Russia and WW3: How did Europe's leaders get policy so wrong?

World War Three! 

The EU's economy is burst like a flat tyre. Today's policy repeats the errors of the 1970s when OPEC's Oil Weapon punctured Europe's economy. A decade of Stagflation followed -- a combination of high inflation and stagnant growth. 

Then, foreigners used oil price blackmail to change foreign policy. They quadrupled oil prices in 1973. They quadrupled them again in 1979.

Today EU's Russia policy is self-inflicted. It is suicidal. World War looms. 

Are leaders abandoning 76 years of peace in Europe -- the longest in all its history?

How did European leaders burn Europe's most precious asset like a candle under a blow-torch?

Let's go back to where and when Europeans gained that peace. 

In 1950, while the Russian Red Army was poised to conquer worn out, post-war western Europe, French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman made a proposal, the like of which no nation in history had ever seen before. 

Remember the context. 

The French Communist party was the largest in the French National Assembly. Post-war inflation topped 60 percent. Schuman first reformed the currency base. When in 1947-8, Schuman had been elected Prime Minister, the US ambassador cabled that a Communist coup d'Etat was imminent. Insurrectional strikes paralyzed the country, riots caused chaos, trains were derailed. 

Josef Stalin ruled the Soviet Union and his Red Army controlled the Baltics, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Bulgaria, Romania and other countries. Millions were enslaved in Gulag camps. Other millions were executed at his personal behest. But in western propaganda however, he was the benign, pipe-smoking 'Uncle Joe'.

July 1949: French Foreign Minister Schuman points at Soviet Foreign Minister Andrey Vishinsky,
watched by US Secretary of State Dean Acheson (left) and UK Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin.

Schuman's analysis was far different from many commentators. He proposed a New Europe by making war 'not only unthinkable but materially impossible.' 

On 9 May 1950 the French Government accepted his proposal. At 4.30, in a notably strong, firm voice, he pronounced his plan to the press.

'Conditions in Europe are going to be entirely changed.'

'France has acted primarily for peace, and to give peace a real chance.'

'All Europeans, whether from the East or the West, will benefit from this.'

'Europe will be born of this.'

'France has acted and the consequences of its action can be immense.'

They were. They turned the world right-side up. Europe entered its longest period of peace and the greatest prosperity in all its history.

Schuman's proposal envisaged a supranational economic Community, firstly of coal and steel. It had innovative, new institutions: 

• an independent High Authority, 
• an elected Assembly, 
• elected consultation of associations of workers, consumers and enterprises,
• a Council of national ministers and 
• a Court of Justice. 

It would create a New Europe based on the hitherto unknown principle of a supranational Community of Coal and Steel.

 All Europeans were invited to join, Schuman declared. 

Russia, of course!

What about Russia, one journalist asked. Can Russia join?

Schuman's answer was shocking to those then. It is shocking to many today locked in boxed thinking.

Russia? But of course! (Mais oui!). 

Russia under Stalin! 

Schuman's grasp of reality and duty was light-years away from many of the leaders today. 

To understand Schuman's design for what he called the European House, we have only to look at his earlier achievements. He helped reform inflated currencies on an international scale. He was instrumental in 1948-9 in creating NATO. It offers mutual defence against any who threaten and invade one of the partner States holding common values. 

What were those values?

Schuman's government had proposed a European Assembly and a common market in July 1948. The Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms listed those values. Membership of the Council of Europe was restricted to States who agreed. Freedom presages the end of tyranny.

Marx's Mistake

Karl Marx had analysed what he called the contradictions and crisis of capitalism. Schuman had analysed the contradictions of atheistic communism. 

How, in God's good earth, would Russia, then Soviet Russia, live in peace and prosperity with the rest of the Continent? For Schuman the answer was the same as would admit post-Nazi Germany and Austria with their horrendous history into a Community of peace. 

He came up with precise predictions. The Soviet Union would collapse before the turn of the century, he told young politicians at the Assembly, although he would not live to see it. Europeans must be ready for that event. They must welcome those freed from its bonds. Politicians failed.

Isolation by former victims leads to repetition of violence. Each nation has innate qualities of culture, resources and geography. Nations should not become intoxicated with their assets to use them as instruments of domination. A Germany that played power politics between East and West was a danger. Post-Nazi Germany, Schuman said, should be welcomed  on the basis of equality by its former victims. 

The same policy that goes for Germany, goes for Russia. Isolating Russia drives her to work against Europe and into the hands of Communist China. It drives Europe into energy and food penury.

What should be Europe's answer for Russia?

Schuman wrote about a 'durable, organic link' to help nations blossom in freedom 'by mutually beneficial efforts and using their common resources.' That Community method is the best way to serve one's own country.

But any misuse of resources for war must be stopped at its first manifestation. 

