Her Majesty’s Government needs to identify and implement a clear principle by which it will establish the political, economic and social modus vivendi of post Brexit Britain.
The abrupt dismissal of hundreds of P&O maritime staff recently is a deeply disturbing sign of where things are drifting without the implementation of a clear reference point for all policy and law in post Brexit Britain.
The manner in which P&O staff were notified of dismissal, and threatened with being handcuffed and physically removed from ships is an outrageous affront to our traditional way of life. That British staff can be summarily displaced by foreign workers employed for a pittance on temporary contracts, is outrageous.
The slogan “global Britain” cannot constitute the necessary guiding principle. The British people did not vote in June 2016 to throw off the burden of EU domination in order to be subjected to the rapacious demands of global big business.
I did not vote in June 2016 for my country to be subjected to the ravages of foreign companies whose only interest is to maximise their profits – whose god is Mammon. I voted for the restoration of our constitutional and legal traditions, and for our traditional cultural mindset formed by Protestant Christianity.
Do unto others as ye would be done by. Treat everyone with respect. Every human being has a fundamental dignity as a person made in the image of God.We should behave accordingly.
This once informed our cultural and religious perception of everything, including our laws. But that cultural mindset has been replaced in the minds of our intelligentsia by a politically correct, Materialistic conception of Human Rights with its associated mindset of regulatory dominance, not cultural restraint and respect. Reliance on regulation led P&O to reorganise its legal position to regulatory advantage. Where that fails, they just flout the law because their cultural mindset recognises no priority for human dignity.
The mentality of the company directors is alien and alien controlled, and that is the decisive factor …
The English tradition of parliamentary supremacy and of common law culture respecting basic justice for all informed the need for a Human Rights Convention in Europe after the horrors of the Second World War.
Britain was strong in its tradition and practice of safeguarding human rights long before the establishment of the European Convention of Human Rights and the associated Court in Strasbourg [not to be confused with the European Court of Justice which adjudicates on the Treaties founding the 27 member European Union].
Britain was a founding member and influence on the European Convention. That Convention provided a framework for other European countries which lacked the traditions and institutions of freedom enjoyed in Britain.
It must, of course, be acknowledged as a matter of historical fact that the British government has often failed to live by the demands of its domestic standards when acting outside Britain, not only in Ireland but further afield. Regrettably, such hypocrisy is in the nature of all government. That is why I promote the 13th century Magna Carta and the 1689 Bill of Rights as vital Constitutional cornerstones to be safeguarded and upheld. They represent an effective, practical basis for the western conception of the Rule of Law – not the 1689 French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen as erroneously assumed today.
It is therefore the restoration of the English constitutional tradition which must become Her Majesty’s Governments cornerstone Principle in post Brexit Britain.
That tradition asserts the principle of constraint on powerful corporate interests like the State. It assumes that the fundamental threat to individual liberty is the power of the strong over the weak; that there must be institutional and legal counter-balance to powerful interests; that such interests must be accountable to the general interest – not superior to it.
In Europe since the 1970s, however, we have seen the European Court of Human Rights appropriate power to itself by implementing a judicial fiction. That fiction conceives of the European Convention as “a living instrument”. I am convinced that this false conception of legal thinking enabled the UK Supreme Court to contradict the democratic decision of Brexit in its seriously flawed decisions in the two Miller cases, the first in January 2017, the second in September 2019.
In practice, the use of this false conception that the Convention is ” a living instrument” constitutes judicial oligarchy. It is a powerful means by which political correctness has been implemented in western nations. The United States Supreme Court has suffered from the same cancerous thinking since the 1970s. It has brazenly re-interpreted the American Constitution in ways unintended by the framers.
In such written Constitutional Republics like France [and European Union] and the USA, essentially political questions have often been settled judicially, not politically – eg the US Supreme Court invented the right to abortion in Roe vs Wade 1973.
The English constitutional tradition, however, required political questions to be addressed by parliament, not the Judiciary.
In Britain, parliament began recognising Trade Unions in 1825 – two centuries ago. Significant social legislation on employment conditions and health was implemented from the 1830s, and women’s votes in 1918. Britain already had a tradition of social concern and redistribution of resources long before the European Convention on Human Rights or the European Union.
Boris Johnson’s supposedly “Conservative” government must recognise and recover the efficacy and adaptability of British political heritage, founded in the English constitutional tradition.
HMG must send a powerful message to Business about human dignity by cancelling P&O involvement in the new Free Ports, and assert the fundamental dignity of every human being.
By placing the English constitutional tradition as the determining Principle for the development of post Brexit Britain, HMG must Repeal – not amend – the Human Rights Act 1998 as Lord Sumption explains in his Foreword to Professor Ekins Policy Exchange submission to the Consultation for the forthcoming Bill of Rights to replace the 1998 Act.
Do read this historically strategic document here.
References to the P&O scandal
Conservatism Institute 