Tag / European Arrest Warrant

by Archivist

The European Arrest Warrant: a useful tool (for a tyrant)

The erosion of liberty continues apace. Watching it happen over time is like observing the crumbling white cliffs growing ever weaker as the waves crash into them. It is generally a gradual, continuous process but eventually comes the moment when a great chunk crumbles into the sea and is washed utterly away. Today is such a day; a sad day for Britain and a shaming one for Parliament. Most distressing of all is how few people are aware of it, and how even fewer seem to care. Make no mistake; this is a significant time in British history, one that will be studied far into the future. We are in the late stages of a long process in which we are willingly surrendering the independence of our legal system. It is the Conservative Party that is leading us down the dark, illiberal path to subjugation. For shame.

David Cameron has tried to portray himself as some kind of British bulldog fighting our corner in Brussels, he even disingenuously claimed to have secured the “greatest ever return of powers to the UK”.  In May the Government opted our of 100 trivial criminal justice measures that have already been duplicated by national legislation or had never actually applied in the UK in the first place. The 35 measures that the Government have opted back into are the most dangerous and illiberal and consist of a large-scale transfer of sovereignty to the European Union. It is nothing less than a step towards the usurpation of the English legal system, which is necessary if we are to be fully integrated into the political state and be part of a common EU criminal justice system. Of all these measures there are none more potentially tyrannical than the European Arrest Warrant.

Not only does is it a total violation of our sovereignty, meaning we have to surrender our own citizens to other EU states on request. It is also another dangerous power for the British state to use and abuse at will. Only a fool trusts in the fear mongering line of defence that the EAW is an absolute necessity to defend us against the great bogeymen of our time, terrorists and paedophiles. It was possible to extradite terror suspects and sex offenders before the European Arrest Warrant was created and would be if were to remove ourselves from its jurisdiction. Furthermore, only a tiny amount of the people arrested under the EAW are accused of terrorism. Opting out of the EAW simply means that we would revert to having extradition agreements that we had before, the kind we have with many non-EU states

How often is the line carted out that the EAW is a “useful” or “essential tool” that the police and security services need in their arsenal? It gives the impression that the British authorities are deft craftsmen who will only use the “useful” tool when absolutely necessary and appropriate. One of the primary considerations when restraining the state is to think of how a certain power, or law, can go beyond whatever its original purpose was and lead to abuse or misuse in the future. An example might be when the social services and police hysterically overreact when a mother and father decide to remove their son from NHS care and seek treatment elsewhere. Oh well, he was only traumatised a little, and they were only held without cause, evidence or trial for a few day. All’s well that ends well.

This argument must be treated with the contempt is deserves. If we gave the police and security services every “useful tool” they asked for we would not have a shred of liberty left.   The same propaganda is used to justify identity cards (which would’ve sealed our identity as serfs), 90 day detention, secret courts and mass surveillance. This is to be placed in the file which reads “if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear”– the mantra of the slave.

Under the European Arrest Warrant no evidence is required to justify extradition and in any case British courts have absolutely no power to consider whatever evidence there may be. It is a trivial bureaucratic matter, in other words, a simple form has to be filled in and then a British citizen can be carted off to a court in a foreign judicial system. That’s it, plain and simple; our centuries old protections of liberty can be dismissed arbitrarily because of a vague accusation made in another EU state without any evidence being provided. Not a peep of protest from EU fanatics, neither from the so-called “liberal” left who caused an uproar when the USA issued an extradition order for Gary McKinnon but raise no objections about the EAW when its tyrannical sights were set on Andrew Symeou or the King family or Keith Hainsworth (and there are many lower profile injustices). Incidentally, if Gary McKinnon was wanted in an EU country he would have been cuffed and extradited hastily back in 2002.

Extradition between countries is often necessary, however, it is surely only right and correct that before the suspect is extradited a court should consider if there is a case to answer? There would be an uproar if somebody was held on remand in Britain without any evidence of wrongdoing, how can anybody (let alone a self-styled conservative or liberal) support a situation in which someone can be dragged off to another country without a court in Britain being able to look at the evidence?

This is the crux of the matter. This European Arrest Warrant is a disgraceful interference in our internal affairs, a further blow to liberty and a violation of our national independence. It is one step further towards a pan-European criminal justice system. Theresa May’s amendments and guarantees are flimsy and it is the EU parliament that decides when they apply, not our own. Britain has, or rather had, some great pioneering traditions of liberty; Habeas Corpus, the presumption of innocence and the guarantee of a fair trial by jury to name but a few. Today in parliament they have been disgraced and we have been betrayed.

by Archivist

The government wins phoney European Arrest Warrant vote

On the 9th July David Cameron boasted that the Government had “just achieved the greatest ever return of powers to the UK” from the European Union. Unfortunately, our Prime Minister often resembles an oily salesman as he routinely misrepresents the truth for short term political gain. The pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty (the slyly renamed EU constitution) was dropped after ratification and now he has been exposed as being opportunistically disingenuous on the subject of the EU once again.

