Our political system is based on the assumption that there are always checks and balances to prevent unbalanced legislation becoming law. […]
“What you don’t seem to understand is that we are good people!” […]
Guardian
Assumption is the mother of all fuckups.
What is clear is that the British need their own written bill of rights and written constitution, so that there are no assumptions, no unwritten rules and no ambiguities about what your rights are and what your elected servants are able to do. The gentleman’s agreement is broken because there are no gentlemen in parliament.
These much needed documents will provide a clear substrate against which all laws can be tested. Should the Constitutional test fail, a new law cannot come into force. Should a new law violate the Bill of Rights, the law is dead in the water.
The author of that piece fails to come to the conclusion that this is needed, and has failed to take the next step after that; the actual drafting of those documents that are so very badly needed.
It is clear that any such document should be crafted in a way that restricts government to street cleaning and maintenance. It should also make impossible any dilution or transfer of powers of the union. Those are just for starters.
Seeing as we are all focussed on the ID card debacle, lets begin with a first draft of the section asserting our rights with regards to our data:
Wheras in the age before flowing information we could live without explicitly naming certain rights that are inherent to life, the free people of this country are now compelled by the inexorable momentum of the digital age to assert with all moral authority, our rights for this new centrury and beyond.
Mankind is born with rights. These rights exist wether they are written down and understood or not. No person would argue that the rights of man before language were different to the rights of man at the time of Magna Carta, and so too, the rights of man in the information era, being incomprehensible to the men of earlier centuries, are no less existant in absentia of someone with the capability to grasp them.
It is with these thoughts in mind that we write down and categorically assert our rights, which are in addition to those rights already described by the great men of centuries past.
Man has the right to:
anonymity
privacy
travel without surveillance
travel without identification
be unidentified
transact without interference
transact by any currency or means
communicate in secret
associate without interference
study without interference
We assert also that:
The details of the life of a man are his real property.
The body of man is sacrosanct. No one shall be compelled to injest anything against his will, and all men have the right to injest what they will.
No man shall be the servant of a state without his explicit consent.
No man shall suffer any law or regulation that infringes these natural rights. Any law or regulation that infringes these rights is void on its face, and we claim and assert forever our moral justification, absolute right and power to reject and disobey any such law or regulation.
That is how you do it. You actually do it instead of talking about it. You gather millions of people who can be convinced that this is correct, and then you assert your rights.
Note also that each of these rights is asserted cleanly; in other words, we do not, as is seen in the German Constitution, assert a right in one sentence and then apply conditions that make the right null and void in the next sentence. Rights are not conditional. It is possible to construct a Bill of Rights and a Constitution that protects everyone’s rights without qualification, but which also prevents one person from causing harm to another. For instance, you have the right to travel. This is an absolute right. If someone blocks a road in a protest, they are able to be removed forcibly from the road because they are blocking people excersising their right to travel. In this way it is possible to maintain order with a set of laws without constructing this root document in a way that renders it stillborn in an attempt to cater for the requirements of law enforcement.
What we need to do now is to complete these documents using the above guidelines. We then need to take the next step, which is to prune the existing legislation of the UK, removing all offensive and illiberal laws. We do this by writing down a list of laws that are to be removed from the statutes at the next election on an emergency basis.
We will charge the conservatives with this task since that is the easiest route; should they balk or refuse, we will create our own party with this sole agenda. If we win the same number of votes that Bliar did to gain power, we will consider ourselvs the winners, and then assert our rights. Parliament would be nullified and our new government put in place by default; a government created by the electorate and obedient only to the electorate.
This means that there will be a time where there are two sets of laws and populations running concurrently in the UK. The one made up of free men obeying the clean set of laws where all bad legislation has been excised, and asserting their rights under the new Bill of Rights and Constitution, and the ‘losers’ who adhere to the Orwellian Police State – the ‘I have nothing to hide’ brigade who have personally pulled the chain that threatened to flush this great country down the toilet.
There may be some conflict.
After we win, and with the new checks and balances in place, it will be impossible for any subsequent government to create an elected dictatorship, as has been done in the UK. All new law will pass through the cleansing filters of the Constituion and the Bill of Rights, and will come out the other end innofensive and effective.
People are slowly coming to the same conclusion; a Bill of Rights and written Constitution are essential if we are to permanently secure our freedom whilst maintaining the present system of democracy, in a repaired form.
Other groups have banded together to write down a set of principles by which they hope to assert themselvs. These documents fail because they do not address the root causes of the problem, offer no permanent solution to it and are often verbose and off target.
What I have written today is crystal clear. It addresses the root problem, and provides a clear and permanent solution to it. Anything less is a total waste of our time.
And we have little of it.
If we do not address and permanently fix these problems right now, the next generation of Britons will grow up not being able to imagine (for example) a UK without ID cards. They will be like the corn-fed Spanish, who whenever they are confronted about that issue, say to a man, “but I have had one since I was born and I don’t feel that it is a bad thing”. It will then be nigh on impossible to return to a true Britain of free people, because no one will know what the phrase ‘free people’ means. They will all be inured to slavery, to being routinely surveilled and made to present ID for every concievable reason.
It will not be like it was in the days of the Soviet Union, where that long suffering population desired freedom because they saw that there were countries where, for example, there was no internal passport. Where you could write whatever you wanted without fear of arrest. Where you could walk with your own cash money in your own pocket without fear of having it confiscated simply for the ‘crime ‘of posessing it. Everywhere in the world will operate on this Autoritarian / ID / Surveillance basis; there will be no example of a free country where everything works without Orwellian control to point to.
All will have been lost.
And to all those nincompoops who say things like ‘go read Magna Carta’, any document that cannot prevent the emergence of a police state is worthless. It is actually less than worthless and dangerous if by its existance it stops people understanding that they have no protection against madmen in office. Still others say, “look at America – they have a constitution and look what is happening there”. So, just because one country is dismantling their democracy, Britain should not take measures to strengthen its own? These sorts of arguments are not even worthy of debate; trying to counter them is like arguing about what sort of nozzle should be placed on a fire hose as your house burns down. This is a crisis situation, which must be treated with a crisis mentality before there is nothing left but ashes and fond memories.
