If you have a spare evening, read the Magna Carta. It is a restraining document. What leaps out from the pages of Langton’s text is the intent to protect subjects from overweening authority (in this case, Norman-French despotism), by restoring ancient freedoms.
I have a copy dated MDCCLXVI (1766) left to me by my father, and to him by his father. The customary law is Saxon, Celtic, even Visigoth.
“All men in our Kingdom have and hold the aforesaid liberties and rights, well and in peace, freely and quietly, fully and wholly, for ever.”
“No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or outlawed, or exiled, or in any way destroyed, unless by lawful judgment of his peers.”
“No constable or bailiff shall take another man’s corn or chattels without immediate payment, nor take any horses or any man’s timber for castles.”
“Any one may leave the Kingdom and return at will, unless in time of war, when he may be restrained for some short space for the common good”.

Europe’s Constitution – the Lisbon Treaty, as we know it – began as a sort of Magna Carta. EU leaders agreed at Laeken in 2001 that the Project needed restraining after Danes and Swedes rejected EMU, the Irish rejected Nice, and youth torched Gothenburg in anti-EU riots.

People do not want Europe inveigling its way into “every nook and cranny of life”, they said. Needless to say, insiders hijacked the process. A Hegelian monstrosity emerged. The text says much about the heightened powers of EU bodies, but scarcely a word to restrain EU bailiffs and constables.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights – legally binding in the UK as of Tuesday, when Lisbon came into force – asserts that the EU has the authority to circumscribe all rights and freedoms.
The text was modified after I threw a tantrum in the Daily Telegraph during the drafting process, comparing it to the “general interest” clause used by Fascist regimes to crush dissent in the 1930s.
Article 52 now reads: “Subject to the principle of proportionality, limitations may be made only if they are necessary and genuinely meet objectives of general interest recognised by the Union.”

Don’t be misled by this inverted wording. What it states is that the EU may indeed limit rights in the “general interest”. In other words, our Magna Carta has been superceeded.
It is the European Court (ECJ) that decides what is “proportional” or “necessary”, and it cannot be trusted. The ECJ behaves like the Star Chamber of Charles I, as I learned following three cases where it rubber-stamped the abuse of state power against whistleblowers Bernard Connolly and Marta Andreasen, and German journalist Hans-Martin Tillack.

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