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Saturday 23 September 2017

Florence speech verdict; steady as she goes

Reactions to Theresa May's Florence speech are predictable. Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt have both slated it, politicians have created varieties of weasel words of semi-approval but the majority in the middle asked of the much-hyped landmark "was that it?"

The avoidance of a cliff-edge and extending our leave date until the end of the current EU budget cycle both make some sense. However, what I was looking for were Mrs May's words on what is to me a critically important part of leaving; re-establishing the supremacy of UK courts. What she said is this:
I am clear that the guarantee I am giving on your rights is real. And I doubt anyone with real experience of the UK would doubt the independence of our courts or of the rigour with which they will uphold people’s legal rights

But I know there are concerns that over time the rights of EU citizens in the UK and UK citizens overseas will diverge. I want to incorporate our agreement fully into UK law and make sure the UK courts can refer directly to it.

Where there is uncertainty around underlying EU law, I want the UK courts to be able to take into account the judgments of the European Court of Justice with a view to ensuring consistent interpretation. On this basis, I hope our teams can reach firm agreement quickly.
In other words, after Brexit the UK supreme court will revert to being fully independent and the judgements of the ECJ will have just the same comparative weight as those from the common law jurisdictions of the Commonwealth and the US, which have long been considered by our supreme court. In fact, the UK has always been more open to the use of comparative law than any of the Code Napoleon nations of the EU. It is therefore the EU that risks isolation from evolving international standards, through a rigid belief in its own politicised court, and not the UK. 

In the field of human rights in particular there has been an international convergence between first-world jurisdictions, and human rights cases in the UK have frequently been argued using foreign case-law; a report for the US congress in 2010 quoted the decline of the US supreme court in leading international law and praised the UK, and the then leadership in the Lords of the UK's supreme tribunal;
The House of Lords has, where relevant, used decisions from foreign courts in these cases to compare how the rights have been interpreted. This applies for not only the European Convention on Human Rights, but also for a number of other international treaties. For example, in A v. Secretary of State, foreign cases were used throughout the opinions of the Law Lords, which was considering the use of evidence that may have been obtained by torture. It noted how the Torture Convention had been implemented into the law of France, Canada, the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. During this case, numerous foreign decisions were referred to—three from the Supreme Court of the United States, twelve from the Supreme Courts of six other countries, and others from international courts and tribunals. Some commentators have noted that the use of so many foreign cases was a “conscious attempt to put the practice of the UK within a global context and to upgrade the common law to modern international standards.” In fact, the approach of Lord Bingham was highly commended by an article in the Law Society Gazette, which provided:
Lord Bingham has performed brilliantly in the job for which he was specifically selected in defiance of the principle of “buggin’s turn”, which would have given it to another. He has stitched the Human Rights Act into the fabric of our domestic law and, in doing so, aligned our jurisprudence with that of an emerging global approach. The breadth of the approach of the House of Lords under his leadership throws into stark relief the decline of its US equivalent … this was a conscious attempt to put the practice of the UK within a global context and to upgrade the common law to modern international standards.
That puts the politicised 'court' of the ECJ in its place, I think. Brexit means our courts will again be free to develop law in line with humankind's continuing social evolution, using the wisdom of the US supreme court and of our Commonwealth cousins, unconstrained by the narrow and primitive world-view of the parochial and somewhat corrupt ECJ.  

20 comments:

Anonymous said...

I admire your faith in the Mayslag Raedwald.

She and her government have NO INTENTION of letting democracy take its course.

right-writes

John Brown said...

I only hope you are right.

The worry is that EU citizens will consequently have different and "better" rights than UK citizens.

For instance, being able to bring spouses to the UK without needing to apply the criteria applied to UK citizens, such as minimum earnings.

[BTW Google "File on 4 Breaking into Britain" to see how this law is currently being broken]

Cull The Badgers said...

But nothing she said is agreed. It is a wish list. President Macron has since demanded more concessions. He has agreed nothing. It was a demonstration of supine appeasement.

We still pay money we adopt all EU tules and regulations. There is no cetain end date. It mounts to an illusion we are leaving.

barnacle bill said...

