The public has spoken and the government should listen to that and to what the people prefer and have to say, is the fundamentals of democracy and of having democracy and democratic governance. The majority of the parliament does not identify with the majority of everyone else in our country. In each case it doesn’t or it depends what else happens. When the majority disagrees with something it should not happen at all. Yet things with which the majority disagrees have unfortunately still taken place in our country despite the existence of democracy.
The parliament is not to decide on decisions that belong separately to each person, because then those decisions are stolen from where they belong, and things cannot become law when they are not first social rules. Laws that prevent crime had to be social rules first, before they could become laws, and smoking indoors together with buying cigarettes from an age of legal responsibility is not a crime or guilty to do, which means that nothing is being punished, other than the personal preference and choice of that person writing the law himself in the absence of society.
Punishment should always be directed against guilt and under no circumstances must apply to innocence, yet this is what the government has done when it comes to smoking indoors or decorating cigarette wrappers with ingenuity signalling, or even buying cigarettes from an age of legal responsibility, which everyone is entitled and has the right to do, and should also have the legal right to do. To deal with such problems states have founded national constitutions that limit the otherwise limitless power of politicians to restrict citizens by legislating arbitrarily.
Writing laws having the nature of smoking bans and plain packaging legislation and even adult smoking prohibitions are underestimating our knowledge and intelligence to be in a position to know that it cannot happen based on our constitution, and challenge citizens to believe it and to believe that the constitution has not yet restricted those politicians from taking other people’s decisions as their own and that the matter under their command and its negotiation can be voted upon by a mere representative parliamentary majority which does not give the same result as the majority of a poll or the actual majority of all the people. Political power is not nevertheless limitless, it is limited by the constitution and its abuse and its reversal against those it is directed at who have elected those who possess it is punishable not by the law they attempt to arbitrarily set against them, when they punish innocent actions of their own choosing, that deserve no punishment, but by the constitution they must comply to.
When they say that we will make it a crime to buy tobacco products by anyone born after that date or will make this or the other a crime, remember that it is not already a crime to become one, it is not a crime to buy tobacco products from an adult, or even not to smoke inside buildings, against anybody else who would claim that in the courts, not against them or directed against them, so it cannot become one just because one person who has control over it wants it to become. That is called a social rule, and crimes claim their status from our social rules and those become the law, what they have decided on their own is not a social rule and should not become the law under any circumstances if the law is not in the form of a social rule.
Laws should not be arbitrarily defined in the absence of society by the state on its own, and that is another problem that should be realised. We have to set all this straight and learn it in order to claim our rights from what’s happening. Fortunately, we do not live in a dictatorship, but in a constitutional monarchy, where all the actions of the politicians must meet the written approval of the state constitution, the Magna Carta from 1215. Unjust laws should never be passed again with a parliamentary majority on its own, they should be challenged by the courts and be cancelled by them by providing the judiciary with the correct argumentation.
Commented under: http://taking-liberties.squarespace.com/blog/2024/1/30/the-public-has-spoken-but-the-pm-isnt-listening
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