“The UK government has acted unlawfully in proroguing Parliament”. This is the meme/soundbite that, every few minutes in the news media, we are being bombarded with in the UK , following yesterday’s judgement of the Supreme Court. Unsurprisingly, there have been calls for the resignation of the Prime Minister. Is it actually true, however?

    If the Government has acted unlawfully, can anyone specify which law, which Act of Parliament has been broken? (This is not a rhetorical question; if anyone out there knows the answer, I genuinely want to know. Please use the contact form.) I haven’t yet heard any Act being mentioned in the reports.

    Parliamentary procedure is governed by the Constitution. Unfortunately we don’t have a written one, so things are not always clear; precedent is the usual factor taken into account when making decisions. When there is an attempt to prorogue Parliament, and the Opposition parties disagree, precedent suggests that they should put down a motion of no-confidence in the Government.

    It’s not just me saying that. It is the opinion of Lord Sumption, former Supreme Court Justice, who said: “the courts are concerned with legal problems, they are not concerned with vetting the political judgements that are made by prime ministers. That is a matter for politicians to deal with, if they don’t like what the Government is doing they have to bring the Government down”¹.

    It is also the opinion of Richard Ekins, Professor of Law at Oxford University, who has written a paper entitled Parliamentary Sovereignty and the Politics of Prorogation, which argues “that the prerogative power to prorogue Parliament is not subject to judicial control. Proroguing Parliament does not flout parliamentary sovereignty; the exercise of the prerogative should be challenged by political action not litigation”². He has also written in The Daily Mail: “The Government has always had the power to prorogue Parliament and it has never been for the courts to control how this power is exercised. That has always been a job for Parliament and, in the end, the people. The Court’s judgment is final and the Government has to accept this. But the Court’s reasons for its judgment are not convincing. Not so long ago, it would have been unthinkable for the courts to consider whether the power to prorogue Parliament had been misused. They would simply have said that this was not a legal question for them to decide”³.

    One possible outcome of following standard procedure is a General Election. The Opposition may come up with alternative explanations (smokescreens) for their behaviour, but the suspicion is that they are terrified that, in the event of an immediate General Election, which is what Johnson has called for, a combination of the Conservatives under Boris Johnson and the Brexit Party under Nigel Farage might obtain a majority. This would prevent them from their avowed objective of keeping us in the EU, thus undemocratically overturning the result of the 2016 referendum.

    Instead of following precedent, therefore, they chose a judicial review, and sought help from the courts. The case eventually reached the Supreme Court, which judged that the Government’s motivation was to prevent Parliament from having its say at this critical time. This is probably true; the Government was trying to get away with this trick. The Court therefore decided that Parliament should not have been prorogued. But did the Government act unlawfully or illegally? I repeat my earlier question, which law or precedent has been broken? On the contrary, it would seem that the Supreme Court has merely established a new precedent (law?), which the Government is therefore obliged, and has agreed to follow. In confirmation of this, even arch-Remainer Kenneth Clarke MP, interviewed on Sky News on September 26th, agreed that this was a “new law”. So how can it be said that the Government has acted unlawfully when it has broken no existing law? Would it not have been better, and less dramatic, to say that they had acted inappropriately?

    On a slightly different tack, it would seem that the unelected Supreme Court is now making the laws, and setting constitutional precedent, rather than the democratically elected Parliament. Is this not a dangerous development?

    (I would be grateful for responses, more information, if anyone thinks I’ve got this wrong. Please use the contact form.)

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Footnotes:

1. https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1172119/Brexit-news-Gina-Miller-Lord-Sumption-John-Major-prorogue-parliament-today-UK

2. Source for quote: https://policyexchange.org.uk/publication/parliamentary-sovereignty-and-the-politics-of-prorogation/ A pdf of the paper can be downloaded from there.

3. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7501071/Oxford-professor-RICHARD-EKINS-locks-horns-PETER-OBORNE-Supreme-Courts-verdict.html

    This article will be of interest primarily to people in the UK. I hope some of our friends elsewhere will also be interested.

    SDP stands for the Social Democratic Party. It was formed in 1981 as a breakaway movement from the Labour Party, which had moved significantly to the Left under the leadership of Michael Foot. It didn’t do very well electorally, and eventually joined forces with the Liberal Party, which renamed itself the Liberal Democrat Party. I thought therefore, I assume like many other people, that it no longer existed — I hadn’t noticed it fielding candidates in any elections. So I was surprised, when attending a recent meeting of Leavers of Britain¹, to discover that it’s still going. Its leader William Clouston and Patrick O’Flynn, a candidate in the forthcoming European elections, both spoke there. I was immediately interested, had a brief chat with Mr. Clouston, took his card and a copy of the party’s New Declaration².

    I’ve written articles previously on various relevant themes:

• the need, from a spiritual perspective, for centrist politics³
• the Earth as a living being, thus a superorganism, and the need for humans to recognise that they are participants in the process of its awakening⁴
• why the European Union, while appearing to be moving in the direction of integration, thus the superorganism, is not the answer, and why instead we should remain independent, sovereign nations, obviously cooperating and being on friendly terms with others like us⁵

    The SDP has no stated spiritual perspective or agenda. It is interesting, therefore, that on many issues it is in agreement with much of what I’ve written. For example, it is a breath of fresh air to find a centre party coming out so strongly against the European Union. Brexiteers on the whole tend to be on the right of the Conservative Party, or to the left of Labour, or even further to the hard left. The centrist groupings — moderate Labour and Conservative MPs, the Liberal Democrats, and the new breakaway Independent Group, otherwise known as Change UK, and subsequently The Independent Group for Change (following threatened legal action)  — are all dedicated Remainers. Here, however, is the SDP’s position on the European Union:

    “We consider the nation-state to be the upper limit of democracy. Along with the family, we regard it as indispensable to the solidarity and concern for our fellow citizens. We regard supranationalism as a neoliberal ideology aimed at neutering domestic politics and placing the most important issues beyond the reach of ordinary voters. The European Union or any other supranational entity is not — and will never be — a social democratic enterprise”.

