One ring to bind them all

Iris Binstead of SOS has just sent us two reports on the EU Lisbon Treaty and the threats it poses to democracy. The first is by Torquil Dick-Erikson, a commentator on legal affairs and a contributor to the House of Lords report on Corpus Juris. His report is a disturbing account of the EU's Militarized Police, the quaintly named Eurogendarmerie, trained in riot control, able to go anywhere in the EU if called in by a nation state, but reporting only to the EU and leaving only at the orders of the EU. The second report, by Professor Anthony Coughlan, Dublin, clearly describes The Supranational State that will be created by the Lisbon Treaty.

Unless the British Parliament refuses to ratify the treaty, that new state will be the master of Britain and all the other states of the EU – one ring to bind them all.

Top Gear in top gear

"Top Gear is simply about the survival of blokeishness in a feminised world. It's about prime-time gender revenge and anti-authoritarianism and male camaraderie It's about the inner schoolboy in every man. . ." Showing on Dave.

Via An Englishman's Castle , who is always ready to sally forth against political correctness and in defence of liberty and common sense.

Patriots mount legal challenges

We are impressed with the number of stalwart, patriotic individuals who mostly on their own shilling are making valiant attempts to defend the freedom of the British people and in particular to put a halt to the EU’s constitutional treaty of Lisbon.

There is ex-policeman STUART BOWER who is suing the Prime Minister for breach of contract. The Labour Party promised a referendum on the EU constitution, and this influenced the vote of Bower and many others. Now Brown refuses to honour his party’s promise. Bower’s case will be heard in Brighton County Court on Thursday, 7 February at 10;30 am. (You can show your support by showing up, preferably with a sign, at 9:30.)

There is TREVOR COLMAN, an ex-detective inspector, who is promoting parish polls demanding a referendum on the EU. It is our legal right to hold and vote in these parish polls. So far 65 parishes have started the process, and 19 have completed it. Every single poll has shown an overwhelming vote of the people – 95.5% - in support of a referendum on the EU. In addition I want a referendum.com is planning 19 constituency-wide polls.

There is JOHN GOURIET, a veteran of previous freedom struggles, who with millionaire STUART WHEELER is seeking a Judicial Review of the Lisbon Treaty in the courts. Gouriet and Wheeler assert that the Treaty is in gross violation of the British Constitution.

There is ELIZABETH BECKETT who has refused to pay that part of her Council taxes that funds the EU’s regional assemblies which have never been mandated by Parliament.

There is JOHN GALLOWAY who has filed a Complaint with the Parliamentary Ombudsman, declaring that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is being untruthful about the cause and effect of the new EU Constitution, which is masquerading as the Lisbon Treaty and will destroy Britain's sovereignty.

You may know of other legal challenges. If so, let us know.

We hope and pray that there are honest judges with sufficient understanding of the British Constitution to rule justly so that these challenges succeed.

Congratulations, Australia

Vineyard at sunrise, Australia

To honour Australia on Australia Day, we have expanded our file. It's worth looking at, if only to read about the young men who saved Australia in 1942 on the Kokoda Trail. The dogged and gallant heroism of those Aussies and the helpful courage of the Papuan "angels" who carried the wounded back down the Trail just sweeps you away.

We couldn't do justice to them or their country, but this is our salute.

743 years

Evesham, where Montfort and the bachelor knights died defending parliament

On January 20, 1265 the first elected Parliament met in Westminster Palace. On January 21, 2008, at Westminster, the British Parliament, a descendant of that first Parliament, began to vote itself out of existence as Labour MPs and Lib-Dims supported the EU's 'Reform' Treaty, which will destroy the United Kingdom as an independent nation.

Sad, very sad, but not that surprising from this group of people. A broken pledge led to the birth of Parliament and a broken pledge may finish it.

Last year we published the very different story of the beginning of Parliament -

The kind of man who will fight a battle with a broken leg, and win it, Simon de Montfort makes a daring break with history and with Henry III by summoning the first parliament and inviting the people to attend.

Montfort's move is a political calculation, but it is also a defence of the right to advise the king, to have a voice in the king's expenditure of the people's money, and to have honest sheriffs, which Henry III had promised in the Provisions of Oxford and Westminster. When Henry III breaks his pledge, Montfort responds by confronting him with the people.

In December 1264, Montfort sends messengers to every county and many cities and towns, asking them to send two elected representatives to a parliament. They are happy to do so.

