Real Reason Why UK Keeps Breaking International Law – Brexit to Covid?
“These VoteLeave Brexit regime members are trying to re-litigate the post-World War II peace settlement, through the vehicle of repeatedly breaching the EU Withdrawal Treaty…”
The Alpha Variant was brewed in Kent England due to the UK’s lackadaisical/actively-passive faux attempt to reach Herd Immunity by letting Covid rip through its population.
As many of us predicted, this policy virtually guaranteed world-beating variants of Covid would emerge.
Alpha emerged and ravaged the rest of the world, including the EU,
and particularly Czechia:
Eventually, Alpha contributed to Delta:
“Delta’s transmission advantage is some function of the underlying genomic background Delta emerged in (B.1.1.7 &…).”
[https://www.researchsquare.com/article/rs-637724/v1]
Poor governance in the UK threatens us all.
The EU exists to prevent Europe’s descent again into darkness.
The Early Warning indicators from the UK are bleeping red.
In the UK’s current regime, the EU is dealing with an anti-democratic group of leaders who think nothing about breaching its own democratic constitution; which thinks nothing about winning an election on promises it doesn’t intend to keep (the very definition of uninformed electoral consent); and which thinks nothing about preventably poisoning its unsuspecting residents’ minds and bodies with disinformation and SARS-CoV-2.
Make no mistake: democracy is not compatible with government sources of disinformation and lies.
Electorates cannot consent to leaders who lie as a matter of course about their intentions.
This is not just a moral issue, it’s a question of informed consent and participation in the democratic community.
About the immanent expected denouncement by the UK of a key part of the EU Withdrawal Treaty that its government was elected to ratify (and which it did ratify), some UK government-fed commentators are saying things like:
“The protocol is unquestionably having adverse effects on trade between Northern Ireland and Britain”
Not seen any evidence of this.
Most of the Northern Ireland Protocol (part of the EU Withdrawal Treaty – let’s all always recall this is not a mere agreement: it’s a treaty) hasn’t yet been implemented.
The UK, itself in breach of the treaty, unilaterally extended deadlines to implement the treaty’s provisions.
The EU extended a wide margin of appreciation to the UK over these breaches, so far.
UK government affiliated political parties stirred up violence in Northern Ireland and then attempted to use this violence in its own sovereign territory as a cudgel with which to intimidate the EU.
What kind of a State does that?
Serious question.
If the UK government was truly concerned about implementing the Treaty, why didn’t the UK government in June 2020 exercise its right to extend the transition by one year, which it was entitled to do under the terms of the treaty?!
The UK even had political cover to do this – Covid was and still is ravaging through Britain at the moment when the deadline for extending the deadline for implementing the treaty expired in June 2020.
These are not the Good Faith actions of an honest partner.
More faulty thinking from the UK government aligned journalists:
“Even the nuclear option … requires a year’s notice.”
Hilarious.
This is what the UK regime is banking on?
If the UK unilaterally breaches the EU Withdrawal Treaty for a fourth time – by unilaterally “suspending” (so it says) the NI Protocol of that treaty – why does the UK think the EU would not do likewise, in order to preserve the rules based order?
It’s a fundamental tenet of UK law that:
She who comes to equity must come with clean hands.
I know this because I was trained as a lawyer at one of Europe’s great law schools (Trinity Hall, Cambridge – founded in 1350 to train a cadre of lawyers during the Black Death), where we were trained to hold politicians to account when they trample on democratic constitutions:
In a nutshell:
That fundamental ancient tenet of English law means that if you have dishonoured a law, you can’t then rely on that dishonoured law to use against the victim of the breach when that victim bites back.
By already thrice breaching the EU Withdrawal Treaty, the UK morally and legally cannot then expect the EU to adhere strictly to its tenets.
The UK undemocratically lied to the electorate (by its own admission) in 2019.
The UK regime won the 2019 election on the promise it would Get Brexit Done, specifically by ratifying THIS Treaty it’s now trying to denounce.