    Well said! However, I’m not in complete agreement with everything they say on this issue. I’ll discuss this further, and some of the SDP’s other policies in future articles.

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    SDP (for the benefit of those outside the UK) stands for the Social Democratic Party. It was formed in 1981 as a breakaway movement from the Labour Party, which had moved significantly to the Left under the leadership of Michael Foot. It didn’t do very well electorally, and eventually joined forces with the Liberal Party, which renamed itself the Liberal Democrat Party. I thought therefore, I assume like many other people, that it no longer existed — I hadn’t noticed it fielding candidates in any elections. So I was surprised, when attending a recent meeting of Leavers of Britain¹, to discover that it’s still going. Its leader William Clouston and Patrick O’Flynn, a candidate in the forthcoming European elections, both spoke there. I was immediately interested, had a brief chat with Mr. Clouston, took his card and a copy of the party’s New Declaration².

    I’ve written articles previously on various relevant themes:

• the need, from a spiritual perspective, for centrist politics³
• the Earth as a living being, thus a superorganism, and the need for humans to recognise that they are participants in the process of its awakening⁴
• why the European Union, while appearing to be moving in the direction of integration, thus the superorganism, is not the answer, and why instead we should remain independent, sovereign nations, obviously cooperating and being on friendly terms with others like us⁵

    The SDP has no stated spiritual perspective or agenda. It is interesting, therefore, that on many issues it is in agreement with much of what I’ve written. For example, it is a breath of fresh air to find a centre party coming out so strongly against the European Union. Brexiteers on the whole tend to be on the right of the Conservative Party, or to the left of Labour, or even further to the hard left. The centrist groupings — moderate Labour and Conservative MPs, the Liberal Democrats, and the new breakaway Independent Group, otherwise known as Change UK — are all dedicated Remainers. Here, however, is the SDP’s position on the European Union:

    “We consider the nation-state to be the upper limit of democracy. Along with the family, we regard it as indispensable to the solidarity and concern for our fellow citizens. We regard supranationalism as a neoliberal ideology aimed at neutering domestic politics and placing the most important issues beyond the reach of ordinary voters. The European Union or any other supranational entity is not — and will never be — a social democratic enterprise”.

    Well said! However, I’m not in complete agreement with everything they say on this issue. I’ll discuss this further, and some of the SDP’s other policies in future articles.

Footnotes:

1. Check them out at https://leaversofbritain.co.uk/
2. This can be found at https://sdp.org.uk/
3. Politics from a Taoist Perspective and Politics from the Centre
4. The Superorganism, a Challenge to Materialist Science, Is the Earth a Superorganism?, and Humanity as Part of the Superorganism. There is also a blogpost following on from all of those: The Earth as a Superorganism – Further Thoughts.
5. The Superorganism Question and the European Union and A Vision for a Spiritual United Kingdom Outside the European Union

    In a speech at the current Conservative party conference, British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has compared the European Union to the former Soviet Union. He also mentioned the word ‘prison’. Having been criticised by various figures within the European Commission, it has been reported today in various media outlets that he has backtracked somewhat.

    It is interesting, therefore, that former president of the USSR, Mikhail Gorbachev, once said: “The most puzzling development in politics during the last decade is the apparent determination of Western European leaders to re-create the Soviet Union in Western Europe”. You would think he was in a better position than most other people to judge. So what exactly did he mean?

    I don’t think that Jeremy Hunt was suggesting anything along the lines of the murder of citizens, or forced labour camps. So what was he actually talking about? Perhaps something along these lines.

    I’ll describe a hypothetical political system. It’s a one-party state, where there is no official opposition, therefore anti-democratic, where laws are decided behind closed doors by unelected, unaccountable officials, where the media are controlled, and where no opposition, no attempt to change the system, or criticism is tolerated. Now, is that a description of the former USSR (and other similar Communist states), or is it a description of the European Union? (Or is it both?)

    Let’s look at the EU’s record on such issues:

    Is the EU a One-Party State?

• No vote of the people in Europe can remove the unelected leaders of the EU; they are chosen from within their own closed group, which is not elected by the people.
• The Council of Ministers makes the decisions, but it meets in secret, with no public record of its proceedings or votes. The parliament to which the people elects MEPs is not allowed to suggest any laws, it is merely advisory. The three party groupings there tend to vote in agreement; they therefore resemble a single pro-EU party, merely endorsing the decisions of the Council of Ministers, rather than being a scrutinising and challenging opposition.
• Inside the EU, we have to accept their policies and laws, no matter which party forms our government.
• The European Union has a fixed political and economic agenda, which (they say) cannot be changed, even though it was put into place by unelected, unaccountable, officials. German finance minister Wolfgang Schäuble said in 2015: “Elections cannot be allowed to change economic policy”. (One wonders therefore why Jeremy Corbyn endorsed a Remain vote in the 2016 referendum, since he wants a complete change of economic policy in Britain.) Various figures, from Angela Merkel downwards, have stated that the EU cannot be changed or reformed.
• Petitions put forward by the public under the Citizens’ Initiative are ignored.

    Press Freedom:

    European justice commissioner Vera Jourova made a speech at the Fundamental Rights Forum in Vienna. She criticised two British newspapers for their hostility to the EU, arguing that “the media’s job in holding the powerful to account should be balanced with a responsibility to avoid encouraging hate”. She did not seem to be including the ranting and raving of Remainers who have branded Brexit voters as ignorant racists and nationalists, and silly out-of-touch elderly people.

