This brings us back to legal fetishism and the importance of grasping regime politics and how it informs judicial thinking. Judges do not simply make and apply rules ‘neutrally’. As I said earlier, judges are representatives of a regime and protect its interests. And at the heart of our regime is faith in, essentially, open borders – mass immigration is one of its central principles and tenets.
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Samizdata quote of the day – Leaving the ECHR will not save usSeptember 2nd, 2026 |
 22 comments to Samizdata quote of the day – Leaving the ECHR will not save usLeave a Reply |
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Except it isn’t exactly “open borders” is it? You have skills and apply for a good job then you can feck off. You’re illiterate and brown and mumble to Mecca then you’re in. Extra points if you’re a rapist. It is only open borders to the merest scum of the earth with an inflatable boat. Of course, if, at any point, you display a knowledge or interest (or heavens forfend! An actual liking of Britain) you are doomed.
Of course I shall be deemed racist for this. I am not. Many years ago I came close to moving to the USA. Yeah, it was because of a girl but I also really liked the place and the people and being in love was not quite enough to seriously consider the move. I felt it was a culture I could “get into” and wanted to “get into”.
Paul Marks regards many of these immigrants as “hostile”. I dunno. Some of the small boat folks are. Some are probably genuine*. A lot seem just indifferent. There is no genuine cultural enrichment. They form ghettoes – little islands of Mogadishu or (the rough end) of Pakistan.
And I do mean the “rough end”. What is frequently missed about the “grooming gangs” is that it is Mafia (Pakia?) style extended families.
*I thought the UN had a rule that a refugee had to stick at the first safe port or something. Doesn’t France count?
Agreed, leaving the EHCR alone will not save us. But it would be a good first step towards reviving good governance.
There is a risk that politicians would announce that the ‘job has been done’ if we leave the EHCR – and that would be just slightly less smoke and mirrors. Remove the Supreme Court, defund the BBC, and bounce illegal immigrants back as soon as they land, and we will be making good progress.
NickM – I regard rapists as hostile, and I regard as hostile people who hold that anyone who “mocks” Muhammed should be killed.
There is a difference between members of a faith doing terrible things (everyone has evil within them – I certainly do, very much so) – and the founder of that faith teaching his followers to do terrible things and doing terrible things himself. A Christian who does terrible things can be asked “would Jesus have done this?” – it is pointless to ask a following of Islam “would Muhammed have done this” – because they can answer, quite honestly, “yes he would have – indeed he did, often, and commanded his followers to do till the end of time” – to that there is no answer, one can not debate further with them.
Unless one is trying to get them to leave that faith – and the “regime” as the post (probably rightly) calls the Western establishment, does not like that – does not like conversion efforts at all, at least not conversions from Islam (they are fine with conversions to Islam).
Discovered Joys – yes leaving the European Convention on Human Rights is indeed a necessary first step.
I remember a Conservative councilor (he has left the party now) who defended the ECHR – “it protects Freedom of Speech” he claimed, and had no answer as to why (if the ECHR protects Freedom of Speech) European countries, including Britain, arrest very large numbers of people for peacefully expressing their opinions, he then claimed “it protects other freedoms” – but could not name one basic liberty the ECHR had protected during the (savagely counter productive) Covid Lockdowns.
As even the Attorney General under the Atlee government noted – the ECHR is so vaguely drafted that any judge can make it mean anything, or nothing.
But the post is also correct – the judges also need to be changed.
Judges such as Sir Edward Coke and Sir John Holt used to defend the basic principles of private property based natural justice (natural law) upon which the Common Law is based – modern judges have very different principles of jurisprudence.
Americans have long understood that just because someone is a judge does not mean they leave their philosophical and political principles (and it is a matter of principles – not just crude “defending the regime” although, yes, that is part of it – as we witnessed with the Kangaroo Court proceedings against the “right wing rioters” in 2024 – suddenly there were no delays in the legal system, and people were given very harsh punishments for minor crimes, or, sometimes, for no crime at all) at the door – even as far back as the 1930s how a judge would rule on basic matters could be predicted by their political opinions – so the appointment of judges (at both State and Federal level) is very much a political matter – and if the right lose we get utterly sick judgments such as those that voided the 1994 vote by the citizens of California to limit the government benefits and public services that ILLEGAL immigrants got.
