A 16 year-old boy has been killed in a drive-by shooting in Nottingham. At this stage, there appears to be no motive.
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I was fully expecting Steve Thoburn and the other ‘Metric Martyrs’ to lose their appeal before the Lords today. That they did, however, still resulted in my spending almost the entire day in a bug-eyed rage. I spent the afternoon doodling designs for giant siege engines that we could use to surround Brussels and reduce it to brickdust. But, upon examining the actual rationale behind the verdict, the veins in my head have stopped throbbing with quite such gusto. I am forced to examine the small-print as both a Libertarian and a lawyer and I find myself largely agreeing with Brian Micklethwait below. The application of EU Directives in British Law is, in fact, governed by British Law, namely the European Communities Act 1972 which rendered all British law as being subject to override by European Community Law. However, the Communites Act itself is a Constitutional Act. As such, it cannot be side-stepped by any subsequent legislation but it can itself be amended or even repealed by the British parliament. There is a way out of the EU; all that is required is the parliamentary will. I will disagree with Brian, though, that the Lords ruling is an implied ‘Declaration of Independence’. That ‘Declaration’ can only be made by a sovereign British parliament and, given the near-blanket commitment of our current political class to the EU project, the manifestation of that ‘will’ is still along way off. February 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
 I followed the link Perry gave us re the Metric Martyrs case, and read the piece by Helen Szamuely with interest, indeed fascination. Now I realise that nothing involving the EU is ever quite what it seems, but my understanding of Helen Szamuely’s understanding of the case is not that the EU now rules Britain, but that the EU now rules Britain on British sufferance, which can, any time we like, be unsuffered. The basis of EU rule in Britain is that Britain switched it on with a Parliamentary Statute, and Britain can switch it off. The British Parliament is and will always remain sovereign. At the heart of the EU project is the claim that once you’re in, you can’t leave. Not so, say our judges. The Metric Martyrs lose, not because the EU says so, but because the EU says so and we say, for the time being: okay. But in the future, we could decide to say: not okay. Britain is not yet a province of the European Superstate, according to these judges. It would be complicated to unravel, very complicated, and it would require a great and highly self-conscious, so to speak, Parliamentary convulsion, in the manner of, say, contriving a new amendment to the US Constitution. But, say Their Lordships, we could unravel it if we chose to, and declare national independence again. Which means that, in a sense, they just did. February 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It is a small matter really, just a trivial case involving some grocers who sold some fruit using Imperial rather than metric measurements. Yet the implications are staggering for the entire structure of British life. 
Don’t co-operate in your own repression February 19th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The Scottish Parliament has just done what unfettered democratic institutions do: make the prejudices of the majority into laws backed by violence to suppress minority view points. They have now banned fox hunting in Scotland, refusing even to compensate the people who will lose their livelihoods as a result. On the later point I am actually glad as the immoral viscousness of this statist intrusion is made all the more stark to see. Until people start to respond in kind and impose a physical cost on such actions by the state, and on supporters of such actions, it is unlikely much will change. Given the complete lack of viable political opposition to the socialist Labour and National Socialist SNP in Scotland, it is horrifying that only Sinn Fein, a grotesque organisation whose objectives are antithetical to liberty, provides the only viable model for friends of liberty who wish to oppose the increasingly repressive intrusions of the state. February 13th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Patrick Crozier is happy to see the old lags of British terrestrial television being given a run for their money UK Channel 5 has been dismissed by the elite as being a non-stop orgy of sex and violence. Such statements in themselves lay bare the warped priorities of our ‘leaders’ but there is one other problem: it isn’t true. Channel 5 is simply the most dynamic and innovative British terrestrial channel around. It has the best reality TV programme: The Mole And it has some of the best history documentaries around. My favourite has to be Hitler’s Henchmen. Not least because an inspired piece of scheduling led to biographies of Hermann Goering and Heinrich Himmler being interspersed with shows covering the life and works of John Prescott and Pete Waterman. In fact, Channel 5’s documentaries seem to be giving BBC2 and Channel 4 something of a headache. For many