For the first time, men across England vote in parliamentary elections. (In the counties they have to meet a 40-shilling property qualification. In the towns there are different voting requirements.) Representatives of the yeomen of the shires and the people of the big towns join archbishops, bishops, earls and knights on January 20, 1265, in Parliament. Nothing like it has been seen since Rome was a republic fifteen hundred years earlier. They confirm the reforms.

Montfort will have to defend the reforms with his life. (See the 13th Century Liberty Timeline and scroll down.) But his astonishing new creation will be confirmed in 1275 and in the Model Parliament of 1295 by Edward I, his godson, and the man who kills him.

The son of a Frenchman, the grandson of an Englishwoman, Montfort has received some negative reviews, but not from the bachelor knights who fought with him to defend reform. Real reform. His last recorded words, also in the Timeline, still inspire us.

James Madison on the EU

A British subject before he became an American citizen, the man who fought for the American Bill of Rights wrote prophetically about Britain and the EU -

"I believe there are more instances of the abridgement of freedoms of the people by gradual and silent encroachment of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations."

James Madison

More about the American Revolution here

Precocious Pugin

Pugin's tower

ANW Pugin was the writer and architect who created the Gothic revival in Victorian Britain. That revival, says Roger Scruton, “was an attempt to re-consecrate a land that had been desecrated by industry” and create a circle of belonging.

Born in 1812 Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin grew up surrounded by his father’s architecture students. He had very little formal schooling, but spent his time copying the medieval prints he loved in the British Museum. When he was eight, he designed his first chair. When he was fifteen, he received his first commission – from George IV - for a Gothic standing cup now known as the Coronation Cup.

Pugin also loved the sea and the theatre. After designing furniture for the King, he designed stage sets. The deaths of his young wife, father and mother within the space of a year left him unsure of what he should do. When his aunt died and left him a legacy, he decided to become an architect, though his training consisted of little more than detailed sketches of medieval buildings in Britain and northern Europe (DNB)

Pugin had keen grey eyes, a mind that never forgot what it learned, and boundless good humour. He “would work from sunrise to midnight with extraordinary ease and rapidity. His short thick hands. . .performed their delicate work even under such unfavourable circumstances as sailing his lugger off the south coast of England” (Catholic Encylopaedia). Pugin was also ingenious, and enjoyed turning awkward architectural problems into brilliant building features.

He taught the workers he employed, and entrusted the building of his designs to them. They adored him.

In 1835 Pugin became a Roman Catholic, an unpopular move at the time, but one closely connected with his passion for Gothic architecture. In 1836 he published his most famous book, Contrasts - its beautiful, satirical drawings compare splendid types of medieval buildings with their meagre early nineteenth-century counterparts (Oxford DNB).

The father of eight children, a self-contained whirlwind of energy – once asked why he kept no clerk to help him, Pugin replied: “Clerk, my dear sir, clerk, I never employ one. I should kill him in a week” - Pugin designed dozens of Gothic churches and their interiors as well as houses, hospitals, and schools. Many parishes lacked sufficient funds for his towers or interior decoration, but St Giles, Cheadle, Staffordshire, built at the expense of the earl of Shrewsbury, had a magnificent red sandstone tower and spire, sumptuous colours inside and a chapel that was a blaze of light.

In 1834 the Houses of Parliament were gutted by fire, and Charles Barry was asked to design the new houses in a Gothic style. That Gothic was chosen was largely the result of Pugin’s architecture and writing. Working with Barry, Pugin produced thousands of construction drawings for the new buildings, and designed the tower that houses Big Ben.

The challenges of the eight-acre project were enormous. Quicksands were found during excavations, and part of the structure had to be erected on land reclaimed from the Thames. In the 1840s Pugin created all the interiors of the Houses of Parliament, designing the chambers, libraries, committee rooms, furniture, stained glass (destroyed in the Second World War) and every gas lamp, doorknob, and umbrella stand.

Pugin designed according to two principles - ‘1st, that there should be no features about a building which are not necessary for convenience, construction or propriety; 2nd, that all ornament should consist of enrichment of the essential construction of the building’ (True Principles). It is a modern manifesto, except that unlike many modern buildings his seem to have a soul – a tender, sacred, brave and festive soul.

