AN OPEN LETTER TO BRISTOL MAGISTRATES' COURT from Roger Franklin

3 January 2012

Bristol Magistrates' Court
Court Code 1013
The Clerk to the Justices
Marlborough Street
Bristol BS1 3NU

Case Number 00S9_02494_1 1
Summons for 11 January 2012

Dear People,

Well, well! What a surprise! All this legal stuff and threats of huge fines and costs over a refusal to fill in a census form. And being expected to travel (at considerable expense) to be in Bristol by 10am - a 6am start, for sure, and full prices on trains. I'd be in no condition...

So, if you are using your mighty legal powers over this trivial matter, I shall have to give a much fuller account of my several reasons for the refusal than I had thought necessary at the interview with the kind census folk at my house on 26 May 2011.

But I'll not come to Bristol - a difficult journey for an early appointment. I can never hear in courts anyway (partly deaf). And you say I need not come. But I would like my arguments to be noted by your court before the draconian penalties you threaten are imposed on me.

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What is all this really about? It looks like it's a need that some authorities have for complete obedience. O.K., so I am rather well practiced in disobedience, civil disobedience. Sometimes I am criminally disobedient, trying (with all too little success) to destroy property that is part of the U.K.'s nuclear genocide machine, e.g. Trident. Such property really has no right to exist. Other times it is civil disobedience (in the tradition of Thoreau), when I have resisted paying taxes that go to pay for nuclear war.

But a refusal of a census? Could this be criminal? Surely civil (more visitors in prison, and maybe earlier release).

So, maybe you would like to know just why I've refused the census and caused so much bother for a lot of people. There are, actually, two separate reasons, one mainly moral, the other legal. It was the moral one that the census people recorded for the papers you have sent to me. That relates to the census being carried out by a war machine corporation (merchant of death), Lockheed Martin, whose expertise with statistics has probably been developed from calculating the numbers of dead, injured and burned that would result from the explosions of one or more of the nuclear devices that Lockheed Martin helps to make at Aldermaston, and doubtless elsewhere.

I am not prepared to cooperate with making payments to that corporation for their latest, different, job of counting living people and their various doings.

There have been other people refusing the census for this same reason - see enclosures herewith.

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Now my civil disobedience is also based on important legal arguments that I didn't bother my census inquirers with as they are complicated, and I had not thought the matter would go as far as it seems to have done. It now seems I must include the legal arguments and risk being 'hanged (deported) for a sheep instead of a lamb'.

A few years ago, being ever more disgusted by the criminal insanity of those who claim to rule the United Kingdom, as they prepare ever more horrendous nuclear weaponry, and go into more and more terrible wars with ever more cruel weapons, I decided that I must completely dissociate myself from such crimes by declaring myself and my property to be politically independent: Tickmorend Free State - all 17 acres of it.

However, after being presumed to be 'president', as the only inhabitant, I began to realise that it must not be a new state: states are part of the problem as they try to take control, often by force. So I have renamed my seceded territory Tickmorend Free Space, a tiny spot in the middle of the U.K. where the queen and her government no longer rule.

Secession has been, and continues to be practised, often with eventual success by smaller and larger political entities - e.g. the original 13 states that seceded from Britain and led to the present U.S.A. Sometimes, sadly, they have led to terrible conflicts as with the American Civil War, and, more recently, Biafra's secession from Nigeria where millions perished in a suppression supported by Britain and Russia. Nonetheless several states inside the U.S.A. still do consider secession, notably Vermont.

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I know of one other small secession in Britain: Albion, near Scarborough, which is also resisting the census. Its case is well developed around the legal issues, which centre around the assumed right to rule of the Queen and her courts of law, all of whom expect total obedience from all their subjects.

By declaring independence a person or territory ceases to be subject to previous rulers and has no need to be obedient to them. And there is no need to get permission to declare independence, one can just do it.

However, to be recognised as independent can take time and be controversial. For the independence to be recognised by former rulers without the use of violence may need a decision from some sort of neutral court because the courts of the previous rulers are bound to be biased. Some international organisations, e.g. the European Union with its Court of Human Rights, or the United Nations should be able to help. Recently this has been the case with the partial recognition by the U.N. of Palestine's independence.

Albion has pointed out that all U.K. courts are part of the U.K. regime, with all officials swearing loyalty to H.M. the Queen. Therefore no U.K. court can rule on the matter of people and places that want to cease their (assumed) previous loyalty to the Queen.

So, I am not asking your court to recognise my independence in Tickmorend Free Space, and to stop bothering me about the U.K.'s census project. You cannot do that. But I shall continue with my civil disobedience until my secession can be confirmed by a court or other authority that is independent of both Tickmorend Free Space and the United Kingdom.

