In the wake of Obama's great foreign policy triumph, a cliche laden speech in Cairo in which he promised to work with terrorist groups to bring western style 'liberal democracy' to countries ruled since the colonial powers quit by absolutist tyrannies, the countries where the so called Arab Spring uprisings suicceeded in ousting tyrants are further away from democracy than ever. Islamist fanatics have grabed power in Libya, Tunisia and Egypt and are preparing to by the sharia, their version of the law of God. They reject what they call 'man-made laws' the laws by which most nations live. For the same reason, Islamists reject democracy. It is a sham, they say, and an offence against God, the supreme ruler.
In the 'enlightened' west the unconstrained powers of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and the increasing focus of the United States Supreme Court on human rights are the secular equivalent. Progressives, those obsessive compulsive sociopaths who love to parade their assuptions of moral superiority think that the European Convention on Human Rights and the Strasbourg court which enforces it are sacred. They believe these rights should be forced upon people everywhere, regardless of how anyone votes, regardless of how the diverse peoples of the world have evolved socially. Human rights are the progressive left's own version of sharia law.
In Iran, the Guardian Council of senior clergy makes the final decision about whether anything passed by the parliament is compatible with Islamic law. In Europe, the ECHR has the same absolute authority over the decisions of all the member parliaments, including our own. I am not sure how far the powers of the U.S. Supreme Court reach. While the punishments haded out by these allegedly liberal and democratic bodies do not (yet) involve stoning or the amputation of body parts, the principle is the same: "We", the priesthood of human rights lawyers appears to say, "are in sole possession of the truth: no other power may stand against us."
Before becoming Prime Minister, David Cameron was suspicious of the human rights theocrats. The moment he stepped into his official residence however power started to corrupt him, he became part of the global elite that while far removed from the world ordinary people live in claims to know better than those ordinary people how they ought to live their lives. In his election campaign Cameron promised to set up a commission on a British Bill of Rights, the idea being to bring home human rights in Britain and place them under the supervision of british courts and British government. He soon started to back of that position in order to earn a pat on the head from other EU leaders and UN bureaucrats. Now we have a situation in which the ECHR can rule that Britain must give prisoners the vote. No major political party and no large section of public opinion agrees. The British Parliament voted overwhelmingly against this measure. Yet, under our present relationship with Europe with which the traitor Blair saddled us, there is absolutely nothing that our elected representatives can do about it. In fact because the ECHR is controlled by left wing elitists who are all in favour of a global government we find those convicted of and imprisoned for serious crimes have more "rights" than hard working, law abiding citizens.
This is the inevitable result of allowing bureaucracy to usurp democracy. I have seen many progressives talking about when democracy fails (as in the votes in several US states to prohibit same sex marriage) the central government must "step in and do what is right." But who decided what is right? The unelected bureaucrats? We could call such thinking the usurpation of parliamentary sovereignty. Nobody wants to remove human rights from our law and as believers in democracy we should welcome the fact that the courts will sometimes reach decisions that challenge the will of the majority in their afforts to protect minority interests. Having said that however elected legislators as representatives of the people must have some power of democratic override. In Britain's principlal Court of Justice, the Old Bailey, there words are inscribed above the portal: "The welfare of the people is the paramount law." GEDDIT progressives, the people; not 'some of the people. It does not say "The welfare of the blacks, hispanics, crims, peedos, trd burglars, rug munchers, retards, dopeheads, crackheads and dickheads in the paramount law (they'd need bigger doors) but the people as in We The People. And who can better determine what consitutes the welfare of the people than the majority of the people. Not the one per cent of elitist, morally superior self styled progressives or the ten per cent of deluded useful idiots who help advance the agenda but all the people. Because when human rights law starts to curtail the rights of some in order to extend the rights of others we are no longer talking about democracy but tyranny. The tyrannophiliac left may delude themselves that utopia could be gained under a benign, Marxist totalitarian global government but that obly shows they are less well informed than the so called low information voters they so despise. It does not really take much reading to find out what life was and is like under Stalin and Brezhnev, Mao Tse Tung, Erich Honeker, Fidel Castro, Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il, Mobutu, Ceaucescu, and almost every other Marxist leader anywhere. Even the most benign, like Tito in Yougoslavia, were not exactly pussycats. What power then can stand against this elite and defend the rights of invividuals to be individual. What organisation will resist calls for the kind of diversity that forced people in advanced societies to accept mores and norms alien to their own culture in the name of diversity while simultaneously trying to suppress the kind of diversity that allows one person to believe in a universe created by a divine power and another to believe the shared reality we live in is actually a computer simulation of a cosmos. At present, there is none. At least in the United States, where the Supreme Court is extremely strong, it is possible, though not easy, for the Congress to amend the constitution and thus the court's powers. (The necessity of such a clause become clear when we learn that the Supreme Court in the mid-19th century upheld slavery in the US on the grounds that it was a property right. It took the Civil War to sort things out.)Whether the current US Congress, which like the administration has demonstrated it has little respect for the constitution, would take such a step is debateable. There is no last-resort ability to intervene with the ECHR, it is all powerful. Although there is something called "the margin of appreciation" which allows the court to give discretion to member states in how they apply its judgments, this discretion is bestowed by the court itself, and cannot be expanded by the members. The 47 judges, some of them from countries such as Russia, Albania and Azerbaijan, where the phrase "human rights" attracts hysterical laghter or an expression of puzzlement