Pugin worked closely with a number of artisans. They included Herbert Minton, who created the decorated tiles in the Houses of Parliament, and John Hardman, the Birmingham button maker and medallist who became Pugin’s close friend and manufactured metalwork and stained glass to his swiftly drawn designs.

Queen Victoria formally opened the Houses of Parliament on 11 November 1852. Pugin, just 40 years old, had died in September, sinking into madness due almost certainly to mercury poisoning.

Gothic architecture enchanted Britain. It may be that like a wise, kind soul it still has something to tell us.

More about British artists here

"Nuts"

"In one of Putin’s boldest moves yet, he ordered the venerable British Council to shut down its benign cultural offices in Russia — an obvious act of retaliation for Britain’s dogged pursuit of Litvinenko’s killers, who have been traced back to the Kremlin itself. Britain’s response hardly indicated any intimidation at the hands of a mighty world power. In a word it was: 'Nuts.' It simply refused to close the offices, daring the Kremlin to move against them and create an international incident."

The master of suspense on politics

At Powerline, William Katz describes the great director Alfred Hitchcock, "the master of suspense" and in a suprising essay describes some of Hitchcock's political lessons.

"Alfred Hitchcock was born in England in 1899 and died in California in 1980. Since you are worldly Power Line readers, you probably know most of his great films - "Rear Window," "North by Northwest," "Strangers on a Train," "Vertigo," "The Man Who Knew too Much," "Psycho," "Dial M for Murder," "The Birds," and others. . .

Hitchcock's films were known for many things, including a glossy, elegant style. But it was his ability to play our feelings, to sense how the audience would react, that was the spearhead of his success. And it struck me that Hitchcock had quite a bit to teach political candidates, even 28 years after his death. Some political players know these things instinctively. Most do not. Consider what Hitchcock knew, and showed in his work.

LESSON ONE – People love to be scared. We don't like to admit it, but it's clearly true. Hitchcock's career was based, simply, on scaring the audience. He reminded us of our sense of vulnerability, of what he called the "watch out" factor in life. There's a world of difference between fearmongering and understanding what people fear. It's outrageous, for example, when critics accuse President Bush of fearmongering when he discusses terrorism, for it's something Americans legitimately fear. Fear, in many respects, is good. It's the reason we don't put our hand on a hot stove.

POLITICAL APPLICATION: The candidate who understands voters' fears, and who can provide solutions, will have a strong appeal. People want their fears addressed. They don't want them ridiculed or ignored. A parent who fears that her child will be beaten up in school is outraged if her fear is shrugged off as a "socio-economic problem." Both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, although sunny characters, understood how, with restraint, to use fear. Roosevelt told America, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself," but forcefully described, and addressed, the economic despair gripping the nation. Reagan spoke of "morning in America," but visceral fear of crime, and of international defeat, was always on his agenda. Understand fear.

The four other lessons are here.

(Scroll down to find the story.)

2008 Heritage Foundation/WSJ Index of Economic Freedom & Prosperity – top 10 countries

“. . .the evidence is piling up that neither government nor multilateral spending on education and infrastructure are key to development. To move out of poverty, countries instead need fast growth; and to get that they need to unleash the animal spirits of entrepreneurs,” reports Mary Anastasia O’Grady in today’s WSJ.

“Empirical support for this view is presented again this year in The Heritage Foundation/The Wall Street Journal Index of Economic Freedom, released today. In its 14th edition, the annual survey grades countries on a combination of factors including property rights protection, tax rates, government intervention in the economy, monetary, fiscal and trade policy, and business freedom.

. . .The Index also reports that the freest 20% of the world's economies have twice the per capita income of those in the second quintile and five times that of the least-free 20%. In other words, freedom and prosperity are highly correlated.”

In the Heritage Foundation/WSJ Index the top ten countries are -

1 Hong Kong
2 Singapore
3 Ireland
4 Australia
5 United States
6 New Zealand
7 Canada
8 Chile
9 Switzerland
10 United Kingdom

O’Grady notes that “Former British colonies in Asia took three of the top five places this year", and explores the links between economic freedom and prosperity.

We note that economic freedom has to include accountability. A story on the front page of the WSJ today reports that toxic factories in China, 126 on the Index, are poisoning workers. This problem is not confined to China. To protect workers from harm the law should hold factory owners financially and criminally responsible.

Read more about the economic freedom and prosperity of the United Kingdom - the good news and the bad - here.