" ... an illusion we are leaving."

Exactly Cull The Badgers, it is to maintain the smokescreen over Brexit that Dithering May with her record at the Home Office was slotted into Number Ten.

terence patrick hewett said...

How soon will we be able to engineer our own trade deals? 2019 or 2022? If it is in 2022 we will be in deep trouble.

Dioclese said...

Sold down the river is how I see it. I can't see this as anything other than backsliding...

rapscallion said...

I'm not entirely sure about May. I do not however trust her - not one inch. I can't decide whether she's putting the fix in so that we end up with a sort of messy associate member status, or playing it cannily. I note her speech was vague, but it was short of detail. It was an all things to all men sort of speech. It is telling that Macron wants more concessions, and you could say that her lack of detail and telling of porkies (saying we had reached agreement with the EU on certain subjects when we hadn't) is telling.

Either she's played a blinder or she's just signed her political death warrant.

Anonymous said...

May is a globalist. What can we expect from such creatures? In the case of our leaving the EU experience tells us the previous globalist resigned before he had to make good on his promise to invoke Article 50 - he subsequently resigned his seat also despite promising to "stick it out". The effect was to begin the process of slowing our exit to a crawl: this would allow time for the various legal challenges that we saw happen.

The globalist's next trick was to destroy the chances of a genuine Leaver taking the wheel and that person was Andrea Leadsom. The media whores had done their job and she was toast. Next the globalists put a fellow globalist in the driving seat and she dutifully applied the handbrake. We are where we are because four-fifths of the political class do not want us to leave the European Union - watch as they stretch it out beyond the next election cycle.

If you're wondering why May is so rubbish at being Prime Minister just look at her record as Home Secretary. The reason she didn't deport those murdering Jihadis is simple: she ain't got the guts to do the right thing and would rather some innocent whitey had their guts blown all over the pavement than upset the Brussels mafia.

Think about this for a moment:

Start to finish the current timetable for exiting the EU will put us just two months shy of the duration of World War 2

I fucking hate politicians.

Steve

mikebravo said...

The only thing we know about Maybot is that she was a useless lying bureaucrat at the Home Office and :

She presided over the huge increase in immigration whilst making noises about reduction.
She happily signed us up for the EU arrest warrant - contrary to Habeas Corpus, when she had an exemption.
She was an enthusiastic enforcer for Harperson's "equality" shite.
She was a remainer.

Why she was put out to front the "visible" tories is a mystery. What the "hidden" tories agenda is being kept a dark secret.

The only thing that is certain is that it will not be what 52% voted for.

Dave_G said...


May was already on dodgy ground after her disastrous election call - her fate had already been sealed however she's now being put forward as the sacrificial lamb (halal of course...) by stretching the leave date ad-infinitum AND potentially handing over billions to the most non-deserving cabal in history.
On the basis of this performance alone, should a GE be held tomorrow the Tories would be toast .... but there's nothing left for Brexiteers to vote for and we'd end up with a coalition of calamity that would definitely derail the process - exactly to plan.

Th.th..th...that's all folk's.

Game over.

Budgie said...

"Nigel Farage and Guy Verhofstadt have both slated it ..." That doesn't in itself make either wrong. I have no idea whether Verhofstadt wants us to go or stay (does anyone, even him?), but Farage is for leaving. That makes Farage's position more likely right in my book.

There is no "cliff edge". It is a change. And we voted for it. We want to stop being run by the EU, and instead be in control of our own laws, borders, fish and money (etc). Labeling that welcome change a "cliff edge" is an emotional spasm. We have nothing to gain by spinning out the Brexit process to 5 or 6 or more years.

May's opinion that no-one doubts "the independence of our courts" is a 'look, there's a squirrel' moment. The issue is whose laws are our courts "independently" applying? If our courts must apply EU laws, we haven't left.

There is now no difference in principle between Conservative and Labour - both want a soft Brexit extended indefinitely. If May's Florence fantasy comes to pass we will still be in the EU in 2022, still paying the EU money, still subject to the ECJ, still implementing EU laws, unable to do our own trade deals, and without even the minimal influence we have now. May is the civil servants puppet, and this is a disaster.

