Lord Monckton has responded more directly to charges that he has falsely claimed to be a member of the House of Lords than he has in the past. Here’s what he said.
I am charmed that so many of you are fascinated by the question whether I am a member of the House of Lords. Perhaps this is because your own Constitution denies you any orders or titles of nobility. Here is the answer I recently gave to the US House of Representatives’ Global Warming Committee on that subject:
“The House of Lords Act 1999 debarred all but 92 of the 650 Hereditary Peers, including my father, from sitting or voting, and purported to – but did not – remove membership of the Upper House. Letters Patent granting peerages, and consequently membership, are the personal gift of the Monarch. Only a specific law can annul a grant. The 1999 Act was a general law. The then Government, realizing this defect, took three maladroit steps: it wrote asking expelled Peers to return their Letters Patent (though that does not annul them); in 2009 it withdrew the passes admitting expelled Peers to the House (and implying they were members); and it told the enquiry clerks to deny they were members: but a written Parliamentary Answer by the Lord President of the Council admits that general legislation cannot annul Letters Patent, so I am The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley (as my passport shows), a member of the Upper House but without the right to sit or vote, and I have never pretended otherwise.”
Let’s break this down.
1) He acknowledges that the House of Lords Act bars him from sitting and voting in the House of Lords.
2) Some beaurocrats, at some point, construed that to mean that hereditary peers excluded by the Act should give up their “Letters Patent” that grant them their titles. But the effort to get the excluded peers to give up their letters was squelched.
3) Therefore, since he still has his “Letters Patent,” and hence his title, he is still entitled to call himself a member of the House of Lords, even though he can’t actually DO anything in the House of Lords.
4) However, the House of Lords Information Office has been instructed to deny that the excluded peers are members.
This seems to me to be conflating two separate issues, because the House of Lords Act 1999 specifically DID NOT annul the titles of excluded peers. The official British Government explanatory notes on the House of Lords Act says,
The Act does not affect the rights of holders of a hereditary peerage excluded from the House of Lords to keep all the other titles, rights, offices, privileges and precedents attaching to the peerage which are unconnected with membership of the House of Lords.
On the other hand, it specifically DID exclude most hereditary peers from MEMBERSHIP in the House of Lords–not just the right to sit and vote. Paragraph 7 of explanatory notes says:
The main provision of the Act restricts membership of the House of Lords by virtue of a hereditary peerage. No present or future holders of a hereditary peerage in the peerage of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain or the United Kingdom, or their heirs, have the right to sit and vote in the House of Lords by virtue of that peerage, or to sit and vote in committees of the House, or to speak in the House, or to receive a writ of summons, unless they are excepted from this general exclusion by section 2 of the Act.
Did you get that? The main point of the Act was to “restrict the membership” of the House of Lords. That means that some people (like Monckton’s father) were kicked out of the House of Lords. Yes, they lost their seats and votes. Why? Because they weren’t members anymore. In fact, the document I linked also says:
Holders of a hereditary peerage whose membership is ended by the Act cease to be excusable as of right from jury service.
If you didn’t get the idea that “restricting” the membership means kicking some people out, did you get that the excluded peers’ membership was “ended” by the Act?
Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there are legitimate legal grounds for Monckton to claim he is still a member of the House of Lords, even though he acknowledges that he does not have the right to sit and vote in the House since the House of Lords Act 1999. If so, then how are all these excluded Lords letting the House of Lords get away with saying there is no such thing as a member who has no seat or vote? Monckton seems to like to file lawsuits–where is it? Where are all the lawsuits by the hundreds of other excluded hereditary peers?
I suspect the answer is that Monckton is about the only one who still thinks that he can find some loophole to wiggle his way to somewhere closer than the spectators gallery of the House of Lords, and no sane lawyer will take his case.
[UPDATE: Tim Lambert has provided even more evidence that Monckton’s legal argument is… on the fringes.]
