WarSclerotic

Thank you, America! Wattsupwith that, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley via Anthony Watts, June 24, 2016

(This is by far the best address I have read thus far on Brexit. — DM)

“Your Majesty, with my humble duty, I was born in a democracy; I do not live in one; but I am determined to die in one.”

And now I shall die in one. In the words of William Pitt the Younger after the defeat of Napoleon, “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”

The people have spoken. And the democratic spirit that inspired just over half the people of Britain to vote for national independence has its roots in the passionate devotion of the Founding Fathers of the United States to democracy. Our former colony showed us the way. Today, then, an even more heartfelt than usual “God bless America!”

***************************

For my final broadcast to the nation on the eve of Britain’s Independence Day, the BBC asked me to imagine myself as one of the courtiers to whom Her Majesty had recently asked the question, “In one minute, give three reasons for your opinion on whether my United Kingdom should remain in or leave the European Union.”

My three reasons for departure, in strict order of precedence, were Democracy, Democracy, and Democracy. For the so-called “European Parliament” is no Parliament. It is a mere duma. It lacks even the power to bring forward a bill, and the 28 faceless, unelected, omnipotent Kommissars – the official German name for the shadowy Commissioners who exercise the supreme lawmaking power that was once vested in our elected Parliament – have the power, under the Treaty of Maastricht, to meet behind closed doors to override in secret any decision of that “Parliament” at will, and even to issue “Commission Regulations” that bypass it altogether.

Worse, the treaty that established the European Stability Pact gives its governing body of absolute bankers the power, at will and without consultation, to demand any sum of money, however large, from any member state, and every member of that governing body, personally as well as collectively, is held entirely immune not only from any civil suit but also from any criminal prosecution.

That is dictatorship in the formal sense. Good riddance to it.

I concluded my one-minute broadcast with these words: “Your Majesty, with my humble duty, I was born in a democracy; I do not live in one; but I am determined to die in one.”

And now I shall die in one. In the words of William Pitt the Younger after the defeat of Napoleon, “England has saved herself by her exertions, and will, as I trust, save Europe by her example.”

Indeed, No-way and Nixerland having already voted down the EU, Brexit may well be swiftly followed by Frexit, Grexit, Departugal, Italeave, Czechout, Oustria, Finish, Slovakuum, Latviaticum and Byebyegium.  At this rate, soon the only country still participating in the European tyranny-by-clerk will be Remainia.

The people have spoken. And the democratic spirit that inspired just over half the people of Britain to vote for national independence has its roots in the passionate devotion of the Founding Fathers of the United States to democracy. Our former colony showed us the way. Today, then, an even more heartfelt than usual “God bless America!”

All who have studied the Madison papers will grasp the greatness of the Founding Fathers’ vision. They were determined that no law and no tax should be inflicted upon any citizen except by the will of elected representatives of the people in Congress assembled.

They regarded this democratic principle as of such central importance that they wrote it down as Article 1, Section 1 of the Constitution of the United States: “All legislative power herein granted shall be vested in a Congress of the United States, which shall consist of a Senate and House of Representatives.” Period. No ifs. No buts. No exceptions.

Except one. The Constitution establishes that foreign treaties ratified by a two-thirds majority of the Senate shall have the same force of law throughout the United States as enactments of Congress.

It is, therefore possible for any U.S. Government that can muster that Senate majority to ratify any treaty and thereby to thwart the central principle of Congressional democracy: that no Congress may bind its successors.

The Republicans, who are not always as lively in their understanding of the threat to democracy posed by supranational and global institutions such as the EU, the UN and its bloated climate bureaucracy, are too often snared or charmed by determined “Democrats” who fully understand and thirst to exercise the power to inflict perma-Socialism on their nation by bilateral, multilateral or global treaties.

It is astonishing how many of the GOP are willing to be cajoled and schmoozed into supporting monstrosities such as the Transatlatic Trade and Investment Partnership, which on its face sounds like a free-marketeer’s dream but is in its small print a series of outright Socialist measures which, once the Senate has ratified them, cannot be repealed. Its climate provisions, for instance, are highly dangerous.

