Truth must be not only discovered,
but perennially rediscovered and redefined.

This week Open Europe published a new report that shows how the Government could repatriate 130 EU laws on crime and policing, including the controversial European Arrest Warrant.

The Government must decide before June 2014 whether a whole raft of EU police and justice laws, adopted before the Lisbon Treaty took force, will continue to apply in the UK beyond December 2014. Under Lisbon, if the Government opts out of any one of the existing laws, it has to opt out of the entire lot.

If it decides to keep these laws as they currently stand, ultimate and full jurisdiction over them will for the first time be irreversibly transferred from the UK courts to the European Court of Justice in Luxembourg. For example, it would give EU judges the final say over the mechanisms for extraditing British citizens to other member states, on the basis of a case brought against the UK by the European Commission.

The EU document relating to these powers was debated on the Floor of the House on 25^th January, during which the Justice Minister, Crispin Blunt, said that:

It is clear that the Government and the European Scrutiny Committee are of the same view: we consider that European legislation in the field of criminal law should be contemplated only as the last resort and only where action at the European level is absolutely necessary.

However, words of caution were given by my colleague, Dominic Raab:

The document before us has all the hallmarks of a massive and substantial power grab from Brussels in the area of EU criminal law. We might have ad hoc opt-outs, but the direction of travel has very serious implications for this country. The clear ambition in the document is for a pan-European code on what the Commission calls “Euro-crimes”, backed by EU penalties and jurisdiction… This is a fork in the road: it is time to decide whether Britain will retain our unique justice system and common-law tradition. This is one of the most serious constitutional challenges the House will face in this Parliament.

Commenting on Open Europe’s report, their Research Director, Stephen Booth, said:

As much as the Government would like to put this crucial decision off until 2014, this is neither politically nor practically tenable. The body of law to which the 2014 block opt-out applies is reduced every time the UK opts in to a new EU law which either amends, repeals or replaces a law on the list. To date, the Government has chosen to opt in on every occasion it has had to make such a decision and has not required Parliament’s approval. No matter where one stands in the debate, this clearly marks a failure of democratic scrutiny.

Finally, the wording of the Europe Commission’s official communication on this issue is of particular concern:

In cases where the enforcement choices in the Member States do not yield the desired result and levels of enforcement remain uneven, the Union itself may set common rules on how to ensure implementation, if necessary, the requirement for criminal sanctions for breaches of EU law.

Regarding sanctions, “minimum rules” can be requirements of certain sanction types (e.g. fines, imprisonment, disqualification), levels or the EU-wide definition of what are to be considered aggravating or mitigating circumstances.

The 2011 Legatum Prosperity Index includes a number of insights. The fourth article is “The European Crisis: Time to Rethink Integration?”

In a sidebar, the author explains that the average confidence in a European Government is 12% lower than the Index average. Legatum suggests that European electorates feel increasingly excluded as national parliaments have ceded more power to the Union, opening up a gap between the process of European integration and public opinion.

Indeed.

The main article begins:

The Prosperity Index findings suggest that top-down political integration by European policymakers has done little to equalise economic or institutional differences among European countries. The income gap between the richest and poorest EU member states remains vast. Countries in the Mediterranean area report high levels of corruption, low rates of social trust, low levels of rule of law, and inefficient public sectors. European integration also seems to fail to raise institutional quality in these countries, as indicated by low public opinion regarding the quality of the court system and fewer reported instances of citizens voicing their concerns to officials.

And they write:

For decades, European policymakers have relied on top-down measures to encourage convergence on a whole range of economic, political, and social policies. The Prosperity Index reinforces the widespread impression that such convergence, as presently understood, has not occurred. This suggests that more top-down integration is unlikely to solve Europe’s crisis.

There are so many questions to ask, about whether convergence necessarily raises standards, about whether convergence promotes systemic failure, about the nature of diversity and plurality and whether people should be allowed the dignity of making their own choices, but these are for other days. For the moment, it simply appears that the EU is a failure by its own standards.

What Europe needs is not absolute homogeneity – its diversity is its joy – but peace, free trade and essential liberties. Adam Smith’s easy taxes and a tolerable administration of justice may be left to the nation states.

Occupy London 6 by Nathan Meijer (click for source)

As CNN reports, the V for Vendetta-style Guy Fawkes mask has inspired Occupy protesters around the world. CNN points out:

Ironically Fawkes, far from being the anti-establishment hero he has come to be seen as in the years since his death, was a monarchist who merely wanted to replace the Anglican king with a Catholic queen.

A transcript of his trial with co-conspirators is available here. It’s hard reading for one not accustomed to 17th century English but, in relation to the matter of the conspiracy:

As concerning the second, which is the Matter conspired; it was,

First, To deprive the King of his Crown.
Secondly, To murder the King, the Queen, and the Prince.
Thirdly, To stir Rebellion and Sedition in the Kingdom.
Fourthly, To bring a miserable Destruction amongst the Subjects.
Fifthly, To change, alter, and subvert the Religion here established.
Sixthly, To ruinate the State of the Commonwealth, and to bring in Strangers to invade it.