Those judgments against Proposition 187 (rightly called the “Save Our State” measure) basically ended democracy in California – if the voters can not even limit the government benefits and public services that ILLEGAL immigrants get, then there is no point in voting at all – indeed no point in staying in such a polity – in short the voiding of the 1994 vote (the voiding by intellectually corrupt judges) signed the gradual Death Warrant of California.
There is no alternative (TINA) – new judges, with different basic principles, must be appointed – but that would be a revolution in British governance.
I think the author is wrong. UK law is quite clear on what should happen to (for example) people convicted of serious crimes. It says they should be deported. But judges decree that is incompatible with the ECHR and let them stay. Leave the ECHR and the judges don’t have a leg to stand on to overturn existing UK law. Yes they are a bunch of Lefty twats, but its the ECHR thats giving them the power to ignore UK law. Get rid of that fig leaf and they’ll face having to apply the law of the UK without any supranational laws above it to use as cover. Now some may try to just ignore UK law anyway, and it’ll take cases all the way to the Supreme Court to get things settled, but settled it would be. And if any do blatantly ignore UK law that just makes it obvious what they are – biased political actors, which just makes it easier for Parliament to move against them. Win/Win in my book.
I’m sure that I heard something, somewhere, about “the perfect” and “the good”? Something about one being the enemy of the other, or something? Yes, I’m sure I heard that somewhere.
Take your little victories as you find them, instead of pining for the one, big, unattainable victory.
llater,
llamas
If leaving the ECHR looked like becoming a big possibility on the future I suspect we’d be facing months or even years of the debate being framed around comparisons with Russia and Belarus and that one of Winston Churchill’s legacies was at threat etc etc etc.
The main problem with the ECHR over the years has been mission creep, always in a fashionable progressive direction. The UK’s own Human Rights Act has made things worse by creating a ratchet effect so that if the courts find that a decision or policy is contrary to the ECHR the state has no right of appeal to the European Court of Human Rights whereas if they find that a decision or policy is not so contrary the applicant does have a right of appeal to that Court.
McGrogan says that repudiation of the ECHR and repeal of the Human Rights Act is a necessary but insufficient step towards uprooting the human rights revolution. I very much agree with that but find parts of the rest of his article less satisfactory.
@ Llamas:
“Take your little victories as you find them, instead of pining for the one, big, unattainable victory.
A lesson learned the hard way by the Imperial Japanese Navy in the Pacific during the last “Great Unpleasantness”.
Leaving the ECHR will not save us by itself, but it is a necessary part of the solution; just as Brexit did not save us by itself, but it did make our own elected politicians accountable for these things.
As for the hostility of immigrants – from the small amount of investigative reporting we have, there certainly seem to be some. What is certainly true, though, is that anyone who arrives here without leave to do so thereby commits an offence under the Immigration Act. Every illegal immigrant has made the decision that their first act in this country will be to commit a crime.
Take the “honey” off the table.
Barbarus beat me to it. Leaving the ECHR is the start. Then make British law sufficiently clear so that judges cannot weasel their way round it. A longer term project would be to stop immigration lawyers, who are open borders activists, becoming immigration judges.
As someone once noted, they are not sending their best. Middle class inhabitants of Lahore or Karachi would tell you that these people are violent primitives, not safe around women, children or livestock.
I’ve written before that a possible element to solving the problem of the regime in Iran would be to drop in about a million pistols with a couple of magazines for each. Enterprising Iranians could then use those to capture larger, better weapons.
But as I read this post, I think Iran is not the only nation that needs this help…now how exactly we get these guns into the right British hands is a logistical problem that is beyond me.
No “reforms” are going to save you at this point. There is talk of a tipping point but I suspect such points are only clearly visible when viewed after the fact…like now.
Pity as I was hoping to visit England and Ireland next year…probably too dangerous. And I’m not sure who I worry about more, the Government because it’s been tracking what I write online or the kindly immigrants eager to tell me about their peaceful religion.
You had a very nice country, history and culture but its all gone now and the Muslims will soon re-write (they’ve brought in a couple who can write) the history books so in 100 years, no one will even know.
There is one question that i have asked before, a few times. Let me try to make it more explicit.
Britain has not left the ECHR, but neither did France.
So can you explain to me why people risk their lives to cross the Channel from France to Britain??