'We must remove all reasons for war, and suppress it up to and including any temptation to start one. Nobody, not even the most unscrupulous government, should have an interest in it any more. I will go further: we want to remove any means to start a war, and to remove all temptation to war, and to risk one for gain. The worst of racketeers will be unable to spring a war on fellow Europeans.'

The Council of Europe Convention provided that instrument. The three European Communities with their common management of coal and steel (classical materials of war), atomic energy (nuclear war) and the common market (trade war) provided peace-enhancing infrastructure, aided by international anti-cartel powers.

Hope for Europe's failed leadership

After the collapse of the USSR, western leaders were not prepared to welcome post-Communist Russia at the moment of its great need.  Russia asked. Russia jointed the Council of Europe in 1996. But on 15 March 2022 Russia voluntarily withdrew. 

Western leaders thought they knew better than Schuman. They were less altruistic. Since Maastricht, they created a complex, dense and undemocratic 'European Union' for themselves. 

The Community future beckons. A European Energy and Security Treaty creating a new Community would bring Russia, the Ukraine and the West together. 

Instead of World War III, the participating States would have guaranteed peace and prosperity. 

But are our leaders too proud and obstinate to see it and work for it?

Do they prefer the suicide of civilisation?

The EU flag flown at the Olympics would be THEFT!

Should athletes from EU Member States carry the European Union flag? 

Let's be clear. There is no distinct EU flag. It is high time for Europe's leaders to be honest about its emblem, its flag. People rally around a flag where it has real and lasting meaning. 

The flag of twelve-stars on an azure field is the flag of the Council of Europe. It is Europe's senior institution. The EU uses the flag as a subsidiary of the Council of Europe. 

So it makes no sense for EU States to flourish the twelve-star flag, because it is primarily a symbol of the Council of Europe. It includes 47 States, not just the 27 of the EU. 

Besides the EU States, the Flag represents:

Norway, Iceland, Turkey, Liechtenstein, San Marino, Moldova, Albania, Andorra, Switzerland, Ukraine, North Macedonia, Russia, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Monaco, Serbia, Montenegro and the United Kingdom.

Should the flag be waived every time one of these States wins at the Olympics? 

The EU seems to be attempting to appropriate total use of the flag. It is an attempted act of pilfering, to use a polite term. It's a theft as much as using the logo of Coca Cola as the emblem of the European Commission. 

Slow motion steal

The Council of Europe owns the flag. It encapsulates honest government and European values. Decades later, it first offered use of the flag with conditions to the European Communities. At first only the European Parliament took up the generous invitation. Other Community institutions then wanted to use it.

The story is a bit like a neighbour borrowing the lawnmower and then after a period of time the neighbour says the lawnmower belongs to me. 

Put it another way. It is like the European Commission installing Coca Cola vending machines throughout the Berlaymont building. Then, when they became so prevalent, saying that the Commission owns the branding of the Coca Cola logo.  

The EU, with its flagrant democratic deficit, seems to think that the 12-star flag is its own. But the question of ownership is even more legally dubious. The flag was offered to the European Communities, not the present EU, which is a different animal. 

The European Council took over control and made the flag part of EU. But ironically, in the referendums on the Constitutional treaty that was rejected by France and the Netherlands, the flag was rejected too. Several other countries were set to reject the treaty but their referendums were withdrawn by the politicians. So the EU constitutionally does not have this flag. The people did not want it to represent the EU.

Then, even more ironically, the Constitutional Treaty was re-assembled from a jigsaw puzzle of articles and amendments and turned into the Lisbon Treaty. Did the Lisbon Treaty have an article defining the European flag and the anthem? 

No. The article which was in the Constitutional Treaty was left out of the Lisbon Treaty! Why? Because the British objected that this made the EU appear to be a federal State, which obviously it wasn't.

There is no article in the Lisbon Treaty that says the Flag of the EU is that which is widely flown outside all EU buildings or inside government offices. The best politicians could come up with was a statement by 17 States, declaration 52, that was added later to the treaty.  

Flag and Song

In 1986 at the invitation of the Council of Europe the European Communities were invited with conditions to use both the flag and the European anthem, Beethoven's 'Ode to Joy' as arranged for it by Herbert von Karajan. This invitation was accepted by the European Council, which was not a Community institution. It was not even a body with a legal personality. That's like the neighbour of the neighbour saying the lawnmower is his. That seems like the EU's European Council is violating a fundamental right -- the right to own and retain property.

The Council of Europe was designed to safeguard human rights after the abuses of Nazism and Soviet communism. In short, unjust rule by a self-defined elite or ideology. 

All Member States of the European Communities and the EU have to be members of the Council of Europe. They have to respect its Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. The EU is in evident crisis with a democratic deficit, closed-door government, and a crying need to re-establish just and honest principles for the Future of Europe. It needs to review its origins.

