27 January 2021

On the first anniversary of the launch of the ‘Education of Nations’ initiative, Law PB publishes an open letter to the Director-General of The International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). Based on a judicial framework provided by one of the foremost judges of our time and the facts contained in Russia’s Military Modernisation, an IISS Strategic Dossier (September 2020), he finds that:

(i) The Director-General has usurped the authority of the IISS Trustees, with or without their consent;

(ii) This IISS Dossier does not meet the legal standard set out in the case concerning the Project on Demilitarisation (‘Prodem’) in 1998 and 2000;

(iii) Furthermore, it helps to create a climate for war which, for a charity, is unlawful.

Law PB invites the IISS Director-General to consider his position… The letter is available here .

12 September 2020

Yesterday, on the anniversary of 9/11 and mindful of the explosion in Beirut on 4 August this year, LawPB published a Bulletin entitled ‘Who Governs in England and Gaza? A Rule of Law Compared’ available on the Home Page .

This was done by email dated 11 September 2020 as repeated below and copied anonymously to others based in Israel/State of Palestine (and one media organisation in England):

_____________________________________________________________________________

For: 

President Mahmoud Abbas

c/o The Palestinian Prime Minister's Office, Ramallah

Dr Aziz Dweik, Speaker of the Palestinian Legislative Council

c/o An-Najah National University, Nablus

Dear Sirs,

I am pleased to present you both with a copy of my attached Bulletin, published today, on the above topic. I hope you will find it of public benefit: it presents material facts concerning my experience of a rule of law in each jurisdiction (as opposed to the legal theory).

The main topic is the true relationship between politics, on the one hand, and religion and law, on the other, in each jurisdiction. From this it should become clear who really rules in England and Gaza and, by necessary implication, across the whole world and what the consequences are for governments and peoples in relation to peace or war; life or death.

I would be grateful if those who have been copied into this email anonymously would forward my Bulletin to anyone whom they think may be interested in these questions. If this seems presumptuous, please forgive me for my boldness. However, it is reported that Waraqah ibn Nawful, a Christian cousin of the Prophet of Islam's first wife, encouraged him to take the experience of his personal revelation seriously, comparing it to Moses who was a law-giver, too. In any event, sometimes an outsider can be helpful by bringing a new perspective to bear, albeit one still deeply rooted in our own Abrahamic faith traditions.

Yours faithfully,

Peter M. Southwood (Dr)

Law Officer for Public Benefit in England and Wales 

(de facto but not yet de jure)

____________________________________________________________________________

10 April 2020

Today, Good Friday, a Bulletin of the de facto LawPB is published in preparation for the expected Peace Games 2020 and the Education of Nations. It is entitled ‘The Charity Commission for England and Wales: An Indictment’ available on the Home page.

Drafted as the seriousness of the coronavirus pandemic was being brought home to the UK public, the sudden end of normalcy, rendered necessary by the need to delay the spread of Covid-19, shatters complacency and ushers in a new perspective. Tragic as the consequences are, most people can expect to survive, and lessons may be learnt for the future.

Not so, the prospects for another Great Power war. For twenty years the Charity Commission, old and new, has covered up its mishandling of the registration of two educational bodies: the Project on Demilitarisation (‘Prodem’) and The Atlantic Council of the United Kingdom (‘Atlantic Council’). Each had a profoundly different view of education in the subjects of peace or war and whichever prevails will decisively affect the Education of Nations and whether another Great Power war can be avoided; and the peace and prosperity of this and all other countries secured. The indictment of the Charity Commission is that it has, with cold and deliberate calculation, subverted the expert judicial framework of Mr Justice Carnwath, later a Supreme Court judge, as endorsed and supplemented by the Court of Appeal in 2000, without excuse or justification. It amounts to a system of state-sponsored doping…

15 February 2020

The de facto Law Officer for Public Benefit in England and Wales (LawPB) notes that the Attorney General was forced to resign by the Prime Minster on Thursday 13 February 2020. The precise reasons for this, as part of the ministerial reshuffle, were not publicly disclosed.