NB: The question is rhetorical, to some extent.
But not entirely rhetorical, in the sense that i am unable to give an explicit, precise, and documented answer. My answer would be guesswork.
But i am entitled to my own opinions, unless & until proven to be wrong.
Baby steps
Yes Marius, Barbarus and Jim are correct.
Leaving the ECHR is a vital first step – without that first step nothing can be done.
Yes, as I and others have pointed out, judges may still play destructive games – but they would then be naked in their evil (exposed), like the judges (both State and Federal) who overruled the vote of the people of California in 1994 and insisted that the taxpayers continue to be looted by illegal (illegal – the word is important) immigrants. Those judges at least exposed what they were – and that under their vile rule such things as “government by the people”, “no taxation without representation” and “the rule of law” were a hollow sham. In a more virile age Americans would have removed those judges (by whatever means necessary), but in the present age all people could do was to (correctly) say “California is finished” and leave.
By the way, the diseased Economist magazine is still beating the Open Borders drum – claiming that President Trump’s success in stopping mass Third World immigration will “weaken America”.
If British judges play the same game – REMOVE THEM.
Yes that would be revolution in British governance – but, if the judges play that game, a necessary revolution in British governance.
“judges cannot weasel their way round it”
95% of what the federal government does is unconstitutional (literally criminal)
As judges are merely a species of weasel, they can weasel their way around anything.
Problem is, those judges were chosen by the people, either directly via election or indirectly by appointment by elected officials.
I would posit that the problem isn’t the judges. It’s The People.
We are simply outnumbered by people who believe things we find ridiculous.
Bobby:
Well…you are, in Minnesota 🙂
Speaking for myself, i find that being convinced that the modern Western diet causes brain damage, is a powerful antidote to gaslighting.
Even when people dismiss my claims about brain damage, i can counter-dismiss them; or just ignore them. Which can be a dangerous practice, of course: I try to remain self-critical.
–WRT this more specific claim:
One of my oldest friends, an Italian colleague of bobby’s, claims the superiority of the Italian justice system on the grounds that neither judges nor prosecutors are politically appointed.
Let’s leave aside the fact that my friend is not entirely correct: 2/3 of the Italian Constitutional Court is politically appointed, last time i checked — which is right now, on Wikipedia.
Leaving aside the above, i am going to call my friend to ask him what he thinks about this.
Steve D – yes, even on blatant things. For example, in 1933 (as you know) the government violated all gold clause contracts (public and private) – and even demanded that people hand over their monetary gold (they “kindly” allowed people to keep gold wedding rings and so on).
This was blatantly unconstitutional – if this is Constitutional, then anything is (executing everyone with blond hair – anything).
Yet it took two years for this case to get decided by the Supreme Court – it was not decided till 1935, and then the Supreme Court ruled (5 to 4) that it was fine – the Constitutional provision that contracts should be respected – ignored, and the Constitutional provision that no State should have anything other than gold or silver coin as “legal tender” also ignored, indeed they ruled that even the stealing of gold from private people – demanding that people hand over their monetary gold (from their homes) or be charged as a “hoarder” – that was supposedly fine as well.
The “Justices”, including the Chief Justice, who voted that way in 1935 proved themselves to be scum – utter scum. They destroyed vital parts of the Constitution (and the “precedents” they cited, such as the Second Greenback Case in the 19th century – were also disgusting) and they made a nonsense of the idea of “The Rule of Law” – not “just” in terms of money, but in general contract law, which they undermined.
bobby b
The people of California had voted in 1994, 60% to 40%, to restrict the amount of benefits and public services that illegal immigrants got – and the people of the United States generally agreed with the voters in California – by an even larger margin.
So the people can NOT be justly blamed for what the judges did – in this or other cases (such as the New Hampshire – where a court decided that Property Tax should be increased in order to spend more money on government schools – thus making a nonsense of “government by the people” and “no taxation without representation”).
Yes the people of California did NOT drag the judges out of their court rooms, strip them, tar and feather them, and then hang them from the nearest trees – but civilized people should not have to do such things.
People should not have their States, or nations, destroyed, by intellectually corrupt judges – there must be straight forward way of removing judges WITHOUT using violence.
Snorri- maybe more people around the world speak English as their second language, so if they can’t emigrate to a country that speaks their first language, then an English-speaking nation is their preferred second choice.