    What was she advocating? A “European approach to media based on quality and smart regulation, if needed”. By ‘European’, she of course meant ‘European Union’; most European people prefer free speech.

    Commissioner Jourova grew up in a USSR dominated regime, Czechoslovakia, and said: “I lived in a totalitarian regime where there was only one right ideology, only one right government and only one allowed discourse. Minorities did not exist, diversity of views and opinions were not respected. People did not dare to speak up”. Now she is suggesting that newspapers should not be allowed to criticise the European Union! If they do, they might be “regulated”.

    To sum up, Giles Merritt, founder of Friends of Europe (a pro-EU think-tank!), said that the EU’s institutions are “distant, remote, inscrutable, politically unanswerable, untouched by the new austerity, and seemingly indifferent to criticism” (1).

    As I said at the beginning, Jeremy Hunt used the word ‘prison’ in his speech. Anyone who doesn’t think that the EU is a prison should note the great difficulty the United Kingdom is experiencing trying to escape.

 

UPDATE

    As stated above, It was reported that Jeremy Hunt had compared the EU to the Soviet Union. What he was actually talking about was the apparent desire of the EU to punish those who want to leave: “It is the Soviet Union that prevents people from leaving. The lesson from history is clear: if you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish, it will grow — and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape”.

    The EU has responded as one might predict, completely missing the point. Various spokespeople have called Hunt’s comment insulting, and referred to repression, violence against citizens etc. Manfred Weber MEP is a typical example: “Show us the gulag… Show us the stasi system… You should apologise”. A more significant figure is Donald Tusk: “The Soviet Union was about prisons and gulags, borders and walls, violence against citizens and neighbours. The European Union is about freedom and human rights, prosperity and peace, life without fear; it is about democracy and pluralism, a continent without internal borders and walls. As the president of the European Council, and someone who spent half of my life in the Soviet bloc, I know what I am talking about”.

    As suggested above, Jeremy Hunt was not talking about gulags and violence. This is again completely obvious from the quote. Perhaps these people should actually listen to what has been said before criticising.

    If Donald Tusk thinks that the European Union is about prosperity, I suggest that many millions of people across Europe would disagree with him. If he thinks that the European Union is about democracy, then I don’t know how to help him. The whole purpose of the EU is to create a federal state, which gets rid of national sovereignty and democracy (ordinary people voting for what they want), replacing them with remote, unelected officials accountable to nobody. (Does that sound at all like the USSR? I have gone into more detail above.) 

    As Mick Hume says: “Every serious politician and thinker in the Western world will declare their support for democracy in principle. Yet in practice the authorities are seeking to limit democratic decision-making and separate power from the people” (2). And it’s not just the Western world. The official title of North Korea is the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Perhaps it’s better not to listen to what people say, rather watch how they behave.

    If the European Union is as Donald Tusk describes it, why on earth would any sensible person want to leave? 17 million people in the United Kingdom must presumably in his eyes all be racists, unreasonable nationalists, and silly old people. This is what the Remain side claims, but is obviously untrue. Perhaps he should take a good look in the mirror, and address the issue that Jeremy Hunt was really talking about.

 

Bibliography (for the first part):

Brexit: The Road to Freedom, Will Podmore, i2i Publishing, 2018

https://www.spiked-online.com/2018/09/26/now-the-eu-wants-to-turn-off-the-sun/

 

Footnotes:

(1) Slippery Slope: Europe’s Troubled Future, OUP, 2016, p15. The think-tank is pro-EU, but apparently trying to reform it. “Friends of Europe is a leading think tank that connects people, stimulates debate and triggers change to create a more inclusive, sustainable and forward-looking Europe”. (They are perhaps wasting their time and should take note of the statements coming from within the EU.) Good luck! (https://www.friendsofeurope.org/about-us/about-us)

(2) Revolting! How the Establishment Are Undermining Democracy and What They’re Afraid of, William Collins, 2017, p1

    The EU is already authoritarian, imposing its vision and removing national sovereignty. It is therefore reasonable to ask where this will lead to, if their proposed union is achieved. Will all countries be instructed what to teach in schools and universities? Does that idea seem ludicrous to you? If so, read on.
    From a spiritual perspective, a matter of serious concern is that there is an attempt by the Council of Europe to impose its worldview upon citizens. I quote an article by Casey Luskin of America’s Discovery Institute from 2007 (1):
    “A hallmark of tyranny is when leaders believe they are so correct that they have the right to criminalize dissent. The Council of Europe claims to be a leading ‘human rights’ body in Europe, but last June its ‘Committee on Culture, Science and Education’ issued a report proposing a ban on intelligent design (ID) in science classrooms, suggesting ID may pose a ‘threat to human rights’… (A European Center for Law and Justice Memo) observes that the Council of Europe’s own Parliamentary Assembly has stated, ‘History has proven that violations of academic freedom . . . have always resulted in intellectual relapse, and consequently in social and economic stagnation,’ and that the European Court of Human Rights has held that ‘pluralism, tolerance and broadmindedness’ are requirements for democratic society. The Council of Europe’s ‘Committee on Culture, Science and Education’ apparently eschews these values when it comes to ID. Indeed, the Committee Report treats Darwinian evolution like a religious dogma, where “doubt” must be prevented through thought-control: The Committee Report asserts ‘there is absolutely no doubt that evolution is a central theory for our understanding of the Universe and of life on Earth’ and thus ID must be ‘combated’ because ‘it is necessary to avoid doubt entering individuals minds’ regarding evolution. The Council of Europe claims to “protect human rights (and) pluralist democracy,” yet the ECLJ Memo makes a powerful argument that it is the Committee Report that threatens the values of free society”.

