ninme

You know, when we whine and moan about the Constitution being trampled, for instance by the Patriot Act (something I’m passionately opposed to getting into), it’s all very offending and we all get very indignant, but when it’s the Magna Carta, it all just seems so much more insulting to history and tradition, or something. It’s gone from a legal document to a sacred one, through the sheer passage of time.

Anyway, I’m reading:

Times Online - It was you who wrote Magna Carta, my lords. And now you must defend it, by Simon Jenkins

And from this, I thought this needed emphasising:

On Monday Mr Hain added his pompous pennyworth. He declared that “the greatest attack on civil liberty in 300 years would be a suicide bomb attack”. Apart from grotesquely understating London’s ability to withstand a bomb, the remark is historically ignorant and an insult to those who faced the sustained threat of the Second World War. Mr Hain is clearly not a man who would risk his life to protect liberty, but would risk liberty to protect his life. He has already turned the House of Commons into an over-armed camp, leaving London’s public services to their own devices.

Ouch.

We don’t really have anything parallel. Not really. Michelle Malkin’s written In Defense of Internment, because the only threat we actually dealt with was spies, and the threat of spies, but our major cities weren’t bombed to ruins, were they.

The contrast with the executive oversight displayed in the past year by the American Congress remains humiliating to the reputation of Parliament. Labour backbenchers are like Herdwick sheep, who know only to graze in home pasture. The one time they rebelled in large numbers was when faced with paying higher university fees for their offspring. Any one of them who now defends civil liberty is dubbed a maverick (not least by the BBC).

Hee. Barbara Boxer must be so proud.

The only bulwark that remains is one we never thought to welcome, the ramshackle agglomeration of cronyism and heredity that is the House of Lords. No constitutional evolution has been more remarkable under Labour than the revival of this place, given a new lease of legitimacy by Mr Blair’s half-hearted reform. He may have appointed twice as many peers a year as any of his recent predecessors, but they have shown little gratitude. The Government is defeated in the Lords more often that at any time in the past quarter century.

It must be defeated again. Mr Clarke and Mr Hain want to railroad detention without trial through the Commons in six days. They will doubtless succeed. The Lords is made of stronger stuff. If it can vote against hunting it can surely vote against the control orders until the election. If the measure is reintroduced by a new government, the Lords should go on defeating it until the Parliament Act is invoked. If this is to be the last deed of old House of Lords, I cannot imagine a nobler baronial epitaph than to die fighting for the Great Charter against a dictatorial Crown.

Except it isn’t the Crown that’s behaving dictatorially, it’s the PM and his government.