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Parliament, as a comment to a previous post reminded me, remains our supreme court. Parliament can still pass a Bill of Attainder that tries, condemns and sentences all in one. In the past, Attainder meant forfeiting all you had; land, titles, houses, property, wealth and even the clothes you stood in. Popular anger against corrupt and sleazy MPs, thieving Lords, bent civil servants, peculative coppers and the rest of the stinking class would have seen a tsunami of Attainders had the 'Mail' and the 'Sun' (or this blog ..) run a vote on it.
Sadly, the ECHR would almost certainly reverse any modern Attainder. Wrecking a national economy, putting 100,000 out of work, stealing £100m and such are not regarded by the ECHR as sufficiently heinous to merit the draconian penalties of full Attainder. What we can do is what we have done - strip the malefactor of any honour they hold. Nowhere in the Charter of Fundamental Rights does it say 'Every man has the right to a KBE'. The ECHR will not reverse the judgement.
Despite the opinion of the press, this was a good call.
The two Romanian gypsy girls had gone down to the Naples tourist beach with a few trinkets, maybe to sell, maybe to provide cover for a morning of purse and wallet thefts. These are tough girls - hanging around London ATMs ready to grab a wad of dispensed cash from the slow and unwary, I've seen them front-down police officers, refuse to move on. But even tough little thieves get hot on an Italian beach; they went to swim, struggled, drowned.
The two nineteen year old lads had travelled together from their village in the Congo, paying down with stolen funds their places on a leaky fishing boat that would get them into Europe. The boat never made it. The bodies of the boys, still together, were washed ashore on a Lampedusa beach.
What the two incidents have in common is the treatment of the corpses. In both instances these were not only left for many hours on the beaches concerned, but in both instances photos have emerged of holidaymakers getting back to sunbathing and swimming around them. Now I know that depth of field and skilled photography can fool the eye, and those bathers who appear just yards away are probably a hundred feet distant, but the photos don't lie in showing their exposed corpses lying alone and only partially covered, unbarriered and unguarded, with no officer or official respectfully watching over them.
The care, preparation and burial of the dead is one of the corporal works of mercy that establish our humanity. Let us be shamed that our attitudes to these people in life should not last in death. We are all equal in death.
It's Monday. Check the Travelcard, fix the diary for the week and throw another £50 billion at Greece to keep it solvent for another fortnight. In fact, much of that money goes back to the French and German banks that own Greek debt, and therefore to bolstering those nations' credit ratings. The Greeks end up not a Euro better off but with a further obligation for their grandchildren to pay for the German and French banks solvency. It's a sort of reverse Robin Hood tax - taking from the poor to give to the rich.
It won't work, of course. But that's never deterred the Federasts from anything.
So Sarkozy, with news of brown envelopes, tax breaks, sleaze and Presidential corruption, is proving that he's just a bent little frog after all. Like so many French Presidents, the stench of peculation, theft, bribery and dishonestly surrounds him.
The Kermits may be happy to be led by such people. We, you may be sure, are not.
The ECHR is not an appeal court in the way the Supreme Court is. Appeals procedures in both criminal and civil justice systems ensure that only the most significant and relevant cases, those likely to lead to a change in either the law or judicial process, reach the old Middlesex Guildhall for careful, lengthy and expert consideration.
But the ECHR is not an appeal court. With a backlog of over 150,000 cases, it is a Court of Special Pleading, grown from an Age of Entitlement. Wherever governments make rationing decisions - rationing Welfare housing, or access to tax-funded medical services, or tax-funded education - there will always be those unhappy with their ration, who want more. While national governments can ignore the whining of self-interest, the ECHR opens its doors to allow them to make a case as to why they should be treated differently to everyone else. Wherever governments design and deliver systems of criminal justice the ECHR opens its door to those who want better treatment than their fellow convicts, who want jury decisions overturned on grounds not forming part of their national law, who want special consideration and personal preferment. It stinks.
Don't mistake me; I think there is a role for a pan-national court to make recommendations to national governments to change their domestic laws. Scandinavian socialist eugenics, the birth-cradle of Nazism, Toynbee's Utopian Fabianopolis, gave us the compulsory sterilisation of the mentally retarded until the 1970s. However, the court's power should be limited to recommendation. Its decisions cannot be binding on democratic nations making their own legitimate decisions on the rationing of Welfare or the penalty for any particular crime.
We once had a Court of Special Pleading ourselves; called the Court of Requests it was empowered to make decisions at variance with the Common Law, to challenge the law. It eventually collapsed under the weight of backlog of cases, as everyone sought special pleading. The ECHR may be headed the same way.
The threat, bluster and economic warfare now being mobilised against Iran by the West is delighting both the Sunni dominated middle east and Wahabbi Saudi Arabia. To get the west to go to war against the most powerful remaining Sh'ia force in the region whilst keeping their own hands clean suits the remaining despots very nicely indeed. And the west, as gullible and myopic as ever, seemingly having learned nothing from Iraq, is heading straight into catastrophe.
Far better to call in all those favours from Israel and have that belligerent little nation act as the west's proxy; the animus between Israel and Iran is widely understood, the fight would be a fair one and Sunni chauvinism would be blunted by a Sh'ia 'champion' in the arena with their widely-loathed common enemy. We would, of course, keep Israel plentifully supplied with arms (to the benefit of our own industry), albeit discreetly, and guarantee the integrity of Israel's pre-1967 border. But that's all.
Labour peers (including Paddy Ashdown) are demonstrating just how disconnected from reality they are in opposing Welfare caps as the government's proposals pass through the Lords. Even if IDS' welfare reforms have missed the opportunity for real and fundamental reform, they are at least dealing with an aspect of welfare that aggravates the majority of voters - benefits claimants living in grand homes at the taxpayers' expense. As the Indie points out, this is just as much an irritation to the 'squeezed middle' as the equally scandalous fat-cat rewards at the other end of the scale.
The British people have, as a whole, a pretty good idea of fairness. It's fine for Richard Branson and Alan Sugar to be wealthy, but not fine for some unknown thieving muppet to equal their wealth by skimming all the profits from your pension fund. It's understandable that a 20-something soccer player or pop tart behaves stupidly with unaccustomed cash wealth, but inconceivable that a 20-something derivatives trader is entitled to do so. Labour peers should realise they're backing the wrong horse; Cameron's vulnerability is his closeness to the obscene earnings at the top end, not the benefits piss-takers at the bottom.
Jonathan Meades has a formidable mind. I still relish the throwaway line shattering smug pretention that he voiced on one of his architectural history TV progs "Lutyens is known to have designed eleven houses, thirty-seven of which are in Surrey".
His piece in the Telegraph urges us not to blame the slum estates of the sixties for the criminal behaviour of the underclass. Not that he likes or approves of the architecture, you understand, but because those who live in Albany refrain from crack dealing in the stairwells whilst those who live in Ernest Bevin House do not. Meades sums it up;
exclusion – initially expressed through truancy and minor delinquency – is wrought by people on themselves, by their irresponsibility and failure to integrate, because their life is an incompatible synthesis of primitivism and envy, of ill-education and consumerist desire
Unfortunately he stops there, hesitant perhaps at wandering too far from architectural history. More, Jonathan, please.