    The Council of Europe is not the same organisation as the European Union but, at the very least, it is part of something which might loosely be called the ongoing European project. Why should the European (economic and political) project be concerned about what is taught in schools and universities? This is not a debate about the truth or otherwise of Darwinian evolution, Intelligent Design, or even Creationism; it is obviously about the suppression of any legitimate, intelligent debate in matters of science, equivalent to the medieval Catholic Church’s suppression of “heresies”. As Luskin convincingly argues, the Council is flagrantly ignoring its own stated ideals (2).

 

Footnotes:
(1) European Darwinists Attempt to Criminalize Intelligent Design as a “Threat to Human Rights”, https://www.evolutionnews.org/2007/08/european_darwinists_attempt_to/
(2) This article is obviously focusing on the European situation. However, it is interesting to note that something similar is happening in the USA – see https://evolutionnews.org/2018/04/acceptance-is-my-goal-reporter-spills-the-beans-on-true-goals-of-evolution-education/

“From resistance fighters to lawyers, the founding fathers were a diverse group of people who held the same ideals: a peaceful, united and prosperous Europe” (1).

    Sounds great, doesn’t it? Also, as discussed in an earlier post, even such a longstanding critic of the EU as Jeremy Corbyn chose to campaign to remain in it, despite its faults. I’ll repeat the reasons he offered for his conversion:

• benefits for workers – jobs, pay, employment rights, investment, health and safety, freedom of movement
• consumer rights, protecting consumers from rip-off charges
• rights for disabled people
• cooperation on environmental issues (climate change, beaches, and air pollution), cyber-crime and terrorism, and the refugee problem.

    Another benefit, it is argued, would be the ease of trade for businesses within the Single Market and Customs Union.
    Given these policies, it would be reasonable to describe the EU as “compassionate conservativism” or perhaps “compassionate capitalism” which, in my worldview, is a desirable objective of centre politics.

    So, two interesting, related questions are:
    1) Is this real, or is it just an appearance? I have heard a stockbroker on the radio call the phrase “sentimental capitalism” an oxymoron, so why do we have an overtly capitalist, free market system trying to be so sympathetic to worker’s rights? Is the EU genuinely altruistic, or are we being brainwashed, and sucked into something unpleasant, with the policies above being used as bribes, to draw us in?
    2) Does the EU really benefit everybody, or is it just the business community and the rich?

    Addressing the first question, it is worth noting that conspiracy theorists see the European Union as part of a global project of One World Government (a New World Order), the ultimate goal of which is a totalitarian system (something along the lines of George Orwell’s 1984). I do not propose to discuss that idea here – there is plenty of material available on the internet for anyone not familiar with the idea. However, one does not have to go that far to want to reject the EU; it is enough to note its opposition to democracy and national sovereignty, and the lies that it tells (as outlined in my previous post), which suggest that it, at the very least, has tendencies in that direction. Furthermore, even if its motives are honourable, it is still trying to achieve them by the wrong means (that will be the focus of my next article).

    Turning now to the second question, as a generalisation, it was the working class who voted Leave, and this seemed to be the decisive factor in swinging the vote. If the EU really benefits workers in the way that Jeremy Corbyn suggested, surely they would have voted to remain. So why did they do it? The philosopher Roger Scruton has offered a persuasive analysis (2), which I’ll summarise here.
    He said that prosperity has increased for many, but not for all, and sometimes entire lives have been blighted, turned upside down. He mentioned cheap imports, and low cost migrant workers as contributory factors. At the time of the referendum, the long history of neglect (Brexit) voters had suffered was largely ignored. (There was therefore an indifference towards the working class, the version of capitalism we are more familiar with in leftish critiques.) The referendum gave them, rather than anonymous bureaucrats, a voice. Metropolitan élites would happily discard such people, in the way that the Labour party, in the discussions over the referendum, seemed happy to discard the indigenous working class, and to speak for the liberal middle-class residents of Islington rather than the struggling factory workers of our northern cities. He said that we must work to include these people, and this was not done by the EU. Instead of taking all this into account, and trying to do something about it, Remainers chose instead to insult Leave voters, saying that their rejection of the EU could only be irrational : “Weak-minded and prejudiced, the ignorant masses rejected the guidance of their more rational rulers, and embraced folly and delusion”.

    Let’s have a look at the figure of Gina Miller. She came to public attention following the referendum when she won a court case against the British government over its authority to implement Brexit without approval from Parliament. She had said that the Brexit vote made her feel physically sick, although one report even said that she was physically sick as she tried to take in what the UK had voted for (3).
    According to an article by John Chapman in the Daily Express, she is an investment fund manager who lives a gilded millionaire lifestyle, having co-founded the investment firm SCM Private, which has a reported £100million in its portfolios. She is married to a millionaire financier known as “Mr Hedge Fund”. She leads a life of privilege, and home for her is a £7million townhouse in Chelsea, west London (4).
    She would seem to be exactly the sort of person Roger Scruton was talking about. Why wouldn’t a millionaire businesswoman want to remain in the European Union? Why exactly did she feel physically sick? Was it through empathy with European workers given what they might lose, or was it the thought that perhaps her business might not be quite so successful?

    The great thing about democracy is that the vote of an unemployed working class person counts the same as that of a privileged millionairess.

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Update July 8th 2018:

    It seems as though my suspicions were correct! Private Eye magazine (5) reports the following: “A foot-in-mouth moment for hedge fund manager Gina Miller as she addressed the ‘People’s Vote’ march against Brexit in Parliament Square last Saturday. Squinting at her text, the investor thundered: ‘It’s about our shares!’ to a baffled audience and an awkward silence, before correcting herself: ‘Er, shared future.’ ”

Quite a Freudian slip!

