Dear Dr. Gabb,

You are wrong to classify me as a "Europhile" on your list. I have never promoted further transfer of British sovereignty to EU institutions nor joining the Euro.

I am happy to confirm my support for William Hague and Michael Portillo's position on British entry into the Euro - that we rule out entry for this and the next Parliament.

Unfortunately, I don't think I can answer your two questions* in the affirmative. Question 1) involves pledging disloyalty to the Leader of the Conservative Party. This is not something I will ever pledge. Question 2) is an odd one as it seems to assume that further European integration could lead to European law having supremacy over English law. In fact European law has had supremacy over English law since Britain joined the EEC in 1972. Answering "yes" to this question therefore seems to commit candidates to campaign for immediate withdrawal from the EU, which is the policy of UKIP and not of Conservatives. If I have misunderstood the questions, please let me know.

I fear I will not therefore earn a "Sceptic" tag on your definition and you will have to classify me as a "?". This is a shame - I always see myself as a "!"

Yours sincerely,

Richard Forsdyke

Dear Mr Forsdyke,

I have received your e-mail of yesterday, and have changed your classification on the Candidlist from a Europhile to a don't know.

This being so, I cannot say that your e-mail has raised you in my opinion, or shown you to any reasonable person as fit to take a seat in Parliament.  You say that you will never pledge disloyalty to a Leader of the Conservative Party.  The natural meaning of this statement is that you regard obedience to a party leader as the highest political morality, and that loyalty to the country of which you are a citizen - not to mention regard for any independent sense of right and wrong - is of far less importance, if of any at all.

There are Europhiles for whom I have some personal respect.  Though I disagree with them, they do sincerely believe that a United States of Europe would be a good thing.  But for you I can have no such respect.  You seem to think of yourself as some kind of political zombie, bound never to resist or disobey the will of your party leader - whoever that may be.  You give reason for believing that you would vote for or against joining the Eurozone, according to how William Hague were to instruct you; and that you would also vote in the same way for or against Corpus Juris, the abolition of trial by jury, the establishment of a republic, and I suppose the machine-gunning of everyone over the age of 60.

Regarding your claim that European law is already supreme, I refer you to the following arguments.  I have reproduced them in letters to other candidates, but no one has yet raised any serious objection to them and they deserve the widest circulation.

It is not true that European Union law is supreme in this country.  A supreme law is one that proceeds from a sovereign lawgiver.  None of the institutions of the European Union can be called sovereign under the laws of this country. Undoubtedly, European law has a primacy that requires our courts to apply it even when it overrides laws made by Parliament.  But this is a primacy that derives wholly from the European Communities Act 1972. Parliament has chosen to allow other bodies to exercise a wide jurisdiction under that Act.  But it can repeal the Act as any time it feels inclined.

This, at least, is the view taken by Mr Justice Hoffmann - the Pinochet Judge! - in the cases of Stoke-on-Trent City Council v B & Q plc and Norwich City Council v B & Q plc (Chancery Division), reported in The Daily Telegraph, 18th July, 1990. See also per Lord Denning MR in Macarthys Ltd v Smith: "if the time should come when our Parliament deliberately passes an Act with the intention of repudiating the Treaty [of Rome] or any provision in it or intentionally of acting inconsistently with it and says so in express terms then I should have thought that it would be the duty of our courts to follow the statute of our Parliament" ([1979] 3 All England Reports, 325).

You may object that these are cases decided before the Maastricht Treaty was incorporated into British law.  I therefore refer you to the 12th edition of Constitutional and Administrative Law by A.W. Bradley and K.D. Ewing (Longman, London, 1997):

...[w]hat would be the position in the (admittedly unlikely) event that Parliament should say expressly (or by clear implication) that a statutory provision should apply notwithstanding any Community obligation to the contrary?...  As a matter of British constitutional law (and regardless of what the ECJ might say), it would appear in such an eventuality that Parliament had repudiated the 'voluntary' 'limitation of its sovereignty' which it accepted when it enacted the 1972 Act.

