Comments on: Blair announces abolition of elections

By: Phil Hunt

Phil Hunt — Mon, 07 Nov 2005 00:41:14 +0000

constablesavage: Phil, do you not think that if the Sun amd Mail readers/government decimated the population it would depress house prices?

That’s true! Supply and demand, and all that.

By: constablesavage

constablesavage — Sun, 06 Nov 2005 08:42:28 +0000

We do have a constitution. We don’t have a constitution reduced to a single written document, like the USA. There’s a difference, most easily seen by the fact that in the UK if you win the most parliamentary seats for your point of view it is sovereign and you get to make the law. In the USA you can have the majority, win the most seats in the legislature, and yet be frustrated by the operation of constitutional interpretation. If you are a democrat single document constitutions are in general a bad idea, and the older they are the more undemocratic they tend to be in their operation.

Which is not to say anything in favour of the Act you describe which strikes me as a very bad one.

Phil, do you not think that if the Sun amd Mail readers/government decimated the population it would depress house prices?

By: Phil Hunt

Phil Hunt — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 23:22:33 +0000

Sometimes I do wonder what it would take for the British people to get the point about civil liberties. Perhaps it would take a totalitarian regime which rounds up one in ten of the population into concentration camps and kills them. Even then, I expect that large numbers of fuckwitted Sun and Mail readers would think it is was a good thing so long as it was people demonised as being an “other” who were killed.

By: Katie Bartleby

Katie Bartleby — Sat, 05 Nov 2005 20:58:09 +0000

D’you know, I was at this talk at the RSA on the future relationship between the judiciary and the executive and I took a newly-arrived American friend, who happily admitted she knew nothing about Britain at all and even asked “what’s the guardian?” when our host for the evening was introduced.

Anyway, when she realised that extra-judicial killings and executive detention were now legal in Britain she said “My God, and we think our civil liberties are under attack because the government knows what library books we check out.”

In America, the majority of the terror “problem” comes from foreigners, and the US Government can do what it likes to foreigners and nobody bats an eye. If they attempted to repress the civil liberties of Americans, people go nuts, quite rightly. They have rights enshrined in law from the founding of their country.

In Britain, however, where the problem is as much with native British citizens as with resident foreigners, the government feels it must go further and can because we have no constitution and, frankly, the judiciary can’t strike down the laws of parliament as unconstitutional. Just think about that for a second: America thinks WE’RE illiberal. I despair sometimes, I really do.