'Elizabeth Beckett's lack of legal knowledge has already been dealt with'

Sorry Chikrodah, but Elizabeth Beckett's knowledge has not not been dealt with. Ardvaark had addressed the wrong Beckett - a Margaret Beckett. We are talking, here, about an Elizabeth Beckett.
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Originally Posted by aarable:
'Elizabeth Beckett's lack of legal knowledge has already been dealt with'

Sorry Chikrodah, but Elizabeth Beckett's knowledge has not not been dealt with. Ardvaark had addressed the wrong Beckett - a Margaret Beckett. We are talking, here, about an Elizabeth Beckett.

Do you actually ever bother to read the posts of others? Come to that, do you actually ever read your own?

In post #6 on this thread you wrote:

Originally Posted by :
Margaret Becket who is an expert on constitutional law, wrote back:

What you have stated above, the claim we that we do not have a 'written constitution', is misleading, since technically it means we do not have a codified constitution. Perhaps you would like to point out to us where it is not codified?
...
We look forward to hearing from you and trust you will correct this information in your newspaper and thus provide your readers with the truth of our very real 'written constitution'.
Yours Sincerely
Elizabeth Beckett

Aardvark made it very clear here: http://www.democracyforum.co.uk/euro...tml#post479995

Originally Posted by :
aarable, I realise that you have confused Margaret and Elizabeth Beckett and misspelt her surname, that makes it harder to discover the origins of what you have produced.

Elizabeth Beckett is not an expert on constitutional law and has never been examined in the subject. She has not been peer reviewed by debating with other students of the law, she has never written an essay or analysis that has been reviewed by a qualified constitutional lawyer and she has not studied on an accredited course of constitutional law. She is described on a number of blogs as a 'student' of constitutional law. I was examined at degree level on the subject of constitutional law by a person who drafted the constitutions of Pakistan and Bangla Desh and I would never consider myself an expert in the way you project Ms Beckett.

When she has appeared before the courts they have dismissed her arguments; if she was an expert she would have won.

As with twizzel and your ill founded treason allegations, you have mistaken someone's reading of law books, which they do not fully understand, with an expertise on the law. As with twizzel's case, Ms Beckett has not sought legal advice nor paid lawyers for an opinion.

Ms Beckett's father was a High Court judge, but she wasn't. You do not get qualifications by osmosis, inheritance or sitting discussing things with daddy over breakfast. The fact that he wrote a law when she was a child does not mean that she became an expert on that law. Ms Beckett's husband was a District Officer in India (a role which ceased to exist 61 years ago), but she was not. That is not a legal qualification and is a spurious 'qualification' to say the least. My father was part of the design team for the Hillman Imp; that doesn't make me a car designer.

To me an expert is a practitioner on the subject, someone who others look to for advice and tuition and who has contributed to the area studied.

aarable, you have given expert evidence in court. You had to state your experience and qualifications which were accepted as valid as you worked in the field in question. Ms Beckett will never be called to produce an article for any legal publication because no legally qualified person will look to her for advice. She has never practiced and never will. She is not an expert.

Which part of that did you not read? Which parts did you not understand? :-)
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Sorry chikrodah, but aarable never reads anything beyond the first sentence unless it is something that really interests him. The views of others do not now, nor ever did, interest aarable. I have spoken to him hundreds of times and yet he still tells people things about me that are untrue.

He failed to note that it was him who first confused the Beckett 'sisters' by starting the post using one name and finishing it using another.

aarable actually posts things and then denies having done so.
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Originally Posted by Aardvark:
The UK does not have a constitution; it has a body of constitutional law. All bar 3 jurisdictions are governed by a unitary document known as a constitution. Constitutions are clear - they are usually called the constitution of a country and can only be changed subject to a specific voting process.

This simply depends on how you view the word constitution. It doesn't have a written constitution for sure but many Conservative writers like Burke or De'Maistre considered all countries to have a constitution which was nothing more than its rules of goverance and political arrangement and they and many other writers from at least the 17th century have considered England to have a constitution.

It certainly hasn't been a very good constitution for keeping the central gov't in check, even the Whig aristocracts who so praised the "Glorious revolution" for keeping Royalist absolutist in check were very happy to switch to legislative absolutism in an astonishingly quick time and it has pretty much continued to this day. As Hayek talked about in his Constitution of liberty it was a belief that the fundamental absolutism of the Westminister parliament and which many thought was against the ancient traditions of "Anglo-Saxon" liberty that helped push the Americans towards rebellion.
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Recent trends in the teaching of constitutional law differentiate clearly between the UK's body of constitutional law and those unified documents that have been created in the last 200 years and which are more properly called constitutions.

The reason that the differentiation has taken place is to get away from the confusion caused by referring to a constantly changing body of law in the same way as a codified document. To call our constitutional law a constitution is to give it a certainty that it lacks.