Meanwhile, I am unlikely to cooperate with any penalties for my disobedience that you may decide to impose.

Yours, amicably, if no longer faithfully,

Roger Franklin

I shall now add an addendum to cover some of the points I have made in slightly more detail.

Addendum

1. Henry David Thoreau wrote the brilliant "Essay on Civil Disobedience" after his one night in gaol in Concord, Massachusetts for refusing to pay a tax that would help an unjust war. That was in 1846, and the U.S.A. had invaded Mexico. The essay inspired Leo Tolstoy in Russia, Gandhi in India, and, later, Rev. Martin Luther King in U.S.A.

2. Small independent states within, or between larger ones:
San Marino. Inside north-east Italy. Popn. 23,000. Independent since 4th Century.
Andorra. Autonomous state in Pyrenees between France and Spain. Popn. 50,000 .
Liechtenstein. Between Austria and Switzerland. Popn. 28,000.
Monaco. Mediterranean state surrounded by France. A principality. Popn. 29,000.
Also, semi-independent British islands: Channel Islands and the Isle of Man. The latter, popn. 65,000, has a degree of home rule and a legislature.

3. Fictional indepedent small states:
The Napoleon of Notting Hill by G.K. Chesterton (1904) - ends violently.
Passport to Pimlico, Ealing Comedy (1949).
The Mouse that Roared, book/film (1955).

4. There are many independent small island states; one of the smallest, still trying for independence is Anguilla, in the West Indies near Granada.

5. In Australia, there have been quite a lot of individual or small group declarations of independence. Many revolve around money, and some have been criminal, but a few seem to be, or have been, reasonable legitimate and to have lasted quite a while. More information on the internet and some publications.

6. Choice of nationality in HMS Pinafore by W.S. Gilbert (and Sullivan):
"For he might have been a Roosian,
A French or Turk or Prossian,
Or perhaps Ital-ian!
But in spite of all temptations
To belong to other nations,
He remains an Englishman!"
Maybe now it should go the other way!

7. As much of the U.K. has just celebrated Christmas, it is appropriate to remember the census that forms part of that story. It seems that you want your census to go even more smoothly than the one in Bethlehem some 2,000 years ago. Then, some rather special people, as it turned out, were forced to travel to Bethlehem to help that census. Now you want me to travel to Bristol to explain my reasons for objecting to this one.

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Postscript

What you are doing looks like the proverbial use of a sledgehammer to crack a nut. Perhaps, though, this 'nut' is already rather 'cracked' to be resisting on such a trivial matter. But I feel I must resist in order to confirm my independence from the U.K.'s rulers and so dissociate myself from their continuing crimes of violence (extreme).

You may want to crush this 'nut' to show how disobedience must always be crushed; to make an example. But do you really think there are many others who will follow me into moving away from the U.K. and its policies of war? I do hope so, but I'm afraid it seems rather unlikely.

A FURTHER LETTER TO BRISTOL MAGISTRATES' COURT from Roger Franklin

27 January 2012

New case number 521200016754

New hearing date: 8 February 2012

This is some additional comments regarding this case. I'm told that my OPEN LETTER to your court of 3 January 2012 was seen by the magistrates on the original date of 11 January 2012.

I did not attend the original hearing, as explained in the OPEN LETTER. However, I now have been offered a car lift by a friend and neighbour, so it will be possible for me to get to the new hearing, hopefully on time (travel by foot, bus and rail from here to the court would have taken at least three hours).

I have had several requests from the prosecution for whether I want their witnesses to be in Court. I have said that I do not need them to be there.

The prosecution are also asing persistently for me to "plead guilty or not guilty". On this matter, I want to say that pleading is not what I do. Pleading assumes an authority over me to whom I am a subject. And in this case I can see no use for the word 'guilt'. All I can say is what I did or did not do, which is, in my case, quite obvious. And I shall come to the hearing to discuss the issues that matter to me, which I have already explained as well as I can in the OPEN LETTER.

I am enclosing with this another copy of my original OPEN LETTER, together with a copy of a local newspaper article from September 6, 2005 that shows how I declared independence from the United Kingdom then. I think I already sent another copy of that to the Court. And I am enclosing some copies of recent local newspapers' coverage of the case.

I'm including a letter from Stroud Life newspaper by a supporter of our Mayor, John Marjoram, who is in court on the same day as me. It expresses very well the way I too feel about the 'Merchant of Death' employed by last March's census.

Yours, still amicably,

Roger Franklin

OUTCOME

In court on 8 February, Roger Franklin is reported to have told the Court: "I try to distance myself as far as I can from the warlike activities of the British state." He was found guilty and fined £360 plus £85 costs and £15 victim surcharge. This amount has now been paid in full as 222 individual cheques mostly of £2 and under by supporters.