Boris Johnson to pass anti-BDS - [Boycott, Divest, Sanctions] -Law

By Lahav Harkov December 16, 2019

"Official says "Antisemitism is an attack on the British way of life and British identity," he said. "Without our Jewish citizens we would be a lesser nation."

The new Conservative government in the UK will pass a law making it illegal for public bodies to engage with BDS, UK Special Envoy for post-Holocaust issues Eric Pickles said at the International Institute for Strategic Dialogue’s conference in Jerusalem on Sunday night.

Queen Elizabeth will read the traditional "Queen's Speech" – prepared for her by the prime minister and his cabinet, which outlines the government's agenda for the next year – at the opening of the new parliament on Thursday. A UK news website called "i" reported that Johnson will write the anti-boycott law into the speech.

The Conservative Party’s platform in the UKs general election last week included a commitment to "ban public bodies from imposing their own direct or indirect boycotts, disinvestment or sanctions campaigns against foreign countries. These undermine community cohesion."

The move is meant to bloc local councils controlled by the Labour Party from using taxpayer funds to boycott foreign countries, including Israel.

Pickles, who is also the chairman of the Conservative Friends of Israel, said that Labour's historic defeat in last week's election showed that the British people reject antisemitism.

"Antisemitism is an attack on the British way of life and British identity," he said. "Without our Jewish citizens, we would be a lesser nation."

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Ed: At least it's clear who is running this government, and they still insist on calling 'anti-Zionism' anti 'Antisemitism'

Source: http://m.jpost.com/International/Boris-Johnson-to-pass-anti-BDS-law-official-says-611044

I fear that Labour's abortion law plans could lead us to a very dark place

26 November 2019

Amid all the eye-catching largesse of Labour’s manifesto — free broadband for all, the council house-building programme, and renationalisations — its radical proposals on abortion seem to have slipped through unnoticed.

However, it is vital we examine the party’s declaration that ‘we will uphold women’s reproductive rights and decriminalise abortions’. Decriminalising abortion would mean you could have one for any reason; you wouldn’t even be asked why you wanted it.

Right To Life campaigners say the plan has the potential to allow unlimited abortions right up to birth, well beyond the present 24-week limit, which is already around twice the average time limit on abortions in Europe.

Labour says there would be ‘wide public consultation on the detail of new laws and regulations’. Legislatively, it would mean scrapping the existing 1967 Abortion Act, which says you have to give a reason for an abortion and that two doctors have to sign it off.

It would involve repealing the relevant sections of the 1861 Offences Against The Person Act, which currently bans abortion. (The 1967 Abortion Act was brought in to allow wide-ranging exceptions, which is why it would become redundant.)

These are seismic changes concerning deeply important ethical issues — and they simply cannot go unremarked.

Moral

They could mean that abortion happens without constraints. If you don’t have to get the procedure signed off by two doctors independently, you could even choose to have one because you did not like the sex of the baby.

How deeply ironic that the party that makes a big deal about being pro-women would make it possible to abort girl foetuses on the basis of gender.

I do realise that, by comparison with Brexit, the economy, jobs and policing, decriminalising abortions may not be first among voters’ concerns. Fair enough.

But the character of a party can be determined by just these sorts of issues, which aren’t mainstream, but still matter.

Abortion is, whatever your view, a desperately serious moral question. It is, quite literally, a matter of life and death. And many people who, for pragmatic reasons, are pro-choice and think it best that abortion be legal in order to be safe will draw the line at what is tantamount to infanticide: late abortions up to birth.

Labour says there would be ‘wide public consultation on the detail of new laws and regulations’. Legislatively, it would mean scrapping the existing 1967 Abortion Act, which says you have to give a reason for an abortion and that two doctors have to sign it off, writes MELANIE MCDONAGH

I accept that the present abortion law doesn’t count for very much. That’s why there are more than 200,000 a year, most relatively early in pregnancy.

I can’t think of anyone who has ever been turned down for an abortion, even though they don’t come anywhere near qualifying for one under the existing legal criterion that continuing with the pregnancy would involve a serious risk to physical or mental health.