This is anti-democratic.
The same MPs who were elected to ratify that Treaty… did so.
In January 2020.
There’s even a fundamental tenet of British democracy that a Parliament can’t revisit a decision which that particular parliamentary session has already made.
Yet, in September 2020, after the UK's Northern Ireland minister announced in the UK Parliament that what the MPs were about to vote on would breach international law, those same MPs trashed their electoral mandates.
And the UK’s government led its nation into pariah status with this decision unprecedented in modern European democracies.
Make no mistake, that moment in September 2020 was the UK’s Reichstag moment.
That was the moment the UK ceased to become a modern democratic state in which the electorate’s informed consented to mandate was respected.
Either the ruling UK party lied to the electorate to secure their election in 2019 about the MAIN issue in that election – its election slogan was even Get Brexit Done.
Or, having honestly intended to ratify that Treaty, now the regime has changed its mind.
Well, either way, the UK governing regime does not have a democratic mandate to take these actions.
Quite apart from anything to do with Brexit, the EU cannot afford to have such a regime on its doorstep.
It cannot negotiate in Good Faith with a regime that asymmetrically expects the EU to honour some supposed one-year notice period, while it (the UK) has undemocratically secured a mandate through lies (voters can only give informed consent).
The EU exists to prevent States like the UK breaching international law, as the Nazi Party did during the 1930s.
Much of what the Nazi Party did in the 1930s which we consider to be abhorrent -its racist anti-Jewish laws for example- was done in strict conformity with its own domestic rules of law.
This is partly why after World War II, the war’s victors established an explicit legal regime setting out internationally applicable laws governing Human Rights and the duties of States in ALL circumstances to respect them.
The right of the public to participate in decision making is a core human right underpinning our democracies.
That right is breached when governments hack the consent of its residents through anti-democratic actions and the promotion of disinformation that misleads residents and voids their consent.
Note here life-threatening anti-mask misinformation from the head of the UK ruling conservative parliamentary’s party’s committee that elects the prime minister of the UK “sir” Graham Brady:
Wider issues are at stake for European democracy if the UK’s descent into undemocracy is enabled by EU weakness.
The UK Brexit regime needs to listen VERY carefully – a majority of the good people of England already are; they don’t consent to this: that’s why the Brexit regime can only ever win by hacking democracy.
The UK does not have clean hands in this matter.
It has already actively and passively allowed over 160,000 of its residents to die due to its anti-scientific and unlawful Covid policy:
The UK has a duty in international law to prevent and control epidemics.
This duty was agreed to by every member of W.H.O. as it’s set out in the International Health Regulations which are binding on all States that signed the W.H.O. Treaty.
This duty is also binding on the UK as it has ratified the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (incidentally one of two or three of the most ratified treaties in the history of our species).
The very purpose of this duty to control and prevent epidemics is to prevent the brewing of variants like the Alpha Variant spilling over into other States, like the Czechia example given above:
These are explicit duties in international law, just as honouring the terms of the EU Withdrawal Treaty are.
The EU also has a persisting duty of care to its former citizens and current citizens resident in the UK.
The average number of lost life years of those who did die from Covid was ten years.
Ten years.
Think about that.
In five years time when the Brexit regime – we must hope- is history, 160,000 people who should be alive, will still be dead.
160,000 individuals with their own thoughts, feelings and contributions to be made inside our communities who should have had yet another five years of life ahead of them will have been dead for five years.
Five years of loving and being loved by family members, friends and those they were yet to meet.
By 1933 the Nazi Party had only infected 1m children with a nasty propaganda virus!
This UK government, by its own admission, lied itself through Brexit and the 2019 elections, thus neutralising any chimera of a democratic mandate.
Its people elected this government to ratify and implement the EU Withdrawal Treaty and the NI Protocol, not to denounce it.