Climate Asylum 
For your further information two points:-
1.There has, since 1800 been a category of Hereditary Peers, with no seats in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom. These are members of the peerage of Ireland. They sat, as of right, in the Irish House of Lords in Dublin. When the Anglo Irish Act of Union was passed in 1800 they lost their seats in the Irish House of Lords. They acquired instead the right to elect a small number of “representative’ peers. Moreover an Irish peer who was not elected a representative peer could sit in the House of Commons, as they were not members of the House of Lords. (In 1922 the election of representative peers stopped due to Irish independence, but of course Irish peers still exist.) So being a Peer but NOT a member of a particular House of Lords not a new thing.
2. Clerks of the House of Lords are servants of that House and NOT of the Government; the Government cannot give them instructions. In exactly the same sense that employees of the American Senate are not employees of the American Government. The independence of Parliamentary Clerks in both houses is jealously guarded, for broadly the same reasons that the independence of the Judiciary is taken seriously.
By: David Barry on July 16, 2010
at 3:25 am
“1.There has, since 1800 been a category of Hereditary Peers, with no seats in the House of Lords of the United Kingdom. These are members of the peerage of Ireland.”
The Potty Peer is not an Irish peer.
“2. Clerks of the House of Lords are servants of that House and NOT of the Government; the Government cannot give them instructions.”
The Queen can and has, through the instrument of her government given the Potty Peer his marching orders.
Your post is a “Gosh! Look at those flying monkies!” sort.
By: Mark on July 18, 2010
at 4:25 am
I dont get the reference to “Gosh! Look at these flying monkeys” could you explain?
For my part I could have been clearer. I was aiming to point out that while Monckton seems to assert that as he is still a peer he is still a member, in some sense, of the House of Lords, that in fact there are LOTS of peers who are not members of the House of Lords, and that such peers have been around for centuries, so nothing unprecedented about Monkton’s actual status as opposed to the one he claims. (His actual status is that he is an hereditary peer of the United Kingdom who is not, by virtue of an Act of Parliament excluding him, a member of the House of Lords.)
My point about the clerks is that Monkton claims they are following Government instructions in denying him access to the chamber. Lords’ clerks do not take instructions from the Government, they simply obey the Law. (Its to do with seperation of powers between the legislature and the executive. Lawas are made by parliament and not by the government.
By: David Barry on July 18, 2010
at 10:21 am
[…] Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah A Local Front in a Global Battle « The Monckton Files: Still in Denial About the House of Lords […]
By: The Monckton Files: WUWT Can’t Stand to Have Monckton’s Claims Questioned « Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah on July 18, 2010
at 5:20 pm
@David Barry
In support of David’s statement I would like to recommend a look at the real facts at the homepage
of the House of Lords at
http://www.parliament.uk/about/mps-and-lords/about-lords/history/.
Also I would recommend intensivley to put Monckton
into the search engine of the homepage mentioned above. It’s absolutely clear that Monckton is a Lord and also was involved in By-elections of deceased members of the House of Lords and he also is listed as a candidate of the House from time to time.
The history of the developments after 1999 can easily be veryfied at
http://www.parliament.uk/documents/lords-information-office/House%20of%20Lords%20Reform%201997-2010%20-%2028%20%20June%202010.pdf.
As fas as I can see, the political situation since 1999 is, that the House of Commons/HoC (mainly the socialists under Blair and later on under Brown) tried to get the House of Lords/HoL under their control and the House of Lords refused to that massively. The dissolution of the HoL by the HoC stopped in 2004, but HoC tried to put own life peers into HoL (obviously with the agenda to change the political majorities in the HoL in it’s favor) and after that, the political power of HoL was trunked stepwise by HoC since 2004. The main reform was done in HoC in 2007 concluding that a bicameral system should be continued with 80% (or 100%) elected Lords and all hereditary Lords removed from the chamber (such as Monckton). But this was not law but opinion making of HoC. HoL voted against that issue even one day later and if someone would have read the numbers, he/she would have recognised, that this election was made by 482 Lords (sic!). This points out, that the older 92-lords-figure from the House of Lords Act in 1999 is plain nonsense. By the way, one may recognize, that between 1999 and 2007 a system was established to replace deceased hereditary Lords in By-elections (where Monckton was as well candidate as elective Lord … but he wasn’t elected until now!). The fight of existence between HoC and HoL is still in full manner at the moment despite the fact that conservatives have the majority in the HoC.