 

Footnotes:
(1) https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history/founding-fathers_en
(2) BBC Radio 4, Point of View, July 13th 2016
(3) https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/one-woman-s-lonely-battle-to-prevent-a-rush-for-the-brexit-sm530ksft
(4) https://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/728603/Gina-Miller-bid-scupper-EU-vote-Brexit-physically-sick (5) issue 1473, 29/6 – 12/7/2018, p6

 

(For the benefit of non-British readers, Remoaners is a term we use to describe people who voted Remain, and who now cannot stop whinging and complaining because they didn’t get what they wanted.)

    Since the referendum on June 23rd 2016 the Remain side has behaved very badly, telling lies and issuing various insults. The most significant “lie” is that the Leave side lied to the electorate, the implication being that if we had been told the “truth”, we would have voted Remain. We should therefore have a second referendum, so that the “correct” decision can be implemented.
    The most quoted “lie” was the one on the side of the Brexit campaign bus, that leaving the EU would free up £350 million a week for the National Health Service. Without wishing to offend those who believed this and therefore voted Leave, this was not very sensible thinking. The Leave campaign was not a political party; it would not hold office following the referendum, and would not be responsible for implementing the nation’s economic policy. It is possible to argue about the actual figure, but the only sensible interpretation would have been that this amount would have been available to the sitting government to spend how it chose, some or all of which could have been for the NHS. So this “lie” should never have been believed. This “lie”, however, pales into insignificance compared with the lies told by the Remain side. Some heavyweight figures were enlisted to argue for the Remain case: Barack Obama, Christine Lagarde (Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund), Mark Carney (Governor of the Bank of England). There were predictions of financial meltdown/apocalypse, the most significant of which was that, if Britain voted Leave, an immediate emergency budget would be required! This was all part of something called by Leavers “project fear”. Despite these predictions/threats, which they were fully aware of, the people still decided to vote Leave. Immediately after the result was declared, an announcement was made that there was no need for this emergency budget! So what was that if not an enormous lie? The predicted financial apocalypse also did not materialise.

    This is not exactly a lie, but we are told that the European Union has guaranteed peace in Europe, for example: “Without their (the visionary leaders’) energy and motivation we would not be living in the sphere of peace and stability that we take for granted” (1). It is true that in Europe we are living in an era of peace and stability, but can anyone suggest one war that would have been fought in Europe since 1945 if the EU did not exist?

    Remainers now say that negotiating withdrawal is so complicated that, if we had known this in advance, we would probably have been more likely to vote Remain. This may be true for some people, but we should always have known that it was going to be difficult; it was obvious that the EU, given that they always ignore democratic votes (as explained in a previous post), were always going to fight. The way of avoiding this problem would have been to give the people a right to vote about joining in the first place; then we might never have been in the current situation.

    Another dodgy Remainer argument is that we should have a second referendum on the eventual deal, the choice being to accept the deal, or remain in the EU. This is obviously a tactic designed to overturn the original referendum, therefore undemocratic. This tactic mimics the behaviour of the EU which, when defeated, calls for the vote to be repeated, so as to give the people a chance to “correct” their mistake. The EU distrusts and is contemptuous of the people; it is not surprising that the feeling is mutual.
    We have already voted to leave. If there is to be a further referendum, the choice would have to be, accept the deal, or leave with no deal. If the other option were contemplated, it would give the EU the incentive to give us the worst deal possible.

    Another Remainer strategy to reverse the decision is to say that the electorate did not know what type of Brexit (hard or soft) we were voting for, the question on the paper being a simple yes/no. This is also said to justify a second referendum on the deal. Anyone who was following the debate in the media should not have been confused, however, since several politicians said that voting to leave the EU would imply a hard Brexit (leaving the Single Market and Customs Union).

    Let’s have a look now at the insults:

• The idea was put around by the losing Remainers that the Leave voters were too stupid to understand the issues, and that referendums shouldn’t happen, because some decisions are far too important to be trusted to the people, and should be left to experts. The word “Populist” has in recent times become widely used. I thought it meant “of the people”, so nothing wrong with that. However, it now seems to mean something more pejorative, something like “of the people, therefore stupid”.
• The second insult was that Leave voters were on the whole old (with the implication that they were conservative and reactionary), that they would die relatively soon, and were therefore ruining the lives of the young who voted to remain.
• The third insult was that Leave voters were racist and/or nationalist bigots.

    These three insults were combined in an extraordinary quote from the Liberal Democrat leader Sir Vince Cable, who said at the party’s Spring conference that Brexit was driven by the “white nostalgia” of the elderly, a longing for “a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink”.

    In the past I have had a lot of time for Cable, a very decent man, and his opinions, but this is condescending, patronising and arrogant. I am not in favour of trading insults, since it is hard to see how that can be helpful, but I’ll imagine an insult that Leavers might come up with in response: Remainers have contempt for the electorate, have no interest in democracy and national sovereignty, and are therefore like sheep who are willing to fall in line with anything this authoritarian organisation wants. They have been brainwashed by the EU, and are too stupid to have noticed this, and have relied on the votes of naïve, over-idealistic young people; perhaps older people have more sense.
    He and fellow Remainers would be outraged if Leavers started talking like this; everybody is entitled to their own opinion. Are they suggesting that young peoples’ votes should count double? It would therefore make sense to look at these issues more sensibly, instead of trading insults. The result of the referendum was close, but we live in a democracy, and have opted, for better or worse, for a first-past-the-post system as recently as a referendum in 2011. So the Remoaners, quite simply, should just get over it. We don’t have a second General Election if the result is close, unless one of the party leaders feels the need. The voters for the losing side just have to get on with their lives. Remainers should do the same.
    It would be foolish to deny that some of the Leave voters were motivated by racism and nationalism. This is regrettable, and I am personally uncomfortable that I had to vote alongside them, and possibly needed their votes in order to win. Such sentiments, however, also have a more positive side; these are called patriotism and love of one’s country, which are usually held in high esteem.