Those leading the UK regime opposed the peace in Ireland specifically because they did not want a “Culture of Human Rights” spreading from Ireland (where the European Convention on Human Rights is entrenched into the constitution of both jurisdictions) into the rest of the UK:
That is the depth of the VoteLeave Brexit Regime’s commitment to overturning the international human rights architecture that was born of the horrors of the Second World War.
The intellectual leader of this anti-Human Rights movement in the UK, Michael Gove (who led the Brexit campaign) is one of the leaders of (it is suspected) the mass infection policies that breach its international law commitments.
As Cabinet Office minister throughout most of the pandemic Gove was responsible for, according to his own former assistant’s evidence to Parliament, the cabinet office’s key failure to coordinate the Covid response to save lives.
Gove in 2000 actually argued that the UK should continue its war in Ireland rather than honour the terms of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement!
It’s worth remembering that at the time Gove was writing that, the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement had been voted on and received substantial majorities in its favour in Ireland and in Northern Ireland.
Gove who led the Brexit referendum VoteLeave campaign which was found by the High Court to have unlawfully spent around £600,000 on online advertisements in the last two day’s before the Brexit referendum even portrayed the simultaneous referendums in Ireland as a “rigged” vote.
Yet such is this senior minister’s substantive disdain for democracy that, despite what was not a rigged referendum, he wishes to re-kindle a war that cost thousands of lives and lasted forty years!
Hardly a surprise then that he and those he leads with (and works for) want also to re-litigate the post-World War II peace settlement!
This person and the people he represents (and I don’t mean the good citizens of England most of whom are the innocent victims of his lies and disinformation) are trying to re-litigate the post-World War II peace settlement, through the vehicle of breaching the EU Withdrawal Treaty repeatedly.
For them, this is not about Brexit or Northern Ireland.
Remember: they tried to ram Brexit through in the UK using ancient constitutional powers that give the monarch the right to defy Parliament.
The Supreme Court in Miller I and Miller II stopped that authoritarian strategy in its tracks by reminding the Brexit regime that the Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights are still law.
For these people, this is about overturning centuries of culture and law that enables a balance to be struck between the duty of the State to respect and support the human rights of its residents and the freedom of those residents.
The EU must honour its commitment to peace in Europe by suspending the Trade and Security pact with the UK.
The EU has a persisting duty to its former UK EU citizens yanked out of its umbrella by a UK regime which has poisoned its own population with lies, anti-democratic elections, sewage, Covid and now pariah status in the international community.
This UK regime has chosen even to poison its own waters with sewage now its free of European Union legal frameworks’ duty to treat its sewage to EU standards.
Those are but two of the many memes that UK civil society used to protest against what it has termed the Turd Reich.
This regime has preventably killed over 100,000 of its citizens on the theory that by sacrificing them it would achieve Herd Immunity to Covid – as a result it brewed Alpha which is a genetic ancestor of Delta that has and is now afflicting over 1m children inside the UK with Covid.
This regime signed a treaty which it has now breached three times with its greatest trading partner.
The UK does 52% of its trade with the EU while to the EU the UK only represents 15% of its market.
Yet, even given this asymmetry this Brexit regime is prepared to risk a trade war it can never win.
The EU must stand firm.
Otherwise…
At the time of writing the Brexit regime, which lifted the mask mandate in schools in mid-May has knowingly and unnecessarily infected 1m+ children with Covid.
Note how the numbers climb after mid-May 2021 when the Brexit regime stopped mask wearing in schools (remember that piece linked to above where the head of the committee that elects the UK prime minister describes masks in the midst of a pandemic caused by a virus that spreads through the air: tools of social control?):
Again, let’s ask ourselves what kind of a regime knowingly poisons its children with a virus we KNOW causes autoimmune problems; death; Long Covid; memory problems in the youngest people in the society which it’s legally obliged to protect?
So while Jonathan Swift offered in his Modest Proposal the idea of solving poverty by using the children of the poor as food, the Brexit regime has been feeding its youngest generation, unarmed, to Covid:
It’s therefore difficult to underplay quite how ruthless this regime is in pursuit of its goal of withdrawing the international human rights architecture from beneath our feet.