This correspondence will be published on the Candidlist web site, and will therefore be available to selection committees when they decide which potential candidates to interview and which to pass over.  Of course, if I have seriously misinterpreted you, your own words will be available for others to inspect and intepret in a possibly more charitable manner.  Or it may be that you have let slip expressions that on reflection do not fully represent your views, in which case I shall be happy to publish your further views.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Sean Gabb
Candidlist Webmaster

Do you answer in the affirmative both of the following:

1) If elected or re-elected to Parliament, would you oppose our joining the Eurozone even if joining were to be recommended by the Party leadership?

2) If elected or re-elected to Parliament and required to choose between accepting the supremacy of European Union law in this country and leaving the European Union, would you vote for British withdrawal?

If you cannot answer both of the above in the affirmative, do you accept the line currently taken by William Hague, which is to oppose our joining the Eurozone for this and for the next Parliament and to resist any further British integration into the European Union?

Thankyou for amending your list.

I am sorry that my refusal to pledge disloyalty to the Party leadership lowers me in your estimation. As your aim as stated in your "In the news" section is to topple William Hague and Michael Portillo, I should have expected loyalty would not go down to well. I will have to hope that members of Conservative selection committees can see a distinction (where you cannot) between refusing to pledge future disloyalty to the Party and zombie-like obedience to its Leader on all issues. I agree with your list of competing loyalties (and would add the views of the local association and the interests of the constituency). It is exactly because there sometimes are conflicting  goods in the world that I think it wise to avoid making sweeping and permanent pledges on websites at a time when I am free of such pressures. Sometimes I think individuals actually weaken their ability to influence party policy by having made solo public pledges. Party politics is a bit like bridge - more difficult to play with all your cards on the table.

You agree with me that since 1972 European Law has prevailed over British Acts of Parliament, but prefer to say that European Law has "primacy" rather than "supremacy". Whatever. I still think Question 2 is dumb. Actually, on your technical point, most constitutional law textbooks are drifting against your view since Factortame [1991 AC 603].

Also, after your reply I did an  Altavista search on "dr sean gabb". I had thought you were a Conservative, but the search revealed you resigned your membership of the Conservative Party in 1997 when we restricted the private ownership of handguns (not a perfect piece of legislation, but most of us felt we could remain within the Party notwithstanding). Have you now rejoined our Party, or do the other rather un-Conservative views my search revealed (forcibly breaking up the UK into four separate countries, providing arms Ulster's Protestants, legalising hard drugs, abolishing drink driving laws etc) mean you remain isolated from party politics? If so, why don't you go for the real zombies and do a list on New Labour?

Dear Mr Forsdyke,

I found your e-mail of yesterday afternoon most entertaining, and am glad to publish it on the Candidlist web site with the rest of our correspondence.  You raise three distinct points in your letter:  the nature of political commitment, the relationship between British and European law, and my personal opinions.  Let me take these in order.

1)  If a commitment in politics were as unconditionally binding as marriage vows are in Christian moral teaching, you would be right to avoid making any.  However, since such commitments  must always be regarded as conditional on circumstances, your objection has no force.  When circumstances change sufficiently, no promise in politics can remain binding.  Suppose, for example, a parliamentary candidate had promised in 1931 always to oppose closer links between Britain and the Soviet Union.  This might have made excellent sense at the time, but could not reasonably have been invoked in the very different circumstances of 1941.  Equally, it is possible that unforeseen circumstances will emerge that require us to accept closer European integration.  If such ever happens, then all previous commitments against must be regarded as cancelled.

This being accepted, we can see the true value of the commitment that Candidlist is seeking on Eurozone membership.  Answering yes to the first Candidlist question does not commit a candidate unreasonably to opposing British membership, but it does reasonably commit.  The debate on the single currency appears to have reached the stage where arguments may change in their details, but are unlikely to be displaced or much amended.  On the one side, we have the advantages of stability of trade and investment and of price transparency within the European Union.  On the other, we have the great political and constitutional disadvantages, plus the fact that Europe is not an optimal currency zone.  In the context of this debate, answering yes to the first Candidlist question commits one to avoiding the unprincipled opportunism that is so regrettably common nowadays in our country's politics.  It does not bar a change of mind in radically changed circumstances.  But it does bar an MP from standing up in 2004 or whenever and saying that, notwithstanding what he may have said in 2000, he had now been swayed by some trivial or foreseeable change in circumstances to accept the single currency - I think of some waffle about "clear evidence of supply side reforms in Euroland" and the like.

