The Great Brussels Bank-robbery..........

The timing couldn’t have been better if you are Farage or worse if you are Cameron. The outrage over Brussels’ smash-and-grab raid on €2bn of British tax-payers’ money is exacerbated by its timing. Whatever possessed the suits in the Berlaymont to produce this IED just before a crucial by-election and almost on the eve of the Great Palaver, the meeting of the EU summit? Stupidity? Or – more likely – the Eurocrats don’t give a toss what the beastly British think.

 

It certainly produced an unusual unanimity of view across the  UK political spectrum. Cameron can never emulate a Thatcher hand-bagging, but he certainly put a bit of stick about . The Lib-Dems called it senseless. Farage talked about ‘vampires’. Miliband may or may not have taken a view. For Cameron, he is facing a possible disaster in Rochester and a Tory revolt over the European Arrest Warrant that Mrs May wants to opt into despite voting against in when in Opposition.

 

The entire episode falls firmly into the ‘you couldn’t make it up’ category.

 

The demand is based on calculations going back 19 years for budget periods long since closed. The EU accounts have not been signed off for about 13 years. The assessment of budget share based on GDP is a Brussels construct that takes into account the proceeds of prostitution and drug-trafficking. (How is the  data collected? From the ladies’ and dealers’ tax returns?).

 

The spread of the demands and rewards piles absurdity upon absurdity. Britain and the Netherlands are punished for success. France has ruined its economy by Socialist profligacy, so it is rewarded with €800 million. Europe’s biggest economy, Germany, gets €615 million which is peanuts to them whilst bankrupt Greece gets clobbered for €71 million. Perhaps it will pay with another German bail-out. Italy, teetering on the edge of economic collapse, is another victim; it gets done for €268 million.

 

So what is Dave to do?

 

He will most likely try to kick the can down the road past May 2017. He carefully left himself wriggle-room by saying that Britain would refuse to pay on 1^st December. He can try diplomacy but any agreement between EU leaders would need the backing of Merckel, and she has already said ‘Get used to it!’ He could mount a legal challenge which could keep the tax-gatherers at bay for a long time. The retrospective nature of the demand and the lack of notice could lead to some very interesting legal exchanges.

 

He could get an agreement to deduct the payments from future Budget contributions so that a lump sum now would be avoided. He could try to get an agreement in the European Council simply to ignore the demand, but persuading the countries that are getting rebates to agree to this is almost certainly out of the question

 

Or just not pay.

 

The EU could launch its own legal proceedings. The maximum penalty would be a fine of around €200 million annually; Britain could refuse to pay until the legal proceedings were over, which could be a pretty long time.

 

At the end of the day there will be a shabby, face-saving compromise.

 

But there is little doubt that this Brussels stitch-up, irresponsible, unreasonable and ill-timed, has been an enormous boost to the followers of Brexit.

 

 

It could be the tipping point when the EU begins its slide down to the midden of history.

·          

Mrs May and that EAW..............

 

Let’s take a look at another  EU ruckus, apart from the smash-and-grab raid for €2 billion.

 

There is the wretched European Arrest Warrant (EAW) which Parliament must soon decide whether to re-adopt. Kitten-heels May is wedded to it, as befits her authoritarian nature. A couple of years ago she was talking about leaving, possibly before her ambitions had No 10 in their cross-hairs. Between 80 and 100 Tory MPs are not. The Tory Party was agin it when it was introduced 10 years ago.

 

It was brought in  as an anti-terrorist measure. It has never been used for this as far as one can tell from the typically scant records. Instead it has been used to collar ordinary offenders for such trivia as not paying the carpenter for fitting a new door or not paying for desert in a restaurant. It is frequently used for minor offences, such as the theft of a bicycle or, in one case,  a wheelbarrow.

 

When it was introduced, there was no entitlement to legal representation at the surrender proceedings or interpretation services at the trial. The Assanje case decide that the EAW could be issued by a civil servant, not necessarily by a judge or magistrate.