To make it absolutely clear: nobody should be using the 92 Lords-number as a real basis because lot’s of things changed after 1999, that are not on the radar of either Monckton-Fans or Monckton-Critiques, despite the fact, that those developments are public and can be found within seconds. As far as I can see, in hundreds of blogs around the world thousands of commentators attacking Monckton’s status as a Lord have simply no idea about the real issue … but they have a clear opinion, of course! Everybody sits in front of a PC doing Blog-Flame-Wars but obviously nobody uses the real facts. That’s a shame
and shows “virtual WWW-analphabetism or WWW-barbarism” at it’s best.
Conclusion: Monckton is a hereditary Lord. Not every Lord, who has a Letters Patent is automatically a member of the House of Lords (although this issue is highly controversial because of constitutional issues). But a Lord is still a Lord and for this reason every Lord (even when he was so naive to send in his Letter Patent to the HoL staff in the past!) has the right to vote for a seat in the HoL or may be elected by other Lords in By-elections. So Monckton is an elective Lord, but (at the moment) not a voting member of the House of Lords.
Google helps everybody….. but one should use it.
Greetings, Upjohn
By: Upjohn on July 22, 2010
at 11:28 pm
Upjohn, after reading your post, I get the impression that you are saying 1) Monckton is a real Lord, and 2) the fact that he can possibly be elected to the House of Lords (if he ever got any votes) makes him a member.
I certainly never denied #1, and the House of Lords Information Office specifically denies #2. In fact, the House of Lords Act specifically refutes #2. If this is such a “controversial…constitutional issue” can you point to the pending lawsuits? Where are all the ousted Lords fighting to retain their membership?
I suspect that there are no pending lawsuits, if there ever were any. I also suspect that you mean the House of Lords Act is “controversial” because a few people still gripe about it–not because it has any chance of being struck down on constitutional grounds.
By: Barry Bickmore on July 23, 2010
at 7:39 am
@barry bickmore
>I certainly never denied #1, and the House of Lords Information Office >specifically denies #2.
Could you show me up, were I wrote, that you denied #1, please?
If the 2nd part of the sentence would be true, how do you explain Moncktons participation in some peers by-peers elections? Just throw his name in the search engine of HoL. He was sometimes candidate but was not elected obviously. So both things are correct: he is a Lord (or he would never be a candidate) and he was voting also in such by-elections.
>I suspect that there are no pending lawsuits, if there ever were any.
Could you show me up, were I wrote about pending lawsuits, please?
You might start Google with “Lord Mereworth House of Lords” to get a glance of the constitutional problems with the HoL Act 1999.
>And another thing, Upjohn. You say that the “92 Lords” number is nonsense >because in 2007 482 Lords voted on a certain issue. What you seem to have >failed to grasp is that since 1999 there have been only 92 HEREDITARY >peers who are still members of the House of Lords.
that’s the only point you got right.
http://www.parliament.uk/mps-lords-and-offices/lords/lords-by-type-and-party/
But … panic-panic …. the actual number is 91 and not 92.
By, Upjohn
By: Upjohn on August 6, 2010
at 9:50 am
And another thing, Upjohn. You say that the “92 Lords” number is nonsense because in 2007 482 Lords voted on a certain issue. What you seem to have failed to grasp is that since 1999 there have been only 92 HEREDITARY peers who are still members of the House of Lords. There are several hundred “Life Peers” (i.e., people with titles that don’t get passed on to their children) that are still members.
In fact, in the HoL historical document you linked, it says,
“The Government published its White Paper, The House of Lords: Completing the Reform (Cm 5291), seeking responses by 31st January 2002, with a view to introducing legislation thereafter. Statements were made in both Houses (HC Hansard, cols 239–55; HL Hansard, cols 205–24).
