Britain's Constitutional Crisis.

Six years ago as the first details of the EU draft constitution began to appear it was even more obvious to me than ever that a huge democracy destroying tsunami was about to engulf Britain. From the summer of 2003 I started posting these concerns on my blog Ironies. I have been planning to repeat some of those postings on this blog as the daily six year anniversaries come around. In preparing which might still be pertinent and which irrelevant, which links still work and which do not etc., it has struck me how deep the conspiracy against the British people has gone and how this is the factor for which we should today hold 'our' MPs most culpable. Any reader may find all the original postings in the archives of the Ironies blog, but ahead of the first look-back entry I am going to quote in full this insightful observation, so apt in today's crisis, that appeared on an American blog USS Clueless, which sums up our continuing democratic crisis very precisely. I linked to this on 26 May 2003 and I will be repeating that whole post here on that anniversary but not this link. I have placed in bold what seems to me particularly significant: For an American like me, who is used to having an explicit Constitution which clearly spells out the powers of government and the limitations on it and the procedures it must use in various kinds of activities, the British system has always seemed deeply worrying. Many of our rights are explicitly spelled out either in the Constitution or in critical Amendments which were ratified later, most particularly our right of free speech, free press and free assembly.

But the British have no such charter. The people of the UK have nearly as much liberty as we do, but it's always seemed more perilous. They have free speech, free press, free assembly, but they could lose it if Parliament passed certain laws. And indeed, there have been times when the press in the UK were subject to significant limits which would not be Constitutionally possible in the US.

The UK has now reached the point where it needs to make two critical decisions: whether to ditch Sterling and use the Euro for money, and whether to join the proposed United States of Europe and place itself under the new European Constitution.

If the US were considering such things, it's extremely clear what would be needed: constitutional amendments. If there were, for instance, a proposal to form some sort of Pan-American Union (with government in Brasilia) and the United States were considering whether to give up its sovereignty and to become part of a larger hemispheric meta-nation, then Congress and the President could not carry out such a thing merely by passing laws. They'd have to pass an amendment and propose it to the state legislatures, and three quarters of them would have to ratify it.

And that is as it should be. For a decision that big, that important, that critical, it should not be left to a small number of leaders to decide. We cannot permit 536 people to end the history of our nation. The real debate about it would take place in the individual states, where the state legislators are far closer to and more attuned to the opinions of individual voters. In a decision this momentous, the decision ultimately must be made by the voters themselves. There would not be any kind of national referendum about it as such; there's no constitutional provision for such a thing. But as a practical matter, the legislatures would express the will of the people of their states. That's always been the case in the amendment process.

And as a practical matter, there's not a snowball's chance in hell of such an amendment actually being ratified.

There's been continuity of government in the UK for a long time. How far back, exactly, it goes depends a lot on what you mean by "continuity". For example, some might claim it goes back to the Norman Conquest. Some might place it at the Magna Carta. Others who were less generous would point out that it would have to begin after the end of Cromwell's period. Indeed, it's arguable that the current form of government really only begins with Queen Victoria, because that's when the monarchs of the UK ceased to actually wield significant temporal power.

Likewise, who exactly would have been considered "British" varies at different times. The Welsh were pretty much conquered and integrated by the 15th century. The Scots, on the other hand, took a lot longer, and indeed maintain a degree of separation even today. For a long time the Irish were part of it, but never accepted that and ended up becoming independent again. Still, there was a feeling amongst the islanders that even with their mutual differences, they were apart from those grubby people on the Continent.

Now they're considering giving it all up, and Tony Blair wants to do the deed of ending hundreds of years of British independence and sovereignty with a procedure approximately the same as he would use to pass a traffic law: via an act of Parliament.

It's not going too far to say that this is the most mementous decision to face the English (and the rest of the British) since the Civil War, when Parliament made the deliberate decision to oppose their own monarch. In a sense, it's even greater than that one. The British are seriously considering giving up their independence and yielding the bulk of governmental power and control to a foreign capitol which will be dominated by people from other nations, who will have the constitutional power to impose laws and policies and regulations on the British even if the people of the former UK strongly disagree with them.

Former Prime Minister John Major writes in The Spectator that a decision this big cannot be made solely by Parliament, or even worse, by the Cabinet. I think that from a moral perspective he's right: this must be a decision which the people of the UK directly participate in. But under the British non-system, where the power of the government is whatever Parliament says it is, it is actually possible for Blair to terminate British independence and submit to foreign rule without any kind of extraordinary action.

In fact, if the decision were submitted to a plebiscite, right now the best guess is that it would be defeated. And indeed that seems to be Blair's primary reason for not wanting to submit it to such a referendum: the voters would get the wrong answer.

Which brings up another deep difference between them and us: we think of our elected representatives as leading us. They think of theirs as ruling them. Our representatives are expected to implement programs and policies which the majority of us would support; they think of their representatives as making decisions without really paying much attention to what the voters would want. Blair thinks that integration with Europe is important, and doesn't intend to let the fact that the majority of British voters disagree stand in his way.

This is not good, and on one level the difficulty that the British are facing in this situation is that they actually have no formal constitutional basis for making the meta-decision about just kind of political process would have to be used for a decision this big. In the US it would require an amendment, using the procedure for ratifying an amendment which we already know and understand; that aspect of it wouldn't even be controversial.

But in the UK now they're not only debating the question of whether they should ratify and become subject to the proposed European Constitution, but also debating the question of how they're even going to formally make that decision. And that's scary: it's actually a distinct possibility that a few hundred elected leaders might give away the nation, and voluntarily submit it to foreign rule.

Remember, this was linked from my blog six whole years ago and yet our foul and corrupt MPs just carried on fiddling their expenses and acting as if nothing was happening. Give away a nation, the author says in his last paragraph, written six years ago, that is what they have tried and almost now succeeded - scarier still - we have let them and allowed them to rob us and get rich in the process! Remember, many of us knew, blogged daily of the danger, tried to start new parties to tell the truth and were sabotaged by, among others, the BBC, acting as an agent of the filthy, treacherous, governing classes on the promise of a huge licence fee increase. Everything in Britain, including you, has been sold out by these people, do not believe for one moment it begins and ends with a few expense fiddles!