The Prime Minster had explicitly promised to hold a vote on the European Arrest Warrant (EAW) but this has turned out to be at worst a lie and at best a serious bending of the truth. Not long after his latest hollow pledge it transpired that the Members of the House were not to get a separate vote on whether or not to rejoin the EAW at all. Last night in the House of Commons the anger of Tory backbenchers was palpable after Speaker John Bercow confirmed that there would be no such individual vote. Instead they were to vote on a mere 11 of the 35 European justice measures, and that did not include the arrest warrant.

As frustration spread, the Tory whips were in a frenzy shoring up support and David Cameron had to rush back from the Lord Mayor’s banquet to try and avoid humiliation. Theresa May, who has badly mishandled this whole situation, insisted that this vote was, in effect, to be an endorsement or rejection of the EAW. After a night of murky politics and dishonesty the bafflingly overrated Home Secretary bungled to victory. The motion that the Speaker insists was not on the EAW and Theresa May says sort of was passed 464 to 38.

And so it goes, that the Conservative Party, aided and abetted by the Labour Party and the Liberal Democrats, is again to shun the opportunity to conserve our national sovereignty and liberty. Instead, a large scale transfer of sovereignty back to the EU is to be implemented after the government avoided a potentially embarrassing defeat with methods of pure chicanery. It was a shambolic episode in which the Tory leadership treated their party members, their MP’s and parliament with contempt.

Why did David Cameron make this promise if it was impossible to keep? And if it was possible to hold a separate vote, who decided against holding it? If the government could have held a separate vote (if it was procedurally possible) then it has acted disgracefully in not doing so and forcing its will on parliament and the country. Could it be that they wanted to force through the EAW and believed any revolt would be small and manageable? The confusion that followed has proven this to be a mistake. These political tricks have left a bitter taste in my mouth and the story is now one of Tory Party leadership deception on matters of the European Union, again.

The Ukip campaign literature for the Rochester by-election writes itself…

by Archivist

Do not stop being angry: Ashya King and the Parental State

The sinister interference of the British state into family life grows ever more contemptible. Such notions as an Englishman’s home being his castle, the right to privacy and , yes, the right of a family to freely choose what is best for their child are privileges made of dust that crumble on closer inspection. This should come as no surprise to anyone. This after all is a country that actually had a “minister for children”, surely a candidate for the creepiest title of government official ever devised and certainly a clue to just how much of a domineering nosy parker the British government has become. The dogma of statism has won and advocates of liberty have lost. It will take an unlikely counter revolution to turn back the cultural tide.

Britain adopted the pernicious leftist instinct to weaken the family in order to strengthen the state long ago. The independent family unit is the fortress of private life; it fosters individuality and protects the inheritance of culture and tradition. This will not do. A powerful state prefers conformism, malleable minds and a dependent citizenry.

A strong family is self-reliant and protective and so is a rival to state power, hence why leftist revolutionaries always strive to break it; because they prefer the all wise, all knowing and all powerful parental state. It is an ideological impulse that leaked through the iron curtain and has infected our society ever since. It is incidents like the maltreatment of Ashya King’s parents that bring this reality into the public consciousness, but there is little excuse for being surprised by this latest development.

The evidence is there for anyone who wishes to see it. The state has long been telling us how to raise our children, from discipline to education, great battalions of advisers are employed at our expense to dispense advice on how to protect us from ourselves, and protect children from their parents. No matter that their advice is often lousy, or discredited, and that the hypocritical governing elites themselves employ nannies and servants to do their parenting for them. If we are deemed to have gone astray the state reserves the right to take away our children and assign them new parents if necessary.

In my time volunteering for a health and social care charity I met many distraught and spiritually dead parents who had been told that they would never see their children again. Such decisions rest on the unchallenged wisdom of the social services and the unaccountable divisions of child snatchers that work in secrecy out of public view. They are subject to no sceptical, independent, evidence based review of their effectiveness and their word is taken as gospel. Hearsay and accusations without evidence can be enough for a family to be broken up forever.

Parents are not given the privilege of the presumption of innocence but are treated like criminals regardless. Parliamentary figures show that the number of application for care orders average over 8,000 a year and of those only around 0.2% are refused. Are some of these justified in the interest of child safety? Of course, but a great many are not, and this responsibility is given to a service that is constantly proving itself to be dangerously incompetent, inefficient and even malevolent. The only time they are subject to pubic scrutiny is when they make yet another mistake that leads to child abuse or death.

The state is also our educator, and its role as teacher is so deeply engrained in our society now that even the recent minimal introduction of autonomy and parental choice has been met with resistance and difficulty. The liberal left especially hates such ideas, its not enough to have a national curriculum imposed and a national inspectorate, they want the peering eye of the local authority in every classroom too. You cannot even escape by educating your child at home as they will soon be knocking on your door and demanding to cross the threshold with refusal leading to legal action. It is illegal to open new grammar schools (that stream by ability) despite their popularity with parents, because the parental state has made this choice for us and has insisted that its ideological devotion to egalitarianism cannot be violated. Not that this devotion stretches to the lives of the political elite, because MPs and ministers send their children to private and elitist faith schools.

