The UK: Asserting rights and affirming status by minorities in our courts

Somewhere in England

A quietly deliberated and adjudicated event a few weeks ago requires some pertinent commentary, in which abused entitlement was found wanting by the assertiveness of the knowledge of right, privilege, history and the law.

After #Brexit, the government of the day went into an overdrive of assumptions of what they thought the referendum meant to the exclusion of the views of the almost divided nation that voted 52% to 48% in favour of leaving Europe.

Unravelling the Brexit conundrum

What ‘Taking Back Control’ meant was completely undefined, it was not a question in the referendum and if the government was not going to return to the people to determine the detail of what their desires for #Brexit were, one would have thought the final arbiter would be with the representatives of the people in the Parliament of Westminster.

Instead, the government was on a course of excluding the legislature out of the final determination and direction apart from the courtesy of a rubber stamping the decisions. This is where we are introduced to Gina Miller.

Standing up to convention

Gina Miller, born in British Guyana, long term resident of Great Britain, a successful investment management expert thought the government, the executive was going about #Brexit by excluding the legislature, by that the Parliament and so with other parties sought judicial clarification as to how to go about #Brexit and in the end won the case at the Supreme Court.

What Gina Miller did which was to assert the rights that any indigenous British-born person with generational lineage and knowledge of the Constitution, history and the law could have done. That it fell to someone else to do this is not particularly unfortunate, it had to be done and Gina Miller did it.

Then a lawless peer wrote

However, this opened Gina Miller to splenetic opprobrium, abuse, death threats and violations of her person and standing, chief amongst the purveyors of this abusive onslaught was a Rhodri Philipps, the 4^th Viscount St Davids whose aristocratic lineage stretches as far back as 1299. In him was the embodiment of entitlement and privilege along with a sense of aristocratic hubris that tempted him to consider himself above reproach and beyond sanction.

Railing against Gina Miller on Facebook, he placed a bounty with the words, “£5,000 for the first person to ‘accidentally’ run over this bloody troublesome first generation immigrant.” His tirade then descended into the utterly reprehensible by calling Gina Miller a “fucking boat jumper” and further questioned her status with this atrocity, “If this is what we should expect from immigrants, send them back to their stinking jungles.” [Guardian]

The law would not stand for it

This sickening onslaught did not stop with Gina Miller, he seemed to have garnered a penchant to not only be abusive but to suggestively inspire to violence anyone who could be enticed by his bounties to cause harm to others he did not like or agree with.

Whilst Arnold Sube had neither clout nor resource to fight back, Gina Miller was a different prospect. Having challenged the Establishment and the orthodoxy and won, she must have considered taking an uppity aristocrat and peer of the realm to the courts was a lesser challenge with a greater prospect of winning through.

Whilst we might forget that Rhodri Phillips was of mixed nationality parentage, his mother being a Chilean, I have concluded that hypocrisy is a coveted virtue of an entitled class without the ability to reflect before expression. For his show of stupidity, the 4^th Viscount St Davids was on the 13^th of July sentenced to 12 weeks in prison. Not long enough a deterrent in my view, but it is a humbling of an overbearingly offensive miscreant. [The Independent]

Know your status and know your rights

That minorities in the UK suffer so many forms of slight, abuse, threats, menace and attacks is not particularly news, I recently faced abuse on a train journey where the perpetrator pointedly questioned my status in the UK, not knowing that I was British-born despite my race. It landed him in court and I should soon be hearing the verdict.

It is not an issue of political correctness; some behaviours are just unacceptable today and must be vigorously prosecuted to the fullness of the law. At its core is the need to ensure that every law abiding person resident in the UK is not subject to unwarranted abuse in the first place and consequently be free from the threat of harm or the violation of their person.

In Gina Miller, we have found a reaffirmation of status and right, the right to pursue all legitimate means of redress in terms of constitutional law as a private citizen and the right regardless of presumed status to have the law deal sternly with anyone who threatens our safety out of malice, spite, racism or anything bad inspired notion of inciting violence against us.

A welcome but unprincely separation

A Prince unworthy

Obviously, one is saddened by the fact that the seeming royal romance between Prince William and Kate Middleton has come to an end.

Seeing the Prince leave a night club at 3:00AM in morning must have been instructive of the fact that the young man is more a man about town than one who really wants to "settle down" and become responsible to use the Nigerian euphemism of coercion to get married.

In these times, there are very few who do get married in their early 20s and the Prince being 24 means that he probably does not think he has played the field enough to accommodate the boring and restraining prospect of marital bliss.

From the reports emanating from anonymous close friends, unnamed palace sources and deluded royal experts, Prince William had been advised to make serious considerations about taking the relationship to a decent conclusion or aborting the affair so as not to have kept the young lady of 25 from prospects that would have been more willing and more appreciative of her.

In fact, this seems to the mirror the case of the Duchess of Cornwall who Prince Charles did not offer a proposal that she went on to marry another man - Anthony Parker Bowles; who now has the accolade of having given life and wife for king and country.

Aristocratic snobbery

Beyond this is the unsightly stuffiness of aristocracy with an inbred culture that is resistant to modern ways and the changing times or what might call the infiltration of the middle classes.

Kate Middleton is the daughter of self-made millionaires whose ancestry is not particularly distinguished and whose mother was once an air stewardess.

This should really have no bearing on the merits of Kate as an individual and partner who being quite well educated as a peer of the Prince, has been not only a close friend but confidant of the Prince throughout university.

However, it is generally the unspoken rule amongst aristocrats that only females in line for offices of state need be educated in formal settings, else, everyone else goes to finishing school learning to be supportive of their future husbands of blue blood in being baby-making machines providing heirs to keep the family name and titles extant and playing hostess to burnish the aristocratic mien of that lineage.

That is the career path of any lady who marries into aristocracy; to adopt any other focus like Diana, Princess of Wales did beyond mother and glamour clothes-horse was to be extending oneself into areas too cerebral for their calling.

This would have been the fate waiting to befall Kate Middleton and in some ways she has mercifully been delivered from that situation.

A stupid brood of idiots

What grates the more is the cretins who only become something by birth rather than by achievement that call themselves friends of the Prince who when Kate made an appearance whispered - Doors to manual - alluding to her mother's old profession as an air hostess; that the Prince could not defend the honour and integrity of his beau by outlawing such talk simply goes to show that Kate is better off with another man.

Maybe in 20 or 30 years time, after almost definitely an unsuitable bride is found to fulfill the aristocratic wife role of providing heirs and hospitality, Kate and William might end up in a Charles and Camilla encore; there is no telling, with royalty; history always seems to repeat itself again and again.

Sometimes, it takes a man time to really develop real respect for the lady who really matters to him. Meanwhile, I wish Kate Middleton well in all she puts her hand to do.