Blair despair

Though it may sometimes strike you that we write about the first thing that comes into our heads, this is not so. Usually we write about the second. Often a post that one of us has written or proposed is vetoed by the other.

After Tony Blair betrayed our country to the European Union, and left office, he decided to convert to Catholicism. At the time Cat suspected an ulterior motive. The timing of the conversion was unusual - new members of the Church enter at Easter. Further Cat noted that the majority of Europe's population is Catholic. Anyone hoping to be President of the EU might well find his path smoother if he, too, were Catholic. However, the idea was so appalling that each of us separately spiked the post. However, the Telegraph’s just published report that Blair is seeking the EU presidency made us wonder.

This site is supposed to be about the best of the Brits and we often describe those men and women who are opposing the self-serving politicians who are selling out their country for their own advancement. Blair seems to fall into the latter category, but as we often have remarked the best of the Brits were often in a desperate struggle with the worst.

We have been writing about those who oppose the EU and the sinking of British freedom.

"The Constitution that She has taken Her Oath to support"

We have found a constitutionally significant comment on a film provided by The Queen to YouTube.

The film, narrated by John de Vere Loder, 2nd Baron Wakehurst, KG, GCMG, shows The Queen’s Coronation, and refers explicitly to the Constitution that The Queen swore to defend. This is the same Constitution that politicians tell us does not exist. This is the same Constitution that the people are now petitioning The Queen to defend by refusing Her Royal Assent to the Lisbon Treaty.

Here is Lord Wakehurst -

“When she is anointed with the consecrated oil, when she takes into her hands the orb, the sceptre, and all the other symbols of royalty, such as the sword, the bracelets, the spurs, and when homage is paid in the form prescribed by the traditions of a thousand years, HER PEOPLE ARE PLEDGING THEMSELVES ON THEIR PART TO HONOUR THE SOVEREIGNTY OF THE NATION IN HER PERSON AND TO WORK WITH HER IN MAINTAINING THE CONSTITUTION THAT SHE HAS TAKEN HER OATH TO SUPPORT.”

Of course The Queen needs the people to work with her “in maintaining the Constitution that She has taken Her Oath to support”.



To work with The Queen in support of the Constitution, visit Your Own Choice, which provides a refresher on the Constitution, sign the petition, and send in your postcard.

You might also want to read about The Servant Queen.

If any reader of our blog can point us to a film or audio recording of Her Majesty speaking the Coronation Oath, we would be glad to put it up.

We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows

I have been praying for this, and saying it could happen to naysayers for two years, and now Michael Yon, someone who really does know, is saying yes, it has happened, please don't destroy their trust. And because he has spoken of British as well as American soldiers, I feature his comments here, adding only, did some people really think that American and British soldiers would have no impact on the Iraqi people? Did some people really think that the courage and strength and wisdom of British and American soldiers and their integrity and concern for the well-being of the Iraqi people would not touch the Iraqi people? Who did they underestimate more? American and British soldiers or the Iraqi people?

There’s only a small group of writers who honestly spend enough time in Iraq to make serious claims based on firsthand accounts. But I’ve seen the Iraqi Army with my own eyes. I’ve done many missions in 2005 and 2007, in many places in Iraq, along with the Iraqi Army: please believe me when I say that, on the whole, the Iraqi Army is remarkably better in 2007 and far more effective than it was in 2005. By 2007, the Iraqis were doing most of the fighting. And . . . this is very important . . . they see our Army and Marines as serious allies, and in many cases as friends. Please let the potential implications of that sink in.

We now have a large number of American and British officers who can pick up a phone from Washington or London and call an Iraqi officer that he knows well—an Iraqi he has fought along side of—and talk. Same with untold numbers of Sheiks and government officials, most of whom do not deserve the caricatural disdain they get most often from pundits who have never set foot in Iraq. British and American forces have a personal relationship with Iraqi leaders of many stripes. The long-term intangible implications of the betrayal of that trust through the precipitous withdrawal of our troops could be enormous, because they would be the certain first casualties of renewed violence, and selling out the Iraqis who are making an honest-go would make the Bay of Pigs sell-out seem inconsequential. The United States and Great Britain would hang their heads in shame for a century.