The Brexit regime had a choice:
Continue to focus its electoral strategy on maintaining the votes of the 30% of the UK population which think, like “sir” Graham Brady quoted above, that in a pandemic caused by an airborne virus masks are a tool of social control.
Or, save its children from the ravages of a novel Coronavirus whose effects are scientifically established by ensuring all children im schools over the age of three-years-old wear FFP3/N95 masks.
The Brexit regime chose to sacrifice a generation of children to Long Covid and worse.
There are those in the EU who might argue we must leave it up to the English to overthrow this regime.
Even aside from the Czechia example above, it’s important to note the level of moral corruption and cowardice among those whom traditionally one could expect the defenestration of such a terrible regime.
In Autumn 2020 when the Brexit regime voted to breach international law, this was the extent of the whimpering protest of the UK’s former Attorney General (who incidentally spent the Covid Lockdown serving his English constituents from a villa in the Caribbean where he was representing clients attempting to deny the British State tax revenue – you see what I mean: those upon whom we might normally rely to save us from tyranny are not Thomas More?!)
The former Attorney General’s whimpering protest at the UK Parliament’s largest party (of which he is a member – he didn’t even resign in protest, unlike Scotland’s senior law officer) voting explicitly to breach a treaty it was elected to implement:
“…Cox’s choice of a clip from the film of A Man for All Seasons is highly pertinent but, to understand it fully, you need to know the context.
“Sir Thomas More has just been confronted by Richard Rich, who is part of the network of spies Thomas Cromwell is using to gather information about him.
“Once Rich has gone, More is urged to arrest him.
“As More says: “This country’s planted thick with laws from coast to coast and if you cut them down do you think you could really stand upright in the winds that would blow then? I give the devil benefit of the law for my own safety sake”…” (the Guardian).
But what of the current Attorney General, my old Cambridge classmate, S Braverman?
Surely she’d stand up for the Rule of Law?
Well, she has been quoted as saying explicitly that if a rule with legal status is neither enforced nor enforceable (in the Cabinet Manual) or such a rule can be changed at the whim of the PM (Cabinet Minister’s code of conduct) then it’s okay to breach that Rule of Law.
And lest it be thought that this weakness is an anomaly, please note here my letter to the Guardian calling the Attorney General out, in all her pro-Brexit fervour, for repeating an anti-semitic trope that I doubt she fully comprehends:
So, my friends, this is the nature of the regime the EU is negotiating with.
It’s quite prepared to cut down every law throughout its own land and other lands.
Now, is the moment for all of us to do what we can to stop it in its tracks.
Stephen Douglas studied English Constitutional, European Human Rights and International law at Trinity Hall, Cambridge.
Envoi:
Since writing the above, the well connected and well sourced Mujtaba Rahman, Senior Research Fellow at the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science tweeted thus:
“Understand that in non-Govt meetings in Paris last week, [UK Brexit negotiator Frost] said United Kingdom Government is:
“Waging a political & cultural war” and that if you want to know what he/key ppl think, ignore Whitehall – because it doesn’t know; same for UKG embassies – because they’re part of old regime.”
[https://twitter.com/mij_europe/status/1458513544106893321?s=21]
Frost has denied saying this.
He would though wouldn’t he – the War on Truth is part of the War on the Rule of Law.
Don’t forget that, as the photo at the very top of this piece memorialises, the Supreme Court found the United Kingdom Prime Minister Johnson lied to the Head of State when he advised them to suspend Parliament ahead of a crucial Brexit vote he knew he would lose.
What Rahman reports fits perfectly i to a pattern of a regime led by people who have been re-litigating the post-World War II settlement since at least Gove’s anti-Northern Ireland peace agreement tract posted above in 2000.
So Mr Frost, I’ll take Mr Rahman’s account over yours in this matter.
Do you?