On 5 May 1949 Robert Schuman said in a speech at the signature ceremony of the Council of Europe Statute in London that adherence to this legal system defines 'Europe' more than geography. 

The lesson is that the EU must conform to the Human Rights of the Council of Europe. That is why all early treaties were discussed and passed in the Council of Europe. Schuman himself explained the institutions and the democratic mechanism of the European Community before the Assembly of the Council of Europe in August 1950. 

The ultimate European Court is not the Court of the EU in Luxembourg but the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.

Who flies the flag? The flag belongs by invention, precedent and law to the Council of Europe. 

The use of the European flag by the Brussels institutions is an act of recognition of being part of Europe based on Fundamental Freedoms. 

These freedoms are recognized by States and their governments. They are not created by governments. Freedoms are given by God, not States. Citizens must be aware that Governments are primarily the entities that wish to curtail human freedoms by abuse of laws and regulations. Citizens need protection against the representatives of the citizens who believe they are better than citizens. The Council of Europe is the body that can do that. Certainly not the Lisbon Treaty's EU that was erected against the will of the people. That is an act of antipathy and hostility to elementary human rights.

States that stop fundamental freedoms can be suspended or even expelled from the Council of Europe. That was the case of Greece under the dictatorship of the colonels.

Among the Freedoms are: 

• Freedom  of Speech,
• Freedom of Assembly,
• Freedom of religion,
• Freedom to own and enjoy possessions etc.

Secret Steal

Did the EU politicians secretly steal the design? The evidence is there for all to judge. 

Power can corrupt. Politicians tend to accumulate powers against the people. They reduce or freeze the people's voice. It disturbs them. They might listen and then ignore voices crying out about injustice and requiring honest government.

Following a ruling by the Court of Justice, politicians were forced to hold European elections to the European Parliament in 1979. That was a quarter of a century after politicians had signed treaties that such elections should be held. Today no elections are afforded to the consultative committees. The Council of Ministers still holds sessions behind closed doors instead of open sessions as the treaties require.

Many people objected to the way the politicians had responded to the ruling on European elections. The treaty and the great Charter of the Community said that pan-European elections were necessary. Instead, the politicians followed only the first part of the sentence in the article in the treaties. They decided to hold national elections to the Parliament according to national rules they invented rather than one election with one statute. 

In the 1980s politicians, aware of public disgust at lack of open councils, and proper European elections, decided to launch a public relations operation to try to fool the people. 

At the meeting of the heads of State and Government at Dublin in December 1984, they called for a report on 'People's Europe'. Ironic indeed since they had denied elementary democracy to the people.

The Adonnino Report came up with a number of measures. They were mostly of dubious legality as if the politicians could command various measures without the agreement of the people. Changes in sovereignty and constitutionality require the assent of the people. Instead the key feature was to provide a feeling of branding, and respond to what they considered to be a federal wish-list.

Prominent among these measures was the flag and the anthem. So what was the solution of the Adonnino panel? It made clear that the 12-star flag belonged to the Council of Europe. As a subset of this Human Rights Europe, the European Communities would have to indicate just that. So the committee suggested that a large letter E should be placed in the centre of the flag to show that dependency.

 Brand theft

So how did the EU get the same flag as that of the Council of Europe? 

What is more legitimate in choosing symbols of sovereignty: 

• a referendum of the people or 
• a secret meeting?

Guess which system was used to decide on the flag?

Yes, the flag was decided at a closed door meeting of the Heads of State and Government at Milan in June 1985. It excluded the public and discussed the matter in private. 

What happened? Some like the British were against creating a flag with implications of sovereignty and without formal agreement of the people. 

So a compromise was reached. The meeting decided that that they would create a 'logo' not a flag. 

And quite impudently also decided they would remove the E from the centre. It was then exactly the same as the flag of the Council of Europe! Why?

So what happened to the use of the logo of twelve stars? It did not last long. 

Within a mere few months it changed from a flag with an E, to a logo without an E, to a flag without an E.

On 26 May 1986, the twelve stars were officially raised as a flag outside the HQ building of the European Commission.

This is an audacious act of brand-stealing. If it were a question of a firm taking the design of a can of Heinz beans or producing something called Coca Cola they would be taken to Court.  

It is brand theft. 

The secret meeting of the European politicians feels that it can steal with impunity. 

Origin of the Flag

The European flag was adopted by the Committee of Ministers on 9 December 1955 following a resolution in the Assembly:

Against the blue sky of the Western world, the stars symbolise the peoples of Europe in a form of a circle, a sign of union. Their number is invariably twelve, the figure twelve being the symbol of perfection and entirety.

— Council of Europe. Paris, 7–9 December 1955.

In fact the question of creating a flag had been raised at the start of Europe's great institution that defines Europe as the zone of free speech and human rights. The Council started its work in August 1949 with 12 signatory States: Belgium, Denmark, France, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, UK (the ten signatories of the Statute on 5 May 1949) and two States that signed before the first session: Greece and Turkey and then in1950 from opposite end of Europe: Iceland.