Cascadian said...

Very astute Budgie......"May is the civil servants puppet, and this is a disaster."

yUK attempts at negotiations are disastrous, it's preparations for seperation are worse. One can only assume there is no appetite for Brexit.

Not too much mention in the news today that yUK's credit rating was downgraded overnight, the managed decline continues apace, and who better than Ms Maybe to oversee it, the mistress of deferred decisions, u-turns, disastrous policy and non enforcement of policy.

Anonymous said...

As JRM said, until we are out and away from the baleful aegis of the ECJ-ECHR we ain't out brothers and sisters.

Anonymous said...

Not too much mention in the news today that yUK's credit rating was downgraded overnight, the managed decline continues apace, and who better than Ms Maybe to oversee it, the mistress of deferred decisions, u-turns, disastrous policy and non enforcement of policy. [...]

Mass immigration is the only factor keeping the GDP figure rising, the economy is in intensive care and the national debt is growing out of control and a government which keeps borrowing to give it away, how many times does it have to be said, running a welfare state free at the point of access allied to a policy of OPEN BORDERS is economic insanity!!!!!!!!!!!!
FFS! the markets know this everybody and his dog knows it and we have a Prime Minister who knows fuck all about anything which really counts, she is cultural Marxist zombie who is clueless about how to even get by, let alone run a first world economy.

May, the lavs and indeed Westminster are the problem, we've had sixty odd years of redistributive Socialism be they tory or lav and now we're broke and high on debt, and going broker.

DeeDee99 said...

May's speech was the equivalent of Chamberlain's - appeasement of a continental bully in the hope it will make them more reasonable. It won't; they'll pocket the offer and then demand more.

And personally, I consider our Courts embedding the Human Rights Act in our jurisprudence and moving towards a global approach to be a negative thing. The Human Rights Act is a foreign terrorist and criminals charter; a free pass to exploit the British people and attack them with impunity.

We should have a British Bill of Rights which balances the rights of foreign terrorists and criminals who would do us harm against the collective right of the British people to live in safety.

Dadad said...

May's speech was just waffle; a device to keep herself in position until the tory party conference.

What she failed to do, conspicuously, was to answer the EU questions re the Irish border, EU citizen rights, and the total divorce bill.

Consequently Barnier will say quite rightly, that not sufficient progress has been made to start trade discussions.

She's a dead woman walking.

Mr Ecks said...


Your piece proves again that you are not a reliable bloke Radders.

You exist in some fantasy world where a treasonous cow like May is on "our" side.


TORY HQ IS 020 7222 9000+ THEIR EMAIL IS ON THEIR WEBSITE.

We all need to keep up the pressure to get rid of the bitch. And --at the very least--confiscate her pension.

Raedwald said...

DeeDee - agree about the need of a Bill of Rights to replace the HRA, but there is no reason why we can't develop human rights law in line with common law nations that have strict immigration / anti-terrorist controls, including the US and Australia. A body of roughly parallel law in the anglophone commonwealth / common law nations is a strong counter to the efforts of the UN and its agencies to undermine us. And a strong counter to the legitimacy ECJ and ECHR.

leila said...

Martin Armstrong Economics reminds us that if we hang around we may be engulfed in the Euro banking crisis even before 2019 (quote) Monte dei Paschi was bailed with public EU funds in May, senior staff capped to 10x average staff member pay (they never lose do they!) and 2 other Italian lenders are in trouble Vento Banca and Bance Popular di Vencenza. And that is just Italy. May should never have even been considered for PM after her Home Sec record but I agree with posts that it was deliberate.

Anonymous said...

Harry says;

Ah well, that's enough. I've quite enjoyed my regular visits here Raedwald, but lately the enjoyment has been tailing off and replaced with disappointment. I'm leaving Mr. Ecks to tell you how it is from now on.

This sort of wish-washy hope for the best stuff you write is part of the problem.

Cheers, all the best.

H