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Daniel Hannan is an MEP for the south east of England. He writes regular bulletins on the European Union and related issues. The most recent is listed first. See also Dan Hannan's EU blog
EU referendum apathy
Why
we must demand a referendum on the EU
I hate to say “I told you so”
Shadow-boxing in Brussels
Continental Drift
Plan to revive Constitution exposed
Why doesn't the EU join Switzerland?
Apathy and the EU agenda
EU finances are an ongoing scandal
The EU was a product of its time
How the EU bought my daughter
Clearing up some EU misconceptions
The EU has blackened its green record
The Euro-constitution is sneaking in by the back door
Growing doubts over the euro
German plan to resuscitate EU Constitution
Vote for an independent Britain!
No votes ignored as Constitution presses ahead
EU accounts not approved for the 12th year running
EU regulation costs businesses €600 billion a year
Brussels is using terrorism to further its federal ambitions
Using children to sell the EU message
Giscard d’Estaing knows best
What if Britain is left behind?
Britons should back oppressed minorities (that means
us, too)
Another Strasbourg scam
When in Rome... copy the Italians and vote for the oddball
So, you thought the European constitution was dead,
did you?
What happened to the free market?
A lonely dissenting voice
Let's get a couple of things straight
Another year, another EU fraud
Lessons from Latin America
EU referendum apathy
Well done to the 50,000 readers who have signed the Telegraph’s
petition
for a referendum on the reheated European constitution. But –
and I’m sorry to be blunt – where the hell are the rest of
you? Do you actively want Britain to be a province of a European state?
Are you happy for your leaders to hand away your birthright without a
by-your-leave? Or is sending in a coupon too much effort?
Gordon Brown must think he has got away with the greatest swindle in modern electoral history. “We will put it [the constitution] to the British people in a referendum and campaign wholeheartedly for a ‘Yes’ vote,” said the last Labour manifesto. Yet, when the Labour leader breezily welshes on that promise, we remain unmoved.
Yes, unmoved: for, while 50,000 is an impressive figure, 19 out of every 20 Telegraph readers – and 99 out of every 100 voters – haven’t signed.
These statistics may explain Mr Brown’s perfunctory tone when he claims that the new “Reform Treaty” is different from the constitution. He sounds like a Brezhnev-era party spokesman, woodenly repeating the party line without expecting anyone to believe it.
The Prime Minister knows, and we know, and he knows that we know, that this is the treaty he promised to put to a referendum. Every other EU leader has affirmed that the two drafts are substantively identical. So, inadvertently, has Mr Brown himself when, in a hilarious slip of the tongue following talks with Bertie Ahern, he announced that they had been “discussing the European constitution, and how to take that forward”. The never-sufficiently-to-be-praised pressure group Open Europe has placed the two texts side by side and found no practical differences: see for yourself here.
Not that Mr Brown cares. He doesn’t hope or expect to carry public opinion. It’s not our approval that he asks, simply our acquiescence. We are becoming like the sullen, captive peoples of the old Comecon states: resentful but resigned, cynical but defeated. Eighty per cent of us say we want a referendum, and 70 per cent that we would vote “No”. Yet there are no marches, no demonstrations, no Soweto-style crowds shuffling toward Downing Street with burning tyres – nothing except the 50,000 patriots who have joined this newspaper’s campaign.
How are we to explain such listlessness? It is partly based on the understandable belief that, however people vote, Brussels will carry on agglomerating powers. The Danes, the Irish, the French and the Dutch have all, at one time or another, voted “No”, only to be swatted aside. If the Euro-elites always ignore public opinion, the public may see little point in having an opinion.
But it also reflects a tactical failure by me and my fellow Euro-sceptics. While most voters want powers back from Brussels, they see the whole question as remote: far less pressing than education, taxation or immigration.
Although the EU now passes 84 per cent of legislation in the member states, most people still think of it as a foreign rather than a domestic issue. In fact, of course, virtually every field of government activity is touched by Brussels.
The last local elections were dominated by the question of weekly bin collections, but only that tireless warhorse Christopher Booker pointed out that local councils were complying with the EU’s Landfill Directive. Nor is it often remarked that HIPs are a product of Brussels’ demand that houses be environmentally surveyed. Nor that the new system of stamp pricing is a consequence of the Postal Services Directive. Nor that the rigmarole needed to open a bank account is demanded by the Money Laundering Directive.
The EU doesn’t confine itself to cross-border issues. Many of its most damaging rulings have no obvious international dimension. Think of the asphyxiation of our art market, the hoovering up of our fish stocks, car seats for 12-year-olds. We pay more than £12 billion a year into the EU budget – enough to scrap inheritance tax and capital gains tax, and still have enough left over to abolish stamp duty. If that isn’t a domestic issue, I don’t know what is.
Indeed, the debate shouldn’t be about Europe at all; it should be about Britain, and whether we want to hire and fire our lawmakers.
But, whether through ignorance, apathy or fatalism, we remain indifferent. Our fathers were prepared to defend, with force of arms, our right to live under our own representatives. Yet we apparently can’t rouse ourselves to sign a petition to the same end. Our rulers have made the calculation that we simply don’t care whether we live in an independent country. What does it say about us if they’re right?
Why we must demand a referendum
on the EU
Suppose – and you might not find this easy – that you were
a committed Euro-federalist. Imagine that you wanted the EU to go the
whole hog, totus porcus, toward statehood. What would you have most wanted
to get out of the recent Brussels summit?
In fact, much of your work would already have been done. The EU currently possesses many of the attributes and trappings of nationhood: a parliament, a supreme court, a passport, a currency, a national anthem, a flag, external borders. There are, though, four more pieces to slot into the jigsaw before the EU can properly call itself a sovereign polity.
First, a head of state. Second, a foreign policy, complete with a foreign minister, a diplomatic corps and accredited embassies. Third, a system of criminal justice, including a European Public Prosecutor and a police force. Fourth, the "legal personality" of an independent government, which confers treaty-making powers and the right to sit in international associations.
All these things are in the draft "Reform Treaty" – along with the Charter of Fundamental Rights, the abolition of some 40 national vetoes, new powers for the European Parliament and a 30 per cent reduction in Britain’s ability to block new initiatives.
