them. I make no secret of my opposition to big European government and creeping integration, but surely even the most ardent pro-European must resent the knavery and trickery of this government in trying to lead us by the nose into something which, it is quite clear, the majority of the electorate dislikes and mistrusts. The government is not empowered in law to follow its own international policies and agendas without the consent of the electorate, yet it is doing so. The government claims its authority from a public mandate, yet abuses the public which gave it that mandate and treats them as dupes and fools. As the Duke of York told another arrogant and capricious ruler in Shakespeare's Richard II, 'Take from time his charters and his customary right;/Let not tomorrow then ensue today;/Be not thyself - for how art thou a king /But by fair sequence and succession?' So too the government presumes to wield a power entrusted to it by the people to abuse and deceive the people. This is one dirty trick, one autonomous, autocratic, undemocratic, self-interested ploy too many. That Charter may be signed by Tony Blair, but it will not be signed by Britain. Top The Difference and Practical example At one minute to midnight on the 1/10/2000 YOU and I had inalienable
rights Greg Lance - Watkins. |