Alternately, in an equation in which the outcome is a stable Iraq for which they (Iraqi Police and Army officials) are stewards, the potential benefits are equally enormous. Because if Iraq were to settle down, and then a decade passes and we look back and even our most severe critics cannot deny that Iraq is a better place, a generation of Iraq’s most important leaders would have deep personal bonds with their counterparts in America and Great Britain. This could actually happen.

Via Instaundit

Galloway files Complaint with Parliamentary Ombudsman

John Galloway of Shropshire is one of the many, unsung people who are opposing the EU's takeover of Britain. John has filed a Complaint with the Parliamentary Ombudsman, declaring that the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is being untruthful about the cause and effect of the new EU Constitution, which is masquerading as the Lisbon Treaty and will finally destroy Britain's sovereignty.

John has just reported that the Ombudsman is considering whether to investigate his Complaint, and has indicated that they will let him know within 40 working days from 3 January 2008. He should hear by the 28th of February whether they will proceed.

We are not sanguine, but it is essential that these actions are undertaken, and since they require energy and intelligence and dedication, we applaud John.

Anyone who wishes to make a similar Complaint, check out John's site.

Euro-Creep

Euro-Creep is underway as the EU takes over Britain -

EU control over the insurance market
 - EU environmental taxes 
- Usurping the United Kingdom’s positions in tax negotiations 
- Tighter EU controls over HM Revenue & Customs - Charter of Fundamental Rights enforced by stealth
 - EU control over electronic communications
 - More EU takeovers of education 
- More EU control over sport
 - New controls over transport. . .

The Bruges Group has all the details.

Speaking of Defoe, whom Cat wrote about yesterday, these lines from his “True-born Englishman” suggest the attitude we need -

The meanest English ploughman studies law,

And keeps thereby the magistrates in awe;

Will boldly tell them what they ought to do,

And sometimes punish their omissions too.

Their liberty and property's so dear,

They scorn their laws or governors to fear. . .

O, Defoe, where are you?

Alex Kingston as Moll Flanders in the Mobil Masterpiece Theatre series

Freedom of speech is under attack. Journalists, publishers and ordinary citizens are forced to defend their free speech against “human rights” commissions and the police (see posts on Lionheart and Mark Steyn below). Areas of Britain have been turned into “no-go” areas for non-Muslims, and Muslims demand that the Bishop of Rochester, the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali, resign because he has remarked that this is so. Soul-killing examples of political correctness are pervasive, and throw a pall over those who would like to speak their minds whether they are right or wrong and whether their ideas are unpopular.

Daniel Defoe was familiar with attacks against freedom of speech and freedom of religion, which forced him into jail and the feared pillory, but despite the fact that he was not personally the bravest of men, he kept on writing and publishing.

He had already experienced the sheer unpleasantness of jail as a bankrupt when his ships were lost in pirate-infested seas. When the government imprisoned him, it was 1702 and he was in his early forties with a business, a wife and at least six children to feed.


Wickedly satirical


In 1701, he had written the wickedly satiric send-up of the English called "The True-Born Englishman". To their credit, the English didn't whine about his verses. They made his poem a bestseller for the next fifty years.

But when he wrote the “Shortest Way with the Dissenters” Defoe pinched the government’s nerves. He had previously irritated the dissenters by pointing out that those who took occasional communion in the Church of England in order to qualify for employment and government office were hypocrites. Defoe was brought up by dissenters, and would have liked them to take a stand and oppose the government oppression that made it difficult for Christians to worship as they chose.


Forced into the pillory


But as the government contemplated taking even more severe steps against dissenters, Defoe leapt to their defence. He satirized the government’s plans for rooting out ‘this cursed Race from the World’, and made tyranny look absurd.

Facing the appalling logical result of their proposed methods, and stung by the "Shortest Way’s" mockery, the government tried to discover the identity of the author. Defoe went into hiding. This does not sound brave, but we sympathize. In May 1702 he was discovered, arrested for seditious libel, interrogated by the earl of Nottingham, imprisoned in Newgate, fined heavily, and sentenced to stand in the pillory unless he revealed his ‘Accomplices’. He refused to reveal them.

The pillory consisted of hinged wooden boards that formed holes through which a person’s head and arms and legs were forced. The boards were locked together to hold the captive tight. Set up in marketplaces or crossroads the victim attracted crowds throwing vegetables, dead animals and stones, and could not defend himself with his hands. Maiming or even death could result. Defoe’s punishment was to stand in the pillory for three days.

