Q & A on ID cards..

What's your stand on ID cards?

Firstly we already have things that go towards ID cards - National Insurance numbers and passports being prime examples.

ID cards to safeguard freedom are a bitter irony. Do we want a government that can follow our movements so easily? that can imposition itself all day between us and our society? It really gives the government too much power over us for a totally disproportionate reason.

Its hardly what you would want in a free society.

Q & A on a Bill of Rights..

Will we have a written bill of rights, with gurantees such as freedom of speech?

Absolutely. That really is the whole point of the written constitution. The proper model of government, to my mind, is that of reasonable people contracting with each other for their mutual advantage so that everyone can live in peace and freedom. A constitution must mark out the freedoms that will be accorded to everyone as its most important section.

There are a number of bill of rights of differing types around the world and my first thoughts were a simple incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights which has a sophisticated jurisprudence to back it up. But then really that might be the problem. Coming from a continental tradition, the ECHR has safeguards built into all the rights which, whilst appearing reasonable, to my mind water down all the liberties so they then start to look like a code of ethics or rules for good behaviour.

No. I want freedoms of a more thorough going kind.

Q & A.... on Europe

Adam, I like the idea for a written constitution. Will this overule any outside 'influence' such as EU?

In my view of supra-national law such as that of the EU, a de facto federal system is achieved if a country's laws are subordinate to those of a superior organisation such as the EU. Under the European Communities Act 1972, as held in the Factortame cases, UK law can in certain circumstances be set aside (I think the proper word is disapplied) if it contravenes EU law. This is not widely understood but ultimately means that at the moment UK law can be overruled by the EU. As a result we live in a weakly federal European superstate already.

My view is that the EU cannot progress as its leaders would like any further without becoming a more fully fledged European superstate. And this is the point : I don't think this should happen. This far and no further. EU law has been of tremondous help in a lot of areas - especially the environment. But it must not develop into a super state. Its origins as an economic entity coupled with Europe's long history strongly recommend that it is not suited to becoming a USE. Europe is not the America of the late 18th century. There has been no populist, passionate quest to set up a democratic European super state. It should not happen until there is such a popular sentiment.

Then add in the large amount of corruption prevalent in the EU and the democratic defecit and I reach my conclusion that the EU has gone far enough. We need a long time of consolidation before further intergration occurs.

In my model then, we stand back from the weakly federal system so that British constitutional law is, if there is a conflict, supreme. Fortunately it is unlikely that there will be a conflict between the British constitution and EU law. I am not for one minute suggesting a withdrawl from the EU, far from it, but Europe intergration is perhaps the most fundamental issue the future of Britain faces and the country has to be clear about what it wants. The present position could be described as something of a "fudge".

If the EU don't like it - tough. We have to be clear one way or another as to what the country wants. Sliding subconsciously into a European superstate is not the future I have in mind.

The Progress Party

This blog stems from my desire to stand for election in the next general election in the UK, which is probably either 2009 or 2010. At the moment I have no interest in being part of any of the other parties in the UK and will probably run as an Independent candidate although we are looking into forming our own political party called The Progress Party. At the moment the only thing I could possibly lose is some free time and the £500 deposit.

Two things have really prompted me to do this. Firstly I would describe myself as having only a normal knowledge of political matters - the sort of understanding one gets from reading newspapers, watching the news on TV and so forth. But I want to learn a lot more and standing for election is a way to get informed and involved.

The Iraq War has really highlighted, in a terribly dramatic way, that as a citizen you just cannot rely on the government getting things right and running things in a way you vaguely approve of. I, like a lot of people, bought into the government's message that there were WMD in Iraq, that it was right to take military action and so forth. Subsequent events have shown how wrong this was. Whatever the moral rights and wrongs of removing a dictator from power, the purported reasons set out by the Prime Minister in that speech in Parliament in March 2003 were plain wrong.

And if the government can be so manifestly wrong about the most important issue it is supposed to deal with, the country going to war, what else is going wrong? A democracy can only work properly if the citizenry engages in politics to some degree and not just shrug their shoulders in the belief that better and wiser people are running it for us - that is what some ranks of our rulers want us to believe. Politics is just too important to be left to the politicians.

In a country where children are stabbed to death in schools and where hospitals are so dirty patients dont want to eat in the canteens something is clearly wrong. This is not the new life for Britain that Mr Blair promised in 1997.

Secondly none of the candidates in the last election in my constituency, Southampton Itchen, appealed to me. I walked all the way down to our voting booth, studied once again who the candidates were and turned and left. In retrospect this was cowardly - I should have at least voted for the least worst option.

The first was John Denham, our MP and from Labour. At the moment I have quite a lot of respect for John. Before the Iraq War he was a front runner in the cabinet, a promising minister in the Home Office. I used to do some fund raising things for the wildlife charity WWF and in 1995 John actually came along to a little stall we ran in the Marlands Shopping Centre in Southampton to give us some support. He resigned in 2003 from the cabinet because he felt he could not support the invasion of Iraq. You can read his resignation speech at www.johndenham.org.uk . But he still represents a government that has not implemented the changes it promised.

As for the Conservatives - my background as a southerner growing up in the 1980s tends to be towards the Tories. But the candidate they put forward lives in Winchester. Then there were the Lib-Dems but I could not support them due to their thorough going Euro-orientation. And finally the UK Independence Party were fielding a candidate who had, several years ago, been a leading light in the Socialist Workers Party. I have every respect for socialists and people on the far left, but could not really vote for someone who seemed to have made such a political turnabout no matter the rationalisation.

Power in a democracy must reside with the people and this brings me to my first proper point. We must have government of, for and by the people in Britain today. A modern state cannot have an unelected person as its head even if that role is primarily ceremonial. In my view the monarchy can stay on, if if is thought useful, in a sort of cultural or historical position but the monarch's role in enacting Acts of Parliament must be terminated. True democracy can never really take hold until the source of its power is elected by the people. Until that time the veneer of Britain's feudal and class history will always remain.

When I studied constitutional law we were told that one of the main practical benefits of the Queen's position is that her long standing gives her a lot of experience to pass onto the Prime Minister. Fine - when she is no longer head of state she will be free to run for government herself or assist in a political party where her experience can be put to good use rather than interfering with the people's elected government.

This is the starting point then - but its not by any means the only one. At the moment these are further points:

1. We must have a proper written constitution so that the rules of our society are easily accessible and not hidden by years of custom and precedents.
2. The proper codification into written form of the civil and criminal law with the removal (by possible encoding) of the common law.
3. The break up of the United Kingdom into seperate states of Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and England each with their own national assemblies, having proper state powers within their respective domains.
4. The institution of a federal government for the people of Britain with a national assembly to be moved to somewhere more central to the country as a whole, for example Leeds or Leicester. This would give the country a chance for a fresh start away from years of power being concentrated in the south east of the country.

So a rather radical agenda - but then the whole point of this is to come up with some new ideas.