So you know what is coming, this is about law. I argue that whenever we talk about law, we should also talk about power. I suggest that many but not all lawyers are guilty of always telling us about law when they in turn should tell us, or be told, about power. I shall refer to a few major lawyers, Lord Bingham, Lord Hermer and Prof. Ekins. They all make much of a phrase ‘the rule of law’.
‘The rule of law’ is quite a phrase. First made famous by Albert Venn Dicey in his lectures on the laws of the constitution, it was theorised by Michael Oakeshott, Joseph Raz and others, and has achieved something like a revival in our time, not least in the book The Rule of Law, written by Lord Bingham QC, who died in 2010.
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‘The Human Rights Act is buggering up the Common Law’ and much else: Blair’s Britain.
May I propose a Bill preventing lawyers from standing as an M.P.
The house of lords is the place for them, just before it is abolished.
Totally, 100%. Demonstrably the ‘rule of law’ as a myth and doesn’t exist in the UK anymore. As meaningless as the Hippocratic Oath is to the medical profession. People can argue or wax lyrical all they want but we have the evidence, an abundance of it by now.
Meanwhile, the rumour mill on Twitter Street is that Starmer is the Southport child-killer’s human rights lawyer and is advising him to plead guilty so apparently he won’t have to stand trial, we ( and more importantly the victims’ parents ) will never get to see his face or hear him speak. Therefore, the truth about his father, and others, being brought over from Rwanda by Blair and the ongoing protection from extradition ( war criminals protect other war criminals, unsurprisingly ) etc, will all remain under wraps.
After all, why have the killer’s parents not been implicated or even mentioned during all of this? No parent can not know their kid who lives under their roof is being radicalized and is performing weird experiments in the kitchen. People aren’t daft, they trust the government about as far as they can throw them and this is all fishy AF;
https://x.com/mercer_holdfast/status/1856783183850975430/photo/1
And is it just pure coincidence that Starmer shut down the Rwanda scheme as soon as he got into office? I don’t know what a ‘deprivation of liberty order’ is but allegedly the child-killer had one of those, and why is the UK government giving safe haven to those wanted for war crimes anyway?
”Hold on WTAF???? Are Mi5 covering up the details of the murderer because his father is wanted by Rwandan authorities, and the UK gave him asylum??”
https://x.com/KateStewart22/status/1818364786247364736
I should revise that statement, actually. Rumours are that the child-killer’s *father* had Starmer as his human rights lawyer, hence he is being protected now.
Wow. Shocking news if it proves accurate.
All I have is statements lifted from social media though, no actual source. Which is unsurprising if the UK governments ( no matter which party are in office ) are actively protecting men wanted for war crimes in Rwanda. I’m not even aware of the details on how they came to be in the UK for all these years in the first place.
Of course, I take it as read that authorities will be bury stuff like this, as deep as it can go. And we have to excavate as we best can.
Nigel Farage was on Winston Marsgalls show. He said he has loads more info and it is a massive scandal.
This rumour fits the facts perfectly Mogs,
The conspiracy theorist may end up being right yet again!
Actually, was he even living at home with his parents? Looking into this “Deprivation of liberty order” it seems people are in some sort of institution due to their mental health and are constantly supervised, also not allowed to come and go freely. If this is the case ( again, no proof, just a comment i read ) then how on earth would he be able to manufacture ricin? Would the staff not wonder why all these castor beans are arriving in the mail? 🤔 🙈
Anyway, this may be a false trail and he was actually living at home. As ever, we take everything we read with a pinch of salt online, until it can be verified. I know police searched his family home but did they also search another address where he was in residence? 🕵 👀
EDIT: Actually you can still live at home and have one of these orders, apparently;
”If you’re living at home, in supported accommodated or in a shared lives placement, you can be deprived of your liberty lawfully if the Court of Protection has granted permission.”
https://www.mind.org.uk/information-support/legal-rights/mental-capacity-act-2005/deprivation-of-liberty/#WhenMightIBeDeprivedOfMyLiberty
In a nutshell, people in power create and use laws to get their way.
Which I suppose theoretically makes common law the most democratic, egalitarian type of law.
I still think a short, simple, clear constitution with rules and principles that the vast majority of people agree on is the best bulwark against the abuse of power and the use and abuse of laws by the powerful.
