The
Lord Monckton Foundation Charter
The Lord Monckton Foundation stands as the wall of the West, the
redoubt of reason, the sentinel of science, the fortress of freedom,
and the defender of democracy. By this Charter, the Governing
Council is directed to obtain and to deploy whatever resources may
be necessary for the energetic furtherance of the ambitions and
activities of the Foundation, which shall conduct research, publish
papers, educate students and the public and take every measure that
may be necessary to restore the primacy and use of reason in science
and public policy worldwide, especially insofar as they may bear
upon the rights of the people fairly and fully to be informed,
openly and freely to debate, and secretly by ballot to decide who
shall govern them, what laws they shall live by and what imposts
they shall endure.
It was neither accident nor
coincidence that the dawn of the Age of Enlightenment and Reason was
also the dawn of the West. The Scientific Method, first adumbrated
in the early Middle Ages as a moral as well as a rational discipline
by the Iraqi mathematician Abu Ali Ibn Al-Haytham, who had
beautifully spoken of scientists as Seekers after Truth, attained
its apotheosis in the minds of Newton, who acknowledged that he
stood upon the shoulders of giants; of Huxley, who held that
scepticism is the highest duty of the improver of natural knowledge;
and of Popper, who said that good tests kill flawed theories. The
politicization and perversion of objective science, and especially
of climate science, are a menace to the West and to the world.
With the British Empire, governance
became truly global for the first time. The world, said the
philosopher Santayana, never had sweeter masters. Today,
notwithstanding the sunset of that first global Empire, the tendency
towards global governance is gathering both momentum and permanence
through entities such as the United Nations, the Organization on
Economic Cooperation and Development and the Framework Convention on
Climate Change, the latest and crudest pretext for necessary
tyranny. Not one
of the multiplying and expanding institutions of supranational and
now global governance is truly a democracy. Only at the level of the
nation-state – and even then by no means universally – is government
of the people, by the people and for the people the happy custom.
Therefore, however necessary it be that nations should collaborate
and cooperate in matters of common concern, every cession of
sovereignty from a nation to a supranational or global entity at
present entails a real transfer of legislative and increasingly of
fiscal power from elected to unelected hands – both legislation and
taxation without representation.
Is science dead? Must reason fail?
Shall objectivity be slaughtered again on the pagan altar of mere
ideology? Is life now objectionable, liberty deplorable, the pursuit
of happiness a crime? Has the nation had its day? Is the
globalization of governance really a public good? Can democracy
survive it? Should not the use of the ballot-box be extended? Should
not every supranational and global institution of governance be
elected? The Foundation exists to illuminate questions such as
these, and to inspire devotion to the cause of Western civilization,
true reason, sound science, universal liberty and worldwide
democracy in the hearts of all men of goodwill.
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