Regular readers will know that I’ve been predicting all this for the past year-and-half. It was obvious that the leaders of the EU planned to revive as much of the constitution as they could get away with. But they could hardly just turn up and sign: that would have given the game away. So, precisely as I forecast, they staged some faux fights, designed to simulate a re-negotiation.
I say this, not to swank, but to make an important point about the EU, namely that this is how it always behaves. When people vote "No" to closer integration – as they usually do, given the chance – their opposition is seen as an obstacle to be overcome, not a reason to alter course.
The purpose of the Brussels summit was to allow the seven EU leaders who had promised a plebiscite to tiptoe away from their pledges. Ireland and Denmark are lucky enough to have rules that trigger a vote whenever any constitutional change is proposed. But the other leaders have joined hands and sworn a terrible oath: no referendums anywhere, in case the sight of one country voting should prompt demand in others. We don’t want the voters picking up any ideas, hein?
I was wrong about one thing, though. I had assumed that, in order to sustain their line that the new text was different from the old, there would be some substantive changes. In fact, such alterations as there have been are decorative, not structural; emendations, not amendments.
This is admitted with startling frankness in the new draft, which emphasises the importance of changing the terminology: "The term 'Constitution’ will not be used, the 'Union Minister for Foreign Affairs’ will be called High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy."
Behind the new nomenclature, however, almost nothing has changed – as those EU leaders who don’t have to back away from a referendum promise artlessly concede. "The fundamentals of the Constitution have been maintained," says Angela Merkel. "The great part of the European Constitution is in the new treaty," agrees José Luis Zapatero. "Thankfully they haven’t changed the substance; 90 per cent of it is still there," echoes Bertie Ahern.
The main dissenting voice is, of course, Britain’s. Our ministers insist that the new draft is milder, because Britain has opted out of elements of foreign affairs and criminal justice. But we went through this exhaustively after Maastricht: a treaty clause trumps a declaration. When asked, the European Court always upholds the legal requirements of a treaty rather than the exemptions.
In two regards, the new draft is worse than the old. When the text was a constitution, it at least had a certain finality to it: further alterations would have required a cumbersome amendment process. Now, though, it contains an "escalator clause", allowing Brussels to extend its jurisdiction without needing further treaties. At the same time, the French have taken out the commitment to free competition, rasing the awkward question of whether the EU now serves any purpose whatever.
We can look at the text from any angle. We can prowl about it, searching for a more flattering light. But we keep coming back to an unavoidable truth: this is the constitution on which all three parties – indeed, 98.8 per cent of MPs – promised a referendum.
Once again, we see that, as well as being undemocratic in itself, the EU traduces democracy within its member nations. That is why the referendum matters so much.
I hate to say “I told you
so”
Yes, but what’s the substantive difference? When you lay the Treaty
Establishing a Constitution for Europe next to the new Amending Treaty,
how do they practically diverge?
The truth, as the brilliant analysis by Open Europe shows, is that the two texts, when measured by their impact on the lives of EU citizens, are identical. Such changes as there have been are decorative, not structural. The only real difference is that we had been promised a referendum on the old draft, but are to be denied one on the new.
I hate to say “I told you so”, but I told you so. I have been repeatedly predicting for the past year and a half that EU leaders would resurrect the constitution under a new name, and with precisely such minimalist and cosmetic emendations as have been agreed. In recent weeks, I was almost the only observer left who was forecasting a deal at the recent summit along these lines. Nor did I ever fall for the idea that Labour might surprise us all by keeping its word and offering us a referendum.
I say all this, not to swank, but to demonstrate how the EU works. The reason I knew that the constitution would come back essentially unaltered, that the “rows” at the Brussels summit would be staged purely for domestic consumption, and that Labour would break its referendum promise, is because this is how Brussels always behaves.
The EU is undemocratic, not by oversight, but because it was designed that way. The patriarchs of federalism – Monnet, Schuman, de Gasperi and the rest – understood that their scheme to merge the ancient kingdoms and republics of Europe would never come off if each successive transfer of power to Brussels had to be approved by the national electorates. That is why they designed a structure which vests supreme power with unelected civil servants. And that is why, in Brussels, the worst of all crimes is “populism” - which, when you think about it, is another word for “democracy”: the readiness of elected representatives to do what their constituents want.
The worst of it is the way national governments pick up bad habits from the EU. Although the 27 member states are all parliamentary democracies, their leaders are learning in Brussels to disdain their electorates. This was neatly encapsulated in one of Tony Blair’s final interviews as Prime Minister, in which, adapting Engels’ theory of “false consciousness”, he told The Guardian: “The British people are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don’t expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it.” Got that? We don’t want our ministers to do what we say. We want them to second-guess our true interests.
This is the single most objectionable aspect of the European project: the way it vitiates democracy, not just within its own institutions, but in its member nations, too. The 27 national leaders have, in effect, given up on their electorates. As the Secretary of the East German Writers’ Union put it following the 1953 anti-Communist riots: “The people have forfeited the confidence of the government”.
If you think I’m going too far, let me point out that, in every member state, by majorities of between 65 and 85 per cent, voters want a referendum on the outcome of Friday’s talks. According to a poll in the Evening Standard last week, the figure has now risen to 86 per cent in the United Kingdom. Let me remind you, too, that 98.8 per cent of British MPs (all but 8) were elected, either on a platform of outright opposition to the constitution, or on the basis of a manifesto promise of a referendum.
If they keep their pledge, and if people vote for the constitution, I’ll accept the results with as much good grace as I can muster and withdraw quietly from politics. But if they won’t let us vote, their whole wretched project will be illegitimate.
Shadow-boxing in Brussels
I’m beginning to feel out on a limb here. Every British newspaper
— with the exception of the nation’s leading quality daily
is predicting an almighty bust-up at the Brussels summit, ending, in all
probability, in a failure to reach agreement.
Regular readers will know that I have been arguing for months that the outlines of the deal have been agreed, and that what is going on now is choreography: a simulated row played out for the benefit of each leader’s domestic media.
We’ll know soon enough who is right. I’m sticking to my prediction — a prediction I first made 16 months ago — that the leaders of the EU will approve the constitution with only what Angela Merkel calls “the necessary presentational changes”.