 

At a different level, English judges have been outspoken in their view that the judicial system, the judiciary and the courts in a number of EU countries do not meet ‘acceptable standards’. Courts in Eastern Europe are notoriously incompetent and often corrupt There is a distinct prosecution  bias.

 

There is no obligation to carry out a ‘proportionality’ check to determine whether the offence is sufficiently serious to warrant extradition. Lengthy pre-trial detention in abysmal conditions are far from uncommon.

 

Over 1000  EAWs are issued every month. In a typical year, the UK will make about 200 requests; by contrast about 700 people are extradited to Europe from the UK compared with about 20 to the US. The system is clogged by trivia. And of course  there is considerable expense, around £30  million.

 

There have been some staggering miscarriages of justice.

 

Andrew Symeou, a London student, was accused of the murder of a fellow-Briton in Greece. The prosecution was thrown out for lack of evidence. Nearly three years later the prosecution appealed, unknown to the accused. He was hauled back to Greece under an EAW. He was in jail for11 months, then held under house arrest. At the end of four years of torment, Andrew was released when the court ruled that there was no case to answer and it became obvious that he had been fitted-up by the police.

 

Then there was Graham Mitchell. He was hauled back to Portugal on a charge of attempted murder 18 years after being acquitted. The case was then dropped. A retired school-teacher in fragile health faced a Polish EAW for exceeding his bank overdraft 10 years previously.

 

You can be prosecuted for an offence  in another country which you have never visited, and for something that is not a crime in English law. Take the disgraceful case of the Australian academic who was arrested on a German EAW at Heathrow Airport in transit from the USA to Australia for holocaust-denial, a crime that does not  exist in English law. He had never been to Germany. He was released after a couple of days in jail.

 

All extradition proceedings, not just EAW should meet at least three basic criteria.

 

The alleged offence must be a crime in English law. There must be evidence that a crime has actually been committed. There must be evidence that the accused committed the offence.

 

The Netherlands does not accept the EAW unless for a crime under Dutch law. Typically, the French simply ignore it. The UK must dump it.

Oil tanks...........

The most cursory glance at the Brent Crude price ticker show that oil has not merely gone south, but fallen off the cliff. It is currently around $85 from its 2008 high of $145. West Texas is $81.

 

It has tanked!

 

How long this will last is anybody’s guess; oil markets are notoriously difficult to predict, but there will be winners and losers.

 

First up are motorists; already there is a price-war at supermarket filling stations.

 

 

Then agriculture which, surprisingly, is a much bigger consumer of energy than industry mainly because most fertilisers are petroleum-based and partly because especially in arid areas farmers consume large amounts of electricity to pump water. Lower energy prices will be a big fillip to manufacturing throughout Europe with the possible exception of Germany. Its mad pursuit of ‘green’ energy makes its costs triple those of the US.

 

The effects in America will be something of a paradox. It is the largest importer of oil and the largest consumer. At the same time it is the largest producer, well on the way to self-sufficiency. Industry should benefit. Already we have seen industrial resurgence, especially in the plastics and fertiliser industries. But there will be an adverse impact on the shale industry because it is expensive to produce, and oil at $85 makes a large proportion of shale sands uneconomic.

 

Other winners could be the dozen or so countries that spend vast amounts on fuel subsidies.

 

But in the true spirit of schadenfreude it is more agreeable to look at the losers.

 

Venezuela is deep in the merde. Chavez blew the sovereign wealth fund on buying votes with unaffordable social benefits. The country is hopelessly in debt. Inflation is running at 60%. It needs oil to be consistently at $120 to avoid going the way of Argentina.

 

Then there is Iran which needs oil to be $135 or thereabouts to finance its profligate spending on both its nuclear programme and the many subsidies that keep the masses quiescent.

 

Russia is by far and away the most interesting member of the losers’ club.

 

The present  game-play between Russia and the West has precedent.

 

It is widely believed that in the 1980s Reagan and the Saudis  fitted up the Soviet Union by cranking up oil supply and virtually bankrupted it. It ran out of cash and suffered the humiliation of asking for a Western bail-out.