The LawPB made clear in his Closing Article no. 1 of 31 October 2019 (at pages 6-7) that if he had been in the position of that Law Officer of the Crown he would have resigned on 25 September 2019, i.e. the day following the Supreme Court judgment on the decision to prorogue Parliament for five weeks. The Court found that Her Majesty the Queen had been led into illegality by the advice she received from the Prime Minister on prorogation. See https://www.directionofconflict.org/closing-bulletins

Specifically, LawPB claimed that the Attorney General had not acted in good faith in providing that legal advice because, however sincere his view, he did not treat Her Majesty fairly. Moreover, nothing has yet been done, as far as is known, to prevent a recurrence of such unfairness.

27 January 2020

On the 100th anniversary of the month in which the League of Nations officially began, the third and final Closing Briefing provides a three-fold indictment of a book by Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman entitled The Future of War: A History (Penguin Books, 2018)..

The de facto Law Officer for Public Benefit (Law PB) offers academics in this or related fields a choice of peace or war, metaphorically:

* Support or join the Peace Games 2020, as trialled by the International Peace Project in 2005/06, in order that the public have a choice of life in peace or death in global war, literally;

or

* Face the prospect of further indictments from the de facto LawPB, like this one, that may be issued from time to time against those senior academics who wilfully choose to forget that their work exists to serve the public benefit, as defined in the case concerning the Project on Demilitarisation, and not their private, academic interest.

The Education of Nations will thereby be a barometer of the prospects for peace or war.

6 January 2020

In the recent United Kingdom General Election campaign three leaders of the Abrahamic religions decided to intervene politically over concern of racism in two of Britain’s political parties.

In the second of three Closing Bulletins, the de facto Law Officer for Public Benefit analyses the relationship between religion, politics and the law and finds that there was no defence on secular or theological grounds for their descent into worldliness. Nor is there any regulator to which complaint or appeal could be made, except the Court of history.

The third and final Closing Bulletin will show how the Education of Nations would work through that Court in a way that the League of Nations, established 100 years ago, did not.

31 October 2019

Her Majesty’s Attorney General has not treated Her Majesty fairly.

In the matter of the legal advice concerning the prorogation of Parliament his defence in Parliament on 25 September 2019 was: ‘At all times, the Government acted in good faith…’ Using the UK Supreme Court judgment of 24 September 2019, this defence is rejected by the de facto Law Officer for Public Benefit in England and Wales (LawPB) in his Closing Bulletin no. 1 and the related article published today. He recommends that Her Majesty has access to independent legal advice on constitutional and charity law to avoid her being led into illegality again in her public capacity.

With the upcoming General Election in mind, LawPB suggests that voters ask candidates whether they intend to take their Oath or Affirmation of allegiance to the Sovereign seriously, on being elected to the House of Commons. For this subject was not raised during the Parliamentary session on 25 September 2019 nor any remedy to the wrong highlighted.

28 June 2019

Finally, an open letter to the public in the Cathedral City of Salisbury highlighting the importance of the public benefit of the education of the public in the differing means of securing a state of peace and avoiding a state of war (an ‘irenical perspective’).

It doesn’t sound controversial and it should not be. Yet a judicially defined irenical perspective has been opposed by every English Attorney General since 2000. If the increased risks of another Great Power war are to be avoided, following the attempted political assassination in Salisbury in 2018 by a weapon of mass destruction, this educational principle must stand.

It did not after Archduke Ferdinand and his wife were assassinated on 28 June 1914 nor when the Treaty of Versailles was signed on 28 June 1919. A hundred years later the education of the public from an irenical perspective is a choice that the public can now make thanks to a Court of Appeal judgment on 28 June 2000…

30 May 2019

An open letter to the Charity Regulator for England and Wales – a non-existent body which would have come into being if the rule of law had prevailed after 28 June 2000 when judgment was handed down concerning the Project on Demilitarisation (Prodem). This letter and the accompanying article no. 5 use three real-life illustrations to apply the Prodem legal framework and show how a new charity regulator would be at the cutting edge of peace-building in 2019, in a manner that was not possible in 1919.

The letter has been copied to a wide range of senior English judges.