Nick Clegg was shocked….SHOCKED…over Tory hints that, if they won the 2015 election outright they might seek to limit the power of the European Convention on Human Rights in Britain. He went into full outrageous outrage mode.
“The Conservatives, extraordinarily enough, want to line up with Vladimir Putin and other sort of tyrants around the world by tearing up our long tradition of human rights,” Clegg told Britain’s LBC radio station on Thursday.
The fact is, of course, that these Tory briefings are all smoke and mirrors to con the electorate into believing that Cameron II would be sweeping into Brussels dressed in a new mandate and clobbering all and sundry with his handbag if the electorate provided him with an overall majority. Anyone with even half a brain knows that in reality he would merely weasel his way into a carefully choreographed fudge that would be all show and no substance.
But that’s enough about the man described so accurately by George Walden as “a onetime PRman for ruthlessly profitable trash TV” – it’s the idiocy spouted by Clegg that sets the teeth on edge. What he is really saying is that Britain’s “long tradition of human rights” can only be buttressed by an assortment of lawyers/legal academics, several from jurisdictions still partly frosted with the icy crystals of Soviet “justice” (Azerbaijan, anyone?) and almost all of the rest emanating from countries whose legal systems reflect the Roman tradition of codified laws rather than the English Common Law based on precedent.
The admirable Janet Daley eviscerated the clegglet with just one thrust of her rapier.
Really? You mean Britain had no historical commitment to the rights of the individual before it became a signatory to this discredited document? And there was me thinking that our long-standing distinguished history as defenders of human rights was one of the reasons we had been involved in the original drafting of that Charter.
As Daniel Hannan reminded us at a time when the monarchies of Europe were successfully suffocating their own nascent representative institutions, the attempts by Charles I and his cohorts to do the same to the English Parliament by invoking the divine right of kings was finally broken in Yorkshire in the summer of 1644. The Battle of Marston Moor did not end the English Civil War between King and Parliament but it fatally weakened the Royalist forces.
That struggle in the 1640s was essentially a dispute about the nature of government and from whence came the authority that legitimised the instruments of government. While elsewhere in Europe there were clashes of arms over dynastic claims or religious dogma in England men were killing each other over the issue of the rule of law. What is not often appreciated is that the king’s opponents did not see themselves as revolutionaries setting up a new order but rather as traditionalists aiming to restore an ancient birthright.
Some of the men who won the day at Marston Moor would have pointed at Henry VIII’s break with Rome, others at Magna Carta. Yet others would have gone back still further, to the folkright of Anglo-Saxon common law that had constrained kings before 1066.
These were men like John Hampden who twice in his life was brought to court for refusing to pay taxes imposed by King Charles I because he claimed they had not been sanctioned by parliament and therefore violated Magna Carta. Hampden later became one of the leaders of the opposition to the king in the early years of the Long Parliament and, at the outbreak of civil war played an important role in the organisation of the parliamentary army. Like many fellow MPs he was willing to fight with gun and sword as well as with pen and in 1643 was mortally wounded during a skirmish against royalist forces, a year before Marston Moor, sealing his cause with his own blood.
As Hannan points out, although there were bumps along the way, after 1644 the Sovereignty of Parliament as the source of authority remained unchallenged for well over three hundred years until 1973 when the European Communities Act allowed EU law to override the legislation of parliament
For centuries the idea that our freedom was deeply embedded in our past was part of the warp and weft of the upbringing of each English generation. Today, however, that key aspect of our history is largely ignored which is why a dyed in the wool Europhile like Clegg can utter such baseless claptrap without fear of being defenestrated by crowd of angry patriots. So Hannan’s book “How We Invented Freedom & Why It Matters” is a must read for all UKIP members and supporters. It shows how our distrust of being ruled by unelected EU officials who can impose their will upon us by mere diktat echoes the unease felt by the John Hampdens of 17th century England when faced with Charles I’s assertion that he was higher than the law of the land.
No free man shall be seized or imprisoned, or stripped of his rights or possessions, or outlawed or exiled . nor will we proceed with force against him . except by the lawful judgement of his equals or by the law of the land. To no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice.
No priest, no king, no lord, no police officer, no faceless Brussels bureaucrat should feel empowered to ignore this ancient compact. Those glorious spine tingling words must be our inspiration as UKIP fights to break our EU chains and restore our traditional freedoms.
Photo by The British Library
I don’t know what is wrong with Nick Clegg but definitely a screw loose. However, what is wrong with the remaining Tories? They still seem to believe all Dave’s words on tough stances and referendums when on every single occasion so far he has failed to reign in the minutest point in British interests back from Europe, in fact it is getting worse by the day. Now birth certificates re to have EU headers instead of Royal crests so new British infants are immediately certificated as EU citizens not British. Where is the demand by Cameron for an immediate referendum under the promises made in the past that if there were major changes we would have a referendum…well having citizenships altered to that of another Country, the EU in this case, is rather a big step and must warrant a referendum under any article on the matter.