 

Putin’s Russia is inherently weaker as a result of his own economic mismanagement. The USSR was a major industrial nation at the forefront of high-technology such as the space industry. Now it is over-dependent on oil and  gas. It no longer makes much that others wish to buy, and non-oil exports have fallen  to single- figure percentages. Its infrastructure is falling apart, its economy is riddled with market barriers, and it is near the bottom of the league for competitiveness.

 

There is no independent judiciary, a major disincentive for investment as there is little confidence in the sanctity of contracts. Education is abysmal.

 

Life expectancy is low, and there is a demographic problem with an aging population.

 

There is a rush to convert roubles into hard currencies and capital flight is about 5% of GDP annually. Sanctions are making it near-impossible for Russian banks to have access to Western credit with $150bn of debt due for repayment within the year.

 

Russia needs oil to be at $100 to meet its obligations at the same time as Putin is increasing defence spending to a massive 4% of GDP.

T

he conundrum is why  Saudi is selling itself short by opening the taps.

 

It seems to be déjà vu all over again.

 

The scuttlebutt is that Saudi wanted Putin to pull the rug from under Assad in return for which they would carve up the oil market between them. Vlad is not playing – at least not yet. With the drop in Gulf-oil dependency since the 1980s, Saudi no longer has its political clout of old, but we are not yet in the end-game. Saudi needs $100 per barrel to break even but with its enormous dollar reserves it can withstand low prices for a long while. However, its welfare programme means that the money-pot is not bottomless.

 

In the meantime, Russia is shut out of Western financial markets and its banks are unable to roll-over a vast amount of foreign debt. Oil production is at risk through lack of Western technology and capital. It costs three times as much to drill one kilometer in Russia as it does in the US.

 

Russia is predicting that oil will bottom-out at $60. If this is even roughly accurate, things are not going to get better.

 

The Ukraine adventure is beginning to look like a very, very bad idea.

 

 

 

America: the state we're in......

 

America is in the final stages of a mid-term election wilh all eyes of the reading classes on the polls. Political commentators are talking at full speed and saying nothing. Perhaps it is my state of mind, but I find the entire process this time a dreadful bore. We are offered a choice between self-congratulating and most likely unethical versions of tweedle dee and tweedle dum regardless of their party livery.

 

And just now, any national item of any consequence is heavily politicized. Suddenly, it is O's fault when hospital staff incorrectly gown-up to attend Ebola patients. He wore a brown suit for a press conference a few weeks back and the criticisms of the haberdashery Nazis were broadcast by the opposition throughout the land.

 

The disloyal opposition smells blood and are running amok to let it spill. To be sure, we are not at our best just now.

 

The situation in the Ukraine has been blown off the news by Ebola and ISIS. So has anything to do with the UK and Europe other than both France and Great Britain having stopped national airline flights to the infected countries in West Africa. It has also been noted that the UK and a few other countries have joined us in combating ISIS albeit with some limiting provisos.

 

We are irate with the Turks who have one foot in the coalition and the other in their mouth. We get frequently conflicting news on their offer to lend us aircraft bases and otherwise aid in the melee only to find their intentions contradicted the following day. Surely they know what they are doing.

 

From what I can gather from media hype, the Republicans are about to make substantial gains in the mid-terms with a high likelihood of regaining the Senate while keeping control of the House. Some eager beavers are already planning what laws they intend to repeal and what punitive actions they will seek against Obama once they take control.

 

Election strategy wizards are saying that the outcome of the mid-terms will depend more on getting out the vote than money spent on their candidates. This is a new twist as the rule here has long been that the candidates with the deepest pockets will be elected. Although this promises to be another record-breaking election in terms of money spent, both the Dems and the GOP are mounting major campaigns to get their supporters off the couch and into the election booth.

 

Toward this end, the Dems have a slight advantage. They have large numbers of supporters who traditionally vote only in small numbers. That is to say people of color tend to support Democratic candidates, but also tend not to vote. Voter mobilizations efforts in the past have indeed prompted larger numbers of blacks to vote, but have not had much influence on Hispanics. The mid-terms may well be decided by how large a percentage of Hispanics actually vote. Again, the predictions are not enough to save the day for the Dems.

