British Liberty: The Legal Case Against The EU

Listening to many modern politicians today, you would think we were living in a utopia. We hear all kinds of buzzwords on a daily basis spewing from their mouths like emotive projectile vomit, right through our TV screens and into your face, soaking everybody with endorphins that provoke constant social media outrage and public virtue-signalling.

‘Solidarity’, ‘Togetherness’, ‘Unify’, to name but a few of these mindless repetitions, often said without any real context or intention behind them — completely without substance. This kind of mindless nonsense goes on overdrive during election periods, as we will have seen recently.

The Labour Party celebrates in Wales despite narrowing its lead and seemingly oblivious to the significant rise of UKIP. The SNP celebrate a ‘historic’ third term, as Mrs. Sturgeon puts it, “in the era of devolution”, an era that has only been going for 15 years — hardly a century-old tradition.

The not-so-Conservative Party continue to plod along with a smug look on their faces, gloating about victory in Scotland and loving every moment of being in Government, despite the fact that they have a Europhile, anti-British Prime Minister who uses foreign leaders to blackmail and threaten his own people, and with the smallest minority since John Major can’t reliably pass anything through Parliament, prompting a rather large number of embarrassing U-turns.

Indeed, despite all of these evidently negative signs of problems within the governance of our country, they all carry on, with their supporters, convincing us that they’re doing so well; they’re getting it right; they don’t need to listen to the electorate at all!

They need only redefine, reinterpret and repackage what the electorate say, because that will make them and their voters ‘feel better’. So let’s throw a few buzzwords in, portray everything as rosy and positive, and hopefully, the emotivism will spread like a critique-killing plague amongst the wider public.

Let’s make ‘feelings’ the new thinking. Let’s make everyone choose the quickest fix, to only care about how they ‘feel’, that way we don’t need to pay attention to the negatives.

I was talking to an acquaintance recently, and in a shameless effort to plug my book (I know, capitalist scum right?), I explained how I felt that the Law was essentially the most overlooked, and simultaneously the most important argument for leaving the European Union (EU).

Liberty, I tried to explain, was an absolutely imperative necessity of life — without liberty you merely exist, but you don’t live. No liberty means tyranny of the majority, which is all well and good when you’re a member of it, but when you’re not, then you’re left with the choice of joining the majority or living in a prison-like world.

The rise of political correctness, and the shaming or smearing of anyone who dares to question the Europhile status quo as ‘xenophobes’ and ‘racists’, is evidence of just how the world can be when liberty is seen as a mere inconvenience to a greater more ‘unifying’ cause of ‘solidarity’.

My book, I explained, was designed to give a legal case against the EU, but specifically pertaining to laws that affect our own individual liberty, the small-man, in ways that we otherwise wouldn’t notice.

I felt it an overlooked and undervalued part of the debate, and thus writing a book about it, as a law graduate who hopes to go on to make it my living to uphold liberty at the English Bar, was a means for me to try to earn my tuition fees but also support the Brexit campaign in an innovative way.

In short, making the case against the EU from the perspective of Law and Individual Liberty in an easy to understand way, would equip people with clearer knowledge and arguments to either convince them, or for them to use in discussions, about how they personally are affected by the EU.

She wasn’t interested. I was somewhat disheartened. It wasn’t the fact that she wasn’t interested in my book (although that is of course shocking enough), it was more the reason why she wasn’t interested.

“What about the case of Andrew Symeou who was wrongly imprisoned, whilst innocent, without trial and on fabricated charges? Don’t you know about that?”

“No I don’t actually, that’s terrible.” She replied.

“Or the Metric Martyrs? Do you know about those? Criminal records for using pounds instead of kilograms?”

“How stupid!” She exclaimed. “No I haven’t heard of it!”

“Well it’s important to know about these things, and plenty of other things too, these kinds of things affect our liberty in huge ways!” I lectured.

The shocking part came next.

“Yes I know Dominic, but sometimes… sometimes, ignorance is bliss.”

And there you have it ladies and gentlemen. ‘Sometimes, ignorance is bliss’ — a choice of words that it seems completely summarises the world we live in today.

The 2016 elections are a distraction by any stretch, because when we scratch through the buzzwords and emotivism we see that, at least despite some breakthroughs, it is the same parties saying the same things.

Worst of all? All of them know that ultimately the office they have been elected to is nothing more than impotent position, accountable not to you the people, but to the EU. If this means they must charm, or fool you with fancy words and emotive smear campaigns, then they will.

Or they’ll tell you all about ‘democracy’ and ‘Human Rights’, one of which is almost non-existent under the EU regime, and the other which actually grants rights to the state over the individual in the form of ‘positive liberty’ rather than granting the individual rights over the state like ‘negative liberty’.

Writing this book made me realise just how important the message really is. Ideas of real liberty, freedom and self-autonomy have been drowned in an ocean of virtue signalling, faux-solidarity, pseudo-civil rights and emotive, indirect blackmailing buzzwords.

In the process, we have handed over our sovereign nation to a foreign, unaccountable body of bureaucrats with little care for the individual and nothing but disdain for Britain. In essence, we have given up our own country’s freedom, liberty and sovereignty, and by virtue of that –almost by proxy, we have given up our own individual liberty, freedom and sovereignty over our own lives and business, at the same time.

This to me, is the most overlooked and yet one of the most important parts of the EU debate, that we have not heard too much about.

It’s time for people to realise what exactly affects them as individuals when it comes to the EU Law that governs our Liberties, including the nuances and subtleties. People have a right to know these things and I may be a mere young(-ish) 26 year old law grad, but I hope that my book will go at least some way to telling them.

‘Ignorance is bliss’ may be true, but bliss never lasts forever.

(Dominic Bardill, the author of Habeas Britanniam: British Liberty & the Legal Case against the EU’ is a law graduate who has been awarded the ‘Provost’s Award for Excellence’ at the University of Law. He intends to pursue a career as a Barrister advocating for liberty in the courtroom.)

Follow Dominic Bardill on Twitter: @dombardill