Tag Archives: government

May’s Brexit Surrender

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The terms include these, via Deutsche Welle:

  • The rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens in the EU will be protected
  • EU citizens living in the UK can be joined by close family members…who live in a different country at any point in the future.
  • Workers and self-employed people will be broadly guaranteed the same rights they currently enjoy

All of which negate one of the motives for leaving the European Union. EU citizens resident in the UK will be magnets for drawing in others for the UK’s generous welfare system—and EU citizens still will be able to seek work in the UK preferentially, availing themselves both of the UK’s higher wage rates and that welfare system.

  • There will be a 21-month transition period ending December 31, 2020
  • EU rules would continue to apply in the UK subject to the terms set out in the Brexit agreement
  • After the transition period, a joint committee co-chaired by the EU and the UK would police the final withdrawal agreement, taking decisions by mutual consent and whose verdicts would be binding

Meaning that the UK would remain unable to enter into separate, independent trade agreements during this “transition” period EU laws would remain in effect inside allegedly sovereign Great Britain, and the EU will retain veto power, via that mutual consent requirement, on post-transition moves—including those independent trade agreements and moves to supplant EU laws with domestic, UK, laws.

  • If appropriate customs arrangements are not agreed to, a backstop arrangement would kick in. A joint “single customs territory” between the EU and UK would apply from the end of the transition period…
  • Under the backstop arrangement, the UK must observe “level playing field” commitments on competition, state aid, taxes and employment and environment standards

Are not agreed to means the agreement will be in accordance with EU diktat or there will be the backstop arrangement. This is what the EU wants, so there will be no agreed customs arrangement.  The EU wants the backstop because those terms require the UK to keep its Northern Ireland inside the EU’s competition, state aid, taxes and employment, and environment laws in perpetuity. This is the beginning of prising Northern Ireland out of the UK—the beginning of dismantling the UK.  This is part of the EU’s demonstration to restive members of the EU and a warning of their fate if they become impertinent, too.

The bottom line for the UK here is that, under this “agreement,” these terms of surrender, the nation will become a speechless, toothless satrap of the EU, and its dismantling will be begun.

May, with her abject surrender to Brussels, has betrayed her nation’s referendum.  And she has betrayed other members of the EU similarly dismayed with Brussels’ interference in their domestic affairs.

It’s no wonder that members of her Cabinet are resigning in droves, her coalition government is falling apart, and her own party is in (sub rosa, for now) revolt.

A European Army

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There’s a nascent move afoot to create a European army to which, presumably, all the member nations of the EU would contribute men, equipment, and money.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel suggested to the European Parliament last Tuesday that such a force

would complement NATO.

I’ll leave aside the question of how the EU’s member nations would pay for such an establishment when they’re having so much trouble finding ways—or reasons—to pay for their commitment (of all of 2% of their respective GDPs) to NATO.

There’s another question that badly wants answers.  While the US—and the free individual nations of Europe and of Asia—have benefitted from the existence of their standing armies, our own Founders had misgivings about such an establishment, to the point that for some years after our own birth, we had neither standing army nor standing navy.  Such a thing was, they feared, the stuff of tyranny.  Even though the formal raison d’etre of a standing army was, and is, outward-looking and for defense of the nation against foreign threat, a standing, professional military facility (they feared) ultimately would become a domestic threat: Government would come to use the thing to suppress and then to oppress the people over whom such a well-equipped Government ruled.

So far, those fears have not been realized in those nations where the people remain free enough to choose at more or less regular intervals the persons they will have as members of their governments.  Such free peoples have checked the power of their governments.

But what of the European Union?  That organization does not have a universally freely elected governing body.  The European Parliament, to be sure, is elected by the citizens of the member nations.  However, that body has no governing authority; it can only make recommendations.  The real power of the EU’s Government is shared among the European Council, which consists of the heads of state of the EU’s member nations; the President of that Council; and the President of the European Commission, whose members are European Council appointees.  That’s a lot of power concentrated away from the will and the choices of the citizens of the member nations.

It’s a power that gets freely and broadly exercised, too, as illustrated by the EU’s Government presuming to reach inside a member nation—Italy—and dictate to that nation what its domestic budget must be.  Were [Italy] to remain intransigent, and were the EU to have its own standing army, what might be an outcome of a future dispute between [Italy] and the EU?

The peoples of Europe, the citizens of the individual member nations, need to think very carefully whether they want to arm so well a system of governance over which they have so little say.

The End of Free Speech

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At least in Europe.  The European Court of Human Rights ruled last Thursday that it’s impermissible to make crude remarks about Islam’s Muhammed if those remarks fall outside what Government deems acceptable.  It seems that, in the course of a 2009 seminar, a woman commented on Muhammed’s marriage to his child bride:

[Muhammed] liked to do it with children…. A 56-year-old and a six-year-old? … What do we call it, if it is not pedophilia?

The ECHR ruled that remark unobjective, lacking historical background, and intended to disparage Islam.

Government will decide what parameters must be present in “free” speech—here, objectivity, with Government defining that parameter—Government will decide the environment and context within which “free” speech must be made.  Government has decided that rude speech is verboten.

The answer to bad speech is not more speech, but—in Europe—no speech other than that which is Government approved.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

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The tentacles reach far—even into the origin of Western concepts of individual liberty.  A British court has ordered

the wife of a jailed Azerbaijani banker to explain how she and her husband could afford their multimillion-pound London mansion or face having it seized.

Government does not have to prove the illegal origin of the money.  No, the holder of the money must prove her innocence.  Here is the outcome of the British government’s legislation ostensibly aimed at allegedly dirty money held by people with political connections or suspected of serious crime.

Think about that: someone with the wrong political connections in the eyes of someone in government, or someone whom somebody in government decides is behaving suspiciously, now must prove his lack of guilt.

Money laundering might seem a perfectly fine excuse for invading individual liberty in this way: truly laundered money does indeed have origins that are inimical to safety.

But so are individual liberties critical to the safety of each of us.  What is the government’s limiting principle here?  Where does the tradeoff between security and liberty naturally end?

Innocent until proven guilty is a concept that must protect even the unsavory, or apparently unsavory, among us because that protection is critical to our own safety.