This noise about how Britain may now stand against to the council's European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is at best naive and in most cases (yes, you, David Cameron) is synthetic. What Cameron has done on this one is pretend this is the crucial line he won't cross. Meanwhile, very much more quietly and apparently without a moment of squeamishness (odd that, how selective the prime minister's stomach is on parliamentary sovereignty), his Government hands over more and more power to the European Union. What he has done by stirring up this prisoners' votes business is simply give the euro-anxious Tories a different kind of 'European' bone on which to chew. Yet this issue is not the meat. The ECHR and its decisions are not the things most endangering Britain's sovereignty now. Still, if MPs are really so determined to stop this so-called 'encroachment' by Strasbourg, maybe a technical note first. Britain freely (and foolishly) agreed long ago to give the court at Strasbourg all the powers that the ECHR has since been using. This so-called 'court' at has never invaded Britain -- the supine British opened the gates to all these European 'justices' and their powers to decide Britain's laws. All parliament has to do if it really does want to stop the powers of this 'court' is just vote to pull out of the Council of Europe, ECHR and all. Then this absurdity of votes for prisoners, and every other ECHR so-called 'human rights' absurdity, goes away; or at least -- and this is what Cameron is hiding in this debate -- until Brussels reminds the United Kingdom that by signing up to Lisbon Treaty and the rest, powers across the Channel can go on imposing these 'human rights' on Britain whether the UK tries to derogate from the ECHR decisions or leaves the Council of Europe altogether. The Lisbon Treaty, among many other poisonous things, gave the EU 'legal personality' for the first time. That means it can sign international agreements, not as an agent for a group of 27 sovereign states, but as a state in its own right. And as this new country called Europe, it is going to join the Council of Europe. It will be a member just as the United Kingdom is now. What that means is that Britain, even if it pulls out of the Council of Europe, will still be bound to the damned thing as a part of the EU: remember, Lisbon made us all 'citizens of the EU' now. If you are a native of England, Scotland Wales or Ireland, your nationality is now 'European' whether you want it or not. The treaty says so, and the treaty, thanks to the refusal by Cameron and William Hague to fight it, is law. Treaties and other international agreements now signed by the EU will be directly binding on the UK and have primacy over all UK laws and the British constitution. And, no, Britain does not have a veto over most of the things the EU might sign treaties on. Slightly delicious note: I gather the EU's signing for the membership has been held up because the EU is demanding that decisions of the ECHR cannot over-rule the decisions of the ECJ. In other words, Brussels is demanding that its own court have supremacy over the ECHR, something Britain has surrendered for its own Supreme Court. So there could be turf conflicts between the euro-courts. As Open Europe notes in its briefing this week on the votes for prisoners dispute, the EU has its own catalogue of justiciable rights -- '' 'the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights, enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. The Charter allows citizens to contest rights set down in EU law at the European Court of Justice, and, in future, possibly also the ECHR (when the EU accedes to it).' This will make it 'increasingly difficult for the UK to negotiate a carve-out from European human rights legislation.' As for the detail of this particular case of prisoners' votes, 'Withdrawal from the ECHR would allow the UK to ignore ECHR rulings on prisoners votes when it come to general elections. However, as voting rights in European Parliament and local elections are covered by EU law as well as national law, their application in the UK could in future be challenged at the ECHR or the ECJ.' Oh, and as for the Cameron fudge about limiting the vote to prisoners serving four years or less, the ECHR has already struck down that notion in a similar case, Scoppola v Italy. It decided that the prisoner's rights were violated because Italian law barred him from voting on the basis of his sentence. So they will knock down Cameron's four years, too, and I'd suspect he knows it. So the MPs might as well go home; or go around to the 'Scrubs for a bit of canvassing. Or Arianna Stassinopoulos as she will always be to those of us over 40 and who were around London when the Greek was making her climb up the ladder. The last time I saw her she was sitting across from me at a small private dinner party at a club in Pall Mall. The party was given for Enoch Powell and his wife Pamela. Arianna was working hard at impressing Powell and all the rest of us (some Fleet St stars were there, so I mostly kept my head down and stayed grateful for escaping the newsroom that night). But the abiding impression was that everything she said had been rehearsed, even down to the hand gestures. She was like a sixth form girl competing for a prize in 'declamation.' Now she'll be pocketing AOL's millions to add to the millions she took from her failed marriage to a bisexual oil heir. But there's more to this than just another lotto win for the Greek. Here's what Brent Bozell, Media Research Center president and publisher of NewsBusters had to say about the deal. Bozell, if you don't know his work, is one of America's sharpest commentators on journalism. (His mother, just by the way, was the sister of William F Buckley): 'This proves AOL News has lost its mind. They must be in such dire straits that they've been blinded by the millions and think an acquisition of The Huffington Post is worth sacrificing credibility and objectivity. AOL News is fooling only itself in thinking there is no journalistic conflict in merging with a hate-filled, vicious, radically left-wing rag.' A look at Media Research Center's report, 'Huffington's House of Horrors,' shows what Bozell means. HuffPost, as he shows, runs an 'ongoing campaign of profanity, crude sexual and excretory metaphors and outright hate speech against conservatives, all under the leadership of Arianna Huffington.' And if you can't deal with the kind of crude language Huffington runs on her Post, then look away now. An example, this from an actor called John Cusack (HuffPost looks to Hollywood for policitical comment -- says it all, really): he denounced conservatives as 'flag-sucking half-wits' who 'speak for all that is cruel and stupid and vicious in the American character. They are the racists and hate mongers among us -- they are the Ku Klux Klan. I piss down the throats of these Nazis.' Actor Alec Baldwin denounced Vice President Cheney for the Huff Post, calling him a 'lying thieving Oil Whore.' Sean Penn mocked television journalist Bill O'Reilly for Huff Post and said O'Reilly was 'massaging his [****** nope, can't write that, not even with a warning] with a loofah,' and said that America's failure to impeach President Bush meant 'we become a [***] stain on the flag we wave.' Really, AOL could have got any of that for a lot less than $315m. It's all free on almost any lavatory wall in any Detroit bus station. Still, AOL might start running that, too, since as Bozell says, 'We can only assume that AOL News has been infected with the same vicious motive [as Huffington]: to target and obscenely smear conservatives.' 'They can do that if they want, of course, but please don't call it AOL "News." That's now become an insult.' Pause for a moment and think about how ludicrous that idea is. The individual eurozone countries have all either blasted apart their banking systems or destroyed their countries with debt, or both. Yet it is from these same economically-idiotic countries that the new centralised economic government will be drawn: somehow the 'magic' of 'more Europe' is meant to turn the politicans and bureaucrats of these nations, all of them proven incompetents, into round-eyed versions of Hong Kong dynamos. The German chancellor assured us all that in her plan the role of the other eurozone states was to decided which member states had best practice in economic matters and then agree to impose that same 'best practice' across the eurozone. Nobody was fooled by what she meant: any working groups set up will find -- hey, here's a surprise -- that Germany has best practice in everything. Not that it actually does. As Charles Dumas of Lombard Street Research says: 'The widely-held belief in the strength of the German economy is a delusion.' But since Merkel has taken control of the formation of a eurozone economic government -- Sarkozy is very much the junior partner, whose role is mostly to act as cover for the fact that Germany is the driver of this policy -- she will get what she wants. Which is: the Germanification of the EU. This shows how far Sarkozy's policy of making himself Tonto to Merkel's Lone Ranger has damaged French influence in the EU. Historically, when the French drove the creation of the (then) Common Market, the community/union was meant to be building the Continent into a Greater France. Now the 27 countries are being forced into building a Greater Germany. And I do mean the 27. Cameron and Osborne may stand to one side of this and say, 'We're not eurozone, nothing to do with us, mate,' but that is not the way the whirlpool of Brussels works: in the end, everyone is sucked in. First the eurozone will be sucked in, mostly because too many people imagine Germany has been powering along for years, so they ought to start doing things the Berlin way. It is worth remembering this: for most of the time since 2000, the German economy has stagnated. The undervaluation of the euro is what has given the Germans their 'bounce' in the last 18 months. Nobody sane wants to have his economic government run by the too-often-flat-lining Germans. Already Lombard Street Research has started refering to the weak 'Club Med' members of the eurozone as 'the new East Germany.'
10 February 2011 1:32 PM
Votes for prisoners: how David Cameron is hiding the truth about European power over 'human rights'
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08 February 2011 4:12 PM
As America's conservatives see it: 'Huffington's House of Horrors'
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04 February 2011 2:59 PM
Merkel and Sarkozy: their plans to turn Europe into a Greater Germany
Sunday, 13 February 2011
Yeah, yeah, yeah, rhubarb, rhubarb, order in the House, 'physically ill' and the rest of it. All I can say to the Commons over this votes for prisoners dispute is: just shut up and pull the trigger and get out of the Council of Europe. Or admit you are too timid to pull the trigger, so shut up anyway and submit in the manner that suits men who are cowards.
The angry cries, even among my colleagues, that there has been 'remorseless undermining' of Britain's parliament and courts implies that the ECHR has been tunnelling away under the stone walls of Britain, rather in the manner of medieval seige warfare. It hasn't. The ECHR has done only and exactly what decades of euro-supine British politicians have allowed it to do. The drawbridge has been down all along, with 'We are all Europeans now' written on cloth-of-gold and slung from the battlements.
Cameron, being so very busy having a public relations-designed 'physcal illness' over the issue, won't admit that the problem with exactly this kind of control by foreign powers over
Britain's legislation will continue as long as Britain stays in the EU: even if Britain now refuses votes for prisoners -- and it won't; in the end, some man caught with 10,000 child porn images on his laptop will have the liberty to cancel out your vote -- ultimately the EU will have ways of getting the same decision reached in the European Court of Justice (the EU 'court,' this one in Luxembourg with the power to enforce EU law in member states). All that will be necessary is for some other ex-con lowlife to bring another case, this time in Luxembourg not Strasbourg.
Which is why the noise in the Commons over this is just noise. Either parliament is sovereign or it's not, and until the MPs vote to take Britain out of the EU, it's not: the 'legal personality' called the 'European Union' is sovereign.
The online news website The Huffington Post is being bought out by internet giant AOL for $315m (£196m). To anyone under 40 the deal is just another internet manoeuvre, this time between the tired and troubled AOL and the American leftwing's favourite 'news aggregator' Arianna Huffington.
I'm at the European Council meeting, and just out from a press briefing by Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkozy. It was meant to be an explanation of the 'grand bargain' the two are right now presenting over lunch to the other 25 heads of state and government. The 'bargain' is a deal all about how the eurozone is going to make itself competitive by means of a centralised European economic government.
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