What are these changes? The name will be different. The structure will be re-jigged, so that the old treaties remain intact instead of being folded into the new one. The EU foreign minister will be given a suitably bland title: High Commissioner for External Relations or some such.
The Charter of Fundamental Rights won’t be written into the text: it doesn’t need to be, since the European Commission, Court and Parliament are already treating it as justifiable, and a new EU institution, the Human Rights Agency in Vienna, is working full time to ensure that we comply with its requirements.
None of this will amount to substantive change. You might almost say that the leaders of the EU plan “to use different terminology while preserving intact the legal substance” — not my words, but the startlingly frank phrase of the summit host, Mrs Merkel.
Obviously, EU leaders can’t admit this, so they have to synthesise a series of battles. The summit will almost certainly over-run, so as to give the impression that the governments went right down to the wire. And, in the immediate aftermath, without sight of the text, each nation will be dependent on its Alastair Campbell to tell it what has been agreed.
There will be a sustained effort, during July and August, to fix indelibly in our minds the idea that the treaty is minimalist and technical. The calculation is that, by the time we finally get to read it, we’ll have lost interest. Similar tactics worked following the Amsterdam and Nice summits.
I could, of course, be utterly wrong. I usually am. But conjecture, for a moment, that I’m right, that a deal is struck, and that the new text is substantively similar to the old. Ponder the following statistic. Out of 658 MPs at Westminster, 650 were elected on the basis of a manifesto commitment to a referendum. What would it say about the state of our democracy if we didn’t get one?
Continental Drift
Don’t say you weren’t warned. It was all there in Tony Blair’s
very first speech as Labour leader. ‘Under my leadership,’
he told his Blackpool delegates in 1994, ‘I will never allow this
country to be isolated or left behind in Europe.’ Ponder those words
for a moment. There is no hint of conditionality in them. Blair was not
arguing that participation in EU initiatives would benefit Britain; rather
he saw it as an end in itself: a demonstration that Britain was a modern,
outward-looking country.
Blair’s internationalism was of the woolly-minded sort that owes more to Lennon than to Lenin: ‘Imagine there’s no countries, it isn’t hard to do, nothing to kill or die for…’ Opposition to the EU, he believed, came from Blimps and boneheads. He was not a Blimp or a bonehead. Therefore the EU must be a good thing. Blair’s Europeanism, in other words, was never based on a cost-benefit analysis; it flowed, rather, from his sense of himself as a progressive cosmopolitan. This is, of course, the worst possible frame of mind in which to enter negotiations, as was demonstrated just six weeks into Blair’s term of office at the Amsterdam summit.
The Major government had been opposing the extension of EU jurisdiction in environmental and regional policy, criminal justice and the Social Chapter. Blair immediately instructed British officials to drop their objections. He did so, not because he actively favoured an extension of qualified majority voting in these areas, but because he wanted to prove his communautaire credentials.
To be fair, Blair’s predecessors had begun the same way. All British leaders trace similar European trajectories: obsequiousness, then exigence, then truculence, then peevishness. They begin by making concessions in the hope of winning influence; then, when they are rebuffed, they become sulky. John Major opened his premiership promising to put Britain ‘at the very heart of Europe’, but closed it by blocking all EU business in opposition to the beef ban. Margaret Thatcher’s first campaign as Conservative leader was for a ‘Yes to Europe’ in the 1975 referendum; her last was for a ‘no, no, no’ to the Delors plan for political union.
Tony Blair, too, started off believing that a little goodwill was all that was needed. The other members were overjoyed when, at Amsterdam, he surrendered the competitive advantage that Britain had derived from its opt-out on social and employment policy. They were stunned when, at St Malo the following year, he reversed the UK’s long-standing opposition to a European defence policy outside Nato. Jacques Chirac, who had been prepared to rejoin the Nato command in return, couldn’t believe his luck. Being tutoyéd by the overfamiliar youngster was a small price to pay for fulfilling a 40-year-old French dream of European military independence.
In due course, Blair began to look for some payback. Having done everything that was asked of him, he now suggested that the other leaders might like, in return, to abandon their plans for political amalgamation. In a speech in Warsaw in 2000, he essayed a classic piece of New Labour triangulation. On one side, he claimed, were those who wanted nothing but a free market. On the other were the superstaters. In between was his vision of a Europe of collaborating nations, pooling their sovereignty only in limited areas.
His fellow heads of government listened impatiently, and then pushed ahead with their plan for a European constitution. Blair was learning, as previous British leaders had learnt, that Euro-diplomacy works on the basis of present advantage, not past gratitude. As far as the other members were concerned, Blair’s early concessions simply brought Britain into line with its obligations under the treaties. They had no intention of abandoning the finalité politique simply in order to humour the Brits.
The PM was genuinely hurt. But worse was to follow. First, the French and German governments met behind his back to ensure that there would be no overhaul of the Common Agricultural Policy. This was a particular blow to Blair, who had always held out the prospect of CAP reform as the justification for accepting more majority voting. Then, in 2005, the other member states closed ranks to demand that Britain – already the second-largest net contributor to the EU budget – should increase its proportion still further. Blair, swearing he would not consent, consented, agreeing to pay a further £7 billion towards the EU’s boondoggles.
At this stage, disillusion set in. But Blair’s disillusion was as much with his own voters as with the EU. He had hoped, in the early days, to tickle the British people out of their isolationism. Many Euro-zealots were dismayed by his promises of referendums, first on the euro and then on the EU constitution, but Blair was confident that his personal charm would turn public opinion around.
Now, as he prepares to leave the scene, he feels that his country has let him down. In a recent Guardian interview, the Prime Minister constructed a quite extraordinary argument. ‘The British people,’ he said, ‘are sensible enough to know that, even if they have a certain prejudice about Europe, they don’t expect their government necessarily to share it or act upon it’. In other words, we secretly want our ministers to do the opposite of what we say we want. It’s a version of what Engels called ‘false consciousness’, and it is very common in Brussels circles. But what’s especially galling, in this instance, is that Blair’s promise of a referendum on the constitution was a vital part of his electoral success. ‘We will put it [the constitution] to the British people in a referendum and campaign wholeheartedly for a Yes vote’ said the 2005 Labour manifesto, thereby ensuring that the general election did not become a surrogate referendum.