Two years ago, a Daily Mail investigation revealed that Marie Stopes, which has 60 clinics across England, signed off abortions for women they had never even met.

Undercover reporters were approved for abortions based on a brief phone conversation with a call centre worker and told there was no need to meet a doctor because they filled out the necessary forms ‘behind the scenes’, based on reasons given to staff over the phone. The discussions could be as short as 22 seconds.

At the time, Marie Stopes said: ‘We would like to reassure women our services comply fully with UK abortion law.’

If the proposal does mean doing away with the upper time limit, that would mean aborting foetuses at the same age as much-wanted premature babies, which we go out of our way, quite rightly, to keep alive. We can keep a baby alive at 23 weeks, which is already less than the existing limit. It is abhorrent to be countenancing increasing the limit — we should surely be thinking of decreasing it.

There is a real danger that Labour’s plans would make Britain’s abortion law one of the most radical in the world.

As I say, most EU countries have laws that restrict abortion to the first 12 weeks of life, the first trimester, which is when most British abortions happen. This isn’t to say that the foetus becomes human only then — ask any woman who’s been for her first pregnancy scan at 12 weeks — but it acknowledges that the foetus becomes more palpably human from that point.

More fundamentally, making abortion easier risks treating it as if it’s just another form of birth control — no more problematic than contraception — which means that we wouldn’t any longer acknowledge that it’s morally on a different level. To my mind, abortion means taking away a life.

And that’s where the British Medical Association seems morally astigmatic in backing the move. It has argued that ‘abortion law is out of step with the emphasis on patient autonomy found elsewhere in medicine’.

Likewise, Labour MP Stella Creasy, who has long campaigned for decriminalisation, remarks: ‘At the heart of this is: do we want women to have the same equal rights over their bodies that men have?’

Except that it’s not just about autonomy, and equal rights with men, is it? There are two lives here: abortion isn’t like having your tonsils out. It’s not just another medical procedure.

Dogmatic

It is this insistence on choice and equality that seems to override every other concern. Labour and the medical establishment may claim the procedures will be regulated and ethical, but the pressure from pro-choicers is to make them increasingly accessible to more and more women.

Abortion is a sensitive, highly charged issue, which divides people of all parties.

This move by Labour to decriminalise the procedure takes us into a very dark place where the humanity of the foetus isn’t acknowledged and prenatal human rights count for nothing. It’s also at odds with developments in neonatal care that make it possible to keep premature babies alive at younger ages.

And it is not supported by most women: a poll by Survation in 2017 suggested that 70 per cent of women favoured reducing the time limit on abortion; only 1 per cent were in favour of extending it.

That’s the rational approach, not this extremist, dogmatic policy. For me, it’s a reason not to vote Labour.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-7725445/MELANIE-MCDONAGH-fear-Labours-abortion-law-plans-lead-dark-place.html

The Great Hate Crime Hoax

By Douglas Murray For The Mail On Sunday
26 October 2019

Do you feel ten per cent more hateful than you did this time last year? Do you think the British public as a whole are ten per cent more unpleasant in 2019 as compared to 2018?

If you believe the latest ‘hate crimes’ stats, then you may come to such a ludicrous conclusion.

Figures compiled by the Home Office claim that there were 103,379 hate crimes committed last year. A record number, and up ten per cent on the year before. Various campaign groups disguised as charities insist that this is merely ‘the tip of the iceberg’.

To which one might say simply: ‘Of course they do.’ For if you are sane and reasonable you will realise that all of this is nonsense – nonsense, in fact, of the purest, most disgraceful kind: professional nonsense, cooked up to serve a political purpose.

It is time that purpose was identified and named.

The foundations of the hate crime hoax started 20 years ago with the Macpherson Report on the murder of the black teenager Stephen Lawrence. As well as its good effects, that inquiry had a number of negative consequences. Two stand out. The first was that an offence against a person of sexual or ethnic minority became a crime of greater seriousness than a crime against someone of no minority group.

So if an old woman was hit over the head for her purse, that was just a crime. But if someone who was gay or black was hit over the head then that was not just a crime but a hate crime. A two-tier system of offence was created in which some crimes (with an identical effect upon the victim) were deemed worse than others.