 

 

Footnote:
(1)  https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/history/founding-fathers_en

    In my previous article I outlined some of the reasons offered as to why it might seem desirable to remain within the European Union. Everyone is entitled to their opinion, of course, but let us consider exactly what it is that these enthusiastic Remainers are in favour of.

1. The European Union is profoundly anti-democratic, and this on two counts:

    Firstly, its stated goal of political integration demonstrates that its aim is to dispose of national sovereignty, and transfer power to unelected EU officials.
    In Britain we have recently celebrated the hundredth anniversary of women getting the vote. Having a vote is the central plank of any democracy, which includes the ability to get rid of politicians we don’t like. As far as I am aware, there has never been any suggestion that there should be a popular vote on the election of an EU president, or any other high-ranking official. Frequently stated goals are to have a common foreign policy and to create a European army. This presumably means that countries would be expected to supply soldiers, but would have no say in when and how they were deployed; instead they would be controlled by an unelected EU Foreign or Defence minister. It is hard to see how this could be acceptable to the British Parliament or people, and presumably other nations as well.

    Secondly, in an attempt to appear democratic, the EU says, or at least used to say, that certain decisions have to be unanimous amongst all members before being implemented. In practice, however, this did not happen.
    If we look at the history of the EU, there have been various significant votes. The first was when Denmark rejected the Maastricht treaty, which had transformed the European Economic Community (Common Market) into the European Union. In theory, that should have been the end of the matter, but instead the EU came up with the Edinburgh agreement, which granted the Danes four exemptions. In due course there was another referendum, in which they voted in favour of the treaty.
    There was the same story in 2001 when Ireland rejected the Treaty of Nice in a referendum. Two significant qualifications were added and, following a massive campaign by the Establishment, the electorate were persuaded to accept the Treaty in a second referendum.
    Later there was a proposal to adopt a European constitution, which would require unanimous acceptance. France and Holland both called a referendum on the issue, and voted against. Apparently President Chirac was expecting an easy victory, but instead a No vote was returned. Again, this should have been the end of the matter, but the EU’s solution was to propose a treaty instead of a constitution, which would not require the same degree of popular acceptance; it only needed to be signed by elected politicians. Thus the Lisbon Treaty was conceived. I cannot remember any pundit or commentator who at the time could find any significant difference between this and the previously proposed constitution; it was even nicknamed the “constitreaty”. As the Financial Times noted: “French and Dutch No votes in 2005 on the constitutional treaty were essentially ignored; the document resurfaced two years later as the Treaty of Lisbon” (my italics) (1).
    It seems clear, therefore, that the purpose of this Treaty was to bypass any inconvenient popular votes which rejected it when it was called a constitution. A significant feature of this treaty was a move from unanimity to qualified majority voting. The EU had obviously learnt their lesson!
    Also interesting is the case of Sweden, which joined the European Union in 1995. Its accession treaty subsequently obliged it to adopt the euro when it complied with all the criteria for convergence. However, in a referendum in September 2003 the electorate rejected joining the euro currency. The EU’s response was to accept the decision, which might appear democratic; you could also say that the EU will allow anything, even breaking the rules, if that ensures that countries remain inside.
    It seems therefore that any time the people are actually asked to approve of the EU or its policies, they vote no. (The United Kingdom’s referendum vote was a further confirmation of this.) Does the EU care? Clearly not. It always finds a way to ignore the decision, and carries on with its scheme, indifferent to the expressed will of the populations of the countries concerned. If the European project is so wonderful, why don’t people vote in favour of it?

    2. The second problem with the EU, although clearly related to the first, is the lies, either that they tell, or that our politicians tell on their behalf. The most significant of these is that we are told, in Britain at least, that if there is to be a major change affecting our constitution, or involving a major transfer of powers to Brussels, then there will be a referendum. Yet this did not happen at the time of the Maastricht Treaty, nor at the time of the Lisbon Treaty (which, as mentioned above, was in itself an attempt to bypass the popular votes in France and Holland).
    A further lie was that we were told we were entering a trade agreement, the Common Market, also known as the European Economic Community (and this without a referendum, although there was a subsequent one, asking if we wished to remain). This was later turned into the European Union by the Maastricht Treaty, again without consulting the people in a referendum. Yet the intention from the outset was always political union, to create a United States of Europe (2), so why did we begin merely with this economic arrangement? The suspicion is that the people would have found the full package unacceptable, so that a preliminary step was considered necessary. It certainly appears that way. It is even debatable whether the EEC was a purely economic arrangement; it has been described as “a major stepping stone in the creation of the EU” (3).

