The Prime Minister has, despite his previous clear manifesto commitment, decided for us that there should not be a referendum on our membership of the European Union. He further claims to "completely understand" those who want us to leave it.
He does not understand.
We are not in the EU now.
It is unfortunate, but as the Bible shows, hardly without precedent, that opposition to the current unlawful state of affairs should begin with voices crying out in the desert. One such voice is Albert Burgess, whose website "A Case For Treason" calls for the arraignment of those in our political class who have agreed to make us subject to European law, regulation and institutions. He is calling for citizens (British subjects) to make official complaints to the police, requiring them to bring charges of sedition, treason etc.
Doubtless this will not succeed in the near future and he will be written off as a crank; but his case is founded on fact and logic and as Thoreau reportedly said, "Any man more right than his neighbors constitutes a majority of one." But look how long it took William Wilberforce to carry the anti-slavery vote in Parliament, and hope.
At the core of Burgess' case is his reading of the British Constitution, which is that rule requires the consent not only of the monarch and political representatives but also of the people themselves using their own voices. Like the US Constitution, this is something that cannot be countermanded by any court or statute; it lies outside and above Parliamentary law.
Nor, I (and doubtless Burgess) would argue, can it be simply be buried in a political party's manifesto; an issue of such tremendous importance cannot validly be muddled up in pork-barrel politics. Voting for a political representative in Parliament is completely different from deciding the manner in which we are to be governed, and in any case our current electoral process effectively disenfranchises millions of us.
To join with other nations in a supranational political entity, in defiance of the settlement of 1688/9, would be a monumental constitutional change requiring the express consent of the people. This has never been given, nor, according to Burgess, can it be imposed except after the successful invasion of our land by a foreign power.
Since we have never had the EU membership question put to us, even the slightest transfer of sovereignty to that entity is ultra vires and has no force in law.
We are not now in the European Union, and I ask everyone who reads this, if they agree, to say so to others at every appropriate opportunity.
ADDENDUM
The Talking Clock blog urges us to support Mr Douglas Carswell's Bill to repeal the 1972 Act that claimed to makes us members of the European Union. I comment:
I plan to write to Mr Carswell to ask him to withdraw his proposed Bill, on two (related) grounds:
1. Parliament had no power to pass the 1972 Act. Without the express consent of the people, this constitutional change could not have taken place and therefore never did. The Act is ultra vires.
2. Therefore, there is no point in repealing an Act that has no force in law. There is no such Act. It falls, and so does everything (all subsequent Acts, regulations, directives etc) that depends on it or in any way arises from it.
Logically, Mr Carswell would do better to submit for consideration a Bill to arrange a referendum for the UK to JOIN the EU, since we are not now members. This would confirm to us all that he shares our view that we are not now in the EU, and also that to join would require the consent of the people in propria persona.
Saturday, June 30, 2012
Friday, June 29, 2012
Problem-Solving
The President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology has recently released a report on the impending shortage of people trained in the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) disciplines.
They note that mathematics courses are a bottleneck in this process.
In a brilliant example of problem-solving, they have squarely fixed the blame on mathematics teachers, and decided that the cure is to have mathematics courses developed and taught by faculty in ‘mathematics-intensive’ disciplines instead.
As I have said on numerous forums, the study of mathematics has been honed, pruned and refined for 2,500 years. I would suggest that we might be doing something right. Perhaps, as some good educational and cognitive psychology studies suggest, ability in mathematics is a fairly rare talent, but nonetheless essential for the training of good scientists?
Wednesday, June 27, 2012
Speculators will starve the poor
Agricultural funds are, I think, a step too far, though the returns will of course attract other investors.
INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: Mostly in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), but now planning to build up some reserves of physical gold via regular saving.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.
Tuesday, June 26, 2012
Speculators will starve the poor
Agricultural funds are, I think, a step too far, though the returns will of course attract other investors.
UK credit card lending down 28% in last 12 months
INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.
UK credit card lending down 28% in last 12 months
INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.
DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.
Sunday, June 24, 2012
Much ado about nothing: Hayward Gallery's "Invisible" exhibition
And so yesterday we walked through a warm and busy London to the South Bank, where, after sharing a doughy cheese pierogi off the real food street market, we ascended bloodstained concrete stairs to the Hayward Gallery.
In we went, noting an avertissement that warned visitors that some might have difficulty reading the labels. Which were printed in white, on transparent plastic sheets, against white walls. Not that there were that many exhibits; now call me middle-browed, but if I'm offered nothing I want a lot of it for my money. In keeping, the gallery was sparsely attended, though one woman was making up for it by gazing very intensely at an empty section of wall. My wife speculates that she might have lost her glasses and thought she was looking at something. Or perhaps she was merely entering into the spirit of the thing (or the nothing).
The first item I inspected with any care was a press cutting from 1959, about Yves Klein's stunt "Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle." Klein sold tickets in exchange for shreds of gold leaf (20 grams for the first exhibition - rising later to 80 grams, such are the effects of inflation). If the buyer opted to convert these into an immaterial experience, he burned his ticket (at least he got one first time of asking, I assume) and the artist threw half the gold into the river Seine; otherwise Klein kept the lot. So the artist got something tangible and conventionally valuable, whatever happened. Gallic cunning? But it's possible, of course, that I may be doing Klein an injustice, for in 1980 one of his pieces was discovered quite by accident in an Italian convent, having been anonymously deposited there in 1961 as a votive offering by the artist, who prayed for success and the increasing beauty of his works.