“The White Paper’s proposals included: the removal of the remaining 92 hereditary Peers left in the House after the first phase of reform; the creation of a statutory Appointments Commission to nominate independent members; the size of the House to be capped, after 10 years, at 600; 120 members to be elected to represent the nations and the regions.”
So in 2001, there certainly still was a debate going on, but it was about whether they should kick out the remaining 92 hereditary peers, not whether there really were more hereditary peers that were still members.
By: Barry Bickmore on July 23, 2010
at 7:53 am
umm Can I just point out that the logic of Monckton’s claim that:-
1. As he is a Lord. (and he is)
2. As he has a right to stand in elections to choose replacement hereditary peers (which he has)
He is therefore a member of the house of lords, albeit with no vote.
On the same basis I could claim, that as I have the right to stand in elections to the British House of Commons (which I do) I am a member of the House of Commons..
In short , the claim absurd.
He is not a member of the House of Lords.
By: David Barry on July 23, 2010
at 8:04 am
@David Barry
Sorry, I have to put a little bit water into your wine.
I agree, Monckton (being a hereditary peer) automatically became a Lord, when his father died. And I also agree, that he has the right to vote in by-peer elections and could also be elected if he runs as a candidate. He is obviously not a present member of HoL in the way, that he sits in the House of Lords being able to vote about something.
Monckton argued, that he is a member of the HoL, but HoL Act 1999 (only being a general law) barred him out. Some critics (example: Lord Merewoth) say, that because HoL Act 1999 is really such a general law and not even one Lord was put away his membership in a specified law act, every Lord being barred out should be recognized as full members of HoL, although he/she is refused to sit and vote there at the moment. The problem is, that indeed that special issue seems not to be solved until now. House of Commens had no correct constitutional basis to abolish HoL in that way, although the political power of HoL was weakened by the House of Lords Act in 2005.
Some critics are of the opinion, that the HoL Act 1999 is unconstitutional, for that the number of 92 Lords is to small to vote about anything in a law binding way and for that every law being passed after 1999 by HoL is not passed correctly and still invalid. See for eyample http://www.foiacentre.com/news-lords-091115.html or http://www.ashleymote.co.uk/?p=3036.
I’m not a british lawyer so I don’t know if this is correct or not. But if this would be true, than Monckton (and other Lords) are barred out illegally. And if this would be correct, the unconstitutional behaviour of the actual House of Lords has immense impacts. For example, the HoL passed the European treaty some years ago and if the HoL had not the correct quorum at that time, the british approval of the EU treaty is invalid. If so, than the complete EU treaty itself was not passed correctly, because it is only valid, when all EU member states had a correct way of parlamentarial affirmation. So this small little HoL Act 1999 is really a big thing.
Why? Well, Monckton is member of the UKIP party in Britain and UKIP is an anti-EU-party having some seats in the EU parliament. It’s really ironic…
The central point of all that trouble seem to be the historical differences of the british constitutional system, that is so different from that of the US or Germany for example.
It seems obvious to me that House of Commons tried to eliminate HoL several times without being completely successful. Although as a liberal democrat I dislike Institutions like HoL, because their way of being constructed are based on non-democratic developments in ancient times. On the other hand – it is never really good, if a country only has one single parliament without a balance of power. And it is obvious, that under Labour government, House of Commens reached out for complete political power in the whole system. That imbalanced power (even recognizing the problems of representation of political parties in a first-past-the-post voting system like that of Great Britain) is not a good thing for a democracy. The voting system in Britain tends to help parties into power although the do not have the majority of votes in the whole country. Under Labour, they also did not have the majority of voters but the majority of constituencies. And no party that does not represent the majority of voters should get too much political power in a democratic system. Or that power gets out of the hand of the people itself and that happend during the fight between HoC and HoL during the last decade or so.
