We are spectators as some settled precepts of democracy come unglued. It is happening in the two countries where you’d bet the farm it would not have happened. Might it be that old, comforting representative democracy is just town crier in a Twitter age?
There is not much to add about the US where the FBI — a handmaiden of the Dept of Justice branch of the executive — found no conflictions in publicising an implicit accusation about one of the two contenders for the highest executive office weeks before a cage fight of a Presidential election. To be fair, for an investigative body to have the information presented to it from the Weiner discoveries left it with an unenviable decision and little choice. Suppress it or expose it — either way it just looks partial. So I suppose there was a high road and that was to put it out there, come what may. You might not like it, but you’d like a whole lot less the road not travelled.
In the UK a subordinate twig of the judicial branch has ruled, against common sense and natural justice, that while the executive arm of government has an inalienable right to form international treaties, only its legislature has the right to revoke such treaties. Why? Because somehow a pants down treaty that seduced a country out of its sovereignty bestowed ‘rights’ on UK citizens — rights which were not in the gift of the so-called sovereign Parliament to give. Logic demands that he that giveth taketh away. Parliament never gave these rights, the EU did. Abrogation of the treaty that would remove these rights is still a Crown, not a Parliamentary power.
The ill thought-out judgement this week concedes that the treaty blindly entered into in 1972 to join the European Communities simply lit a fuse. That fuse has sputtered until a 12 starred blue flag flutters everywhere and Ode to Joy has become the continent’s Uber Alles. A ‘European Union’ burst forth, Alien-like from the chest of its host, the Common Market. The folks who signed that treaty never envisaged that the other signatory of the treaty would steal into its canon of domestic law; would usurp its Common Law principles, snap its sovereignty in twain and would declare itself supreme despite the plain fact that the signers of the treaty did not give them any such right so to do.
So the British Constitution beloved of Dicey, Coke and Burke exists no more. There was made an enormous de facto Constitutional Amendment in 1972, stealthily robbing a nation of its sovereignty by degrees and turning it into a satrapy.
And an election will not solve this dichotomy, while the judicial branch can pull rank on the previous settled will of Parliament which duly voted that a referendum should decide this matter and that the executive should implement that will.
And do you know what? When the self-styled ‘Supreme’ Court of England and Wales overturns its lower court’s dictat in December, the Remoaners will go crying to the real supreme court, The European Court of Justice, telling daddy how those nasty people over in England took their ball away. Expect Felines among the doves in the Spring…