Monday 12 April 2010

(see end of  article for Letters Patent-definitions.)


12 April 2010

All UK legislation passed since 2000 is null and void


All UK legislation passed since 2000 is null and void –

including Lisbon Treaty

 

Mismanagement of House of Lords Reform

Should Create Constitutional Crisis

But will Lawless Government Ignore Legal Consequences?


Reform of the House of Lords in 1999, which resulted in all but 92 hereditary peers losing their seats, was not completed with due parliamentary process. It was therefore unlawful. 
One inescapable legal consequence follows. It means that every Act of Parliament passed by the two Houses of Parliament and granted the Royal Accent since 2000 is unlawful, because an unconstitutional House of Lords was not, and could not be, a properly constituted party to the parliamentary process. 
The full implications of this sensational fact have only just come to light. Perhaps the most important recent Act of Parliament now in serious doubt is the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty which converted the UK government from being one of 27 theoretical masters of the EU into its servant. 
The first piece of this astonishing jigsaw came to light when it emerged in 2008 that the Brown government inadvertently admitted the removal of passes to hereditary peers was unlawful. A small point, you might think. But no. It rests at the very heart of our constitution. 
The authority for this admission, with its potentially catastrophic unintended consequences, was Baroness Ashton. Now the almost invisible head of foreign affairs in the European Union, at the time Baroness Ashton was the equally invisible Lord President of the Council, and responsible for constitutional matters in the House of Lords on behalf of the government. 
Stay with the next few paragraphs of detail. They are crucially important.

On 29 September 2008 Lord Laird received a written answer to a question about Letters Patent. (Hansard column WA 398.) 
Lord Laird asked Her Majesty's Government: By what means Letters Patent creating peerages can be changed; and in what legislation that has occurred. [HL5196]:
The Lord President of the Council (Baroness Ashton of Upholland): 
The effect of Letters Patent creating peerages can be changed by legislation which has that specific effect. It cannot be changed by legislation of general application. 
Thus, the Peerage Act 1963 allowed Peeresses in their own right to sit in the House of Lords regardless of the terms of any Letters Patent creating the peerage. The House of Lords Act 1999 removed the right of anyone to sit in the House by virtue of a hereditary peerage unless they were specifically excepted from the provisions.
Conversely, the House of Lords decided in 1922 in the case of Viscountess Rhondda that the terms of the Sex Disqualification (Removal) Act 1919 were not sufficiently specific to allow her to take her seat in the Lords when her Letters Patent allowed her to inherit the peerage, but not the seat in the Lords.
I am aware of only one case in which the effect of individual Letters Patent has been changed by Act of Parliament, which is that of the Duke of Marlborough in 1706.

All that might sound dull, legalistic stuff, but the consequences are huge. The key words are in the first paragraph : ‘The effect of Letters Patent creating peerages can be changed by legislation which has that specific effect. It cannot be changed by legislation of general application’.
Membership of the House of Lords is dependent upon receipt of Letters Patent by recently ennobled peers from officials directly serving the Monarch. They are not issued by the government.
So the clear consequence of Baroness Ashton’s written answer to Lord Laird is that 
no peer was lawfully removed from his or her seat in the House of Lords by the House of Lords Act 1999 precisely because it was ‘general legislation’, and did not debar any individual peer of the realm.
Indeed this piece of ‘general legislation’ did not empower Her Majesty’s Government to impede a single hereditary peer who had taken his or her seat in the House of Lords after having sworn the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, from continuing to carry out their solemn duties in the House of Lords as Councillors to the Crown, in accordance with the British Constitution. 
This unequivocal – if belated – clarification of the constitutional position confirms that some 900 hereditary peers were wrongly dispossessed of their Letters Patent. Their right to attend the House of Lords was not revoked by the House of Lords Act 1999. 
Then, as if to underline the shambles which passes for a Nu-Labour government, Baroness Ashton absent-mindedly and separately told the Lords that: 
‘The House of Lords Act 1999 removed the right of anyone to sit in the House by virtue of a hereditary peerage unless they were specifically excepted from the provisions’. 
She had either forgotten her written answer to Lord Laird, or chosen to forget. Or did nobody in her office think to check the facts before she spoke?
In much the same casual and careless style, immediately after the apparently lawful passage of the House of Lords Act 1999 and to avoid any untoward consequences, the Blair Government initiated two surreptitious, unconstitutional operations to secure their unlawful reform.
First, they somehow managed to persuade most of the hereditary peers to hand over their Letters Patent despite the fact that they were provided directly by the Monarch and remain the property of each hereditary peer to this day.
Secondly, immediately after the House of Lords Act 1999 had received the Royal Assent, all hereditary peers who were to be exclude from the Chamber had their passes removed from them, so that they could be physically prevented from gaining access.
All of which raises serious questions about the role of the then leader of the Tories in the House of Lords, Lord Cranborne, who agreed this shoddy arrangement with Blair apparently behind the backs of the leaders of the Conservative Party at the time, and – it is now clear – without even having the wit to check the legal status and rights of the peers being ejected.
Unsurprisingly, the British media did not unearth this fundamental piece of constitutional dishonesty at the time, nor in the following decade. Nor were they much interested in the efforts of one peer’s attempt to rectify it in June last year. 
That was when Lord Mereworth, a debarred hereditary peer, quietly decided to put this crucial constitutional legal standoff to the test. 
He requested a pass so that he could present his Letters Patent, take his oath of Allegiance to the Crown and then take his seat in the House of Lords. 
When he discovered that the House of Lords authorities would not issue a pass enabling him to gain access to the Chamber, Lord Mereworth then wrote to The Lord President of the Council (no longer Baroness Ashton) :

