There's no such thing as 'The Supreme Court' , and the body that wrongly calls itself this should stay out of politics

Author: 

Martin,  John of Dorset , Alan Thomas, William,  Bill,           

Date: 
Tuesday, October 1, 2019 - 23:00
Article link: 

 

I am not only concerned about the behaviour of the Prime Minister but also some of the things his opponents are saying. The Labour MP Jess Phillips has allegedly received threats and was involved in an incident in which a man was banging on her office windows. She reportedly said that as a result, Boris Johnson must now 'change his strategy' on Brexit'. Now I know Ms. Phillips may be concerned about the atmosphere and rightly so. I too think Boris should tone it down. But as someone who is asking others to be careful with words shouldn't she actually have said change his 'language' - not strategy? This to me implies that because someone who, as far as we know is acting independently with no affiliation to Johnson or the government or vote leave as a political movement, is acting inappropriately, the political strategy must now be changed. This is similar to saying that because someone threatens terrorism or violence our political decisions must then be altered in fear of this threat. I am not saying that these threats are made up or shouldn't be taken seriously but in these times we must also be careful to decipher propaganda from fact.

Jeremy Bonington Jagworth,

Although it is certainly true all EU members must be subject to the ECHR, which is an interfering and useless body, it's remit is relatively narrow. It's the ECJ that is the EU's supreme court. Technically, it can only interfere when EU law or competencies are implicated. However, the EU competencies now range over almost anything, from social to energy policy. The ECJ is largely a political body. One of its major functions is to increase the power of Brussels. Often it has had members who have not even had legal training, let alone served as judges before. It males our Blairite supreme court look good.

Getting to that judgement, it certainly was absurd and political. It was, for example, delivered suspiciously quickly. It has also upended our constitution, by essentially removing all the reserve powers of Her Majesty. The court said, without true precedent, it gets to decide when and where these apply. Rather than the Crown-in-parliament being de jure sovereign (the COREPER and Commission are partly our de facto sovereigns) now the Commons and the court alone are. The plea that the government could use porogue to subvert parliament anytime ignores the fact the executive can't pass laws or supply without parliament. Our host is entirely right. If the courts and parliament are to act in this fashion, I think Johnson should simply refuse to ask the EU for an extension. But he should delay for a while. Let's see the parliament scramble, divide in multiple ways, to act in latw October to stop us leaving.

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Martin 27/9 at 3.41pm

"... not stepping in to save Thomas Cook."

Whether it 'got it right' due to wisdom or panic is a debateable question. The Chancellor was already starting to worry where the money was coming from to fund his master's plans for a wizz-bang Queen's Speech in a few week's time, and at the same time, the great unknowns of a no-deal Brexit were, no doubt, looming in his mind.

Apart from that, the company, that was once known in the travel business as the 'Sleeping Giant', had a track record of government bail-outs, and failed to change the business. TC&S was, when I left the company in 1968, a classic case of elderly senior management asleep at the wheel. A very sad story, indeed.

 

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Posted by: Martin | 28 September 2019 at 11:54 AM
**I would like to tell you that voting was an incredibly important process but in this country I wouldn't dirty my ballot paper.**
Recent events with the judiciary and antics so called Remain supporters prove that the system of voting is now null & void. (And apparently, the very wealthy woman called Miller has announced that it is the duty of parliament to scrutinise ballot
results - and reverse them if they fail that scrutiny of noble and honourable people)
Where do we go from here?

Martin 28/9 at 11.50am

Steady on there, Martin. Were it not for the fact that our exchanges are light-hearted fun, I would be tripping along to a solicitor in pursuit of a sizeable sum of money in respect of your slur.

Instead, I will add a little more to my Thomas Cook story. In the 1960s and '70s, the holiday business was changing rapidly.
Freddy Laker had set up Laker Airways and Laker Holidays, Richard Branson had set up Virgin Travel, and Tom Gillick, a name you might not know, had set up Clarksons Holidays. This latter company rapidly became the largest package holiday company in the UK.
For most travel agents such arrivals quickly became the main part of their business. TC ignored these changes and relied on reputation and the sale of their Travellers Cheques (a goldmine, that was lost when people took their plastic cards with them on their travels) to keep their head above water.

One of their main problems was that all management had come up the same engrained route. Hardly any shop managers were under 40, the majority were in their 50/60s. Area Managers were almost certainly in their last decade of employment - with pensions looming. Big changes were certainly the last thing they were rooting for.
Shop staff had no access to senior management.

All in all, a recipe for disaster.

William | 28 September 2019 at 01:11 PM comments "Recent events with the judiciary...prove that the system of voting is now null & void" and asks "Where do we go from here?".

I tried to answer that question even before he asked it, but the censor - er, I mean, moderator - disallowed it, even though it contained nothing remotely actionable.

History teaches that in these chaotic situations a strong man rises up and takes control. Exactly how that happens depends on the police. If they are feeble and/or ill-disposed to the chaotic government then a civilian uprising may succeed.

If they are technically competent and loyal then those civilians will find themselves behind bars. In which case the strong man will probably come from the army, because it is the only organisation with the muscle to over-power the police.

In our case the police are technically competent even though they show little or no interest in deploying that competence where they are paid to deploy it, in preventing crime.

They have become an integral part of Common Purpose, and will certainly support their CP colleagues, so the second possibility is the more likely.

(C'mon Virginia, what do you think lies behind recent attempts to make the army trans-gender friendly, etc?)

Alan Thomas | 28 September 2019 at 02:08 PM writes of "Travellers Cheques (a goldmine [for Thomas Cook], that was lost when people took their plastic cards with them on their travels)".

It has always puzzled me why Travellers Cheques should have fallen into disuse. I found them ideal. Perhaps those people who take their plastic cards with them on their travels have never had the experience of one failing in some god-forsaken area of "the foreign".

The only defence, apart from carrying multiple cards and crossing your fingers that the same malady doesn't affect all of them, is to keep a sizeable sum in cash - which is unwise for very obvious reasons.

Bill

One can still buy Travellers Cheques (and foreign currency) from Amex.

The attraction of TC's for Thomas Cook was very simple: people bought them for
cash some time before departure date, and cashed them in two or three weeks later. Some people kept the un-cashed cheques for their second holiday, some put them in a drawer for next year's holiday. Some folk departed this world with £20 quids-worth still tucked away for a sunny day that never came! £Millions of uncashed cheques, all paid for in advance, with a purchase fee, and another small fee if they cashed in their leftover foreign currency.

Lovely-jubbly!

Own comment: 

I do not have  much regard for the U.K. and I have always scoffed at the idea that an 'unwritten constitution' will defend the country on account of a respect for tradition, given what Henry VIII did to far-better established traditions and how much novelty-loving the U.K. populace has got.

It was still with some surprise that I watched the 'supreme court' in the U.K. - which I didn't even know existed, assuming that the High Court  was the highest court in England - step in to take sides in a political mess.

The point made in the article is nonetheless good: The highest court in the U.K. is actually in Brussels. Perhaps the prime minister can appeal there!