If you cannot make a commitment in the sense that such things have always and everywhere been understood, you do not display the political wisdom to which you lay claim in your e-mail of yesterday.  You simply raise doubts regarding your wisdom or honesty.

2) Your claim that "most constitutional law textbooks" are coming to oppose the view that the Queen in Parliament remain sovereign is unsupported by any evidence; and since, I have already provided a full quotation in favour of this view from the newest edition of one of the most respected texts on constitutional law, I will not renew our argument.  I will only note that if you cannot see the difference between primacy and supremacy, you still have much reading and thought ahead of you before you can presume to ask people for their votes.

3)  you seem very pleased with yourself to have discovered my personal web site, and I am rather flattered that you have taken the time to look at some of my voluminous writings.  However, I would suggest the following:

a) There was no need to look me up in Altavista - though I am pleased that my efforts with the search engines enabled you to find me without much trouble - as the address of my personal web site is given at the foot of every e-mail that I send.  In any event, I am surprised that you did not already know something about me.  In the past few years, I have appeared hundreds of times in the British media arguing on the issues that you mention; and I do not think I am boasting if I say that I am better at explaining myself in the media than William Hague has been on Europe.

b) If you took the trouble to study the philosophy of the party you have joined, you would see that there is no lack of consistency between my stated opinions and being a conservative and even occasionally a Conservative.  Edmund Burke regarded the criminalisation of recreational drugs as utopian nonsense, and Benjamin Disraeli openly took opium while delivering his 1852 budget speech in the House of Commons.  Enoch Powell - among other Conservatives - was hostile to the drink driving laws on constitutional grounds.  A concern for our fellow citizens in Ulster has been a continuing theme in Conservative politics during at least the past hundred years.  You should ask someone who has read some history about Lord Randolph Churchill and Sir Edward Carson.  Better still, you might visit a library for yourself.  You might then realise that while there is nothing in my views completely alien from the thought of our greatest conservatives, those conservatives would be deeply shocked at the sight of a prospective Conservative candidate coolly refusing to commit himself to the defence of his country and constitution.

c) You proceed from my opinions to doubting if the Candidlist is a reliable, well intentioned source of information to the Conservative Party membership.  Whatever my direct or quoted statements in the media, you can rest assured that the Candidlist is as reliable a source of information as I can make it.  In no case have I allowed a personal like or dislike of a candidate to sway my classification.  In all cases where I have corresponded with a candidate, the whole unedited correspondence has been published.  This enables any visitor to our web site to go behind our classification to see the grounds on which it has been made.  In one instance - I cannot be specific - a selection committee has chosen to understand a correspondence in a sense quite opposite to my understanding of it.  My ambition is to go into the next election with a personal statement on the Candidlist web site of views on Europe from every Conservative candidate.  Give me this, and my classifications and my motives will be redundant except as part of a wider conversation.

These are my thoughts on your latest e-mail.  Again, I regret to say that you do not rise in my opinion.  Please do feel free to write again if you believe that you might change my mind - though I do suggest that next time you might consider paying more attention to spelling and grammar, as this correspondence is to be made generally available on the Candidlist web site.

Yours sincerely,

Dr Sean Gabb
Candidlist Webmaster

Well, Dr. Gabb, if I ever decide to run on an "Opium and Enoch" ticket I shall seek your unqualified endorsement.

Now that it is clear that you are not in fact a Conservative, I will not contribute further to the site.

Anyone wishing soundly to judge my understanding of Conservative philosophy and history can go to http://www.amazon.co.uk and buy "After The Landslide" which looks at Conservative ideas, organisation and strategy during the Party's periods of Opposition during the 20th Century, and of course provides prescriptions for the current one.

My e-mail address is richardforsdyke@yahoo.com

Goodbye.