    Following the referendum in 2016 the BBC invited five commentators to reflect upon the result and the EU (4). On July 13th it was the turn of the philosopher Roger Scruton. Here is a summary of his argument, which, if correct, shows how the powers that be were trying to introduce the European Union by the back door.
    He said that the Treaty of Rome, which established the EEC in 1957, did not guarantee sovereignty of its signatories; on the contrary it diminished it, with the ultimate aim of destroying it. It was a treaty against the nation state. Nations were not just surrendering the ability to tax goods crossing their borders, but surrendering borders too, also the right to make laws within them.
    The official story was that the Treaty of Rome sought to regulate trade and commerce between the nation states, but in subsidiary matters, where the application of the treaty was not in question, national governments would exercise full sovereign choice. The directives of the European Commission were claimed to be purely technical matters, governing the management of the internal market. He claimed that this story is entirely deceptive (thus another lie), since all laws can be seen as bearing upon trade between the nation states; the scope of the treaty was therefore unlimited. He thought that the promise of sovereignty in subsidiary matters was completely empty, for who decides which matters are subsidiary? In effect, there was subsidiarity only if the European Commission permitted it.
    He went on to say that the Commission is not elected and its legislation is neither publicly introduced, nor openly discussed. There is no organised opposition, no clear procedure for correcting mistakes, nor for rejecting those who make them. There is no way of rectifying these defects, since there is no we who can insist on another arrangement. All we can do is to get our governments to withdraw from the treaty.
He also addressed the issue of immigration within the EU. The rule of the Single Market is that there should be freedom of movement, which led to an unprecedented level of immigration, which was probably not foreseen originally. Now, however, there is no legal power to limit it, and no country can undo the provision, even if it is leading to a demographic catastrophe.

    Also interesting was an article around that time by commentator Rod Liddle (5). Here are some of his observations:
    “If we stay in the EU, we will be consigning ourselves to a future that, in political terms, resembles the old USSR: no dissent, no alternative point of view permitted. A supranational body run by authoritarian liberals. Now, there’s hyperbole for you – what seems, on the face of it, to be an exaggerated claim. Yet this is what the EU is doing right now, explicitly and brazenly. The unelected president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, has recently made it clear that any country that elects a right-of-centre populist government will be stripped of its rights to make decisions within the EU, and possibly subjected to a loss of income. He did not hint at this, he actually said it. If Austria had voted its Freedom party into power, it would have had its decision-making capacity within the EU removed.
    “The EU is currently applying the same sanctions to Poland, whose electorate had the impudence to elect a mildly socially conservative government. The Poles could face a total removal of their voting rights and economic sanctions – all for voting in the ‘wrong’ party. The European Commission gave itself these powers – to bully and ostracise countries that vote for policies that contravene Juncker’s own personal credo – back in 2014. This is not merely outrageous and scandalous, but genuinely worrying. No dissent allowed whatsoever from the socially liberal, fiscally conservative line. Because it is not only the right-wing populists who have incurred the wrath of Juncker and the rest of the commission. If you are Greek and vote for an anti-austerity left-wing socialist party, you will be bullied too. No dissent allowed. None”.
    I understand that some people of a liberal persuasion (I include myself) may think that all this is a good thing, and that right-of-centre tendencies should be opposed at all costs. I’ll discuss that question in a later article. For the moment, I’ll just say that the current authoritarianism is too high a price to pay, for who knows where it will lead next? Is the European Union really as liberal as it seems?

    I understand that the late Tony Benn, British Labour politician, had five essential questions for people of power. I’ll answer them from an EU perspective: 
    What power have you got? If not absolute power already, that’s your aim.
    Where did you get it from? Certainly not from the people.
    In whose interests do you use it? If in the interests of the people, they would support you. Presumably, therefore, you use it in the interests of the governing elite.
    To whom are you accountable? No one.
    How do we get rid of you? We can’t. We have to vote to leave your organisation, and then go through the nightmare of having to try to extricate ourselves.

    If the aims and ideals of the EU are such a good idea, why can’t they trust the people to vote for them, instead of bullying the people and imposing the ideals? I repeat some remarks from the opening of this article: in Britain we recently celebrated the 100th anniversary of women getting the vote (they had to fight, and one even died in well-known circumstances). Having the vote is deemed to be a fundamental principle of democracy. So why are so many people in favour of an organisation which is devoted to making the votes of individuals meaningless?
    An interesting example is the British Liberal Democrat Party, which is in love with, and totally uncritical about, this authoritarian organisation devoted to removing democracy. Is there some contradiction there? I have never heard any recent leader say a bad word about it – Paddy Ashdown, Nick Clegg, Tim Farron, Vince Cable, the latter openly campaigning for a second referendum, and insulting Leave voters (6). It is also reasonable to ask whether an imposed, authoritarian liberalism deserves to be called liberal.
    I’ll agree then with Roger Scruton, in the programme mentioned above, who said that the real reason for voting to leave the EU in the referendum was voting for the right to vote.

 

 

Footnotes:
(1) https://www.ft.com/content/030ea098-fd7b-11e5-b5f5-070dca6d0a0d
(2) The idea and the plans were in the air well before the Treaty of Rome in 1957. Check out
Altiero Spinelli and his vision of a unified Europe. The date of his manifesto was 1942. Also
Winston Churchill was calling for it after World War II. So it was already being planned behind the scenes!
(3) BBC Radio4, Point of View, July 11-15, 2016
(4) Sunday Times Magazine, June 12th 2016
(5) He told the party’s 2018 Spring conference that Brexit was driven by the white nostalgia of the elderly, a longing for “a world where passports were blue, faces were white and the map was coloured imperial pink”.

    As stated in the previous article, I’ll look here at the claimed advantages of being in the European Union. I’ll do this by examining the case of a surprise convert to the Remain cause.    