But the second development was more damaging, still: Macpherson stated that a crime was a hate crime if it was ‘perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by malice or ill-will towards a social group’.

So if I get hit over the head I might be the victim of a bog-standard crime. But if I am hit over the head and think, or pretend to think, that it is because of my homosexuality, then we are in the realm not just of crime but of hate crime. And that means the sirens of the modern police force can really go off.

In the years since the Macpherson Report, the British police have done everything they can to prove that they are on the beat with this new orthodoxy.

They don’t just want to find hate crimes. They need to find hate crimes. Some years ago a friend of mine was accosted on a train late at night by a couple of rowdy drunks. Reporting the matter to police at the next station, the officers positively begged him to report it (once they found out he was gay) as a ‘hate crime’. He insisted that there was no such element to their abuse. The police seemed desperate to persuade him otherwise.

That is just one of the reasons why the statistics on hate crimes keep going up and up. The police want them. They want to be able to report them. They positively advertise for them.

In case anyone thinks that is an exaggeration, consider the pathetic video released by DCC Julie Cooke of Cheshire Constabulary. It took the form of an online message for ‘pronoun day’, which she described as ‘a day which is particularly important to people who identify as transgender or gender non-conforming’. Cooke wittered on: ‘Being misgendered can have a huge impact on somebody and their personal well-being. It can also be used as a form of abuse.’

And here is one of the problems of this form of touting for business. The Home Office’s statistics claim that, in the past year, ‘transphobic hate crimes’ rose by 37 per cent. That is a pretty horrific number – like all the other rising hate crimes numbers. Until you dig one centimetre beneath the surface. What exactly constitutes a transphobic hate crime? Murder? Mugging? Burglary? Well, once again we have to remember that these crimes are in the eye of the beholder. And consider just one such beholder from only a few days ago.

Ria Cooper is a glamour model based in Hull, who ten years ago (at the age of 15) became Britain’s youngest transgender woman. Other than that, there is no reason why the nation at large should have heard of her. Except that earlier this month it emerged that Ms Cooper recently contacted Humberside Police to tell them of a set of WhatsApp messages she had received she was reporting as ‘transphobic’. What were these messages? Well, they were from a photographer whom Cooper accuses of trying to scupper her modelling career.

The photographer reportedly pointed out that Cooper has a penis, which was not the sort of lady he was after. Cooper calls this ‘f****** disgusting behaviour’ and deemed it ‘transphobic’. So there is another ‘hate crime’ just there.

Of course, campaigning groups long-ago cottoned on to the fact that all of this suits their interests. I suspect that sometimes that interest is commercial.

The remaining LGBT organisations in Britain have relatively little to do with their time. Their battles are largely won, and presumably their careers and pension plans are at risk from this success.

So ‘rising hate crimes’ must provide a massive business opportunity for these groups. Other groups also benefit from this marketplace of grievance.

Last month, when Parliament returned to spend a couple more days bickering about Brexit, Labour MPs used the opportunity to attack the Prime Minister. On what? Why hate crimes of course. The ridiculous, fulminating MPs kept pretending that Britain is in the midst of a hate crimewave and that the PM himself is responsible.

Labour MP Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi and others insisted that Boris’s column last year defending the right of Muslim women to wear the burka (a column his opponents deliberately misrepresented) in fact caused a ‘spike’ in anti-Muslim hate crimes. They claim that such hate crimes rose 375 per cent in the week after his column.

Which sounds impressive until you realise this is a rise from eight reported incidents in a week to 38 reported incidents. Scepticism has been poured on these figures.

Labour MPs who were attacking the Prime Minister with these bogus statistics were only using the favoured tactic of recent years.

For the fact is that since the Brexit vote there has been a huge number of ways in which people opposed to the result have assailed the British public.

We have been called stupid, ignorant, gullible and more. But perhaps the favourite claim of all has been the claim that the Brexit vote unleashed a tidal wave of hate in the British public. Anti-Brexit campaigners repeatedly pretended that the tragic murder of a Polish man called Arek Jozwik in Harlow in August 2016 was a result of the referendum. The resulting trial found that the murder was a squalid and mundane event with no link whatsoever to Brexit. But that is par for the course.