There is no one book in the UK which contains all that might be termed constitutional law although the main commentaries (Hood Phillips, Wade, Dicey) are regularly updated. It is confusing, especially for laymen, to refer to our constitutional arrangements as a constitution since that implies all sorts of structures to amend or vary the document. In fact the courts can interpret our laws in a way that changes our constitutional arrangements (Factortame is referred to on another thread).

We are unique in also having conventions and customary actions that are discussed in the constitutional law books, but technically have never been written down as direct instructions with the monarchs signature on the bottom.

When people refer to 'the constitution' they are probably not certain what they mean. Some will know a number of the laws that are 'constitutional', but most won't (I'd have to go back to the books to check on some of the more obscure rules that guide us). It's like the Coronation Oath - lots of people seem to be aware of it, but wouldn't recognise the changes that have occurred over the centuries, yet it is part of our body of constitutional laws. If it were part of a constitution as such it would be enforceable, but it is not and therefore can't be enforced. In the same way a lot of our constitutional laws cannot be easily enforced as people keep finding out.

I prefer always to refer to a body of constitutional law rather than a constitution. That's what I was taught at law school and I'm happy with it.
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i have just put on bbc Parliament and their is a bill of rights committee talking about a british bill of rights and are talking like we dont have one,so it looks like they are thinking of replacing the bill of rights 1688 how nice of them.

this is what i have seen so far

europhile and anti freedom kenneth clarke who is saying we dont need a bill of rights and still is affter the 90 day attainment notthing new there.

the earl of onslow

andrew dismore chaiman

henry porter of the observer
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Gremlin in the works,

They may try and remove the BofRs, but it will still be there by virtue of the way in which it came into being.

Contact Elizabeth Beckett if you need more on this.
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No it will not be there. If the current Bill of Rights (rights for who?) is expressly repealed then, since it was Parliament that passed the last one, that is the end of the matter. Parliament is sovereign and may legislate as it wishes.

Elizabeth Beckett is a sweet little old lady who has read some law books, but is not an expert on the subject as has been clearly established before.

If you want to know more contact a professor in constitutional law at Oxford or Cambridge and not some unqualified pensioner.
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Originally Posted by Aardvark:
Recent trends in the teaching of constitutional law differentiate clearly between the UK's body of constitutional law and those unified documents that have been created in the last 200 years and which are more properly called constitutions.

The reason that the differentiation has taken place is to get away from the confusion caused by referring to a constantly changing body of law in the same way as a codified document. To call our constitutional law a constitution is to give it a certainty that it lacks.

There is no one book in the UK which contains all that might be termed constitutional law although the main commentaries (Hood Phillips, Wade, Dicey) are regularly updated. It is confusing, especially for laymen, to refer to our constitutional arrangements as a constitution since that implies all sorts of structures to amend or vary the document. In fact the courts can interpret our laws in a way that changes our constitutional arrangements (Factortame is referred to on another thread).

We are unique in also having conventions and customary actions that are discussed in the constitutional law books, but technically have never been written down as direct instructions with the monarchs signature on the bottom.

When people refer to 'the constitution' they are probably not certain what they mean. Some will know a number of the laws that are 'constitutional', but most won't (I'd have to go back to the books to check on some of the more obscure rules that guide us). It's like the Coronation Oath - lots of people seem to be aware of it, but wouldn't recognise the changes that have occurred over the centuries, yet it is part of our body of constitutional laws. If it were part of a constitution as such it would be enforceable, but it is not and therefore can't be enforced. In the same way a lot of our constitutional laws cannot be easily enforced as people keep finding out.

I prefer always to refer to a body of constitutional law rather than a constitution. That's what I was taught at law school and I'm happy with it.

Well as I said it is all in the terminology which seems far from settled. Different people tend to view what a constitution is in varying ways.
If you take say Edmund Burke he certainly believed Britain had a constitution as did all nations and he'd say any nations constitution would likely go beyond and written document to how the country and its institutions operated and asigned sovereignty. Perhaps the two need to be seperated from each other but personally I'd say the constitution or political make-up of a nation goes far beyond anything a written constitution could provide.
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"A government that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away."

Well said Bonnie Dundee.

You might, then, be interested in what one of your compatirots said on the subject:


Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor at the University of Edinburgh, had this to say about the fall of the Athenian Republic some 2,000 years earlier:

"A democracy is always temporary in nature; it simply
cannot exist as a permanent form of government."


''A democracy will continue to exist up until the time
that voters discover they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury.

'' From that moment on, the majority always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, which is always followed by a dictatorship.''

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years''

''During those 200 years, those nations
always progressed through the following sequence:

1. From bondage to spiritual faith;
2. From spiritual faith to great courage;
3. From courage to liberty;
4. From liberty to abundance;
5. From abundance to complacency;
6. From complacency to apathy,
7. From apathy to dependence;
8. From dependence back into bondage'
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