Now that pledge is to go the way of so many others. Like the leader of East Germany’s Writers’ Union following the 1953 anti-Communist riots, Blair feels that the people have forfeited the confidence of their government. How apt that his last act as Prime Minister, his agreement to the reheated European constitution, should be a breach of a manifesto commitment.
I once asked Enoch Powell how he felt about the British electorate’s readiness to go along with European integration. ‘When I was a young man,’ he told me, ‘I made the mistake of despairing of my countrymen. I shall not repeat at the end of my life the mistake I made at its beginning’.
Tony Blair made the same mistake from the opposite perspective, namely to believe that the British people could be made to see themselves as Europeans. He won’t be repeating that, either.
Plan to revive Constitution exposed
This is how our code-breakers at Bletchley must have felt when a fully
operational Enigma machine fell into their hands. After months of guesswork,
we finally understand the enemy's intentions. This single providential
discovery could represent the turning point of the entire campaign.
I am clutching in my hot, trembling hands the most extraordinary document I have come across in eight years of Euro-politics. It is a letter from the German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, to her fellow EU heads of government. In it, she proposes a scheme to bring back the European Constitution under a new name - or, as she artlessly puts it, "to use different terminology without changing the legal substance".
Now this, in itself, is not surprising. Many of us have suspected all along that the Eurocrats would try to bring back their constitution surreptitiously: I have written as much in these pages. What is shocking is the brazenness. Mrs Merkel flagrantly admits that she wants to preserve intact the content of the constitution, making only "the necessary presentational changes".
These changes mainly involve dropping paragraphs that the voters don't like, and which are in any case unnecessary because they restate what is in existing treaties. Thus, Mrs Merkel suggests excising the reference to the primacy of EU law. Since this concept has been part of EU jurisprudence since 1964, she reasons, there is no point in rubbing people's noses in the fact by spelling it out.
She also proposes scrapping the reference to the EU's symbols. Again, not a single 12-star flag will be hauled down as a consequence. The bands will still strike up Beethoven's Ninth, bringing a lump to Euro-enthusiast throats (I'm afraid that that stirring tune now has much the same effect on me as it has on Alex in A Clockwork Orange, and for the same reason - bad connotations). The change will be, as Mrs Merkel puts it with such admirable frankness, presentational. Similarly, she has a clever wheeze to "replace the full text of the Charter of Fundamental Rights with a short cross-reference having the same legal value". And so on.
The leaking of this letter is calamitous for the Euro-federalists. Their whole strategy depended on obfuscation, complexity and voter fatigue. The electorates of Europe might sense that their leaders are up to no good but, so far, they have not been able to hang their doubts on anything specific. Now, though, they have it in black and white: they are to get the same constitution as before, but without the promised referendums.
Think, for a moment, about how scandalous this is. After all, Labour's commitment to a plebiscite did not come as an afterthought. It was central to that party's election strategy.
There was a time, back in 2004, when it looked as though Europe might again dominate British politics, greatly to the detriment of the governing party. People could see that Brussels was engaged in a huge power-grab. They could see, too, that other countries were offering referendums. The Tories and the Lib Dems were demanding the same right for Britain.
Tony Blair feared, with good reason, that, if he did not allow a referendum, voters would treat the 2004 European election and, worse, the 2005 general election as surrogate referendums. Returning from the Caribbean, tanned, fit and lean, he suddenly announced that he would, after all, let the people decide.
We Tories were left opening and closing our mouths like Appalachian yokels. Mr Blair's announcement deprived us at the last minute of what was to have been our main argument. I remember, as a Euro-candidate in 2004, having to pulp whole forests of redundant campaign literature. We duly went down to the worst defeat the Conservative Party has ever suffered - worse even than the catastrophe of 1832.
Having promised a referendum in two manifestos, and having won office on that basis, Labour will find it hard to explain why it now wants to rat. The publication of the Merkel letter makes it impossible to pretend that the new text is substantively different from the old one.
No doubt ministers will try, essaying all sorts of sophist arguments to the effect that treaties are different from constitutions, and that the EU is already doing most of the things that the sceptics complain about. None of it will wash, though.
I hope I never have to give an interview like the one poor Geoff Hoon gave to The World at One last week. His own mother, had she been listening, would have thought him a terrible fibber. "What was different about the constitutional treaty," stammered the hapless Europe minister, "was that it altered the basic relationship between the European Union and the member states, and therefore it was appropriate to have a referendum." How painful to re-read those words in the context of the Merkel letter.
Let us be clear: the European constitution amounts to a revolution in how our country is governed, perhaps the most far-reaching since the civil and religious upheavals of the 17th century. This revolution is taking place not as the result of popular insurrection or foreign occupation, but because the governing party is abusing its majority.
Labour may get its way, in the narrow sense of ramming the new treaty through without a referendum. But it will pay a heavy price in damage to its reputation, as will the Euro-integrationist cause more widely. "Vencerán, pero no convencerán," as Miguel de Unamuno told the Nationalist leaders at the beginning of Spain's Civil War: you'll conquer, but you won't convince.
Parliament is not the owner of our freedoms, but their temporary and contingent custodian. If Labour MPs want to give those freedoms away in perpetuity, they should have the decency to ask us first.
If they win, I promise to accept the result with as much good grace as I can muster. But if they go back on their manifesto promise, they won't deserve to be forgiven.
Why doesn't the EU join Switzerland?
Here’s my latest wheeze. Every time the European Parliament meets
in session, I make a speech on a more or less random subject. My theory
is that, if you turn over almost any stone in the EU, you’ll find
some creepy crawlies under it.
Yesterday, I decided to talk about the EU’s relationship with Switzerland. And, sure enough, I stumbled upon a rather shocking fact. Brussels is censuring the Swiss for offering “illicit state aid” to certain companies, thereby prejudicing Europe’s internal market. And what does this “illicit state aid” constitute? You guessed it: low taxes.
Keen readers of this blog will know that MEPs are typically given only 90 seconds to speak. Here’s how I filled my time:
Mr President, why are the Swiss doing so much better than us? Why is the Helvetic Confederation richer, more content, more orderly and better administered than the European Union?