are, in the politics of the last say, our dictators. They are their own overseeing authority. As dictators are free to do, they take their time in dealing with challenges to their omnipotence. The court has a backlog of more than 150,000 cases. Where is all this going, you might well ask. Several times in recent months barack Hussein Obama, the quintessential European has warned Britain against distancing itself from the EU, spoken in favour of integrating all of the sovereign states that make up the Union into a single European Superstate, and called for Turkey and other non European nations (including Syria and Egypt!) to be granted EU membership. Obma is totally committed to the cause of a 'progressive' scientific dictatorship as are joint EU Presidents, the former Maoist turned Federalist Jose Maunel Barroso (who is on record as saying those sceptical about the Federal Europe project are dangerous)are and uberbureaucrat Herman von Rompuy. Why are all these leaders who share socialist leanings and a taste for living the very high life at the expense of hard working taxpayers so very keen on ever bigger government presiding over ever bigger supra national communities? Could this drive to abolish nation states and local cultures and replace sovereign governments with an unelected bureaucracy be part of a plan to create the 'scientific dictatorship', the global meritocracyadvocated by politicians like Barack Hussein Obama and Tony Blair and stretching back to luminaies such as novelist H G Wells, the Fankfurt Kulturkampf movement Vannavar Bush - a leader of the Manhattan project, Bertrand Russell and Herman Kahn (scroll down the linked page) a leading thinker behind the shift from public leaders to "action intellectuals" and an inspiration for the film Dr. Strangelove and that US President Eisenhower warned against in his farewell speech? (In case people question the authenticity of my scientific dictatorship link, books have been written on the topic). Interestingly this 'scientific dictatorship' when we read the words of its strongest advocates, is not about hard sciences in which developments are suggested by empirical evidence but sof sciences such as psychology, media manipulation of public opinion and even more disturbingly ... ... wait for it ... ... EUGENICS (go on, goggle or Bing "scientific dictatorship" "eugenics" and see what interesting results you get. ************************************************************ So if the commission won't address this question of parliamentary sovereignty, its conclusions, expected at the end of this year, will make no difference. Anything it recommends will be a mere relabelling, some pious restatements of human rights, wrapped, for Mr Cameron\rquote s political convenience, in the Union flag.\par \par How is it, then, that a government is frustrated by the very people it appoints? Here we come to the huge problem nowadays of our permanent official and semi-official classes. So weak is Parliament, and so nervous is government of looking over-political, that these classes fill the gap left by \ldblquote here today, gone tomorrow\rdblquote politicians.\par \par If you look, for example, at the public appointments rules introduced in the name of procedural correctness, or of \ldblquote diversity\rdblquote (which, by an Orwellian effect, really means uniformity), you will see that they are run by civil servants. Naturally, they choose people appealing to the civil servant\rquote s cast of mind. Everywhere \endash in the appointment of peers or quangocrats, in IPSA, the body which decides on MPs\rquote expenses, or on the Committee for Standards in Public Life \endash unelected people lay down the moral law for the elected. They welcome the opinions of interest groups, and exclude those of the public and the people the public elect.\par \par Thus, for example, all those charged with looking at the matter keep advocating that there should be state funding for political parties (in effect, nationalising them), despite the known reluctance of actual taxpayers to come across with the money for such a rotten cause. Even in Downing Street, itself, Mr Cameron has allowed the permanent machine to outmanoeuvre the political appointments brought in to enact his will. Off, on his bicycle, pedals his brilliant adviser, Steve Hilton. In the driving seat of the Rolls-Royce of officialdom purrs the ever more powerful new Cabinet Secretary, Sir Jeremy Heywood.\par \par I am not arguing, of course, that elected people are personally morally better or wiser than unelected ones. We have many able and decent public servants (and several fairly useless MPs). My point is that the word \ldblquote servant\rdblquote is the key. You now hear the phrase \ldblquote independent civil servants\rdblquote as if such a thing were a part of our constitution. Yet it is a contradiction in terms. The civil servant serves. If he becomes \ldblquote independent\rdblquote , whom does he serve? The servant becomes master.\par \par The problem came up this week in Parliament. The Public Accounts Committee wants to be able to question civil servants freely, forcing them to answer its questions. You can see why, when they now seem to act without any even theoretical reference to ministers. Yet if ministers are no longer responsible to Parliament for the actions of officials, then what are ministers for? The word \ldblquote bureaucrat\rdblquote means one who has power by virtue of occupying his office (the \ldblquote bureau\rdblquote ). Democracies are supposed to be suspicious of that.\par \par It is not a coincidence that such people favour the European Court of Human Rights. Great liberal jurists like Lord Lester, one of the Lib Dem members of the commission, instinctively dislike democracy. He calls the idea of ultimate democratic override of a court \ldblquote reactionary\rdblquote . Such people think of democracy as little more than a series of unenlightened opinion polls in which majorities vote to oppress minorities. For them, the ECHR is perfect. It is publicly funded, internationally guaranteed, unanswerable to anyone elected by anybody, and stuffed with people like themselves. For those same reasons, the rest of us should fear it.\par RELATED POSTS:The Theraputic Society Is Destroying Civilisation
Many of the problems afflicting Britain and its neighbours appear to be related to what has been called The Theraputic Society, Nanny State and paternalistic liberalism. As government grows, corporate industry and private business is increasingly coming to resemble the public sector, ruled less by economic rationality than by an intrusive bureaucracy functioning increasingly like an HR department.
Heard In A British Court: Miss Trenchard Then Penetrated [the rape victim] With Her Lady Penis
A 19-year-old trans-identified male broke down in tears after a Guernsey Royal Court jury unanimously found him guilty of rape on July 28. Despite the serious crime, Freddie Christian Trenchard, who was born male but identifies as a “trans femme,” was first reported to police in February of last year, though the crime occurred in the summer of 2021.