years these stuck up elito-vision channels have been pumping out nothing but revisionist pap. You know, ‘Churchill was a drunken child molestor’, that sort of thing. But then Channel 5 started broadcasting things like “British Heroes of World War 2” (the title says it all). And then “Secrets of World War 2”. In the hands of the elite this would have been all about how Churchill contributed to the slaughter of Russians on the Eastern Front but from Channel 5 it a set of stories about the daring exploits of our ancestors. I do not know if Channel 5’s documentaries are particularly popular. But the reaction (especially from Channel 4) has been revealing. To “Secrets of WW2” Channel 4 countered with “Battle Stations”. To “Heroes” they countered with “Commando”. And to a fine 3-parter on the Falklands they dusted off a 10-year old documentary of their own and put it out as a spoiler. But the really interesting thing about this is the way the content has changed. Quite simply, Channel 4 has sobered up, smelt the coffee and dumped the revisionism. Commando was an hour long show but contained little more than half an hour’s actual information. Could it be that the missing half an hour was the revisionism they had to axe to get the ratings? Patrick Crozier February 11th, 2002 | Comments are closed
Two men have been killed and a third seriously injured after being shot by armed men in a pub in South London February 10th, 2002 | Comments are closed
It is a few minutes past noon and I can hear the sound of artillery from my home here in Chelsea… no, it is not the start of an anti-European Union revolt but rather a 41 gun salute being fired off in Hyde Park that heralds the start of the Queen’s Jubilee. February 6th, 2002 | Comments are closed
January 31st, 2002 | Comments are closed
The BBC, in its on-line news, reported on Monday: “Roman Catholic lawyers should refuse to handle divorce cases, Pope John Paul has said.” In fact, the Pope said nothing of the sort and the Telegraph points this out in an editorial after some ‘fact-checking of arses’*. As I have mentioned before, I would be a whole lot less bothered by what the BBC spews out but for the fact that I am forced by law to pay for this mouthpiece of the statist British establishment. * = Pace Ken Layne: asses are a type of strange donkey and are less likely than posteriors to be repositories of facts and falsehoods. January 30th, 2002 | Comments are closed
As I noted in a previous blog article, the British media have finally turned seriously nasty with the Labour government. Why? Search me. Could it be that they (a) now believe that “New Labour” is running seriously out of steam and that, (b) knowing new Conservative Opposition Leader Ian Duncan Smith better than the rest of us yet do, they believe he’s got something going for him? (a) and (b) feeding off each other, of course. After all, if Labour’s now mountainous majority is seriously reduced at the next general election, then the Labour government that follows will be a lame duck, in the manner of the John Major regime. And if the next Labour government is going to be a lame duck, their threats and promises of advancement already, now, count for less than they used to, and Ian Duncan Smith’s threats and promises now count for somewhat more. In politics, perceptions of the future are facts in their own right. Therefore, the media are now switching their loyalties. I think this may make sense of this bizarre “America snubs Britain“ stuff that Our Great Leader (the Owl Man I mean, not Tony Blair) has been complaining about. He’s right. I don’t feel snubbed either, and I don’t know anyone who does. But, there could be a subtext, as they say in the theatre. Isn’t one of the implied messages of this America-snubs-Britain spiel that all Tony Blair’s recent World Statesman performances count for very little if he and his mates can’t get so much as a pair of handcuffs and a blindfold removed from one Al Qaedist in US custody, and that the Bush White House doesn’t give a damn what Tony and his Cronies think about this, that or anything else. Ergo Blair’s a twat. I’m not saying Blair’s a twat myself. I’m saying that the Daily Mail and the rest of them are saying it, in a slightly roundabout way. Could that be part of what’s going on? January 29th, 2002 | Comments are closed
The Daily Mail, a newspaper that if I ever do link to it will be filed under the “Havens of fluorescent idiocy” section, had as its front page headline on monday: TERROR SNUB FOR BRITAIN So in spite of the fact no less than five polls in Britain show support of about 90% for US actions in Cuba, somehow “Britain” is being snubbed. Not “the British Government” or “elements of the British media” but “Britain” is being snubbed. So presumably the 90% of people in Britain who appear to support the US are, well, not Britain. The 10% that supports the anti-American media elite and establishment and who were presumably ‘snubbed’…that must therefore be “Britain” according to the Daily Mail. Interesting. And so then just who the hell are the 90% of people in Britain that don’t feel in the slightest bit snubbed by USA? January 29th, 2002 | Comments are closed
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