Civil Liberties - strike two for the coalition

While one realized that, like any new administration, the Conservative-LibDem coalition would be in the hands of permanent officials for the first year or so, it is still rather startling that the new government has already reneged on two manifesto commitments by BOTH parties.

The first is the retention of the NHS Summary Care Record (SCR), an unnecessary and extremely expensive data-collection and centralisation exercise implemented stealthily by the Labour regime, despite condemnation by its supposedly main beneficiaries, the physicians of the British Medical Association.

Now Home Secretary Teresa May has announced that the right of the black-clad police Praetorians to keep people in jail for 28 days without charge are to remain in force for at least another six months.

'At least' - yeah; we all know what that means.

That piece of totalitarian shit effectively abolished Habeas Corpus, the right of every prisoner to challenge the terms of his or her incarceration in court before a judge that most distinguishes Common Law from statist continental Statute Law.

Originally, a writ of Habeas Corpus was simply a subpoena. A king or local official could impose a writ of habeas corpus to force someone to appear and testify. But over time it took on a civil libertarian meaning, as embodied in the Habeas Corpus Act of 1679, which made it clear that it was a civil right protecting the populace from being arrested without charge.

Ten years later came the Bill of Rights, some of its concepts archaic and the rest now so shot full of holes that Cameron was right to promise a statutory restatement - something we can whistle for now, it seems. Those rights were: 

• Freedom from royal [for which read executive] interference with the law. Though the sovereign remains the fount of justice, he or she cannot unilaterally establish new courts or act as a judge.
• Freedom from taxation by Royal Prerogative. The agreement of parliament became necessary for the implementation of any new taxes. [taxes are now commonly raised, never reduced, by administrative decree]
• Freedom to petition the monarch. [good luck with that]
• Freedom from the standing army during a time of peace. The agreement of parliament became necessary before the army could be moved against the populace when not at war.[no need - the increasingly paramilitary police can do the job just as well]
• Freedom for Protestants to have arms for their own defence, as suitable to their class and as allowed by law. [hee hee]
• Freedom to elect members of parliament without interference from the sovereign. [but not from the bribery, electoral registry packing and postal ballot fraud perpetrated by the executive in the last election]
• Freedom of speech and debates; proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament. [the first part has been abolished by a variety of laws against 'hate speech' and the our grotesque libel laws; the second was most recently, and unsuccessfully, invoked to claim Parliamentary immunity for MPs charged with expenses fraud]

What makes it all practically irrelevant is that three-quarters of all British legislation is now Statute Law made by the EU bureaucratic oligarchy, rubber-stamped by Parliament - as an overriding treaty obligation - to make it de jure under Common Law, a development unimaginable to, and hence unanticipated by, previous generations.

To make Parliament's dereliction complete, the enabling clauses of the rubber-stamped EU legislation are delegated to the permanent officials who will enforce them. Thus most of our laws are drafted by unelected bureaucrats in Brussels, and their application is decided by unelected bureaucrats in Whitehall.

Any national Bill of Rights worth having, therefore, must start by repatriating democratic sovereignty. As I said - we may whistle for it, but there is no chance whatever that the fons et origo of all our loss of liberty will be addressed by those elected to go through the motions in the Palace of Westminster. They are the hostages of their permanent officials, and will ultimately do what they are told.