Allow me to suggest a reason. Switzerland is founded on what one might call the Jeffersonian principle: the notion that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people they affect.
The European Union, by contrast, is founded on the converse principle. The very first line of the very first Article of the Treaty of Rome commits us to an “ever-closer union”. Whereas power in Switzerland is dispersed, power in the EU is concentrated.
And from that one structural flaw, Mr President, come most of our present discontents: the unintended consequences of our directives and regulations; the inflexibility of our policies; the sense that the government has become remote from the governed; the determination of our national electorates to vote “No” to Brussels at every opportunity; and, come to that, the high level of taxation in the EU.
Why, then, do we keep bullying and hectoring the Swiss over their refusal to join us? Why do we attack their success in keeping their cantonal taxes down? Why do we encourage that minority of Swiss legislators who see EU membership precisely as a way of sidestepping their voters and escaping their system of direct democracy?
Is it that we envy our neighbours their success? Or is it that we fear that our own citizens will be encouraged by their example, and demand independence for their own states?
Let me propose an alternative approach. Instead of seeking to drag Switzerland into our Union, why don’t our member states instead apply to become cantons of their confederation? They are, after all, getting something right, these Switzers.
Apathy and the EU agenda
I don’t like to say “I told you so”, but I told you
so. In a joint press conference with the Dutch prime minister, Tony Blair
has admitted that he plans to bring back a version of the EU constitution
under a different name.
The leaders of the EU will go through the text removing the passages that restate what is already in the existing Treaties, or that formalise an extension of power that has happened de facto. This will allow them to present an apparently much shorter text – shorter, however, only because Brussels, anticipating the entry into force of the constitution, has already started to do most of the things that it would have authorised.
The common foreign policy is up and running, with huge Euro-embassies in non-EU capitals and a diplomatic corps that dwarfs any of the national foreign services. The harmonisation of justice and home affairs has taken place, despite the rejection in the French and Dutch referendums of the clauses that would have authorised it. The Charter of Fundamental Rights is being treated as justiciable.
Why irk the voters by spelling these things out, reason the Eurocrats, when they are happening anyway, albeit with no formal legal base? This, after all, is how the EU has proceeded for 50 years: first it extends its jurisdiction into a new field; then, often years later, it formalises that extension in a treaty. It’s what we Old Brussels Hands call “the Monnet method” and, from a Euro-enthusiast point of view, it has been a stunning success.
Where voters would be unlikely to endorse new transfers of power to Brussels, they often grumblingly accept losses of sovereignty that are presented to them as faits accomplis.
Having removed the otiose paragraphs, the 27 EU leaders will be able to present their electorates with a supposedly slimmed-down document. “These are largely technical changes,” they will insist. “New voting weights, an end to the rotating presidency, some streamlining of the Brussels bureaucracy: you surely can’t suggest that we should pester people with a referendum over something so trivial.” But, of course, the reason their new text will be shorter is because the EU has already implemented most of the old one.
The worst of it is that the Eurocrats will probably get away with it. Although voters don’t much like European integration, they are often fatalistic about it, believing that nothing they do can arrest the process. Faced with technical arguments about whether or not the Charter of Fundamental Rights has binding force, or the precise legal basis of the European External Action Service, they are likely to shrug resignedly.
How we are reduced as a people. If, after long debate, Britain reached the view that it would be better off as part of a larger European polity, this would at least be understandable. How degrading, though, to watch us shuffling off our freedoms from no higher motive than boredom.
Our fathers were prepared to defend, with force of arms if necessary, their right to live under their own laws and their own parliament. What would it say about our generation if we were to toss that right aside, without a shot being fired in anger, simply because we couldn’t be bothered to read about what was happening?
EU finances are an ongoing scandal
What else does the EU have to do to convince you that it’s a racket?
This week, 100 police officers were involved in dawn raids in four EU
countries.
They arrested a series of EU officials, some apparently with Mafia links, in connection with the theft of tens of millions of euros. It seems that companies were being asked for bribes in return for contracts. Three Italians have so far been charged.
I know, I know: all institutions have bad people in them, there is sleaze at national level too, blah blah. But this is in a different league. For the past 13 years, the European Court of Auditors has refused to sign off on the EU accounts because it can typically verify only 10 or 11 per cent of total spending. The problem is not simply to do with a handful of shysters; it is structural, a product of how the EU is designed.
Milton Friedman used to observe that there are two kinds of money in the world: your money and my money. We are careless about the first, but jealous of the second. The trouble is that, in Brussels, it’s all your money. The EU expects bouquets when it spends, but not brickbats when it taxes, because the taxation is carried out for it by national authorities. At best, this makes it blasé in its attitude to fiscal prudence; at worst, downright corrupt.
One of my most treasured memories of the European Parliament was of the debate that followed the Asian tsunami. One after another, MEPs rose to call for larger aid contributions. “We should give a hundred million euros, colleagues”; “No, two hundred million!”; “My friends, nothing less than three hundred million euros will demonstrate the Union’s commitment to reconstruction” etc.
Then a well-meaning Italian Christian Democrat rose to suggest that we might make a more practical contribution. Why didn’t each MEP contribute a single day’s attendance allowance – around €300? At once, the room turned to ice. Those who had been so free with their constituents’ money suddenly found all sorts of practical objections to chipping in their own.
For a few minutes, that poor Italian took over from me as The Most Unpopular Man In Brussels.
If the kitchen is dirty, bacteria will breed. The EU is set up in such a way that no one has any incentive to reduce spending or eliminate corruption.
The European Commission demands a constantly expanding budget, hoping to buy itself popularity. The European Parliament never refuses it resources for fear of arresting “the process of European construction”.
Euro-officials on the spot make sure they plough through their budgets so that they can demand more the following year. Their recipients, knowing that there is a pot of money waiting to be claimed, are none too scrupulous about getting their hands on it. The national authorities, taking the view that it is all EU money, have little interest in policing the system. And anyone who complains can always be shouted down as a xenophobe.
This last, at least, has begun to change. The scandal has been comprehensively covered by Spanish and French newspapers as well, obviously, as in Italy. And German journalists, for a long time reluctant to cover any story that showed the EU in a bad light, are making up for lost time. Only in Britain, oddly, is there scant interest.