….”Where is the demand by Cameron for an immediate referendum under the
promises made in the past that if there were major changes we would have
a referendum”…
What is in the small print, is that all of these changes have been agreed and many that have not taken effect yet, from the Lisbon treaty, don’t count.
The European Act 2011, is not worth the paper it is printed on, as the Lisbon Treaty is self amending. No further treaties are required, and any changes tend to be incremental, small tranches, that add up to whole chunks over time. A process that has not changed in 42 years, adding to the Acquis Communautaire. The Government, whoever it is, Labour, Tory or Liberal are taking us for fools, because many are taken in with this ruse.
unfortunately here, I am preaching to the converted. The salami slicing of our sovereignty has continued unabated for decades. In some games there is a ‘Safe’ word. Our leaders haven’t called it yet and so we endure the torture and ultimate demise.
“That struggle in the 1640s was essentially a dispute about the nature of
government and from whence came the authority that legitimised the
instruments of government”…
Very interesting times the 17th Century, in the battle of wits between parliament, the royals and dictators in their different forms. Charles I, thought he could rule by devine right and thought himself above the law, where parliament was asserting itself to be the sole law maker. When Cromwell became Lord protector, he was probably worse than Charles I, during his time in office, behaving like another tyrant and dictator. Henry the VIII was such a despotic dictatorial king in the 16th Century. Anyone than cross him didn’t last long.
“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely”
People were starting to get their fill of despotic tyrants and different authorities trying to influence them from abroad, like the Pope and foreign monarchs and Princes.Lurching from protestant to Catholic to protestant beliefs, depending on who the King or Queen was. Loyalty to one belief, sometime fatal with a change at the top.
I have no idea where the concept came from, for a Constitutional Monarch, later in 1688. Perhaps it was like this before 1066, but events in the 17th Century helped to seperate the power of the monarchy from the executive. Some brilliant individuals crafted a contract with the new King William and Queen Mary, called the “Decleration of Rights”. Once on the Statutes, called the Bill of Rights 1688.
For the first time in years they now had a King and Queen who ruled, but its power was checked by parliament. It was Parliament that made the laws and the monarchy only had power to agree or not agree. It held the power, but could not exercise it.
It was also an assertion that no one is above the law, including parliament and the monarch. It is the law that is sovereign, not parliament and parliament needs to remember this.
There is now a belief, and I think it true, that anyone in government is now above the law. All seem to be immune to the most heinous crimes of paedophillia, High treason, Sedition, corruption, maybe even murder, yet any attempts to bring someone to book, is swept aside usually for the reason of” it’s not in the national interest”
The establishment all line up to protect each other, but there are exceptions.
They can be imprisoned for a speeding offences, or purgery or fiddling their expenses, but the more serious crimes, they are untouchable. They may even get a promotion to the Lords, but their crime is kept a secret until their death.
It is this feeling in the public perception, that parliament is above the law that will finally bring this system down with a revolution, if it is not seen to be within the law.
Let it be a peoples army of Kippers who change all that.
Vote UKIP
“While elsewhere in Europe there were clashes of arms over dynastic claims or
religious dogma in England men were killing each other over the issue of the
rule of law.”
And not very long afterwards the victor (Oliver Cromwell) set up his own dictatorship and went off to Ireland to continue his fight with the Royalists. And what were followers of an English King and an English dictator doing fighting in Ireland? The answer, of course, is that the English had been colonising Ireland for centuries and in recent years had sent large numbers of Protestants from England and Scotland to take the land of the native Irish, who happened to be strongly Catholic and this, in turn, was another factor which influenced the extreme Protestant, Cromwell. Like the French Revolution, the English Civil War started out as a war to gain Parliamentary rights but quickly descended into dictatorship. No wonder the English were desperate to invite Charles II to take over once Cromwell senior was dead.
As for Henry VIII’s ‘break with Rome’, I’m not sure what that has to do with human rights. All that did was increase the power of the monarchy. Henceforth, the King was in charge of both secular and religious matters in the country. And Henry VIII was no lover of civil liberties. Anyone who disagreed with his policies had their heads chopped off, as Thomas More and John Fisher (Bishop of Rochester) found out. They were the lucky ones. Less fortunate were the 18 Carthusian monks who were hanged, drawn and quartered.
I think that might be ‘hung drawn and quartered’. Hanged is the term that refers to death by hanging whereas the point of hanging as the first part of this executional process was extreme discomfort not death. Were the victim to have been hanged they would not be in a position to witness their own disembowelling. I suspect that many failed to survive that bit and the quartering was probably performed on a corpse in most cases. However, having never witnessed this process first hand I could be wrong.
If you want to see the hung, drawn and quartered process, watch the “Braveheart” ending. It’s the only film I’ve seen that shows a re-enactment of what used to happen. A Truly barbaric spectacle of extreme torture, meant to drive fear into the most hardened of individuals watching, for the crime of high treason.
Clegg and all the other spineless politicians want to hide behind the petticoats of the EU & US . It’s not only human rights that they do this – foreign policy, defence, environmental etc….As you point out our history and culture points to a “libertarian” and independent spirit which does not require any interference or influence. Yet, we continue to sleep walk our way to subjugation.