It’s all far from an answer to the contemporary corporatism which oppresses and impoverishes the majority of us and yet Fawkes inspires those who protest the obvious failures in our present system. Having visited the protest, I believe most protesters are peaceful.  I shouldn’t think they are volunteering for the punishment decreed for Fawkes and his conspirators: it included, amongst other things, having their genitals cut off and burnt before them.

The protesters’ use of Fawkes masks is surely far less to do with Fawkes himself and far more to do with the fantasy of revolution against state tyranny that is V for Vendetta.  The film, like the protestors, errs in eulogising Fawkes, a traitor and terrorist, but it is not without wisdom.

In particular, in his broadcast speech, V says of the dystopian state of Britain:

How did this happen? Who is to blame? Well certainly there are those who are more responsible than others, and they will be held accountable, but again, truth be told, if you are looking for the guilty, you need only look into a mirror.

And so we should. Each of us, over several generations and with the best of intentions, has voted for parties which offered doctrines of state power, not freedom.

If the banks and other large corporations oppress us and manufacture injustice (and they do), it is because they enjoy privileges granted by the state, privileges which – like deposit insurance and bank bailouts – were meant to protect us. Corporations do not have coercive power: states are territorial monopolies on the use of force. The privileges granted to corporations and the consequent injustices are the tragic result of attempts by democracies to provide what people want: security and prosperity.

In the mid-nineteenth century, Alexis de Tocqueville set out the kind of despotism democratic nations have to fear:

Above this race of men stands an immense and tutelary power, which takes upon itself alone to secure their gratifications and to watch over their fate. That power is absolute, minute, regular, provident, and mild. It would be like the authority of a parent if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood: it is well content that the people should rejoice, provided they think of nothing but rejoicing. For their happiness such a government willingly labors, but it chooses to be the sole agent and the only arbiter of that happiness; it provides for their security, foresees and supplies their necessities, facilitates their pleasures, manages their principal concerns, directs their industry, regulates the descent of property, and subdivides their inheritances: what remains, but to spare them all the care of thinking and all the trouble of living?

And so the Government worries about wellbeing in a thoroughly technocratic way and brings you Mindspace: Influencing behaviour through public policy. The state today spends over half of GDP: can anyone seriously believe that this is limited government and a free society? Communist China spends less: 2010 GDP was $5.93 trillion and state spending $1.33 trillion – 22% of GDP .

In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek explained that technocratic government would crush Parliamentary democracy, just as it has done, and lead to tyranny through its own failure. In Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, Schumpeter made the case that the success of capitalism, in the context of democracy, would lead to corporatism and the fostering of values hostile to entrepreneurship. Capitalism would be replaced by some form of socialism through a tendency, which we have seen, of electorates to return parties of social democracy. Schumpeter believed the intellectual trends of society would destroy the capitalist structure.

And so it has come to pass. In Living with Leviathan, David B Smith writes (as I have blogged before):

New Labour’s so-called ‘third way’, and the prevalent economic paradigm in much of ‘Old Europe’, appears to correspond to none of these categories [free market, socialist and 'Butskellite' mixed]. Instead, it appears to be a system under which the private sector maintains a nominal legal control over its capital and labour, but the returns on these factors of production are so heavily influenced by tax and regulation that the public sector ends up effectively controlling such returns. This sham form of mixed economy, which needs to be distinguished from the British mixed economy of the 1950s, has traditionally been associated with fascist regimes – for example, the gelenkte Wirtschaft (supple or ‘joined-up’ economy) that Goering implemented in Nazi Germany in 1936.

The awful truth for many who protest our present social system, calling for greater democratic control over more extensive state power in the general interest, is that we already live in the system which is the inevitable, predictable consequence of their demands. It is that statist system which is manufacturing injustice, eroding freedom and impoverishing us today.

In the film, V says,

People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people.

Indeed, and when people demand liberty over licentiousness and security, their freedom from state power and the dignity to determine their own destiny within a fixed moral framework, no doubt politicians will arise who will give it to them.

I look forward to the day.

Further reading

• Where I stand
• Why government spending is hard to cut
• Posts on liberty
• Five videos which explain our predicament
• Detlev Schlichter on the Second Crisis of Socialism
• Relevant reading: book reviews, bookstore

There is no greater threat to the security and prosperity of the United States today than the out-of-control, secretive Federal Reserve.

Imagine that parents, overwhelmed by debt and months behind on their bills, sent their spendthrift teenagers out each weekend for a night on the town with credit cards and blank checks. Would anyone be surprised if this family never got their finances under control?

via End the Fed | Ron Paul 2012 Presidential Campaign Committee.

As I have said over and over again, the errors of the central banks are at the heart of our present crisis. It was the central banks which enabled 40 years of chronic currency debasement which supported the banks’ reckless behaviour and brought us to this awful pass.

Now, what’s the British version of “End the Fed”?…

“There’s no, on my part, no bad blood, no rancour, no bitterness. These are valued Conservative colleagues, I understand why people feel strongly and we will go forward together and tackle the difficult decisions the country faces.”

via BBC News – EU referendum: Cameron says no bad blood towards rebels.

The debate is available here. I voted for the motion, in line with my pledges. I now look forward to continuing my support for the Government.