The Lord President of the Council
The House of Lords,
Westminster,
London SW1A 0PW
By First Class Special Delivery
22nd June 2009

Dear Lord President,

Please accept the following as a token of esteem. Set out below is the published written question asked by Lord Laird of Artivargan and the written response given by your predecessor Baroness Ashton of Upholland on behalf of Her Majesty’s Government on 29th September 2008. 
Given the answer, it is clear that the hereditary peers’ Letters Patent were not amended by the House of Lords Act 1999 owing to the fact that the said Act is a piece of legislation for general application. Your predecessor’s answer put beyond doubt that my peerage and connections with the House of Lords do meet the requirements for a pass to be issued to me forthwith.
I enclose a copy of my letter dated 24th April 2009 to Sir Michael Wilcox KCB, the then Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, requesting him to renew my pass to the House before it expired at the end of April 2009.
I felt sorry for Sir Freddie Viggers, the current Gentleman Usher of the Black Rod, [who is] clearly a dignified man of honour, who would not have demeaned himself by signing the letter on 17th June in response to my letter of 24th April unless he had been ordered to do so. 
The response was as follows:- 

‘I have looked into the renewal of your House of Lords pass and I have discussed this with the Lord Speaker, the usual channels and the Clerk of the Parliaments. I must inform you that it will not be possible to agree your request. Your peerage and connections with this House do not meet the requirements for a pass to be issued, and I am not able to issue a waiver.
I enclose a copy of the said letter. In light of the above and bearing in mind that I have had to wait two months for a totally incorrect and an extremely embarrassing response, I hope you will upon receipt of this letter acknowledge it by return and confirm that you have instructed Sir Freddie Viggers, to issue me with a House of Lords pass within seven days of the date of this letter.

Yours faithfully
Lord Mereworth.

The full reply to Lord Mereworth has never been made public, but since the Lord President of the Council at the time was none other than Lord Mandelson, we can safely assume the word “No” featured prominently. 
The legal consequences of this situation, now it has come fully to light, are immense. 
Not only are some 900 specific Acts of Parliament required to debar the hereditary peers who have been unlawfully ejected from the House of Lords, but the chances of their being passed are nil – precisely because those same 900 peers would have to be re-admitted to allow the process to be conducted lawfully!
All foreign and Commonwealth governments should be informed in case there are consequences elsewhere which require attention. 
The European Union should be told that every one of its pieces of legislation enacted by an Act of Parliament since 2000 is null and void. (This would present the ideal opportunity to withhold funds to the EU, at least until all the consequences of this crisis were clarified.) 
Even more importantly, the British people now have the an overwhelming legal right to question every judicial and governmental decision based on every Act of Parliament since 2000, while the incoming government, whatever its composition, starts with a statute book the last lawful entry in which was some ten years ago.
Everything since was unlawful!
There is a splendid irony here. Having thrown the constitutional furniture around the room in this wanton fashion ten years ago, Nu-Labour then packed the House of Lords with its own cronies, almost none of whom have since shown any understanding of, or respect for, the British constitution. Yet they all now enjoy the trappings of ennoblement, and hold the very Letters Patent unlawfully denied to some 900 others. 
No doubt both the head man, now a multi-millionaire, and his dour Scottish side-kick aspire to joining them one day. Their respective wives will doubtless see to it. 
Meanwhile, and much more seriously, the Privy Council has an unavoidable obligation to advise the Monarch on the constitutional situation which has finally come to light. 
Someone has the unenviable task of informing Her Majesty that every one of the Acts of Parliament to which she granted the Royal Assent since 2000 is null and void because the parliamentary process before it arrived on her desk was fundamentally flawed. 
And it will come as no surprise when the unlawfully removed hereditary peers petition Her Majesty to intervene and reinstate the House of Lords to its lawful composition by returning their Letters Patent.
However, the supreme crisis is simply this. Unless the incoming government is prepared knowingly to break the law (because they cannot claim to be ignorant of it) no new legislation can be passed with due parliamentary process and offered to Her Majesty for Royal Assent because the means of completing that process have been fatally undermined by the House of Lords Act 1999. 

And to repeal it will require the re-instatement of all hereditary peers. 
'Seeing what's at the end of one's nose requires constant effort.' George Orwell.

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Letters patent

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Letters patent by Queen Victoria creating the office ofGovernor-General of Australia.

Letters patent (pl. letters patent; Latinlitterae patentes) are a type of legal instrument in the form of an open letter issued by a monarch or government, granting an office, right, monopoly, title, or status to a person or to some entity such as a corporation. The opposite of letters patent are letters close (Latinlitterae clausae), which are personal in nature and sealed so that only the recipient can read their contents. Letters patent can be used for the creation of corporations or government offices, or for the granting of city status or a coats of arms. A particular form of letters patent has evolved into the modern patent granting exclusive rights in an invention.

In the United Kingdom and countries formerly under that country's influence, letters patent are issued under the prerogative powers of the head of state ("royal prerogative"). They constitute a rare, if significant, form oflegislation without the consent of the parliament. Letters patent may also be used to grant assent to legislation.

In the United States, the forgery of letters patent granted by the President is a crime subject to fine and/orimprisonment up to ten years (18 U.S.C. § 497). Without letters patent, a person is unable to assume an appointed office. Such an issue prompted the Marbury v. Madison suit, where William Marbury and three others petitioned the United States Supreme Court to order James Madison to deliver their letters for appointments made under the previous administration.

[edit]See also

[edit]External links

[edit]Examples of letters patent