Greetings, Upjohn
By: Upjohn on August 6, 2010
at 10:28 am
Upjohn,
1. I don’t think Monckton is able to vote in elections for open seats in the House of Lords. If he could, I doubt he would have gotten ZERO votes all the times he ran.
2. As I mentioned above, all you are saying is that some people have griped about the House of Lords Act 1999, and claimed it was “unconstitutional.” So what? People say that about all kinds of things in the U.S., but the fact is that the final arbiter of such things is the Supreme Court. If the HoL Act was really unconstitutional, when did any British court make such a ruling? Have the people who are griping about it ever filed a lawsuit to get it struck down? If none of this has ever happened, what we have is a few crackpots living in fantasyland.
By: Barry Bickmore on August 6, 2010
at 11:21 am
It is to be hoped that he would be excused from jury duty as well.
By: Tenney Naumer on July 26, 2010
at 6:57 am
He is not, as a Lord, excluded from Jury duty anymore. That exclusion ended when the membership of the House of Lords ended
Lunatics however are still excluded.
By: David Barry on August 6, 2010
at 10:45 am
@barry
“I don’t think Monckton is able to vote (….) ZERO votes all the times he ran.”
Well, this would be Monckton’s problem, wouldn’t it?
“2. As I mentioned above, all you are saying is that some people have griped about the House of Lords Act 1999, and claimed it was “unconstitutional.” So what?”
well, this “so what” might be a hidden political issue at the moment. Just google about it, it becomes an issue even in the british press. If I’d be a UKIP member, I’d fight a lawsuit against the HoL Act 1999 in order to shut it down. Just for fun >;-).
Greetings, Upjohn
By: Upjohn on August 7, 2010
at 1:26 am
@barry
it might be off-topic in here (so, Blogmaster, feel free to delete that here), but I’m bored about childish anti-Monckton-propaganda. Why? It is obviously propaganda without an aim because real climate issues are not discussed here in full.
Most people discussing climate issues do not look at the financial costs of subsidising alternative energy systems. In Germany we subsidise each Euro, that is made with photovoltaic system/PV, with 5-8 Euros on top. Even 1 Euro turnover produced with wind mills/WM power is subsidised with 2 Euros again. PV’s produce at the moment only 1% of the german electric power (WM’s: about 8-9%). We threw out 60.8 billion Euros from 1950-2008 for atomic power research, but we threw out 30.5 billion Euros for PV’s and additionally 19.8 Billion for WM’s only during 2000-2008 in Germany! Atomic power plants produce 22% of our electrical power by the way. So we threw out nearly as much for alternative as for atomic energy power but less than 50% of the atomic power energy at the end. I would like to see that amount of money put into atomic fusion technologies researched in southern France instead of investing it into PV’s or WM’s. That would be much clever, because the state should only subsidise basic scientific research.
Just compare the numbers and you see, what “green thinking” really does to the whole economic system. PV’s and WM’s are very ineffective alternatives. They only can be implemented on the basis of massive subsidies. Compared with biogas produced electrical power (9,8% of german electrical power is produced by that) PV is absolutely ineffective. But we created some hundred thousand jobs in that field – but only on subsidising them by the tax payer and the private electric power consumer. That’s the money, greenies like to have on tax payers expense, because we have massive financial links between green lobbing organisations and the world of green business.
If greenies would really care about the environment, they would not try to stop cole fired plants, but simply would buy woods in order to harvest the trees. This wood could be stored in old and deactivated cole mines nearly for free. That would bind CO2 very cost effective. But no greenie would really have financial benefit from that. I’ve never heard Greenpeace or WWF talking about simple CO2-solving strategies. Well, just follow the money and you can see, that for example “Greenpeace Germany” is a seller of “green electrical power” on the market. So we have a direct link between green politics and green marketing, based on political lobby groups. And there are tons of other links, one can easily check out be doing Google Search.
I would propose to every global CO2 alarmist not to talk about Monckton too long, but invest his personal eneergy in cutting some trees in order to put them under the earth as quick as possible. And after that plant new trees again in order to bind CO2 in an easy way again. I think, we have many non-working cole or steal mines all over each country of that world, don’t we?