 

O is simply waiting out his tour of duty. He reacts to certain stimuli, such as the need for stricter preventive measures against Ebola. Then his leadership wanes and he is off to the golf links. Nobody doubts he will do well on the lecture circuit after his term ends. Many would be delighted were he to begin that circuit tomorrow and let someone else tend to governing.

 

My bigger concern is the American political tendency to consume its own flesh. Once individuals are elected, their detractors are hell bent to destroy, discredit, disable and downgrade them. Their every move is subject to the scrutiny of political hit men who brand them as stupid, incompetent or evil no matter what they do. In the process, we are undermining our own political systems and the democratic principles upon which they were built.

 

I guess this is the route of all empires.

Nigel's new friend: Barroso!

Nigel Farage has a new friend. Juan Manuel ‘Sound Bite’ Barroso. He must be doing handstands over the  nearly-ex Brussels boss saying Cameron’s plans for immigration limits are a mirage.

 

He thinks he has shot Dave’s fox. And it must be said that if the tactic is to limit the issuance of NI numbers, the latest cunning plan, then Barroso is surely right because it will simply encourage the black economy.

 

According to him, ‘free movement of people’ is a fundamental EU principle that can’t be changed. Really? The free movement of goods and services is another fundamental principle that can’t be changed, unless, of course, by Germany that has refused to implement the rules on services since the single market was first introduced   way back when. And there is the small business of the 3% limit on budget deficit that both Germany and France ignored, giving the green light to the spend, spend, spent of the Club Med that has left them in the merde.

 

This is what the Chairman of the Tory Party riposted:

 

Barroso’s only the latest person from Europe to tell us we’ll never get what we want. But remember, we were never going to get the rebate that Margaret Thatcher successfully got; we were never going to get to pull back powers but we’ve done that for a whole lot of competences; we were never going to get a cut in the EU budget, people said that was impossible, but David Cameron’s negotiated that. There are lots of impossible things that we’ve managed to do in Europe.’

Barroso is formerly of the extreme left, and his Marxist propensity to invert language so that ‘truth’ becomes ‘lies’ and ‘lies’ become’ truth is plain to see. He tells us that outside the EU the UK will have ‘no influence’. A country of 63 million people, the healthiest economy in the OECD and one of the top six in the world, the only EU country with a credible military capacity (with the possible exception of France), with international relationships beyond anything achieved by the EU, cannot punch its weight outside the Club?

As for Europe, Kissinger is alleged to have put his finger on it. ‘If I want to call Europe, who do I call?’ As an entity, the EU has no influence worthy of the name. It is not the super state that he and his ilk are driving for, so it cannot have any international clout overall. Neither can it have coherent policies on very much at all, apart from meddling and aggrandising itself.  Its ambitions to destroy proud old nations and to impose its undemocratic will on 300million people will end in tears. It has zero defence capacity despite the pathetic attempts to create rival to NATO. The Eurozone is dysfunctional. EU countries are in economic disarray with many facing severe recession.

 

But Barroso is unable to resist the bully-boy scare-mongering that is the default position in Brussels. He says that Brexit would mean that the UK becomes a becomes an economic pariah and that the EU would boycott it. Really? The UK is the biggest European export market. It consistently runs a balance of trade deficit with the EU countries . Does he expect us to believe that Europe would cut off its collective nose.

 

He even brought Ebola into his farrago. Quite what this has to do with anything is opaque, but all that did was to make us bless the English Channel.

 

To return to the real world, the simple truth is that in politics nothing is immutable, not even EU treaties.

 

He and others are saying that immigration restrictions would be ‘illegal’. Actually they would be in breach of our treaty obligations, which is not quite the same thing. A change would require the consent of every member of the EU so its likelihood is so remote as to be totally unachievable. Changing the rules on benefits is another matter; this would simply require a majority of members and of the EU Parliament. There is evidence of support for this, especially from Germany.

 

Cameron will probably get away with this, but this is nowhere near enough: his commitment is to reduce the sheer numbers allowed in.