In the wake of the referendum there have been claims that British voters celebrated the result by a wave of hate crimes against ethnic and sexual minorities. Nothing could be further from the truth. There is no country in the world more tolerant than this one. Yet time and again in the past 20 years – and never more so than since the referendum – we have been slandered and smeared.

Political campaigners have used bogus statistics to push their own political and sectarian interests. It is time that people named and shamed the smear-merchants. There are bigots out there, as there are in every country. But this is not a bigoted country. And we have the right to vote how we want to vote without being defamed as such.

If there was one wave all sensible people should wish for in the near future it should be a wave of scepticism about the claims of campaigners whose only interest is in doing down this country.

A country which has justifiable pride in our tolerance and should exercise a healthy dose of scepticism towards our critics.

Source: The Great Hate Crime Hoax

Now trans and gay hate crime will mean SIX months in jail after judges are ordered to crack down with harsher sentences than those that are given for domestic burglaries

By Steve Doughty / Daily Mail

Transgender hate offences to get harsher sentences than domestic burglaries Judges ordered to hand out tough jail terms in a crackdown on hate crimes

Figures revealed that transgender hate crimes up 37 per cent on the year before Sentencing Council denies the guideline is 'politically influenced or motivated'

Judges have been ordered to hand out tough jail terms in a crackdown on transgender and homophobic hate crimes.

Offenders found guilty of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexuality should get at least six months in prison, new sentencing guidelines state.

And there should be a six-year jail sentence for those convicted of the worst cases of intolerance against gay or transgender people.

The instructions, released yesterday by the judge-led Sentencing Council – the statutory body that recommends punishment levels – mean transgender hate offences will receive harsher sentences than domestic burglaries.

It comes after police figures revealed reports of hate crimes soared last year, with transgender hate crimes up 37 per cent on the year before.

Mr Justice Julian Goose, of the Council, said the guidelines would help the courts take a ‘consistent approach’ to sentencing the offences, adding: ‘Public order is essential for the safe-functioning of society and the law seeks to protect the public from behaviour which undermines this.’

The instructions, which will come into effect on January 1, follow a series of cases in which police have been accused of launching heavy-handed investigations into transgender hate crime allegations.

This year Surrey Police quizzed a Catholic mother-of-five after she was accused of ‘misgendering’ the trans daughter of an activist on social media by using the pronoun ‘him’.

Last week Thames Valley Police launched an inquiry into possible public order hate crimes by demonstrators who put up stickers in Oxford with messages such as: ‘Woman: noun. Adult human female.’

The guidelines, which judges and magistrates must follow unless they can show doing so would run against justice, are the first to apply to public order offences – which include the offence of ‘stirring up hatred based on race, religion or sexual orientation’.

This is the only public order offence for which offenders can be convicted for what they say, write, broadcast or post on the internet or social media.

Most cases of hate crime sentenced in the courts are convictions for ordinary offences – considered aggravated – because the criminal targeted a victim from a minority group.

The Sentencing Council said the least serious offences of stirring up racial hatred, in which people spread hate ‘recklessly’ without intending to do so, should be handed community punishments rather than jail time.

But the same does not apply to spreading hatred on religious or sexual orientation grounds.

The number of hate crimes reported to police has reached 100,000 a year for the first time.

Home Office figures showed a 10 per cent increase this year, with a surge in allegations of homophobic and transphobic abuse.

Police must record an incident as a hate crime if a victim believes they were targeted over their race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or because they are transgender.

There were 103,379 such reports in England and Wales in 2018/19, up from just over 94,000 in the previous 12 months. Transgender hate crimes jumped 37 per cent, to 2,333, and there were 14,500 cases involving sexual orientation, an increase of 25 per cent.

The number of incidents has more than doubled since 2012/13 when just 42,255 hate crimes were logged.

The Home Office said the rise was partly down to improvements in recording methods, but admitted it could also reflect a ‘real rise’ in crime levels.

There were 79,000 reports of race hate crimes, up 11 per cent, and incidents involving religious hate rose 3 per cent to 8,500.