Still, the problem remains. Eurocrats do not have to answer to anyone, and so can arrange matters around their own convenience. MEPs, notionally the people’s tribunes, are reluctant to complain on the glass houses and stones principle. Most national governments, too, are prepared to tolerate Brussels corruption, seeing it as a price worth paying for deeper integration. And so the scandals continue.
The EU was a product of its time
"I know you like to knock the EU, Hannan, but getting to 50 is no
small achievement," says a Euro-enthusiast friend. He has a point.
Those of us who criticise the Brussels racket need to acknowledge that,
whatever its faults, countries keep joining it.
The more I think about it, though, the more it strikes me that most of the EU’s flaws are a direct consequence of when it was founded.
All organisations develop according to the DNA that was encoded at their conception. The US, born out of a popular revolt against a remote government, was built on the Jeffersonian principle that decisions should be taken as closely as possible to the people. The EU, by contrast, was founded on precisely the opposite principle: “ever closer union”.
Why? It all comes down to bad timing. The US had the good fortune to draw up its constitution at the moment when Western thought was most obsessed with limited government and the Rights of Man. Sadly, the EU, too, was a child of its time, founded at the height of the post-war consensus, when big was beautiful, and everyone expected the state to keep growing.
Thus, where the US Declaration of Independence promises life liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights guarantees our entitlement to strike action, social housing and affordable healthcare. To this day, the EU toddles happily along with Five Year Plans, price controls, quotas and the social chapter. How very cutting edge it must all have seemed in 1957.
The EU’s founding fathers were not just suspicious of free markets; they also distrusted untrammelled democracy. They had seen the electorates of Europe fall for demagogues and fascists, and were determined to find ways to temper the ballot box with the wisdom of experts. So they designed a system where supreme power was in the hands of unelected European Commissioners.
People often talk about the EU’s “democratic deficit” as though it were an accident. In fact, it was central to the Euro-patriarchs’ scheme. Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman understood from the beginning that their audacious plan to merge the ancient nations of Europe into a single polity would never come off if each successive transfer of authority to Brussels had to be approved by the voters.
That is why they made sure that the people in charge wouldn’t have to worry about public opinion. And that is why, to this day, the EU sees democracy as secondary, cheerfully tossing aside referendum results when they are inconvenient.
Complaining because the EU is undemocratic is like complaining because a cow is bovine, or a butterfly flighty. It is fulfilling its prime directive.
How very different the EU would look if we were setting it up today, in the age of cheap air travel, consumer power and the Internet. The founding fathers of 2007 would never presume to send their regulatory tendrils into every little crevasse of national life. Instead, they would concentrate on cross-border issues, notably the facilitation of commerce. I wonder what they would call their creation. European Free Trade Association, perhaps?
How the EU bought my daughter
My daughter – how sharper than a serpent’s tooth – has
become a Euro-fanatic. She points excitedly whenever we pass a twelve-star
flag. She nags me about moving permanently to Brussels. She grins from
ear to ear whenever she hears the EU anthem, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
(It has much the same effect on her father, by contrast, as on Alex in
A Clockwork Orange, and for the same reason: bad connotations). She is,
in short, the model European citizen. And she’s only five years
old.
It’s all a question of perspective, I suppose. For her, Brussels means Eurostar journeys and eating in restaurants and being allowed frites and dame blanche because Mummy isn’t there. It means exploring the quirky corridors of a building that, to a young child, must seem like a mediaeval castle. It means playing with Daddy’s bubbly researcher Rebecca. It means being made a fuss of by the ushers and security guards and kitchen staff who can remember when she was a baby.
As I pondered this, I was hit by a dazzling revelation. Aren’t these, mutatis mutandis, the only reasons that anyone supports the Brussels system these days? The EU budget may look like a waste of money but, in fact, it is purchasing the allegiance of powerful and articulate groups in each country: contractors, big farmers, local councillors, journalists.
The EU spends €250 million a year flying reporters – especially local reporters – to Brussels, and showing them a good time. It spends hundreds of millions more on subsidising community groups and local projects. It churns out propaganda aimed directly at children.
It’s very rare, these days, to find people who just happen independently to have made up their minds in favour of transferring more powers to Brussels. Whenever I am accosted at a public meeting by people mouthing the tell-tale slogans – "we have to be in there to argue our case", "what about 50 years of peace in Europe", "of course I’m not a federalist, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be constructively engaged" – I ask them what they do for a living. Nine times out of ten, they turn out to be either a retired Eurocrat or what one might call a worker in an ancillary industry: a Jean Monnet professor, for example, or an adviser on pan-European defence procurement. It is surprising how often someone’s Euro-enthusiasm turns out to be directly proportionate to his financial stake in the system.
The same principle is at work among MEPs. I have watched the transformation of the delegates from the new member states over the past three years. As their lips have become more firmly clamped around the teat of the financial allowances, so they have started to see all sorts of advantages in European integration that were previously opaque to them.
It happens even among entire countries. There are very few EU nations that would vote "Yes" to the European constitution: even Germans have swung against the project. In fact, only two states secured "Yes" votes from their peoples: Spain, where the Prime Minister kept insisting during the campaign that "four out of every ten kilometres of our highways were paid for by Brussels"; and Luxembourg, the single largest per capita recipient in the EU. (That’s right: Luxembourg, the wealthiest country in Europe, is also the one that does best out of the budget.)
Fifty years on, there is little idealism left in the European project. I am reminded of mood in the Soviet bloc in the 1980s, where very few people believed in the principles of Marxism-Leninism, but plenty understood that their status depended on the maintenance of the system. As with the Comecon states then, so with the Evropeiski Soyuz now: the apparatchiks carry on mouthing their old slogans, but everyone else has seen through their racket.
As for the five-year-old, I’m treating this as her major rebellion against her parents. With luck, she’ll have got it all out of her system by her teens.
Clearing up some EU misconceptions
A common European history textbook, says Denis MacShane, would correct
many of the misapprehensions that have grown up about the EU.
He’s right that the European story is encrusted with myths and distortions. Scraping away all these barnacles will be no easy task. But he’s quite wrong to think that the false accretions are mainly Euro-sceptic. I’d say that those that have stuck hardest and longest to the hull are the ones used to justify the project. Consider a few of them.
