How does the justice system work in the U.K. versus USA? (independence, Sacramento)
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There were a number of reasons the Government didn't take action, the first being that it would be difficult to administer food rationing without ID Cards, and it should be noted that criminals could exploit the system far more easily if ID Cards were scrapped.
All of which may be true, but that doesn't change the basic issue that an emergency power enacted for one purpose was extended by the government for several years, long after the original reason for that emergency power being enacted had ceased to exist - A point which was made by Chief Justice Lord Goddard in the Willcock appeal case. As I mentioned earlier, I'm very dubious about emergency powers to begin with, but it's especially worrying that so many governments take an emergency power passed for one purpose and then start using it for various other purposes, and practically have to have such powers pried from their grasp years after the original emergency is over. Governments are quick to seize new powers, but extremely reluctant to give any up.
In Mr. Willcock's case, he would have certainly been asked to produce his driver's license anyway, since it involved a motoring incident, so what was the purpose of the P.C. demanding to see his identity card as well, except for the fact that he could and, as noted at the time, it had become the norm?
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It's also worth noting that EU Countries now have ID Cards, and the UK does not.
The citizens of many European countries have been used to demands for "Vos papieres, s'il vous plait" or "Papieren bitte!" for a very long time. But as you will obviously know (and as also commented on by Lord Goddard in the Willcock appeal), the idea of somebody being stopped and required to produce "his papers" for no particular reason has always been regarded as decidely un-British, the sort of thing demanded of by police states. Remember the outrage when Blair's government was talking about introducing a new national ID card scheme?
The biggest distinction I see is that the UK has one single set of laws and process that apply equally in every County and corner of the country...
where the US has 50 different sets of laws and process in addition to the Federal set.
In MY view this makes the US system far INferior.
I strongly disagree with this.
The reason why we have 50 sets of laws is because the United States is a Republic... and not a Democracy. The UK has a large central government, while the United States (at least in principle) is supposed to have a small central government with sovereign states.
UK to US is not a good comparison... though US law is based on the "English Law" concept as Brave New World said in his really good response.
The better comparison to the US (in structure at least) is Europe... the European Union and the European "states" (countries). That is more a Republic.
The European Union sets Directives... which the individual European states can then expand on, but maintain a minimum standard.
In the United States, Federal law trumps state law as long as that law is Constitutional... but the states are within their power to create their own additional laws, as long as those new laws are within the constraints of Constitutional law.
By no means is it "inferior," it's significantly more advanced, and is meant to protect the rights of the citizens by giving states the ability to "compete" with each other for population and opportunity.
If a state gets too heavy handed and gets too oppressive, people can leave for more accommodating states. For example... the state of Florida is now significantly more populated than the state of New York. One day, Florida may become unpopular and people move back. But it's that competition that helps maintain a sense of checks and balances. When you have a popular government that rules the land absolutely... it's much more difficult to stop.
The UK has a lower murder rate, but it's also an island, and it does not have a 1000+ mile border with one of the poorest nations in the world with people streaming over by the 100s of thousands every month.
The United States, even with all of that, is listed as like #57 or something way up there. Not great... but half the world is still above it. Still, the overwhelming vast majority of our crime comes from illegals that come across the border. It's not to say that poor immigrants are bad, but criminals are allowed to cross into the border as well... and well, they commit crimes. Central American countries, and Mexico, are more than happy to export their criminals to us. Mexico has 5 times the murder rate of the United States...
The UK has a lower murder rate, but it's also an island, and it does not have a 1000+ mile border with one of the poorest nations in the world with people streaming over by the 100s of thousands every month.
The United States, even with all of that, is listed as like #57 or something way up there. Not great... but half the world is still above it. Still, the overwhelming vast majority of our crime comes from illegals that come across the border. It's not to say that poor immigrants are bad, but criminals are allowed to cross into the border as well... and well, they commit crimes. Central American countries, and Mexico, are more than happy to export their criminals to us. Mexico has 5 times the murder rate of the United States...