It is no accident, therefore, that the bankers, the corporate profiteers, the Greens and the National Socialist Workers’ Party of Scotland – the corporatists and the communists together – made common totalitarian cause and heavily promoted the campaign to keep Britain in the EU, that paradise of vested interests and their poisonous lobbyists.

It is likewise no accident that precisely these same national and global vested interests heavily promote the campaign to subject Britain and the world to various unnecessary and damaging measures whose ostensible purpose is to control the climate but whose real ambition is to curb capitalism, fetter freedom, punish prosperity,. limit liberty and deny democracy.

The necessity to protect the flagile flower of democracy from the scythe of Socialism is now surely self-evident. Here are two modest proposals to ensure that the will of the people prevails over the power of the politicians, the Press, and the profiteers.

First, every new treaty, and as many pre-existing treaties as possible, should be made subject to repeal by a national referendum – and not just by a referendum called by the governing party because it thinks it can win it but by the people via the initiative procedure. Britain would have left the EU long before now if we, the people, and not those who govern us, had had the right to put referendum questions on the ballot.

Secondly, the governing bodies of all new supranational or global bodies exercising real sovereign power or spending taxpayers’ money from the states parties to the treaty that establishes them should be elected at frequent intervals by the peoples of those states parties.

Otherwise every international treaty, being a transfer of power from elected to unelected hands, diminishes democracy. Britain’s membership of the European Union effectively took away our democracy altogether, so that three new laws in five (according to the researchers of the House of Commons Library) or five in six (according to the German Government in a submission some years ago to the German Constitutional Court) are inflicted upon us solely because the unelected Kommissars require it.

Till now, our obligation has been to obey, on pain of unlimited fines.

The vote by the people of Britain to break free from this stifling, sclerotic tyranny has sent a shock-wave through every major international governing entity. It was no accident that the the International Monetary Fund, the Organization for Economic Corruption and Devastation, and various world “leaders” including Mr Obama, broke with democratic convention by openly promoting a “Remain” vote in a flagrant attempt to interfere in Britain’s decision.

Mr Obama’s intervention was decisive. The moment he demanded that Britain should remain within the EU, the polls began to swing against it. It was only when, in his maladroit fashion, he had sought to interfere in Britain’s decision that so many undecided voters woke up to the danger that the maneuverings and posturings of the international governing class represent to democracy.

What will Britain’s decision mean for the climate debate? Of course, it will break us free from the EU, whose governing elite had seized upon the climate issue as a purported ex-post-facto justification for the now-hated bloc’s continued existence.

We are left with our own British governing class, which has until now been no less determined than the EU to damage our economic and environmental interests by shutting down vital coal-fired power stations and carpeting our once green and pleasant land with windmills.

Now that the EU and its devoted poodle Mr Cameron have been consigned to the trashcan of history, it is near-certain that any new British Cabinet will take a more alert and less acquiescent stance than the present lot on the climate question.

It may even occur to the new Cabinet to check whether the rate of global warming is anything like what the profiteers of doom had predicted; to count the number of downstream businesses – such as cinder-blocks made from fly-ash out of coal-fired power stations – that have been destroyed by the EU’s war on coal; and even to wonder whether the forest of windmills that infest our once beautiful landscape are now extracting between them so much kinetic energy from passing storms that they are slowing them down, causing far more flash flooding than slightly warmer weather would (if and when it happened).

In the past, there was no point in our politicians asking any such questions, for our policies on all matters to do with our own environment were set for us by the unelected Kommissars of Brussels, whether we liked it or not.

Now that our politicians are going to have to learn to think for themselves again, rather than acting as an otiose, automated rubber stamp for directives from Them in Brussels, perhaps the Mother of Parliaments will begin to calculate the enormous economic advantage that Britain will gain by abandoning all of the climate-related directives that have driven our coal corporations, our steelworks and our aluminum works overseas, and have killed tens of thousands by making home heating altogether unaffordable.

We, the people, are the masters now. Our politicians will have to reacquire the habit of listening not to Them but to us. Here, and in the rest of Europe, and eventually throughout the world, let freedom ring!

Thank you, America, and God save the Queen!