French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman signs Statute of Council of Europe at
St James's Palace, London, 5 May 1949.

Proposed designs came from across Europe and far beyond. (One, with a single gold star on a blue background, came from a European named C W Raymon in Japan but this design was already in use.) 

The Council's Director of Information, Paul Levy, a Belgian, was in charge of the project, and liked the basic design. In September 1953, the Assembly proposed 15 stars (then the number of States). French deputy  Robert Bichet was rapporteur. But the Germans in the Council of Ministers refused. Among the 15 was the Saar, a disputed territory.  The Saar objected to being cut out. 

What about thirteen stars? Twelve stars in a circle with a large star in the centre? That was rejected as many did not like thirteen. 

The Secretary General Leon Marchal suggested just 12 stars.  Levy was charged to provide reasons to support it. He replied: 

'Twelve is the sign of perfection and fullness. There were twelve tables of law in Rome; there are twelve apostles; there are twelve sons of Jacob; twelve months of the year; and twelve hours in the day; ... twelve signs of the zodiac represent the entire universe, so why shouldn't twelve stars represent Europe of both sides of the Iron Curtain and both sides of the Pyrenees?'

Leon Marchal drew the case of the twelve stars surrounding the woman of Revelation 12, which biblically represent the twelve tribes of Israel (as distinct to Roman Catholic views). Levy drew up details of the design for public use. Levy must therefore be considered the designer of the flag. 

Was the flag a Marian or Catholic symbol? Not according to Levy who was at the origin of the design. It was Levy who drew that exact specifications of the flag. Levy was a Holocaust survivor. Marchal was also keen to have a politically neutral emblem. A religious symbol would not have passed the Assembly and the Committee of Ministers.

The Assembly's adoption of the flag on 8 December 1955, a 'Marian' date, was a 'political accident.' (Sauver l'Europe, pp163-8, published 1978.) The Marian idea was a later unsubstantiated fiction. The final decision was made on 9 December by the Committee of Ministers. 

Meanwhile, officials at the European Coal and Steel Community had created their own flag. It was a not very aesthetic design. It had six stars in two rows of three but on a field divided horizontally between blue (steel) and black (coal). 

Robert Schuman much preferred the Levy design. Then some decades later, in 1983 the European Parliament decided to take the flag as its emblem. The European Communities as a whole then decided they would also do the same.

For Schuman the synergy that was in the original proposition between the Council of Europe and the Community reinforced the necessity of unity: the Council of Europe was and is the human rights guarantor of the proper working of the Community.

Conclusion: 

The lesson of the European Flag is that all European institutions must come under the judgement of the European Court of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and democratic supervision of the institutions of the Council of Europe.  That includes respect for property rights.

The EU leaders will only properly guide Europe to her destiny when they are honest with themselves. 

Beyond Brexit: UK Constitution upturned; Europe in a Human Rights Revolution

Review of Vernon Bogdanor: Beyond Brexit

Vernon Bogdanor excels in his analysis of the UK Constitution. He draws incisive conclusions about the major changes of the Constitution that have arisen from more than four decades of membership to the European Communities. He traces the change of model from UK’s unwritten constitution where Parliament ruled to the slow but sure movement where European “officials” in the Commission apparently pre-empt all.

As he wrote, and it is more apparent after he wrote, the Referendum, as an instrument of governance, has become the predominant factor in Britain’s Constitution.

The Referendum represents the most important challenge not only to UK because of Brexit, but because, by the disrespect of the referendum by Brussels as the primary instrument of democracy, Europe is entering a prolonged crisis which will overturn decades-long corrupt policy by politicians.

Early constitutions

Historically Britain did have a written constitution briefly under Oliver Cromwell. Before that, before the Anglo-Saxons arrived, and indeed the Romans, ancient Britons were governed by wise principles called the State Triads, the basis for our present Common Law. One of these defines the three governance principles:

• firstly, a referendum of all the people,
• secondly a parliament of 300, and
• thirdly a court where jurors or elders vote under its protection and privileges.

These ‘Laws of Wales’ were confirmed in the Magna Carta 1215.

The Referendum is now coming back to first place. It has changed how Britons think about their Constitution.

European Communities

Bogdanor does not dig so far back into history. But he is clear and detailed on the recent developments. He is right to draw attention to the fact that the original institution was the European Coal and Steel Community 1951 and not the “Common Market” 1957. His analysis of the supremacy of European law and the British lack of understanding of it is well worth a read.

The Continentals, however, have also failed to warn of the drift and resist the negative changes for all European citizens: the Democratic Deficit.

This is not something inherent in the Community system. In fact it was conceived as the most democratic system ever.