 

One option, and a very inadequate one, would be an emergency brake that would impose temporary controls on immigration flows. The fatal flaw in this is that it doesn’t restore Britain’s control of its own borders and would simply be a ‘sticking plaster’ solution. There is no way in which UKIP and the Europhiles would go for it. Other options might be quotas or points-based systems which already exist elsewhere. These have almost no chance of success as they would require treaty amendments.

 

So it is beginning to look as if Emperor Cameron has no clothes. Unless there is a massive but unlikely shift in the Brussels stance, his renegotiation of the terms of membership are simply doomed. Farage knows this very well. That’s why he is always smiling.

 

 

UKIP: what's it for?

Quite what does UKIP stand for?

 

According to the chatteratti, they are a bunch of nutcases, swivel-eyed loons, and fruitcakes, a one-man band with a two-trick pony peddling nothing more than Brexit and stopping all immigration.

 

The truth is that Farage is arguably the most charismatic English politician of the day, so he naturally attracts media attention. He is ‘one of us’, not one of those metrosexual exotics who bloom in Westminster but not elsewhere. Now UKIP has Douglas Carswell, an experienced, articulate, shrewd and experienced MP who is that rara avis, a conviction politician. And the party has no less than 24 of the 73 British MEPs.

 

The UKIP election manifesto for 2015 is unsurprisingly a work in progress but the key areas of policy are fairly clear.

 

On immigration here is what it says:

 

We believe Britain must get back control over its borders, so that it can welcome people with a positive contribution to make while limiting the overall numbers of migrants and keeping out those without the skills or aptitudes to be of benefit to the nation.

 

Difficult to argue with that, unless you are a Guardian-reading swivel-eyed loon. No problem with Polish builders or Czech engineers, but East European Roma are less welcome. The core policy is to claw back from the EU the lost powers of border control, not to haul-up the drawbridge.

 

It also promotes the very sensible aim that immigrants should not been titled to benefits until 5 years of tax and NI have been paid; you must put in to draw out! They must speak reasonable English, carry health insurance and have worked in their claimed profession for 12 of the previous 24 months. Visas would be issued on a points system as in Australia, and work-permits would be time-limited. Currently some 800,000 British jobs are on offer in the EU.

 

Of course, this presupposes an exit from the EU. The savings on membership fees for this club are said to be £55 million per day.

 

On tax, George Osborne has rather ‘stolen their clothes when they were out bathing’ by adopting UKIP’s policy of removing minimum wage-earners from taxation and a top rate of 40% starting initially at £45,000 of taxable income. UKIP wants to abolish inheritance tax; it brings in only about £4 billion. It is easily avoided by the mega-rich but hits the middle classes. Foreign aid would be ‘drastically’ reduced.

 

UKIP has scant sympathy with the climate-change lobby. Green taxes would go and subsidies for wind-turbines would be stopped. The Climate Change Act would be repealed at an annual saving of £18 billion.

 

On law and order, the wretched European Arrest Warrant will be abolished. It was sold to us as a terrorist-control necessity; it has not been used for this a single time. The Tories have  nicked UKIP’s proposed withdrawal from ECHR jurisdiction.

 

On health  and social welfare, the NHS would be run by elected County Health Boards. Surgeries would have evening opening for workers. On housing, local people would have priority for social housing. On education, new grammar schools would be created.

 

Obviously there is more to come during the build-up to next year’s election, but a two-trick pony it ain’t!

 

 

 

.

The sick man of Europe..

Germany the ‘sick man of Europe? This may be difficult to take-in, but it’s true

Following the introduction of Europe’s funny-money, Germany has lived high on the schwein with a Euro that is under-valued relative to the German economy. It has led to boom-times as Germany lends cheap money to the Club Med, where it is not cheap at all, so that the Italians, Greeks et al can buy Mercs, Beemers, and lots of white goods on tick.

Not anymore. Germany is in the poo big time.

A key part of Merckel’s economic policy is to suppress earnings to subsidise exports, reducing domestic demand. There are zombie banks. There is low infrastructure investment resulting in Germany falling apart, with roads and bridges crumbling away. Even the Kiel Canal, which survived the best efforts of the RAF in WW2, has been closed for repairs because a key lock has failed. And yet Germany is awash with money that it does not invest, as if saving was an end in itself.