For these offences, the new rules say the least serious offences should attract a six-month jail sentence.

For those who commit the hate crime from a position of authority, or plan to incite serious violence or whose activity was persistent and widespread, the typical jail sentence should be three years and as much as six.

By contrast, the Council’s rules mean burglars can avoid jail with a community sentence.

The Council said it wanted to reassure ‘concerned respondents the guideline is not politically influenced or motivated’.

But prison charity The Howard League criticised judges for advocating short jail terms.

It told the Council’s consultation: ‘The guidelines should be encouraging the use of effective community programmes rather than expensive, ineffective short-term prison sentences.’

Offenders found guilty of stirring up hatred on the grounds of sexuality should get at least six months in prison, new sentencing guidelines state. And there should be a six-year jail sentence for those convicted of the worst cases of intolerance against gay or transgender people.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7577477/Now-trans-gay-hate-crime-mean-SIX-months-jail-judges-ordered-crack-down.html

Holocaust Denial Not Protected by Human-Rights Law, Court Says

By Hugo Miller October 3, 2019,

Photographs of [alleged] holocaust victims at the Auscwitz-Birkenau concentration camp museum in Poland.

Denying that the Holocaust ever happened isn’t a form of freedom of expression protected under the European Human Rights Convention, a top court has ruled in a case that stretches back nearly a decade.

Udo Pastoers, a German who suggested in a 2010 speech that the Holocaust never occurred, was fairly convicted under the country’s laws against the intentional defamation of Jewish people, the European Court of Human Rights ruled while rejecting his complaints.

Pastoers’ argument that his statements were protected by Article 10, which protects freedom of expression, was “manifestly ill-founded,” given that he “had intentionally stated untruths in order to defame the Jews and the persecution that they had suffered,” the Strasbourg, France-based court ruled on Thursday. His complaint that he was denied a fair trial in Germany was also rejected by the ECHR.

Pastoers had given a speech a day after Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2010, saying that the “the so-called Holocaust is being used for political and commercial purposes” and also referring to a “barrage of criticism and propagandistic lies” and “Auschwitz projections.” He was first convicted in 2012 by a German district court, and then a regional court rejected his appeal of the verdict less than a year later.

Anti-semitism has again been on the rise in Europe, statistics show, with France reporting a rise of 74% last year in acts motivated by such religious hatred. In Germany where some of the strongest rules against hate speech were designed to discourage such behavior, anti-semitic offenses climbed by 10% in 2018 with violent acts climbing by 60%.

The ECHR noted in its Thursday ruling that the German court had been thorough in its examination of Pastoer’s comments and hadn’t taken his remarks out of context. The tribunal said the German had deliberately obscured some of his remarks to try to get his message across more subtly.

“The impugned part had been inserted into the speech like ‘poison into a glass of water, hoping that it would not be detected immediately,’” the court said.

Source: www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-10-03/holocaust-denial-not-protected-by-human-rights-law-court-says

Police arrest Camborne man in connection with “Holocaust denial” broadcasts

Police have arrested a Holocaust denier from Camborne because of his anti-semitic broadcasts and social media posts.

Graham Hart, 67, was held for several hours before being released. To date, no charges have been brought. Earlier this year Cornwall Reports detailed how the Cornish Pirates rugby club had stopped playing Hart’s music after complaints about anti-semitism.

According to the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism: “A dossier provided by Campaign Against Anti-semitism has led to the arrest by Devon and Cornwall Police of a 67-year-old man from Camborne on Thursday as part of a pre-planned policing operation.

“The man was arrested on suspicion of producing a racist internet radio broadcast that could incite racial hatred under the Public Order Act 1986. He has since been released but remains under investigation pending further enquiries.

“Campaign Against Antisemitism’s Director of Investigations and Enforcement, Stephen Silverman, said: “The ease with which the internet has been harnessed in recent years by extremists as a vehicle for hate speech is a growing cause for alarm. Campaign Against Antisemitism commends Devon and Cornwall Police for its prompt response and diligent handling of this matter, and will be watching developments with interest.”