The two areas where his analysis is weak are the nature of European Democracy (as originally conceived and why it is ‘chloroformed’ under France’s autocratic president Charles de Gaulle) and the major change in the British constitution now that the Referendum is main instrument that outclasses even parliamentary decision-making. A more subtle and perhaps more important point is how to stop politicians cheating when a referendum is declared. This can be done when referendums do not have an adequate legal framework, for example, where the framework itself violates human rights.

Democracy is based on Human Rights

After the bloodiest of world wars and threatened by Soviet expansionism, the democrats who agreed on the Community idea, obviously wanted a democracy that would help west European democracies help themselves. They wanted to build together a better, freer world. The first step was the creation of a minimum standard for a country to be considered democratic. This was formulated in the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms of the guardian organisation, the Council of Europe.

This body and this entrance ticket may be considered the Bill of Rights and its guarantor for the future safety of Europeans and their States.

All subsequent treaties such as the European Communities had to be examined for human rights adherence and agreed by this body. And so they were. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3tcJKfuMYCk

Democratic blockage

What happened? Western Europe experienced an economic miracle for three decades that were unprecedented in its previous history. But in the 1980s it ran out of steam. Europe’s democratic engine is based on a ratchet system: it can go forward but not back. But for a while it can be blocked from advancing.

Europe gained its first Single Markets in 1953. De Gaulle stopped the advancement to what had initially been agreed: a transparent, open Council of Ministers and elections to European bodies. After de Gaulle’s departure in 1969 was when the reform to the high standards of Schuman democracy should have been made.

Alas, politicians, Continental and British, Irish and Scandinavian, preferred the neo-Gaullist system. European elections to the Parliament should be based on a single statute and one election, not 28 national elections that are easily manipulated. The closed-door Councils of Ministers remained. Politicians could thus abrogate to themselves excessive powers without public supervision.

The inevitable crisis

Today we are entering Crisisland: Brexit comes after barely surviving Greece’s Grexit and the continuing euro crisis.

Is the original democratic vision broken? Democracy needs the rule of law to sustain it. Law needs democratic glue to make it viable long-term.

Robert Schuman, the French Statesman who originated the Community method, created a new system to provide a partial (step-by-step) democracy in sectors to link and pacify ancient States and peoples, continually at war amongst themselves.

As Bogdanor says in his Gresham Lectures, Schuman initiated a ‘scientific experiment’ in democracy (speech at Strasbourg, May 1949). Schuman also said that democracy cannot be improvised. Progress is not automatic, nor, because of human nature, always in the right direction.

The Cause

This is where Bogdanor could have applied more of his analytical skills. After the war, the Community experiment was based on solid principles of good governance. The first document signed by the founding States in 1951 was buried by Gaullists in French archives. It was not republished again for fifty years. It is what Schuman called the Charter of the Community.

It is simpler than Magna Carta. It has one key right, the right of people to freely choose their destiny. True democracy contrasted with the Soviet system where the people could only vote for the Party and party dictatorship of the proletariat.

Democracy goes hand in hand with the first institution of modern Europe. That was not the EU or the Community but the Council of Europe, formed in Strasbourg in 1949. Its Rules of Membership – the Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms – defined European values, Magna Carta rights on a broad European scale.

States and free populations that recognise these values of a free society are those that can call themselves European with freedom of thought, assembly, the press, presumed innocence in Court, and so on.

The Convention of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms now defines Europe more than geography.

Where did Europe and UK go wrong?

All the early treaties, 1951-57, were discussed at length in the Assembly of the Council of Europe to ensure they complied with human rights.

By the time UK joined NONE of the later ones were.

1950 European Coal and Steel Community, ECSC,

1953 European Defence Community, EDC

1953 European Political Community, EPC

1957 European Atomic Energy Community, Euratom,

1957 European Economic Community, EEC: Spaak Report.

The Community was considered a guardian of fundamental rights because it was within the Council of Europe system. For example, Article 3 of the EDC specifies the fundamental rights of the individual and rights of States.

1957-69 De Gaulle seizes power in France, stops elections.

1973 UK joined 3 Communities, ECSC, EEC (Common Market) and Euratom. But no elections to European Parliament and Consultative Committees took place.

1986 Mrs Thatcher agreed to reinforcing the Single Market in the Single European Act (SEA). But the politicians added more institutions. They were unpopular and few citizens agreed to them. This constitution-changing operation was mounted against British, Danish and Greek objections, only one referendum (in Ireland). Only nine of the 12 Member States signed the SEA initially in February 1986.

The politicians, meeting in the still closed-door Council of Ministers, created these new institutions for internal and external affairs and a hierarchical control by a European Council of heads of Government, after the pattern of de Gaulle’s system.

Constitutional change requires affirmation in referendums. In the UK, where some saw to where such constitutional change without popular authorisation could lead, a Referendum Party was formed with the aim of correcting government policy to the innovations without popular legitimacy.