I do suspect that French philosophy is basically for impressing French chicks. It worked with Simone de Beauvoir, for one; and years ago in Paris, my beloved and I were watching TV and caught an interview with Serge Gainsbourg (conducted by Jane Birkin, as I recall) where he was acting the literary lion à la française - unshaven, Gauloised, possibly well-oiled as we used to say, and spouting un grand tas de testicules about la vie, l'amour etc. Fortunately we were well-oiled too, and understood him as drunks do each other. French women know that their role is to serve the gorgeous peacock; one remembers H E Bates' "A Breath of French Air", where muscular Adonises play ball on the beach, admired by mousy-looking girls with what the Irish call streely hair.
Good art (like radio plays) makes you do some of the work, and there's no shortage of clever people stropping their intellects on this one:
The exhibition is entitled "Invisible: Art about the Unseen, 1957 -2012". We paid, were given tickets after reminding the counter clerk (was this a foretaste of the installation?) and gave them to the attendant at the door, who said something we didn't catch, so we asked him to repeat it. It was "Can you see me?" with what I suppose he hoped was an appropriately ironic smirk; I guess we should have replied, "Yes, but we can't hear you."
In we went, noting an avertissement that warned visitors that some might have difficulty reading the labels. Which were printed in white, on transparent plastic sheets, against white walls. Not that there were that many exhibits; now call me middle-browed, but if I'm offered nothing I want a lot of it for my money. In keeping, the gallery was sparsely attended, though one woman was making up for it by gazing very intensely at an empty section of wall. My wife speculates that she might have lost her glasses and thought she was looking at something. Or perhaps she was merely entering into the spirit of the thing (or the nothing).
I do suspect that French philosophy is basically for impressing French chicks. It worked with Simone de Beauvoir, for one; and years ago in Paris, my beloved and I were watching TV and caught an interview with Serge Gainsbourg (conducted by Jane Birkin, as I recall) where he was acting the literary lion à la française - unshaven, Gauloised, possibly well-oiled as we used to say, and spouting un grand tas de testicules about la vie, l'amour etc. Fortunately we were well-oiled too, and understood him as drunks do each other. French women know that their role is to serve the gorgeous peacock; one remembers H E Bates' "A Breath of French Air", where muscular Adonises play ball on the beach, admired by mousy-looking girls with what the Irish call streely hair.
Maybe, as with Sartre in 1943, the concept of nothingness (or for others, the numinous) is a reaction to a time when you were supposed to join one team or the other, with no standing on the sidelines (it's getting like that again now, I sense). À bas les salauds, and all that; spit in the eye of those "assured of certain certainties"; let the spirit off the leash of Reason.
Having said that, Sartre seems to have been able to redirect his gaze to concrete matters when it suited him, as witness the controversy over his stepping into a Jewish professor's job when it became forcibly vacant under the Nazis; and in the 1968 Paris student riots, he suddenly abandoned his fundamental stance on existentialism and became able to believe in collective freedom, at least for a while. Perhaps his volte-face and surrender to the authority of Marxism is the core of surreal rebellion. As a paper already cited says, "Hysterical questioning is critical of power (“Why have you done this? This is not just!”), but beneath it all is a provocation to the father figure to appear and to interpellate more successfully."
Back to the matter in hand. There was other stuff here, including Robert Barry's Energy Field (AM 130 KHz) from 1968 (a wooden box with a battery and coil), and a room with a couple of air coolers (my wife said she found these things very welcome after a sauna). One room was a blackout (pictured below; fortunately I captured another visitor, so I got both ground and figure, the essentials of all Western art).
Then there was a wide upper gallery. This space spoke to me: it said, 'You paid fourteen quid for this." And finally, something for the kids: Jeppe Hein's Invisible Labyrinth. You know, like those inlaid floor mazes found in some theme parks and gardens, only here you had to memorise the routes.
Of course, reviewers don't pay to get in, and on the whole, nor would we have, if we'd known what was in store. But surely every show must have a closing number, and to play you out here's the orchestral version of John Cage's 4' 33'' so you can have something to hum as you leave:
Coincidentally, the show we saw after, "Yes, Prime Minister" at the Trafalgar Studios (Whitehall Theatre as was), also featured a nothing, this time the Prime Minister, described in the play as "a vacuum". It was funny and beautifully acted, but edgier and darker than the old TV programmes - as with Stravinsky's The Rite Of Spring, we scent
in the artist's work
a storm coming to us in real life.
A shame then that five minutes down the road from there we have a PM who is the human equivalent of a German beach towel, merely keeping the place for a real person to come later. Like Jim Hacker, we now see Cam thrashing about with a handful of Blairite eye-catching initiatives to divert attention from his failure to achieve anything*. As we passed the now-gated entrance to Downing Street I said, make the most of it, you've got twelve months.
*... and, sadly for him, draw attention to his own "housing benefit".
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