    On April 14th 2016 the Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn made a speech, recommending voting to remain in the European Union in the forthcoming referendum. Many political commentators were, to say the least, somewhat surprised by this, since he had been a longstanding critic of the EU. Here is a brief history (1):
    In 1975 he voted against remaining in the European Economic Community, the forerunner of the EU (2).
    In 1993 he spoke out against the Maastricht Treaty, which established the European Union, and moved towards political and economic union. He said then that it takes away from national parliaments the power to set economic policy, and hands it over to an unelected set of bankers, who will impose the economic policies of price stability, deflation and high unemployment throughout the European community. In 1996, he again expressed doubts about the lack of accountability: “We have a European bureaucracy, totally unaccountable to anybody, powers have gone from national parliaments. They haven’t gone to the European Parliament; they’ve gone to the Commission and to some extent to the Council of Ministers. These are quite serious matters”.
    In 2008, he voted against the Lisbon Treaty. He wrote the following year: “The project has always been to create a huge, free-market Europe, with ever-limiting powers for national parliaments, and an increasingly powerful, common foreign security policy”. He has also accused the EU of endorsing tax havens, and has said we should oppose it if this meant the imposition of free-market policies across Europe. It is therefore obvious that he has always perceived the EU to be a blatantly unapologetic capitalist organisation. Media commentators have suggested that his opposition to the EU was based upon his assumption that he would find it very difficult to implement the socialist society he desires in Britain while it remained in the EU. The quotes above support this view unequivocally.

    It was somewhat surprising, therefore, when he said in the speech mentioned at the beginning that there was “a strong socialist case for remaining” (although he also said that he wanted reform and progressive change). He said that we should remain in the EU “warts and all”. This was a somewhat remarkable conversion.
    Some members of his party nevertheless criticised him for offering apparently only lukewarm support during the referendum campaign. He dismissed these claims, yet every time he appeared on television endorsing the Remain campaign, he spoke in a dull, monotone voice, and always looked (to me) as though someone was holding a gun to his head. How can we explain all this?
    His party overwhelmingly wanted Britain to remain in. He is willing to oppose publicly his party on the question of nuclear weapons (Britain’s Trident programme), yet obviously feels, for whatever reason, unwilling to do the same on the question of the EU. Last year I was at a friend’s birthday party, where I was introduced to a senior person within the Fabian Society. I put this question to her (an enthusiastic Remainer). She appeared to agree with my suggestion that he was a reluctant Remainer, and her reply was “someone must have leant on him”. Given that he has a reputation for being “a man of principle”, someone who always speaks his mind, this would appear to be something of an understatement! There must have been some seriously heavy pressure put on him by some unnamed people. What was he afraid of? (3)

    Perhaps I am being unnecessarily suspicious of his motives. Instead let’s take his comments at face value. The reasons he offered for his conversion were:  

• benefits for workers – jobs, pay, employment rights, investment, health and safety, freedom of movement

• consumer rights, protecting consumers from rip-off charges

• rights for disabled people

• cooperation on environmental issues (climate change, beaches, and air pollution), cyber-crime and terrorism, and the refugee problem.

    All these are very reasonable objectives, and it would be hard to argue against them. None of this was new, however, all these items being on the EU agenda at the time when he was previously criticising it heavily. So none of this explains his conversion. I might also add that we do not need to be in the European Union to adopt such policies; we are quite capable of legislating for them ourselves. This leads to the suspicion that he wanted to remain in the EU in order to have these policies imposed from outside, because he could not foresee winning an election and implementing them himself, although he obviously could not admit this. (It is interesting that he did not mention the benefits for trade of being in the Single Market and the Customs Union, which are also frequently stated as advantages.)
    Another reason he gave was much more dubious, addressing the overweening power of global corporations and ensuring they pay fair taxes. This was a strange claim, given that he had previously accused the EU of supporting tax havens. I don’t know if he was right, but that was obviously his opinion. More interesting, however, is the suggestion that the current President, Jean-Claude Juncker, “spent years in his previous role as Luxembourg’s prime minister secretly blocking EU efforts to tackle tax avoidance by multinational corporations, leaked documents reveal” (4). So even if the EU were not supporting tax havens before, they now have someone in place who is sympathetic to the idea!

    His arguments then became weaker. He said that “there is a powerful socialist case for reform and progressive change in Europe”, and that “change can only come from working with our allies in the EU. It’s perfectly possible to be critical and still be convinced we need to remain a member”. He went on to talk about the need for more accountability, economic and labour market reforms in a real social Europe. (Was he afraid to say “socialist”?)
    So Jeremy Corbyn thinks that Britain could remain in the EU and persuade it to convert to Socialism?  I suggest that this optimism is bizarre and naïve. He obviously did not learn from the experience of Prime Minister David Cameron who had been campaigning on the idea of remaining within a reformed European Union. He had clocked up many airmiles travelling around Europe, trying to obtain concessions from various leaders. If the EU had really wanted us to remain, you would have thought they would have offered him something meaningful which he could have taken back and offered to the British electorate. Instead they left him in the embarrassing position of having to try to sound enthusiastic about almost nothing. The headline “concession” was that Britain would never have to join the Euro. But nobody around that time had even suggested that this was on the agenda; it was therefore something of a dead issue.
    So why did Jeremy Corbyn think he was single-handedly going to persuade the EU to reform on issues of democratic accountability? One of the EU’s raisons d’être is actually to remove national sovereignty, thus democratic accountability, as he himself had previously stated with great clarity. I’ll address that topic in my next article.

 

  Footnotes:
(1) Source for much of what follows BBC Radio4, World at One, April 14th 2016
(2) The programme said “not to join”, but I assume this was a mistake, since Britain was already a member, and the referendum was about whether to remain or not.                                                                          (3)  Interestingly, the day after I uploaded this post the well-known political satirist Jonathan Pie (real name Tom Walker) was interviewed on BBC radio5 by Adrian Chiles. They agreed that Corbyn could be trusted to say what he thinks. Walker then added that the one thing that he didn’t believe was that Corbyn was a Remainer.                                                                                                                                                    (4) www.theguardian.com/business/2017/jan/01/jean-claude-juncker-blocked-eu-curbs-on-tax-avoidance-cables-show