law

"I saw pictures of people who were bent on violence and on destruction and on destroying property and that is completely unacceptable,"
David Cameron

the bullingdon twats

A spokeswoman for London Mayor Boris Johnson said: "The Mayor is appalled by the scenes of violence this evening. There is no excuse, whatever one's view of the vote in Parliament, for the destruction and aggression seen today. It is an insult to democracy."

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/violence-flares-as-mps-deb...

No excuse for violence. Completely unacceptable. Put your tail coats on.

Cameron, Osborne and the Bullingdon set

'...At a typical evening in 2005, the Buller partially destroyed an Oxford gastro pub called the White Hart. "All the food and plates had been thrown everywhere and they were jumping on top of each other on the table like kids in a playground," said the pub's landlord, Ian Rogers. "But they apologised profusely afterwards." And paid for it too, of course. That's how the Buller works: it buys its way out of trouble...'

James Delingpole,

So when does violence insult democracy? When you can't pay for the damage, of course. If those students had had any foresight they would have left their debts in wads of notes at the scene of the crime. And 20 years from now, they would all be running the country.

the bullingdon twats grow up

"Chin-chin. Let's repaint the mercedes at taxpayer's expense."

Correspondence with Johann Hari concerning his article about Megrahi...

Dear Johann
You may be interested, if you don't know it already, in Gareth Peirce's analysis of the Megrahi case at http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n18/gareth-peirce/the-framing-of-al-megrahi. I know you mention in your article that 'there are some serious commentators who argue that Megrahi was framed', but it seems fairly clear that you don't go along with that. I'd be interested to know how you feel confident enough to dismiss it - which is effectively what you do by referring to Megrahi as 'a convicted terrorist - the worst in modern British history'. (You also say that 'Megrahi was sent home to Triploli to be greeted by cheering crowds after serving eleven days for each person murdered'.)

I also think that for those few people who still don't acknowledge that Iraq was about oil (and surely they're relatively few by now, aren't they??) I'm not sure that what I understand to be your main argument will be all that convincing. You seem just to be saying that Blair is unscrupulous (which we knew), that he was prepared to trade a convicted terrorist for oil, therefore he must have been prepared to go to war for oil. (A simplification, of course, of your words, but isn't that the essence?). In a way, I think that by linking this single example of Blair's duplicity and self-interest to the Iraq war, you are almost less likely to convince detractors: what is important in the case of Iraq (and indeed Megrahi) is surely the context, including the history of US and British actions in the Middle East, rather than the intentions and actions of one individual.

If one does accept that Megrahi was almost certainly framed, then it seems to me that there are far more important issues than those addressed in your article. These include:

Some extracts below from the Lord Chief Justice's Mansion House speech (emphasis mine). It turns out that our proud constitutionless democracy is less of a democracy than even I had thought (though just as proud).

...my deepest concern at the moment is directed to the increased use of what are described as Henry VIII clauses...

Henry VIII was a dangerous tyrant. The Reformation Parliament made him Supreme Head of the Church, the representative of the Almighty on earth – hardly an encouragement to humility: it altered the succession at his will: it changed the religion backwards and forwards, at his will: they were a malleable manageable lot. And there is a public belief that the Statute of Proclamations of 1539 was the ultimate in supineness. The Act itself was repealed within less than 10 years, immediately after his death in 1547. But it had allowed the King’s proclamations to have the same force as Acts of Parliament. That is a Henry VIII clause...

Consider the Banking (Special Provisions) Act 2008 enacted in the hurricane of the banking crisis. It granted the Treasury, presumably the Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, the power to make:

“(a) such supplementary, incidental or consequential provision, or
(b) such transitory, transitional or saving provision, as they consider appropriate for the general purposes, or any particular purposes, of this Act…”

But the power goes further. It expressly provided that an order may

“(a) disapply (to such extent as is specified) any specified statutory provision or rule of law;
(b) provide for any specified statutory provision to apply (whether or not it would otherwise apply) with specified modification.”

So we have an Act of Parliament which expressly grants to the Treasury power to disapply any other relevant statute bearing on the provisions of the 2008 Act or indeed any rule of law.

The same process is at work with section 51 of the Constitutional Reform and Governance Act 2010. This enables any Minister of the Crown, by order to make such provision as he or she considers appropriate in relation to any provision of the Act. The Act, as it says, relates to our constitutional affairs. The order may:

“(a) amend, repeal or revoke any existing statutory provision,
(b) include supplementary, incidental, transitional, transitory or saving provision.”

So the new constitutional arrangements can be revisited by ministerial order, directed not merely to amendment repeal or revocation of any provisions in the Act itself, but directed at any of our existing statutory provisions.

...

I have tried to pursue this question and recently read two letters from the Ministry of Justice on this topic. And it made alarming reading. First, it is clear that there is no routine method for collecting information about Henry VIII clauses. Doing the best the Ministry could, during the parliamentary session up to 10 November 2009 there were I quote “around 70 such powers contained within the legislation enacted so far”. The information is that at least 10 of them were not new, but were re-enactments, and 15 of them contained provisions allowing consequential amendments. Between 10 November and the end of the parliamentary session for 2008-09 there were some 53 additional such clauses, of which 10 were provisions allowing for consequential amendments, and 5 enabled the proper functioning of pilot schemes. So we are talking of over 120 Henry VIII clauses in one parliamentary session. Does this surprise you? It certainly astonishes me.