Productivity is low. Growth is almost non-existent; average GDP increase is only 1.1%,lower than both Britain and the US, placing it 156^th out of 166 countries.

The demographics are startling. It is estimated that  within lives in being  the population will decline by 17 million. A third of the population will be over retiring-age. The current reproduction rate is only about 1.4 when at least 2.1 is the replacement rate. And yet the retirement age has been reduced from 65 to 63 despite the certainty of a smaller work-force having to support an increasing number of retirees, the very opposite of what should have been done.

In 15 years’ time Germany is likely to have more than 6 million fewer workers – even fewer if immigration falls below the current average annual rate of 200,000.

The education system is deteriorating. There are far fewer young graduates than in Britain (29% against 45%). Whereas the UK has 3 universities in the world top-five, Germany’s highest is a miserable 49^th.

And there are serious ‘governance’ problems.

Strict labour laws make it nigh impossible to fire a permanent worker, even harder than in France. When ranked for ‘ease of  business start-ups’ Germany ranks 111^th.  

Red tape forces low productivity on the services sector. Regulation of professional services is one of the most obtrusive in the Western world. For example, only a qualified pharmacist is allowed to open a chemist shop (and not more than four, so there are no chains like Boots) even if only non-prescription medicines are sold.

The Government has no enthusiasm for reforms to encourage growth in productivity, which is lower even than in Portugal.

Wages have fallen in real terms over the last 15 years. The result is domestic demand stagnates, forcing over-reliance on exports. The crunch in the Club Med has now stifled demand from that quarter, leaving Germany very reliant on its huge exports to China where the economy is already slowing-down. Its share of global exports is now at a record low. Weak domestic demand is also a key factor in reducing  demand for Club Med exports (and British).

Its banks were totally reckless in financing property bubbles, the root cause of the crashes in Spain and Ireland, and funding the consumption splurge that did for Greece and Portugal. They are unlikely to get back their money,

 

It was not primarily Greece that wrecked the Eurozone. It was Germany.

 

 

Apres moi, le Farage........

Politics has burst into life at last. UKIP is no longer a fringe protest group. It is a serious political contender that is certain to shake up the old order. It shows that the public is utterly fed-up with condescending MPs of all parties, where there is no clear blue water between the parties, and the public is treated with disdain. The Westminster village has been located somewhere to the south of alpha centauri. It has had its day of elitist self-interest and needs to join the real world if it is to survive.

 

The outcome of the recent by-elections must have come as a shock to UKIP itself, and as a disastrous drubbing to both main parties, such was the drama of Caswell getting a bigger majority on a smaller turn-out than when he was elected as Tory MP back in 2010. And narrowly missing taking a safe Labour seat when all they needed was about another 300 votes to cause an upset of Biblical proportions.

 

A silly piece in the Sunday Times compared UKIP to the Tea Party, a bunch of red-necks with no coherent policies dominated by oldies who are against big government and high spending except when it comes to their own benefits. UKIP is more akin to the Conservative Party as it existed before Ted Heath invented conservatism-lite through an addled ‘One Nation’ stance. Which really means ‘if you don’t like my principles I have others’. Maggie soon hand-bagged that notion and went on to three election victories.

 

Experience has proved one thing beyond peradventure. If your idea of politics is to slag-off the opposition by insult and muck-raking the electorate will punish you for it. It is abundantly obvious that the media of both right and left imposed blanket censorship on UKIP. Months could go by with no mention at all even though Farage is notable for producing the mot juste whenever Grub Street wants a quotable line. Then it tried to project him as the saloon-bar bore, forever with a pint in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Then it tried scandal-mongering with scant material to go on. Then it blanked the UKIP Conference (Sky News gave it a few second just before the sports report and weather forecast. By contrast it gave wall-to-wall coverage of the Lib-Dem Conference; to say that this would attract only a minority audience would be an exaggeration.

 

Now they are at it again. Some people are slow learners.

