Our basic Liberties and Freedoms – to be surrendered to a Foreign Power?

 

The article in the Daily Mail on Friday, October 17-2003 under the heading

 

‘Why the Queen must stand up to Mr Blair’ - Part I

 

By

 

Simon Heffer

 

[Here is a message which we all should take notice of with only a few weeks before the British people have their say on June 10 -2004 - a day that will decide if the People have awoken from their usual languor where politics is concerned – at least for once and Vote for the largest Anti EU party - the UKIP in order to claim back their Country and Constitution].

 

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‘When the Daily Mail campaigned for a referendum on the proposed EU Constitution earlier this year [spring-2003] it did so for one overriding reason.

 

The basic liberties and constitutional freedoms of this country were in danger of being surrendered to a foreign power, and no one was prepared to seek consent of the people to do so.

 

The creation of a super-state run from Brussels, with the power to intervene in almost every aspect of British law and policy would strike a blow to every part of our unwritten constitution, and therefore to all the freedoms we take for granted.

 

The role and function of the Monarch were threatened along with everything else.

 

Our Queen has few prerogative powers left –

1) Such as her right to choose whom to send for as Prime Minister.

 

2) And her right to refuse dissolution of Parliament.

 

 She is, though part of the essential checks and balances that stop – or should stop – any threat to our democracy, constitutional settlement and way of life.

 

Now the Queen’s advisers have become alert to the treat to her position and prerogatives that this increasingly discredited proposed [EU Constitution] poses.

 

Her constitutional advisers are said to be examining the draft text, and particularly Article 10. It states that ‘the constitution and law adopted by the union’s institutions in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the over the law of member states.

 

The Queen is sovereign in Parliament. Article 10, as interpreted by constitutional experts, implies that Parliament will lose the right to contradict EU rulings through its own legislation.

 

It is the ultimate symbol of the sovereignty we stand to lose, and proves the utter dishonesty of Government minister Peter Hain’s argument that the revolutionary document is but ‘ tidying –up exercise’

 

Threat

 

Under the proposed  [EU] constitution, the Queen would become an irrelevance. She would embody sovereignty no longer, for there would be no true sovereignty in Parliament for her to embody.

 

She may still have the power to send for a person to become Prime Minister, but that person would be answerable effectively to the President of the EU.

[It might even turn out to be our present dictator Tony Blair- if this does not get the people out to vote on June 10 –then they will have to take the consequences]

…The Parliament, which she could or could not dissolve, would be stripped of its powers. [The Queen] would no longer be the ultimate authority in her own kingdom.

 

This is not the first time the Monarch has been concerned about the treat Europe poses to her position.

In 1992. When the Maastricht Bill was going through Parliament, she became concerned about the conflict with her Coronation Oath, in which she had promised to govern her people according to their laws and customs. Her then Prime Minister, John Major, persuaded her that there would be no conflict.

 

However, this new threat is fundamental, far-reaching and infinitely more serious. It effectively strips sovereignty from the Queen in Parliament and subjugates her and it to the unelected powers in a European Superstate .

 

It would mean the end

of our Constitutional Monarchy and the transformation of our royalty into a tourists’ theme park’ for it would have no other function.

The real issue, though, is what the Queen should do when her advisers confirm that her Prime Minister is proposing to use Parliament to dismantle her constitutional role without public consent given in a referendum or at a General Election.

 

Mr Blair regards himself as Head of State, so he may not be too concerned

. Our Queen, however, recognises that her first duty is to her people, to safeguard their liberties. She would be quite right to conclude that those liberties will be in more peril if, through Parliament, she is not sovereign, for that sovereignty embodies democracy.

 

No Monarch has refused the Royal Assent to a bill since Queen Anne in 1702.  The last Prime Minister to have his advice ignored by his sovereign – Robert Peel, who fell out with William IV in the 19^th Century – had to resign. Such confrontations have always since been avoided by negotiation at an early stage, and in secret.

 

The Victorian constitutionalist Walter Bagehot said that the Monarch only really had the rights to be consulted, to advise and to warn.  If the Prime Minister were to suggest doing something foolish, the Queen could use her 51 years of experience of statecraft (which dates back before Mr Blair’s birth) to warn him of the consequences.