Can you please provide statistics for your claim that "the overwhelming vast majority of our crime comes from illegals that come across the border"?
According to FactCheck.org, "There are not readily available nationwide statistics on all crimes committed by immigrants in the country illegally," so I'm curious as to which source you may have obtained your information from.
However, regional statistics records have been kept and analyzed:
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Alex Nowrasteh, with the libertarian Cato Institute, analyzed the Texas data to make a comparison of immigrants in the country illegally and native-born residents. In a recent post he noted that in 2015 Texas police made 815,689 arrests of native-born Americans, 37,776 arrests of immigrants in the country illegally and 20,323 arrests of legal immigrants. Given the relative populations for each group, he wrote, “The arrest rate for illegal immigrants was 40 percent below that of native-born Americans.â€
In addition, he wrote, the homicide arrest rate for native-born Americans was “about 46 percent higher than the illegal immigrant homicide arrest rate.â€
Both MrRational and Atari2600 above are wrong on specific points.
1: MrRational: The UK does not have a single set of laws. Both Scotland and N.I. sometimes have their own individual civil and criminal laws that differ from England & Wales. Just look up the Scottish concept of "Not Proven."
2: Atari 2600 is confusing the term "Shot to Death" as used by easthome, with the term "Murder." Manslaughter, and Suicide, are not murder, but can result in death by gunshot.
The better comparison to the US (in structure at least) is Europe...
It's a reasonable comparison in some ways, but the underlying principles are quite different.
Here in America, the federal government derives its powers from the states (in theory - let's set aside federal overreach for the moment), and the U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from doing anything which is constitutionally outside its jurisdiction, per the 10th Amendment.
A condition of a nation joining the European Union is that it agrees to all EU law being supreme over national laws where there is any conflict. The EU passes a directive (and it issues thousands every year on every conceivable subject) and every member nation is obliged to incorporate that directive into its own national laws, meaning that each member country effectively gives up sovereignty to the EU. Sometimes (as has often been the case with the United Kingdom) there will be some sort of derogation after negotiations which permits a member country to be exempt for a certain period of time, or to transition slowly toward meeting the orders of the EU over a period of a few years (as happened, for example, with the forced use of metric measurements in the U.K.). Another condition of being an EU member is that a nation which fails to implement an EU directive can be fined by the EU, or have its representation in the EU parliament withhheld until it comes into line. So effectively, it's a case of following every EU directive or leave the EU - Which as the debacle of "Brexit" showed, could turn out to be messy (but that could start a whole different topic).
The key point is that being a member of the EU makes a country subservient to the EU, and with the thousands upon thousands of EU regulations and directives, at an ever-increasing rate over the years, this has greatly reduced the ability of national governments to legislate according to their own national needs and forced them to implement legislation which nobody in certain nations ever wanted. The EU seeks to have fewer differences between member nations than exist between the various states in the U.S., something which is already the case in many fields (or "competences" as the EU insists on calling them). One of the EU's favorite terms is "harmonization" - A step by step process toward making the laws identical in each member country. And under EU law, once the EU acquires a "competence" in a specific field (control over employment conditions, control over regulations for new vehicles, or whatever) that can never be returned to the sole jurisdiction of a member nation. It's always a one-way street toward EU harmonization and the EU getting more power.
As far as the U.K. is concerned there is a certain amount of power delegated to Northern Ireland, Scotland, and more recently Wales, so yes, there can be variations in laws, as was seen with the mask mandates continuing in Wales after being dropped in England, to use a recent example. But the areas in which these three separate governments can operate outside of Westminster's rule is tiny compared to the autonomy that states in the U.S.A. have. To take one more example by way of comparison, VAT (Value Added Tax - the nearest equivalent to sales tax, although it operates in a different way) is fixed for the whole U.K. at 20% for most items (I'm assuming that hasn't changed since the last time I checked - I don't keep up with the budgets now I'm not there!), certain items are exempt, a few are charged at lower rates, etc. Compare that with the U.S. where each state sets its own rules for what's taxable and what isn't, what the state tax rate should be, whether counties or cities can add on their own local sales tax, and so on (and remembering that a few states have no sales tax at all). I could cite many more examples for comparison, but I think the point has been made.