 

It never occurred to these exotic metropolitans that Nigel was seen as ‘one of us’, who spoke like an ordinary human being and voiced the feelings of millions of people who see themselves as alienated and marginalised and feel the disappearance of Old England.

 

Inevitably we go from a bear to a bull market with the cognoscenti predicting that UKIP could win 25 seats next May and hold the balance of power. Unless there is a landslide of the like not seen since Labour’s conquest in 1945, this is just not going to happen. At best UKIP will get five more seats, but that could be enough to break mold and herald a new era in British politics. Cameron vs. Miliband will be Major vs. Kinnock all over again.

 

And, like Dracula, Gordon Brown will rise again.

Getting out of the ECHR......

Justice Minister Chris Grayling has bowled a vote-winning googly at the European Court of Human Rights that will be gleefully caught by the public. Amongst the many European institutions disliked by the British, this one is particularly loathed, most particularly for its interventions preventing the deportation of terrorists and criminals. The absurdity of many of its judgments has helped to bring it into ‘hatred, ridicule and contempt’, as the lawyers say.

 

The latest spat has been about votes for prisoners. There was the ruling that ‘life’ no longer meant imprisonment for the whole of the criminal’s life (only imposed for the most heinous crimes such as the murder of Drummer Rigby). Other scandals include rulings that a Nigerian who had served 8 years for raping a 13-year old girl could not be deported because over the years he had established a right to ‘family life’ (most of those years had been spent in prison), neither could the murderer of Phillip Lawrence on similar grounds, and there have been judgments that defy reason such as keeping a cat establishes a ‘family relationship’ which is a bar on deportation. There have been numerous cases of travellers and criminals using the ‘right to family life’ as an escape clause.

 

To be fair, many of the dotty judgments have been handed down by the English courts, but they will have been governed by ECHR decided cases and dictats.

 

The  proposal is withdrawal of UK law from the jurisdiction of the ECHR by scrapping Blair’s  Human Rights Act and replacing it with a Bill of Rights which would mean that ECHR judgments would be ‘persuasive’ instead of binding. It would no longer be a court of last resort.

 

This was the position before the HRA came into force.

 

The ECHR was largely a British post-war creation. Its original mandate was to rule  upon cases of major importance relevant to all European nations that recognised its jurisdiction – that is, most of them. But it has transmogrified from “an international tribunal adjudicating on a few major cases… into an appeal court ruling on the minutiae of administrative decision-making, ranging from what is allowable in smacking a child to what degree of ill health is needed before deportation becomes a cruel and inhuman act”.

 

The quotation is from the former Attorney General Dominic Grieve, who is now ferociously attacking Grayling’s ideas. An entire vineyard of sour grapes?

 

Quoting Lord Hoffman, he went on ‘the Court has turned its back on the original vision of the Convention………. it has been unable to resist the temptation to aggrandize its jurisdiction and to impose uniform rules on member states; …………the jurisprudence of the Court is uneven in quality, sometimes poorly reasoned and uncertain in scope, the result of its expansion and increasing lack of jurisprudential homogeneity and collegiality on the back of the greater number of states adhering to the ECHR”.

 

Grayling proposes “limitations” on how rights can applied, a new test of ‘triviality’, a change to the definition of “degrading’ to avoid a repeat of the case of the deportee whose appeal succeeded on the grounds that the requirement to live in a particular place in Somalia was degrading. There will be measures to prevent cases being brought against British military serving overseas.

 

If the ECHR and the Council of Europe refuse to agree to this change in status, Grayling proposes withdrawal for the European Convention on Human Rights, the court’s parent.

 

So where does all this fit with the EU?

 

Although various treaties acknowledge the principles of human rights, there is nothing in law that would prevent the UK from pulling out of the ECHR, although it would still have to apply HR law when implementing EU law. ECJ rulings on human rights issues would still apply, such as banning insurance companies from giving lower rates to women for annuities because they live longer than men, or motor insurance because they have a lower claims-record.

 

If all this goes through Parliament, it will be almost unique: a Tory Party Manifesto pledge that was actually kept!