1.“Nationalism used to cause wars”
In fact, the main cause of war in modern times has been trans-national
ideologies: Jacobinism, Communism, Fascism – now Islamism. In each
of these cases, patriotic loyalties have been a focus of resistance against
tyranny. Where nationalism has caused conflict, it has usually been the
nationalism of a people denied self-determination within a supra-national
state – precisely such a state as the EU is becoming.
2. “The EU has solved the problem of war on our continent”
The EU was not so much a cause as a consequence of the peace in Europe.
The immediate causes of the peace were the defeat of Hitler, the spread
of democracy and the mutual guarantee of the Nato alliance.
As a rule, bourgeois democracies do not fight each other. The North Americans have also “solved the problem of war” on their continent. The US hasn’t fired a shot in anger against Mexico since 1848, nor against Canada since 1812. North Americans have somehow managed this without contracting out their democracies to a supra-national secretariat.
3. “European integration was a reaction against Nazism”
As John Laughland showed in his seminal work, “The Tainted Source”,
this is pretty well the opposite of the truth. Many of the patriarchs
of Euro-federalism turn out to have had rather inglorious war records.
The notion that there ought to be a “common European home”
between Anglo-Saxon capitalism and Soviet Communism was a favourite argument
of Quisling movements during the occupations.
Despite this, Euro-philes never tire of painting their opponents as quasi-Nazis. Two years ago, the EU’s culture Commissioner, Margot Wallström , speaking at a ceremony to mark the anniversary of the liberation of the Theresienstadt concentration camp, said that people who voted “No” to the constitution were starting down the path that had led to the Holocaust.
It was an asinine thing to say and, when I chided her in a newspaper article, she doctored her website to remove the offending passage. Still, her comments neatly demonstrate the tendentious way in which Euro-federalists use history.
For the truth is that, during the Second World War, most European governments recognised their obligations to their Jewish citizens. It was refugees who were without protection, which is why the Nazis went to great pains to declare Jews stateless, and why the worst abominations took place in the zones where there were no national governments, such as Poland and the Baltic states. Sovereignty, in other words, turned out to be one of the strongest defences against Hitler.
4. “Britain lost out by joining too late”
The favourite moan of British Euro-zealots, trotted out at every public
meeting, and turned into two full length books: This Blessed Plot by Hugo
Young and Missed Chances by Roy Denman.
The idea that Britain was stand-offish after the Second World War is hard to reconcile with the facts. Britain was the driving force behind Nato, the OEEC and the Council of Europe. We made a massive contribution to the security of Europe through the British Army of the Rhine, and passed on 25 per cent of our Marshall Aid money to help the starving people of Germany.
Britain was certainly keen on global free trade, and therefore suspicious of attempts to create a closed customs union in Europe. When the federalist countries unveiled their scheme for political and economic integration, Britain tried to divert them, arguing instead for a broad European free trade area, open to the rest of the world – the so-called “Plan G”. Our intervention served only to spur the other states into pushing ahead more quickly.
The Macmillan and Wilson applications broke down on the same issues: free trade, political union, access for Commonwealth products. It was only when Edward Heath accepted the federalist agenda in full that Britain was allowed to crawl in.
In other words, to say that we could have turned the EU into something different had we been present at the start is a complete inversion. It was precisely because we were arguing for something different that we were kept out.
5. “The EU is so successful that everyone wants to
join”
Hmm. Remind me: what are the richest countries in Europe? That’s
right: Norway, Iceland and Switzerland. Opinion polls in all three show
large majorities against joining the EU, and can you blame them?
It would be splendid to have a history textbook that acknowledged some of these truths, but I don’t expect Brussels to fund it. Any volunteers?
The EU has blackened its green
record
The EU is a solution in search of a problem. Whatever the question, the
answer is invariably “more Europe”.
So it was only a matter of time before the European Commission alighted on climate change as the ideal justification for enlarging its powers. Who, after all, could object to cross-border action against pollution? As a Eurocrat put it on the Today Programme this morning, even Euro-sceptics now acknowledge that the EU is the appropriate level at which to legislate.
This afternoon, EU environment ministers will set out a series of new initiatives on everything from vehicles to carbon emissions. They want a range of eco-taxes, and the power to fine polluters. Our own Environment Secretary, David Miliband, has suggested rebranding the EU as the “Environmental Union”.
This is the EU, let us remember, that has caused one of the greatest environmental calamities in Europe, namely the Common Agricultural Policy, whose output-based subsidies have encouraged the felling of hedgerows, the use of chemical fertilisers and the impoverishment of Third World producers. This is the EU that has destroyed what ought to have been a great renewable resource: North Sea fish stocks. And this is the EU whose Parliament peregrinates every month between Brussels and Strasbourg, with a fleet of carbon-emitting lorries to carry its gear, and with all its paperwork printed off separately at each end.
The extension of EU jurisdiction into the ecological field is based on a non-sequitur. No one denies that environmental issues are international in their scope. But it does not follow that the best way to tackle pollution is through the EU, as opposed to multi-lateral agreements.
After all, 86 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions come from outside the EU, and the figure is increasing by the minute, with China set to overtake the US as the largest source of CO2 in 2009.
Then again, this isn’t really about greenhouse gasses at all. Rather, it’s about the EU’s long-held ambition to equip itself with a criminal justice system. As the brilliant lobby group Open Europe has pointed out, people would, in any other circumstances, reject the idea of Euro-crimes. But, add the world “environmental”, and the notion suddenly sounds more reasonable.
What’s that? You don’t think that, left to themselves, sovereign states would collaborate? Well, how do you think they sorted out their dialling codes, their patent laws, their internet addresses?
Think, for a moment, about the little miracle that takes place whenever you post a letter by airmail: you buy your stamp in the UK, the revenue goes to the British post office, and yet you are reasonably confident that your letter will be correctly delivered on the other side of the world.
And here’s the thing: airmail doesn’t need a European Commission or a European Parliament. It doesn’t need trans-national fines and taxes. In fact, it doesn’t need any standing bureaucracy at all. Rather, it rests on an agreement between independent states that has operated since the 1840s. Now, can you name a single EU directive that has been so successful? Prosecution rests.
