NEWS ........

2. PARLIAMENT TO ABDICATE?
By Edward Spalton

AN EVIL BILL FROM FASCIST LABOUR

As soon as Tony Blair came to power in the Labour Party he removed Clause 4 of the Labour Party constitution (that is he rejected nationalisation), courted big business, embraced the corporatist European Union (having stood previously on his personal opposition to it) and passed a law to control elections and election finance - but not funding by Trade Unions. Blair is a corporatist, in the continental European tradition. No other PM in history has attended Parliament so rarely and no other has such contempt for the democratic process, having tried to pass off the democratically obnoxious European Constitution as a "tidying up exercise".

So much of what Blairite Labour stands for is in the European fascist tradition (for the many personal and ideological parallels see the book Fascist Europe Rising Chapter 4, available on the website www.freenations.freeuk.com/publications ) so the increasingly authoritarian legislation which he has put on the Statute book of our once free nation comes as no surprise.

The Regulatory Reform Bill has now been laid before Parliament. It sounds like something George Orwell might have described in his book 1984 and it is a repulsive piece of legislation - so congratulations to the academic lawyers from the Cambridge University Law Faculty who wrote in a letter to The Times of 16th February that

"The Government could re-write almost any Act and in some cases
enact new laws, that at present only Parliament can make".

The very name, The Regulatory Reform Bill, lacks any real social content which might benefit the people, nor does it fit the description of a constitutional measure to define the terms of democratic governance. On the contrary it removes democratic constraints in the interests of the State and hands power of law making to ministers, partly advised by anonymous corporate bodies and unconstrained by Parliament.

It is reminiscent of the Enabling Act passed by Nazi Germany in 1933 and of course totally consistent with the delegation of British sovereignty to Committees of the European Union. There have been a long series of such provisions in domestic legislation. The metrication legislation permitted ministers to make law as the whim took them. The Incitement to Religious Hatred Bill permits the Attourney General to prosecute or not as his politics dictate. The Pensions Act allowed ministers to decide the minimum funding requirement. In many Laws it is laid down that agencies (like the Crown Prosecution Service) are permitted not to prosecute if "it is not in the public interest", a dangerously arbitrary notion.

The Regulatory Reform Bill will permit Ministers to change the whole operation of the British Constitution. Yes, the British have a constition, a written constitution, one that goes back some 800 years, but it is at its most vulnerable when the executive controls (or through Crown prerogative powers bypasses) our Parliament, and not the other way round. As the eminent professors of Law at Cambridge point out no government in a country with a CODIFIED constitution could behave in this way. Ministers, it is clear will use these powers to re-visit past legislation and create the laws they were unable to make by due parliamentary process.

What is really frightening is that 90% of those who understand these constitutional scandals are outside Parliament and 90% of those inside Parliament (dominated as it is by the air-head "Blair babes") do not understand but are making these arbitrary, anti-democratic, indeed fascist laws. There will surely be a terrible reckoning.

PARLIAMENT TO ABDICATE?
By Edward Spalton

Among the hullabaloo about identity cards and banning smoking and the "glorification" of terrorism, a thoroughly nasty Bill of incalculable constitutional consequences has been presented. It goes under the grey name of The Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill No 111. I have tried to read it but it is in the sort of language, which makes the head spin after a line or two.

Even the explanatory notes are heavy going - but the basic purpose is to make it easier for the government to enact laws without having to tax the intellects or attention of MPs. The Bill is a way of allowing laws to be passed by orders from ministers, bypassing MPs altogether. Of course, they say the law will only be used for uncontroversial matters - "a tidying up exercise", as we were assured the EU constitution would be. But what if these powers were to fall into the hands of a government less given to plain dealing and truthfulness than this one?

In plain language, it is an "Enabling Act". The ambition to pass such measures is not unknown. The late Sir Oswald Mosley proposed just such a law for the day his fascists came to power. It would, he said, "turn Parliament from a talk shop into a workshop". His exemplar, the even less lamented Adolf Hitler, inherited a number of similar "emergency laws" from previous, democratically elected, centre party governments. They were sufficient for locking up his opponents until he could pass the total enabling act, dispensing with parliament altogether, except as an applauding audience.

John Spencer, a Cambridge law professor, says that this Act would enable the government to create new offences without debate, punishable with imprisonment for up to two years. They could also introduce house arrest, give the police even greater powers to interrogate and detain, set up new courts (Star Chamber, perhaps?) and rewrite the rules on immigration, nationality, divorce, inheritance and the appointment of judges - all without troubling your friendly neighbourhood MP or depriving him of a wink of sleep by late night sittings..

In other walks of life, people lose their jobs when a function is outsourced - but not our MPs. Legislation is largely out of parliamentary control already. A recent German study showed that 80% of their laws now originate from the EU - either as regulations, which apply straight away or as directives, which require national parliaments to pass laws implementing EU policy. As the EU's laws apply across Europe, Britain cannot be very different.

This Bill, if passed, will ensure that most such laws will not receive the slightest scrutiny in parliament. Blair's babes will not have to trouble their pretty little heads. As one Old Labour peer remarked, "They will be able to get home in time to put the babies to bed".

We have departed so very far from the former principles of responsible British parliamentary democracy. Perhaps it is time for the government to dissolve the people and elect a new one.