By the way: I’m convinced that man-made CO2-driven global warming (most often falsy naimed “Climate change”) is mainly a myth. If you compare real temp stations data with GISS-NOAA-data you often see manipulations of datasets. Everyone who has an Excel can check that out himself. It’s really not very complicated.
For example: at present, my whole country of 83 Mio.
inhabitants is only represented with 9 (!) thermo-meters in Hanson’s dataset, although Germany runs about 1500 thermometer stations and about 50 of them have long records of more than 80-100 years. All but one of Hansons nine thermometers are situated in cities. The last one is in Emden harbour near the Northern Sea. This kind of computer modelling, that claims that for example 2010 is the hottest year on record globaly is simple cherry picking nonsense. And it’s a shame to claim that we have massive increased global warming (that we obviously do not have).
On the other hand, nobody uses Google Scholar for ancient atmospheric CO2-data sets of the 19th century. If you watch http://www.realco2.de and if you would like to check the original papers (most of them are published in Google Scholar because they were published long before the implementation of copyrights), you would see that CO2 content of the atmosphere in many locations was often nearly as high as today. Those sources have not been checked out by IPCC and that’s a shame. Lindzen and Choi (2009/2010) proved that the CO2-driven heating of the atmosphere is only 1/6th of the factors used in climate computer modells. Those issues simply kill most of the myth of man-made CO2-driven global warming in my eyes. For me, it was typical, that Abraham said nothing about those issues in his presentation.
At last: I would use Moncktons youtube-presentations usually as something to have fun. If I would like to have scientifically serious climate issues for non-climate scientists, I would start with friendsofscience.org and after that I’d google directly for Bob Carter and Richard Lindzen and others. There are tons of scientific videos all over the internet presented by scientists of both sides and if one would beginn to recheck their claims then one would usually fall for the sceptic side as I did after the CRU eMail scandal last year.
The whole issue is not something about a Church of Global Warming but simply all about calculating data. But in reality Greenies and politicians and business-based propagandists have transformed the whole climate system debate into some kind of uggly flame war on the expense of science itself. That’s neither a way to solve future energy problems (and THAT is a real problem, not CO2!) nor is it helpful for our democracies we want to have our children to live in for the foreseeable future.
By, Upjohn
By: Upjohn on August 7, 2010
at 2:26 am
As I appearedto be addressed and accused of “childish anti monckton propaganda”
Do I take it that upjohn now tacitly accepts that Monckton’s claim which he supported that Monckton is a member of the British House of Lords, is false?
The relevance to Monckton’s views on Climate change, and so to the climate change discussion he is part of arises from two points:-
1. He has used the claim and uses it to give weight to his arguments, as when he appeared before the congressional committee.So it matters if it is false.
2.It is a false claim, and indicates that in at least one case Monckton makes a false statement in support of his argument.
By: David Barry on August 7, 2010
at 6:11 am
@barry
sorry for adding a new posting about the political developments in Great Britain. Moderator, feel free to kick that posting out because of being off-topic.
As far as one can see searching the political comments on the web, we had a hard struggle between the labour party (under Gordon Brown and before under Tony Blair) in HoC and the HoL. HoC reached out to eliminate the powers of HoL stepwise and on the other hand increasing its own political power. You might google for the corruption scandals in HoC some months ago and also about the present developments of the conservative government of the hung parliament at the moment. It’s quite clear that the liberals as the conservatives try to implement a voting system that fits their own needs (encouraging the chances of a majority in the parliament not with a one-party but with a political coalition system in Britain). In contrast, the actual voting system favours the likelihood of a one-party-government despite the fact, that their parlament representatives do not represent the majority of voters.