I agree. Not a panacea (there is no panacea save for the eternal and steadfast vigilance of the populace, and that is not going to happen) but a good point of reference. I think the US had it about right, though even there leftist judges have distorted the intention of the constitution horribly by inventing rights that the those who adopted the constitution never imagined were conferred.
Amazing that the ricin aspect of the ‘story’ is not raising interest by the captured press.
Law: is that which is discovered. Common and Natural Law.
Legislation: is called “law” in the same way all paper hankies are called Kleenex, that is, counterfeit, is invented by individual rulers or elected miscreants in Parliaments to serve their own interests and those of their supporters, favourites and cronies. Legislation always undermines Law by removing it protection to allow others some advantage.
” The safety of the people is the supreme law. This was used during COVID-19. It is another power argument: since it refers to necessity”
They are doing a similar thing in Germany against their political opponents. The so called protections against ‘fascism’ are being used to try and close down the AFD.
Tyranny always rules by necessity.
Necessarily, as tyranny is just discretionary use of power “as deemed necessary” (by the tyrant).
Against fascism is the justification for the existence of these provisions. But they’re really supposed to cement the status quo 1949: German affairs have been arranged in a particular way based on securing agreement of the victorious powers (a German term, Siegermächte, ie, Britain, USA, Russia and – by grace of figleaf – France) and seeking to change this particular arrangement or even just to discuss it freely is a crime. This goes to the point that people can be declared no longer deserving of human rights by the German supreme court. I don’t know what this means in practice and I don’t think it has ever been done (save informally for Rudolf Heß who ended is live in solitary confinement of the crime of being alive) but it’s an explicit provision in the so-called German basic law (sometimes wrongly referred to as German constitution).
The AfD is opposed to this status quo in various ways (for instance, it seeks to abolish the clause in the UN charta which legitimizes military intervention in Germany on discretion of the victorious powers and wants to stop paying for the West-European French hegemony aka the EU) and hence, it’s legally skirting on thin ice despite it doubtlessly isn’t fascist at all.
Only 2 things I remember from the Jurisprudence part of my Law degree on what law is. The American Realist school that “the law is what the judge says” and from Hobbes of “for most people life is nasty brutish and short” fame that “the law is what is enforced at the end of a bayonet”
A lot of references to Greeks here, without mentioning the worst of them, namely the Tyrants. Leaders who came to power, often following military success or threats admittedly, but who did not have the constitutional right to power. They then used the power to rule in a cruel fashion. With the tiny support of the UK demos and the laws and taxes they are overseeing, it could be argued that this Government is an archetypal tyranny. As for interpretation of law, oh for the leaders of our legal system in quite recent times such as Lord Denning, the greatest Master of the Rolls we ever had and the most even handed applier of law without fear and favour. Our current judiciary, without exception have been captured by their politics and subservience to their favoured left wing views, to oppose and restrict populism (and what pray is wrong with populism, people expressing their preference for their country), and, more recently, in hoc to someone they see as the ultimate law maker, because he was the DPP you know, even if he oversaw his department at a time of disastrous legal outcomes, that, of course, were not his fault, because they were never on his desk.
Law is supposed to make the exercise of power non-discretionary and, for the usual case, not required. As such, it’s a necessary ingredient of any civil society.
At school we were taught that no one is above the law which is massively different from the rule of law.
I’ve tried reading through this Bingham lecture in order to get an idea what rule of law is supposed to mean but ended up being driven away by the loads of self-congratulating waffle. At least to Lord Hermer, it probably simply means rule by (mostly British) lawyers, something he believes to be the greatest invention ever made. Unsurprisingly, he’s a British lawyer.
Didn’t Dickens take a swipe at the Law in Oliver?
“…we are being encouraged to pretend that the language of power can be abandoned or eliminated, and replaced by the language of law.”
In other words a camouflage. Camouflage can be used for defence, to hide from a predator, or offence so a predator can conceal an attack. It is clear that the law is not being used to hide from a ‘predator’.
“existentially axial”….what the hell is that?
Convention should come first and the law should back it up. We seem to have reached the stage when everyone is so uncertain of themselves that they rely on the law for every decision. Look at the mess caused by trying to adapt the law to address individual grievances, with ” hate crime” or ” non-crime hate incidents” . These fly in the face of convention. Even the latter needs a constantly refreshed individual sense of proportion.