Ink and parchment

Via The Anglo Saxon Chronicals we have this from the Telegraph. It concerns itself with the interesting issues of which of the UK’s various laws are constitutionally statue (ie need to be explicitly overridden by the will of parliament) and which are not (ie do not need to be explicitly overridden but, instead, are diminished or nullified by new laws in a hierarchical manner – or something like that anyway). Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights were classified as constitutionally statute during the trial of the Metric Martyrs three years ago so need to be explicitly overridden which I don’t think this government has officially decided is a progressive thing to do yet. Give them time.

The recognition of the special status of some legislation in the UK is becoming an issue now. The safety of the conviction of the Metric Martyrs (convicted of selling produce in Imperial measures like pounds and ounces), the right to fine people without a conviction (which seems to be shady legally if the Metric Martyrs were guilty), the governments current plans for restricting freedom of people not found guilty in a court of law and, also, possible issues for various bits and bobs of EU legislation. All these things, it seems, reach back through history to a couple of rather well written inky parchments.

I’ve posted about this issue before and concluded that the state and this government can get themselves out of the various problems that the Bill of Rights and Magna Carta will very soon cause for them. Aged documents which primarily concern themselves with the rights and liberties of the unwashed masses are inconvenient for the powerful progressives who look upon hand written documents as rather quaint but irrelevant in modern Britain. Nietzsche once said:

The masses seem to me worthy of notice in only three respects: first as blurred copies of great men, produced on bad paper with worn plates, further as a resistance to the great, and finally as the tools of the great; beyond that, may the devil and statistics take them.

The parchment bonds which are beginning to raise their voices exist exactly for this reason. For the protection and liberty of the masses that Nietzsche, a great man, refers to.

In the Telegraph article Christopher Booker concludes:

Whichever way the Government plays it, in its continuing assault on the constitutional rights of the British people, this time it is stuffed.

Which leaves me thinking two things. Firstly that I may be underestimating the trouble that these old safeguards will cause for the government and, secondly, how nice it is to see the MSM catching up with the blogs on this story. Mind you, you can't blame them; they simply don't have the manpower.

Posted by John at February 28, 2005 09:36 AM | TrackBack