P.S. There are local bylaws in parts of the U.K., the closest thing to local ordinances here, but they are generally over quite minor things comparatively. City ordinances in the U.S. can be much wider in scope.
Last edited by PBC-1966; 04-21-2022 at 01:34 PM..
Reason: Added postscript.
Your Factcheck.Org does not discount or deny what I've said. It merely says that it cannot disprove the claim.
The NGIC stopped keeping track of this information, likely intentionally; however, prior to this organization no longer reporting on it... they had determined that the majority of crimes were being committed by illegals and illegal criminal gangs.
I also worked at US SOUTHCOM for a tour, which handled drug and narcotics interdiction, and dealing with human trafficking coming from Central America. EDIT: We also deal with the Caribbean, and South America too of course... but much of our work was related to Central America. So I "lived it" so to speak...
Last edited by Atari2600; 04-21-2022 at 03:51 PM..
Your Factcheck.Org does not discount or deny what I've said. It merely says that it cannot disprove the claim.
The NGIC stopped keeping track of this information, likely intentionally; however, prior to this organization no longer reporting on it... they had determined that the majority of crimes were being committed by illegals and illegal criminal gangs.
I also worked at US SOUTHCOM for a tour, which handled drug and narcotics interdiction, and dealing with human trafficking coming from Central America.
Well, I didn't say that FactCheck.org disproved your claim. I was mostly curious as to where you get your information from. Now I know.
JudicialWatch.org is not exactly what I would call an unbiased source, and they have a history of making "numerous false and unsubstantiated claims that have been picked up by right-wing news outlets and promoted by conservative figures."
Your other source, Fairus.org, was founded by white supremacist John Tanton.
Well, I didn't say that FactCheck.org disproved your claim. I was mostly curious as to where you get your information from. Now I know.
JudicialWatch.org is not exactly what I would call an unbiased source, and they have a history of making "numerous false and unsubstantiated claims that have been picked up by right-wing news outlets and promoted by conservative figures."
Your other source, Fairus.org, was founded by white supremacist John Tanton.
Judicial Watch was referencing a Federal document from the Department of Justice.
I've never been to FairUS.org before... I was merely referencing it because it came up in a search. This is information that I know from my job, and was looking for information to substantiate it. For the record, I myself am Hispanic.
Hispanic people, like myself, aren't bad. But criminals flee to the United States from Central America for the same reason why Americans flee to Mexico to avoid arrest and crimes. The difference is... right or wrong, the United States is extremely lenient towards illegal immigrants, but demands extradition for U.S. citizens committing crimes and fleeing to Mexico. Mexico and Central America don't care when their criminals leave to go to the United States.
Last edited by Atari2600; 04-21-2022 at 04:49 PM..
It's a reasonable comparison in some ways, but the underlying principles are quite different.
Here in America, the federal government derives its powers from the states (in theory - let's set aside federal overreach for the moment), and the U.S. Constitution prohibits the federal government from doing anything which is constitutionally outside its jurisdiction, per the 10th Amendment.
A condition of a nation joining the European Union is that it agrees to all EU law being supreme over national laws where there is any conflict. The EU passes a directive (and it issues thousands every year on every conceivable subject) and every member nation is obliged to incorporate that directive into its own national laws, meaning that each member country effectively gives up sovereignty to the EU.
I think the federal government derives its powers from the Constitution.....
In the event of a conflict federal law preempts state law....
Experience suggests it is easier to secede from the EU than the US... (Brexit vs Confederacy)
The US code currently runs to about 60,000 pages across 53 Titles. The CFR runs 180,000 pages, hardly insignificant.
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