The first cheat was to call the SEA a revision and not a treaty. The second cheat was not to have it analysed for Human Rights abuse by the Council of Europe. By this time the Council of Europe, side-lined by de Gaulle in 1957, was not allowed to interfere in the process or to pronounce on the diminishing human rights of these political operations. 

Human Rights by Force

The Community system had no institution called the European Council of Heads of State and Government. There was good reason. All European politics should be conducted in the Council of Europe and in Community bodies in open session.

The ‘Summit’ was an invention of Charles de Gaulle. He was the only Head of State allowed.

It provides fertile soil for an oligarchic control of European affairs without public supervision. In the Community system it was not even an institution, never mind a body with legal personality.

In the European Council, Heads of government could now meet in secret. Heads of government could decide what to do for their own advantage. They also had national majorities to pass them or force them through their parliaments. Later Treaties (Maastricht, Amsterdam, Nice, Constitutional and Lisbon) were forced through parliaments in rapid succession.

Once they leaders were agreed it was easy. All government parties with their parliamentary majorities did not have to take minority or popular voices into account. Some treaties were passed in spite of referendums blackballing them. Human rights? Forget it!

No Human Rights ‘interference’ was allowed from the Council of Europe. A substitute for proper Human Rights was penned, called the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Another fraud as it confused ideology with natural law rights.

It was forced through parliaments, in spite of its having been rejected in several referendums!!

Some Human Rights!

Impact of Human Rights

So what would happen if real Human Rights were restored and enforced in the Strasbourg Court? Sections of the present treaties would be resiled. What is the most significant section today?

The Lisbon Treaty was rejected by three States—France and the Netherlands when it was called the Constitutional treaty, and once by Ireland when it was called the Lisbon treaty.

Given a chance, UK voters would have rejected it with a large majority according to all observers. They were not given a chance. Politicians in UK and several other countries withdrew their already announced referendums.

The Lisbon Treaty does not pass the Council of Europe test. Nor does it pass the referendum test of popular support for a constitutional change.

What would happen if the Lisbon Treaty were no longer valid?

Well, for a start, there would be no Article 50. And no valid referendum of 23 June 2016. The people would have a choice of treaty. It is clear that across Europe, Lisbon treaty was unacceptable because referendums were banned. The only State, Ireland, that voted on it, voted against it. And then, under financial duress, Brussels politicians told the Irish to vote again!

A written Constitution for the UK?

Bogdanor concludes that UK is heading for a written Constitution. Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales have such documents. These have been granted by the central Parliament in Westminster after referendums.

UK still has European Human Rights law that overrides even parliamentary Acts. So Westminster needs constitutional certainty.

Not so fast.

Much must be clarified first, primarily the voice of the people. This is the fundament of fundamentals. Neglected too long, the referendum is the most powerful, legitimising constitutional institution (with two others acting as helpers, parliament and the courts). Parliament is no longer seen as the main constitutional body that nothing can bind. The Supreme Court judgement in the Miller prorogation case shows that Government in Parliament is subject to judicial review and its decisions can be reversed and declared null and void.

(T)he Order in Council which, being founded on unlawful advice, was likewise unlawful, null and of no effect and should be quashed. This led to the actual prorogation, which was as if the Commissioners had walked into Parliament with a blank piece of paper. It too was unlawful, null and of no effect. 

Back to Constitutional Basics

Democracies are States or entities of the people ruled by the people for the people. Not closed-door oligarchies.

While no one doubts the legitimacy of the 1975 European Community referendum with its decisive result, the same cannot be said for David Cameron’s 23 June 2016 Article 50 referendum.

Why? The legal framework is missing. The May government said it was basing its exit letter on Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty. The 1975 vote did not base itself on a treaty but the free vote of the people.

The legality of the Lisbon Treaty is quite dubious. It is a palpable fraud. Both Labour and Conservatives promised a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. None came.

In reality referendums in France and the Netherlands had already rejected its articles. Later, six States, including the UK, were refused the possibility of a referendum. Why were they refused? Because the politicians knew and said at the time that these populations would reject the treaty!

Instead, in UK the treaty was passed off as agreed — without a referendum. But not only without one. It was passed off in direct opposition to the people. It was rejected in referendums in Ireland and in France and the Netherlands when it was called the Constitutional Treaty.

This sleight of hand must be rectified at first for future generations. A constitutional arrangement based on a fraud will not stand.

The people must agree to the Lisbon Treaty before it can be used. Only then can a problem free Article 50 be used as a basis for a referendum decision in Parliament.

The UK is in the midst of a constitutional revolution, comparable to the union of the United Kingdom. Now it is on the scale of the Continent of Europe (excluding only such States as Iceland, Norway and Switzerland etc who do not wish to join).

The Convention of Human Rights of Strasbourg supplies the baseline. The 1951 Great Charter of the Community defines the right of peoples to choose.