The tax system, as we know, has become a social engineering tool. Rather than families being allowed to make their life choices independently they are shaped by the guiding hand of government. There is no longer any need for young women to take any personal responsibility when taking the risk of becoming pregnant and it doesn’t matter if the dad is a total dead beat either. There are a great many financial incentives for becoming a dependent and accepting the state as the breadwinner. We now know all too well the disastrous influence this has had. As Adele, the talented singer laced with an instinctive conservatism, once said: ‘The ambition at my state school was to get pregnant and sponge off the government […] that ain’t cool.’ All taxpayers are forced to subsidise this policy which makes personal responsibility and self-reliance unnecessary while strengthening the parental state.

Meanwhile a unified family unit is punished economically if it decides to forgo a double income in order to raise the child at home. The government wants your baby to be raised in a nursery and encourages this vigorously, and oh so generously, by offering *ahem* “free” childcare (that we all pay for through taxation, duh). This is nothing more than a bribe with our own money to make it push us into the life style choice that it prefers, which is the baby in a state approved nursery being raised outside of the family and the parents both back to work as soon as possible to add to GDP.

We should, of course, all be free to make our own decisions on whether to raise a child at home, or return to work, that is up to the individual. But is it right for the state to use a punitive tax system to effectively make this decision for us? Anyone visiting this website will surely answer in the negative.

I am trying to highlight just how many tentacles the state has, and how they have penetrated further and further into every area of our lives, every aspect of our existence, and how its attempts to usurp the family can be easily traced in a recognisable pattern. So, let me return to the plight of Ashya King and his beleaguered parents. It exposes to us all the suspicion with which the family is viewed by state officials.

Two loving parents were suddenly turned into criminals in the eyes of the law because they dared to defy the great monolith, the National Health Service. They were treated like unhinged kidnappers. The officials involved ensured they were portrayed as if off their rocker. It was implied they possible religious nuts, or just plain neglectful. The media frenzy and the international alert and subsequent manhunt would ordinarily be reserved for dangerous killers, it was absolute hysteria. Luckily the media turned when the received more information and helped disarm the zealous police and NHS. What if none of this had been reported? I dread to think where they would be now.

After finally being released from the Spanish prison where he had been held without charge, for no good reason at all, Brett King was unapologetic and unequivocal: ‘They were going to kill him in England or turn him into a vegetable.’ Basically, they were not happy with the treatment being received under the NHS or the arrogance of the doctors unwilling to listen to their questions. They were fearful of the horrible side effects of the treatment he was receiving which they had been told could leave him brain damaged or deaf, if it even worked. And so these desperate parents researched an alternative treatment called “proton beam radiotherapy” which is used in much of Europe and the USA. It is thought to give better long term outcomes but is not available on the NHS.

When the Kings dared to question NHS orthodoxy the doctors refused outright to refer their son for alternative treatment, or to transfer his paper work, and threatened to issue a control order and remove Ashya from their custody. The parents made the decision to sell their Spanish holiday home and pay for the treatment privately in Prague (where doctors have since been very positive about the potential for the successful treatment of Ashya). The Kings still insist that they informed doctors of their intentions. It made no difference, the full force of the authoritarian parental state kicked in, and only a huge public backlash forced the very belated involvement of politicians and the eventual release of Brett and Naghmeh King from prison, without charge.

It was shocking, terrifying and enraging but it is simply part of the statist culture; the assertion that parents cannot be trusted to raise their own children and state officials have unquestionable right to overrule them. We have since learned how wrong they were, and how inaccurate the unpleasant propaganda campaign against them was. They were not acting wildly and irresponsibly, they were making a free choice that they thought best for their son.

Unfortunately, because the choice was to turn their back on the “envy of the world” NHS, that has Cancer survival rates that linger well behind most western European countries, they were depicted as neglectful parents and kidnappers. Remember all the alarming talk of how Ashya could die at any time because they did not have the necessary equipment? Well, they did have that equipment after all. We being covered in a slurry of lies.

What crime did these parents commit except assuming they had authority as parents? Are they not free to travel where they please and to seek out alternative medical treatment? When the dust settles people will forget all about this. They will stop musing over the fact that state officialdom has revealed to us all quite explicitly that they believe it is their right to expunge our liberty at will. That they have the power to arbitrarily overrule the parents rights over their own children.

Anyone who cared to notice already knew this, but the wider public should not allow their outrage to subside because although this case has been resolved, the authoritarian culture that created it has not been. This is a culture in which the parental state mistrusts the family and encourages us all to be suspicious of parents through propagandistic, fear mongering campaigns. They are designed to convince us to presume guilt, to believe that the family is always potentially a corrupting influence and parents a threat to their children. In such a culture of fear where are we encouraged to turn? Why, to the big, strong embrace of the wise and benevolent parental state, of course.