On the 29th, 30th and 31st of July 1702, he was taken there. The crowds were massive. His supporters stood in a solid ring around him for three days to defend him from missiles. It is said that the crowds began to throw flowers. He appeared, as Alexander Pope described him, ‘unabashed on high’. His ‘Hymn to the Pillory’ was sold in the streets and declared defiantly that he was ‘an Example made, to make Men of their Honesty afraid’.

Our modern observation: It seems likely that the Muslim complainants against Steyn and his publisher Macleans and the police authorities who want to interrogate the blogger Lionheart may have the same intention – to make them and others afraid to speak or write about certain subjects.

His business in ruins


Defoe survived the pillory, but his business of making bricks lay in ruins. We often speak about men and women willing to risk their lives for freedom. It is not much less of a hardship to risk your business, on which you and your large family are depending, as Defoe did.

Subsequently he was repeatedly harassed by unjust arrests, but he kept on writing, and, in an unexpected career move that we make no attempt to defend, became a secret agent for a government minister he trusted. We note that Great Britain might never have been established without his writing and intelligence network. He was instrumental in assuring that Scotland voted for the Act of Union with England.


Following his passion


During these years Defoe revolutionized journalism by founding a ground-breaking Review that provided opinions and context to the news. He eventually published more than 300 books, pamphlets, and journals on conduct, marriage, psychology, politics and crime (the last two not always separate subjects). In his attempts to create political and economic writing that would be read, he began creating dialogue, character, and story. The result of following his passion was that between the ages of fifty-five and sixty-four he entered his most creative period and established the new literary form of the English novel with the glorious Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Moll Flanders (1722).

In Crusoe he created “the greatest mythic fantasy ever written of the solitary survivor who will never succumb. . .Physically, mentally, and spiritually Crusoe survives and grows stronger” (DNB). Deeply embedded in the world's cultural consciousness, Robinson Crusoe has never been out of print, and has been translated into a number of films, including Castaway with Tom Hanks. “Only the Bible has been printed in more languages” (DNB). In Moll Flanders Defoe created a resilient, optimistic heroine with multiple adventures, troubles, and escapes, and swept his readers into global possibilities while simultaneously confronting the question of evil.

A work that seems eerily modern is his secret history of the Treaty of Utrecht which confirms that the British have long been plagued by ministers and rulers who would manipulate the public and agree to a treaty that gave away all of Britain’s hard-earned success. Defoe was not a protectionist or a snob about trade. He showed an “early, acute understanding of banks, the new credit economy, and the transportation system necessary for increasing trade” (DNB). He envisioned European nations joining together to make the seas safe from pirates and open to merchants of every nation. In the event, it was the Royal Navy and US Navy that accomplished this task, and that have maintained the freedom of the seas for the last two hundred years.


"The Original Power. . .of the People of England"


One of Defoe’s least-known and most important works was published in the same year as the "Shortest Way with the Dissenters". This is "The Original Power of the Collective Body of the People of England" (1702), which is “one of the most eloquent defences of the rights of the people and most militant about their relationship to government. . .” It asserted many of Locke's arguments with great power, vindicating the “‘original right’ of ‘all men’ to live under a government dedicated to their benefit” (DNB).

Ah, Defoe! Where are you today when the British people face increasing assaults on their freedoms, their common sense, and their bank balances? Your spirit lives on in bloggers. May they find a way to reach the British people as effectively as you did. May there be British brave enough to defy jail and the pillory, and Brits brave enough to defend them.

Trying to save an old police station and prison in Hong Kong - a curious case of the long reach of the law?

The renovated police station and prison in Hong Kong as proposed by the Hong Kong Jockey Club and designed by Herzog & de Meuron. Preservationists do not like the design and want the station and prison left as a monument to “collective memory”.

Yesterday the Wall Street Journal reported on the controversy aroused in Hong Kong over renovating the old Central Police Station and Victoria Prison. I have never been sentimental about police stations or prisons, not even the Tower of London, but Hong Kong’s longing to preserve physical memories of the past, in this case the British past, reminded me of a letter to the editor from a Chinese citizen of Hong Kong which I read years ago and which introduced a new idea to my mind. The letter came from a woman who knew what it was to be a refugee in a city of shanties quite different from the Hong Kong we know today.