I think, the real political background of the discussion about the whole Monckton-HoL-thing should force the political interested EU-citizen to look for the backgrounds of political reforms within his own governmental system. As every one can see (who looks around a little bit), the Labor Government under Blair/Brown tried to impose a 1-chamber-parliament on the long run, that does not have a check-and-balance-system like most other EU- and non-EU-democratic states have (i.E. USA: Congress vs. Senat; Germany: Bundestag vs. Bundesrat). That tactic of Labour government obviously tended to a massively “overpowered” one-chamber-system, that was in addition massivley corrupt as the present corruption scandals showed in detail within the last months in Britain. This makes me shivering because you can see, were “climate politicians” might bring us all. On the one hand they try to implement a very centralized political system, on the other hand they massivley missued public spending for sometimes purely private issues. That’s much more than Irony … that shows primarily, that in one big democratic country of the European Community one single party tried to take over political power in a kind of undemocratic coup
d’etat. And the british voters hardly stopped them at the ballot box. Most climate activists (even the british ones, but in Germany it’s just the same as I can see) think of them selves as liberals heading for a good future. But, and this is the really disgusting part, they spit on our democracy step by step. So we do not have a fight between “good or bad guys” in terms of climate policy, but between increasingly undemocratical centralists and not as centralistic liberal democrats.
If Americans read that posting, I would give them the following thought: what would you think, if the Congress tries to eliminate the Senat stepwise?
If Germans (or Swiss) read in here: would you think it is democratic, if the Bundestag tries to reduce the power of the Bundesrat?
Although HoL is not the same as the Senat or the Bundesrat, it functions in Great Britain a little bit like them as a second chamber, that had blocked for example laws directed against socially underpriviliged people issued by the Blair/Brown government in the past (even labour-related Lords did so!). And the Blair/Brown government tried a lot to put HoL down to have their agenda passed.
Most of our citizens all over Europe seem not to have checked that political problem out. Perhaps, because the media is not dealing with that issue. And that’s a disgrace.
The HoL-case of Monckton leads one from one political climate issue to another political danger to democrazy. In Germany we would call that “Buerokratur”, a mixed term of bureaucrazy and dictatorship (=bureaucratatorship). In Europe, the EU commission decides about climate issues and no single european is able to vote for them or against them. But we have to pay them. They do make about 30% of all laws issued in Europe at present and we as voters can’t hold them accountable directly. Every one who wants to be a climate activist should be concerned about those developments, because propagandizing for that political aim means the reduction of peoples or voters political power. I don’t want to live in a society based on bureaucratatorship!
Looking at EU commission, you should recognize, that they are implemented not by the EU parliament. The commission can be rejected in full by the EU parliament but the EU parliament itself has no proposal right for the EU commission. That’s pervers and not democratic! For example: a regular parliament is elected by voters and the parliamentarians themself choose and vote for the ministers and also for the chancelor or prime minister or the head of government. Not so in the EU commission. There members are proposed in secret by the member states and after that, they can only be rejected by the EU parliament. And this kind of policital system was put upon us Europeans not by a free election of a european constitution (when starting that process, France, Denmark and the Irish voted against that constitution, we Germans were not even asked to vote about it by our own parliamentarians!) but by a simple european contract being accepted in our parliaments of the european member states. So we as citizens were not asked for our vote. This is also not democratic and if we let these things move forward, we all can say farewell to our political power as voters. The only ones who seem not to be so politically ignorants as the europeans are the US-, the australian and the kanadian citizens at the moment. I hope they learned that political lession that we europeans missed in the past.
Greetings, Upjohn
By: Upjohn on August 7, 2010
at 6:05 am
[…] of Lords since 1999. When asked to respond about this misrepresentation by members of Congress,Monckton basically acknowledged that the British government doesn’t recognize him as a member of the House of Lords, but claimed […]
By: The Monckton Files: House of Lords Recap « Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah on July 18, 2011
at 10:23 am
[…] allowed. (See this classic in crackpottery, for instance.) Once, when I posted on my own blog a response to one of Monckton’s pieces that was published on WUWT, I submitted a comment on the WUWT page in which I simply announced that […]
By: The Monckton Files: Cornered? « Anti-Climate Change Extremism in Utah on February 9, 2012
at 12:50 pm