In the 21st Century the people in a referendum must agree every constitutional treaty.

An honest Europe cannot be built when politicians are allowed to fool the people in constitutional arrangements made in secret and without public assent.

David Heilbron Price

Eurdemocracy

25/XII/19

Trump highlights Jerusalem; EU warns of Dark Days ahead

When President Trump confirmed Jerusalem as Israel's capital, the EU warned of Dark Days ahead. Is Jerusalem the light of the world? Does it throw light on Europe's black record?
“President Trump’s announcement on Jerusalem has a very worrying potential impact,” EU’s Foreign Policy chief, Frederica Mogherini, said in Brussels. Making a surprise, unannounced visit to the EU Commission’s press room, she forecast that “it has a very fragile context and thus the potential to send us backwards to even darker times than the ones we are already living in.”
What on earth did she mean?
What are the darkest days of Europe’s post-war history? Has she forgotten? Oil is blacker than midnight.
Well she has an excuse. She was only a few months old at the time of the Yom Kippur war. That took place in October 1973. It was the year of blackest Blackmail.
Europe is still held hostage. Its Foreign Policy is still owned by the oil sheiks.
Proof? The Saudis and others turn the oil spigot off at will. The supply diminishes, the price rockets. The European consumer consistently pays six or eight times the free market price for petroleum. Or twenty times on occasion, a 2000 percent price hike! (Where a non-cartel oil producer sells on the free market a highly profitable price lies between between five to ten dollars a barrel.)
If the EU had a self-respecting Foreign Policy it would defend its citizens from such predatory international cartels as OPEC, now working in cahoots with Russia. Global cartels would not be artificially hoisting energy prices. They would not be attacking the European economy like blood-sucking leaches.
Second proof. The EU now feels confidence enough to bring anti-cartel measures against American-based modern industries such as Microsoft and Apple. But what about oil? For that the EU External Action Service has no fuel in its tank.
The high cost of imported energy amounts to two or three times the entire EU budget. It could be a fraction of that if the EU had a real Foreign Policy. Europeans would get a boost on a prosperous economic up-curve.
Third proof. The Community system has the power potential to stop international cartels. Action depends on the will of its foreign policy operators. At the start of the EU with its European Coal and Steel Community, ECSC, the Commission, then called the High Authority, dismantled the greatest threat to world war. Even in the early months of its action, it was able to dismantle the steel, coal and armaments cartels that were the cause not only of the WW2 but WW1. Robert Schuman created the ECSC and Euratom to enable Europe to be energy-independent. Today’s EU leaders think they know better.
In August 1973 Saudi's King Faisal warned USA and the world that it would use its Oil Weapon to break any country's independent foreign policy supporting Israel. Then came war. Following the October 1973 Egyptian attack on Israel, Arab nations were surprised then shocked to see Israel was not crumbling like tissue paper. In fact Israel was winning.
That was the year when the Arab OPEC countries attacked Europe. The Arab League told the Europeans that if they did not immediately cease from supporting Israel they would get not one drop of oil. They imposed a 100 percent embargo on Europe. No more oil. The European economy went into a nosedive. Some countries like the Netherlands and Denmark were totally dependent on Arab oil. They were only saved from utter ruin by emergency European measures and sharing, thanks to the European Community’s single market established in 1953.
Did the Europeans stand up with back straight and tell the sheiks where to go? What did they respond honestly and frankly to King Faisal who only a few years earlier, to show his civilization, had issued a decree outlawing slavery in his kingdom? At last! For the first time in a millennium thousands of slaves gained their freedom. During the 1967 Six Day War, the Arab oil exporters had already cut oil by 60 percent to Europe. Had the Europeans learned lessons about potential financial slavery in 1973?
Hardly.
A meeting of European foreign policy chiefs just a few weeks later on 5 November 1973 issued a Joint Declaration on the situation in the Middle East.
Defiance? A search for justice and truth? None of it. It spoke of the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people. That was the first time they had done so. And there is a good reason why. They bought a lie to get oil. They all knew how Syria, Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt maltreated and confined their so-called 'Palestinian refugees.'
Palestinians? Up to the Declaration of Independence by David Ben-Gurion’s government in May 1948, only Jews were known as Palestinians. They were people of the British Mandate for Palestine.

Under the British Mandate, Arabs preferred to be called by their tribes, Southern Syrians, Egyptians, Saudis or Bedouins. Readers of the Jerusalem Post should know that at this time it was known as the Palestine Post.
The parents of Moshe Dayan, hero of the Six Day War, held British passports declaring they were Palestinians.