William McGurn wrote about that period -

“By any measure, the future for this Asian country looked bleak. Enormously overcrowded, its normal population had skyrocketed, increased not just by a naturally high birthrate but also by revolution in a neighboring country - forcing thousands of desperate refugees upon its borders. Lacking natural resources and utterly dependent upon its unpleasant neighbor for water and food, the country's situation had deteriorated so badly that a local UN official declared the only way for it to survive would be with massive Western aid. An American newspaper proclaimed the country to be 'dying,'. . .

'Virtually every sizable vacant site . . . was occupied, and when there was no flat land remaining, [people] moved up to the hillsides and colonized the ravines and slopes which were too steep for normal development. The huts were constructed of such material as they could lay hands on at little or no cost - flattened sheets of tin, woodened boarding, cardboard, sacking slung on frames. . . . Land was scarce even for the squatters and the huts were packed like dense honeycombs or irregular warrens at different levels, with little ventilation and no regular access. The shacks themselves were crowded beyond endurance. . . . Density was at a rate of two thousand persons to an acre in single-story huts. There was, of course, no sanitation.'”

There was, however, a British administration and the rights and protections of common law. In the 1960s there was also the inestimable Sir John Cowperthwaite, Financial Secretary of the Crown Colony. He did not respond as Democratic candidates in America or Labour MPs in Britain would respond to this sort of crisis – with promises of big government programs that would take care of everyone and which, with the best of intentions, would create people who might be living minimally improved lives but who would have no future because they would be maximally dependent on the largesse of the state.

Cowperthwaite was a classical free-trader in a tradition that stretched from Adam Smith to Milton Friedman. Like Friedman he believed that “The only cases where the masses have escaped from grinding poverty. . .the only cases in recorded history, are where they have had capitalism and largely free trade. . .There is no alternative way of improving the lot of the ordinary person that can hold a candle to the productive activities of the free-enterprise system” – and productive, creative and energetic people.

Under Cowperthwaite’s financial administration Hong Kong became an international business centre with six million prosperous and largely peaceful citizens under a non-interventionist government founded in British common law. Which takes me back to the the high feelings aroused by the renovation of an old prison and the Chinese lady who wrote to a Western newspaper years ago.

She wrote simply, in words something like these, 'When we came to Hong Kong we had nothing, and we were given nothing. We had no social safety net. We had only the law. We knew that no one could come to us in the middle of the night in our shop and take what we had earned. We knew that the law would protect us.'

Hong Kong had Chinese and British creativity, free trade, and British law. Perhaps that is why people in Hong Kong care so passionately about an old police station and prison - or perhaps free trade has been so successful, and so many new buildings have been built, there are few historic buildings still extant?

Appeal to The Queen

A second postcard appeal to The Queen has been launched. The first was quite successful in driving the government to promise a referendum on the EU Constitution in 2004. We hope that this appeal will remind Her Majesty of Her Constitutional powers, which we are afraid she deprecates. The card reads -

Your Majesty,
I appeal to you to defend and uphold the British Constitution, as you promised us in your Coronation Oath. I urge you to refuse your Royal Assent to any Bill to enact the E.U. Reform Treaty, unless we, the British people, have first been allowed to have our say in a fair referendum. You promised to govern us according to our laws and customs. The Bill of Rights 1689 states that we should never be ruled by ‘foreign powers’.

In 2004, after large numbers of Britons petitioned both you and your government, Tony Blair promised us a referendum on the European Constitution. As nearly all European and British leaders agree, the E.U. Reform Treaty is a virtual carbon copy of the European Constitution, with around 99% of its wording the same as four years ago.

This Treaty will bring in a European government. Britain would be forced to accept a European foreign and defence policy, including an E.U. army and paramiltary units with the right to operate on our soil. Precious rights such as the presumption of innocence and trial by jury will no longer be guaranteed. Under the Treaty, the E.U. will have power to further remove what independence we have left, without our consent. You may by convention have to follow government advice when giving Royal Assent, but, equally, the government must not give you unconstitutional advice.

Order the Cards
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Send a cheque, made out to CREC, to:
66 Chippingfield, HARLOW, Essex CM17 0DJ.

Telephone enquiries can be made to -
Derek Norman (Chairman) 01480 435837
Tony Bennett (Secretary) 01279 635789
Graham Wood (Development Officer) 01904 795204

Website: www.european-referendum.org.uk

The Brits at their Best file on the EU could be a useful start if you have questions about the EU's threats to Britain and the British people.