Hart is a Cornish nationalist whose anti-Jewish sentiments have brought run-ins with the police before. His latest arrest followed a campaign initiated by Penzance councillor Tim Dwelly, who runs a Facebook page called Cornwall Antisemitism Watch.

Hart has been a regular broadcaster on an internet radio station called “Revolution Radio.” A co-host, called Brizer, apparently based in Ireland, has now defended Hart and criticised Mr Dwelly.

Graham Hart's song "Hoax Train" is a clearly anti-semitic expression of Holocaust denial

In a torrid rant of anti-semitism, Brizer claims to know details of the arrest, alleging that eight police officers arrived at Hart’s house before taking him, and his computer and mobile phone, to the police station. Brizer has followed-up his initial claims with a further anti-semitic rant against Mr Dwelly today (Tuesday.)

Devon and Cornwall police have been asked to comment. The 1986 Public Order Act has for many years been the main law available to combat hate speech, but the 2006 Racial and Religious Hatred Act has brought new offences before the courts. It is not immediately clear if Brizer’s social media posts, which are clearly anti-semitic, might be grounds for further police action.

Holocaust denial is a specific crime in 16 European countries, and in Israel, but not in the UK, which relies on more general race and hate laws.

Source: Anne North - Cornwall Reports - 4th June 2019

https://cornwallreports.co.uk/police-arrest-camborne-man-in-connection-with-holocaust-denial-broadcasts/

[Ed.] This article is hysterical in tone, but it is true that that 1986 Public Order Act has been the main weapon to combat free speech in the UK on the spurious grounds of alleged race 'hate'. Conviction under this legislation is virtually inevitable, as someone somewhere is always going to be offended. The 'Campaign against Antisemitism are attempting to further bend the law following the conviction of Alison Chabloz, using the 'malicious communications act', which was modified in 2002 to cover electronic communications. This is with the aim at protecting the dead from defamation - only not the gentile dead.

The truth will out, however hard the apparatchiks of the Media and the State fight to prevent it, as happened after the Chernobyl disaster.

The May Withdrawal Treaty would be a Disaster and could not be Renogotiated

Rodney Atkinsonon: April 24, 2019

There are those who have immaculate credentials as Brexiteers but who have recently decided to support the disastrous May Withdrawal Agreement (W/A). They nearly all agree that the Agreement is totally unacceptable but say that it does “at least mean we leave” and we can re-negotiate the terms later. International Treaty Law and the Withdrawal Agreement’s horrendous weakening of our economic and negotiating position make such an idea dangerously naive.

As Martin Howe QC has rightly stated this is not like a game of football where we can with a new leader make a strong recovery “in the second half”. Howe rightly says it is like a game of chess where all the key pieces have been lost (in the Withdrawal Agreement) and even the best Brexiteer can no longer win (in the trade negotiations to come).

Equally disastrous is the incorporation of this “deal” into an International Treaty with the EU from which it is virtually impossible to escape. Those who think this view wrong – like Professor Patrick Minford – say that the “letter of the law” will not prevail because “states can always withdraw from treaties”.

But revoking a treaty is not at all easy since most of the grounds for revocation refer to the State in question being “misled” or “corrupted” in some way. We know of course that in this case it is the people of Britain who have been misled by their own State throughout these 46 years of EU treaties and are being misled now by May pretending that this Withdrawal Agreement gets us out of the EU when it does not. Indeed it binds us more strongly, with no votes or power and it does so potentially indefinitely.

The Vienna Convention on Treaties does not care at all whether people and voters of a State have been misled. These treaties are between States and we cannot say that our Government has been misled – they are themselves the misleaders!

Treaties are either signed after a war when one side has been subjugated (that is how Britain got Gibraltar at the Treaty of Utrecht) or when there is simply a mutual desire and respect between two States with no existing bonds or controls or power relationship which disadvantages one party before they even start negotiating a treaty.

This is not the case here. We are not negotiating a treaty as a sovereign power with another sovereign power but as a supplicant prisoner of an empire which has legislated for us, regulated us and taxed us for 46 years to their advantage and whose power the May W/A continues to enforce after we have “left”.

Professor Minford says of the Treaty with the EU which May would sign:

It is not sufficient to say that because it has been signed it is indefinitely binding; this would only be sufficient if there was a supranational power that could enforce this.