Dvora Dayan, Palestinian wife of a       Palestinian

But the term Palestinian was not long thrown away in the dustbin of history. Nasser, the Egyptian dictator, working with the USSR Disinformation Department of the KGB pulled it out of the trash. The Arab League met in Cairo in 1964. They created the fake Palestine Liberation Organization, to foment trouble with the Soviets’ many other anti-colonist terrorist groups. After the 1967 war, the brutal Egyptian-born Yasser Arafat became its third chairman in 1969.
Remember at that time Palestine meant the geographical area of the British Mandate. In the League’s Mandate Article 7, ONLY Jews were given Palestinian citizenship!
This was agreed by the world's powers -- including the Arab States!

"Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have agreed, for the purpose of giving effect to the provisions of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations, to entrust to a Mandatory selected by the said Powers the administration of the territory of Palestine, which formerly belonged to the Turkish Empire, within such boundaries as may be fixed by them; and
Whereas the Principal Allied Powers have also agreed that the Mandatory should be responsible for putting into effect the declaration originally made on November 2nd, 1917, by the Government of His Britannic Majesty, and adopted by the said Powers, in favor of the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, it being clearly understood that nothing should be done which might prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country; and
Whereas recognition has thereby been given to the historical connection of the Jewish people with Palestine and to the grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country;     ...

ARTICLE 7.

The Administration of Palestine shall be responsible for enacting a nationality law. There shall be included in this law provisions framed so as to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews who take up their permanent residence in Palestine."

The Palestinian National Charter or Convention glosses over any precise legal and political issues, and legitimate identity, by confounding the geographical term with broad brush appeal to the Arab nation. Warning! Disinformation and Fake History!
There was never in history an Arab nation called Palestine or an Arab people called Palestinians. Neither was Jerusalem ever a capital of an Arab State. It is the 3000 year old capital of Israel that is today legally occupied.  No "Palestinians" are mentioned in the famous 1967 UN Resolution 242. Why? No such people existed! Jordanians, the Hashemite Arabs expelled from Mecca who illegally occupied the vast, eastern Mandate trans-Jordan territory, had in 1948 occupied Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem illegally and militarily.
Warning! Disinformation uses the same words but changes their meanings. The Palestinian National Charter or Convention glosses over any precise legal and political issues, and legitimate identity, by confounding the geographical term with broad brush appeal to the Arab nation.
There was never in history an Arab nation called Palestine or an Arab people called Palestinians. Neither was Jerusalem ever a capital of an Arab State. It is the 3000 year old capital of Israel that is today legally occupied. No “Palestinians” are mentioned in the famous 1967 UN Resolution 242. Why? No such people existed! Jordanians occupied Judea and Samaria and East Jerusalem illegally.

Article 1:
Palestine is the homeland of the Arab Palestinian people; it is an indivisible part of the Arab homeland, and the Palestinian people are an integral part of the Arab nation.
Article 2:
Palestine, with the boundaries it had during the British Mandate, is an indivisible territorial unit.

It is this poisoned, drugged cake that the Europeans began to bite into when they made a Joint Declaration, under the informal, non-legal framework known as Political Cooperation.
Having seen the Europeans scattered like flocks of sheep before ravenous wolves, an Arab delegation descended uninvited on the European Summit at Copenhagen on 14-15 December 1973. I witnessed the shock of European leaders! They were discussing 'European identity'. In a reference to the planned new holocaust of Jews and the near lethal attack on European economy, they referred to these black events with diplomatic circumlocution as the 'energy crisis'.

"The Heads of State or Government considered that the situation produced by the energy crisis is a threat to the world economy as a whole, affecting not only developed but also developing countries."

As the Arabs worried that total subjection of the European economy might slip out of their control, as other energy sources became available, OPEC quadrupled the price of oil to turn open blackmail into long-term financial blackmail. Then they slapped Europe again to make Europeans sure they knew who was boss. The prices were quadrupled again in 1979, reducing Europe’s huge financial surplus to desperation and impoverishment.

The other side of the ledger is bulging. The multi-trillion dollar Saudi Aramco is by far the richest company in the world. It has ample resources to pay the best public relations and media. It can easily oil the wheels of politics. Such was the way in the 1960s when PR firms recast the embarrassing terminology that the United Nations had used. Samaria (the capital province of the Israelites) and Judea (the tribal land of the Jews) became the West Bank.
  In July of the black year of 2008, the Islamist wrecking ball smashed again. It took a decade to wind up OPEC's explosive demolition machine. Twice as high as before!
 

The petroleum cartel jacked the price up to 147 dollars a barrel. It pilfered from the world economy more than ten percent of global GNP. Again the world fell into destitution. (In 1972 oil was under two dollars!)
But recent events have cooled this theft. Shale oil and gas and the arrival at last of more intelligent energy sources threaten the future of the blackmailers. Hence the major changes in the Arab world.


Europeans are slow and too arthritic to escape from hostage today. Mme Mogherini’s reaction is typical of the Stockholm syndrome of captives defending the hostage-taker. US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson needs to spend more time in Brussels to bring those living in the dark into the light of day.
May the captives gain their freedom!