But the WA establishes the supranational power – the EU itself – and we are bound by it in so many ways that they could legally attack our interests as soon as we seek fair trade, no freedom of movement, fair mutual tariffs and mutual recognition of standards for instance. EU countries are already threatening we can’t trade with them if we re-claim our fishing grounds!

In other words it is precisely our lack of sovereignty at the start of negotiations which weakens us irredeemably. Only the No Deal WTO option gives us that sovereignty.

In such circumstances we cannot negotiate, as an equal, a totally different economic, legal and constitutional relationship after we have signed an international treaty implementing May’s deal. Professor Minford says the EU State can see its economic interest in renegotiating this deal after we have signed it! But this deal is a comprehensive prison for the UK in which we are prey to every possible blackmail and dirty economic deal or laws directed at our industries, agriculture, finance and fishing.

Indeed in the transition period (which could turn out to be indefinite) the EU can sign us up to trade deals with other countries with tariffs and market access which could disadvantage our industries – and we would have no say in those terms! At the same time they prevent us from concluding our own free trade deals with third countries!

The balance of advantage after 46 years of EU regulatory and legislative power is decisively against us before we even sign a new treaty and the WA binds us possibly indefinitely to it – even threatening to remove N Ireland from our territory. Imagine we agree to WA and seek to overturn its provisions by negotiating a trade agreement with the USA and the Commonwealth. Would those countries be happy to help us break treaty law?

WA also gives the EU at least 2 more years to export more EU citizens to the UK who 1. could become UK citizens and gradually outvote Leavers 2. Give (in the WA) the EU sovereign power by increasing EU case law over these “supercitizens” whose social privileges in the UK are protected whereas UK citizens’ rights will not be!

REVOKING A TREATY UNDER THE VIENNA CONVENTION

I quote here from the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties:

Article 45: Loss of a right to invoke a ground for invalidating, terminating, withdrawing from or suspending the operation of a treaty

A State may no longer invoke a ground for invalidating, terminating, withdrawing from or suspending the operation of a treaty under articles 46 to 50 or articles 60 and 62 if, after becoming aware of the facts:

it shall have expressly agreed that the treaty is valid or remains in force or continues in operation, as the case may be; or

(b)(it must by reason of its conduct be considered as having acquiesced in the validity of the treaty or in its maintenance in force or in operation, as the case may be.

(The UK could hardly negotiate over 3 years, pass domestic legislation and sign an International Treaty and claim it was “not aware of the facts”)

Article 50: Corruption of a representative of a State

If the expression of a State’s consent to be bound by a treaty has been procured through the corruption of its representative directly or indirectly by another negotiating State, the State may invoke such corruption as invalidating its consent to be bound by the treaty.

(But as we noted above it is the British people – not the British State which is the signatory – who have been misled and corrupted and there the Convention is silent)

Article 60 – ONLY a breach by the other party is a reason for termination..

(The EU, given such power over us, will certainly not break the terms of this unequal treaty)

Article 62: Fundamental change of circumstances

A fundamental change of circumstances which has occurred with regard to those existing at the time of the conclusion of a treaty, and which was not foreseen by the parties, may not be invoked as a ground for terminating or withdrawing from the treaty unless:

the existence of those circumstances constituted an essential basis of the consent of the parties to be bound by the treaty; and

(b) the effect of the change is radically to transform the extent of obligations still to be performed under the treaty.

(It is difficult to see any change of circumstances – apart from the break up of the EU itself – which would fit this description)

Finally of course this would be a Treaty which – unlike the Lisbon Treaty’s Article 50 permission to leave the EU – would contain no automatic power for the UK to leave. The EU would itself hold the key to the prison. And International Treaty Law would bind us to the terms we had signed.

In the Houses of Parliament we have Labour and Liberal Parties and Tory Remainers who think these disastrous terms do not bind us enough to the EU and scores of Tory Brexiteers who think they can sign a disastrous treaty and then get out of it!

Those whom the Gods would destroy they first make mad.

Source: - The May Withdrawal would be a Disaster and could not be Renogotiated