The Euro-constitution is sneaking
in by the back door
I've just worked out how the federasts are going to do it. Ever since
the French and Dutch "No" votes, the craftiest legal minds in
Brussels have been looking for a way to resurrect the European Constitution.
Now, they have found one: a way so devilishly beautiful that even those
who support national sovereignty must tip our caps to them.
The problem they faced is simply stated. On May 29, 2005, 15 million Frenchmen voted "No". Two weeks later, five million Dutchmen followed suit. The constitution cannot come into force unless all 27 EU members agree, and neither the stubborn Frenchies nor the swag-bellied Hollanders show the least sign of changing their minds.
Europe's elites, however, immediately made clear that the project remained on course. "The French and Dutch did not really vote 'No' to the European constitution," insisted Luxembourg's Prime Minister, Jean Claude Juncker.
"The constitution is still necessary," announced Germany's Chancellor, Angela Merkel.
Other countries have since pushed ahead with ratification: 18 of the 27 members have now adopted the text.
And herein lies the lawyers' dilemma. The French and Dutch governments don't dare put the same draft before their electorates. But, if the text is amended, parliamentary approval will have to begin all over again in the 18 ratifying states, and some of their voters might well start demanding referendums of their own. How, then, can Euro-enthusiasts present an apparently new document in France and Holland without reopening the debate elsewhere?
"We have the answer," says Alain Lamassoure, a former Europe minister who is now Nicolas Sarkozy's vicar on earth. "We shall go through the text with a rubber instead of a pencil. Many of the clauses are unnecessary, because they reiterate what is already in the treaties. But these are generally the articles that people object to. So, if we take out what we don't need, we can avoid any new referendums."
It is a horribly plausible plan. For the fact is that, as Peter Hain, then Europe minister, kept trying to tell us, three quarters of the EU constitution is a rehash of the existing treaties. This shouldn't make it any more acceptable, of course: the whole point of the constitution was that it was an opportunity to draw up a settlement in accordance with people's wishes. If we objected to something that Brussels was already doing - the Common Fisheries Policy, say - this was our opportunity to remove it.
Still, excising these articles will allow supporters of the constitution to claim that the document has been medicinally purged - especially if they also cut the clauses that offer a legal basis for something the EU is already doing unofficially: the diplomatic service, the space programme, the defence procurement office, the human rights agency, the charter of fundamental rights, the external borders agency, and so on.
The 27 heads of government will be asked to approve this plan at a dinner in Berlin next month. Shorn of its otiose paragraphs, the constitution will be less than half its present length. It will still specify the changes in national voting weights, the creation of an EU presidency and foreign minister, and a slight extension in majority voting. But the French and Dutch governments will claim that the new version is too trivial to warrant new referendums, as will the other governments that fear their Euro-sceptic publics: Sweden, Poland and Britain. Geoff Hoon, the Europe minister, has confirmed that the Government's promise of a referendum on the constitution would not apply to a "mini-treaty".
And - here's the clever bit - the 18 states that have already ratified will be able to tell their national assemblies that, since the curtailed version contains nothing new, there is no need to start the implementation process all over again. The outcome will be identical to approving the full constitution in its present form.
Which brings us to something that neither side of the debate likes to acknowledge. The bits of the constitution to which people object are, in general, the bits that restate the status quo. Voters are complaining, not about what Brussels proposes to do next, but about what it is doing now.
Believe me. I have spent the better part of four years criss-crossing my Home Counties constituency and reading out passages of the constitution to WIs and Rotary Clubs, farmers and sixth formers. I have crossed the Channel to repeat the exercise in front of European audiences - in their own languages when I can. Whomever I am talking to, they reserve their angriest contempt for the paragraphs that repeat the existing treaties. Article I-6, for example, never fails to prompt a mutinous growl: "This constitution shall have primacy over the laws of the member states." But this clause simply makes explicit a doctrine that has been evolved by the European Court of Justice since 1964.
"Our mistake was to spell everything out," says a senior German official. "For 50 years, the people of Europe were happy to eat sausages. Then we came along and asked them whether they wanted to eat tubes stuffed with chopped-up sow's udders."
Indeed. Until now, the EU has proceeded by stealth. First, Eurocrats would extend their jurisdiction to a new area and then, often years later, they would formalise that extension in a treaty. The Single European Act recognised the unofficial Brussels role in environmental policy, Maastricht the effective harmonisation of foreign policy, Amsterdam and Nice the informal standardisation of immigration and criminal procedures.
Instead of being presented with revolutionary changes, voters were informed after the event.
This, of course, is how Britain joined in the first place. Had we had a referendum in 1972, we would almost certainly have voted "No", but, by 1975, the "Keep Britain in Europe" campaign (as it was careful to title itself) was able to appeal to our conservatism: we were committed now, we had burnt our bridges with the Commonwealth, we couldn't let our new partners down. It is a delicious paradox that, at that very moment, Parliament was passing an Act to outlaw inertia selling.
The constitution was a one-off. Instead of occupying territory inch by inch, under cover of night, the integrationists drew up their cataphracts in ranks and offered us a pitched battle. It is not a mistake they will repeat again.
The democratic experiment is over. We are back to the Monnet method of behind-the-scenes integration. Eurocrats have calculated that, as long as we are presented with a fait accompli, we will shrug our shoulders and accept it. And, God forgive us, they are probably right.
Growing doubts over the euro
Enjoy your moment, all you apostles of the euro: this is as good as it’s
going to get. The accession of Slovenia last month brought membership
of the single currency to 13, and I’m willing to bet that that’s
as high as it’ll ever go.
A survey in the Financial Times this week showed that, throughout the euro-zone, large majorites hanker after their old currencies. The nostalgia is keenest at the Union’s core: nearly two thirds of Germans oppose the euro. The FT made no attempt to disguise its contempt for the doltishness of the common man. Its report began: “The euro-zone economy may be growing robustly, but its citizens appear not to expect significant financial gains as a result. They give scant credit to the eight-year-old euro for improving their national performances, an FT/Harris poll shows…”
But it’s not just the polls. Millions are simply opting out. A chunk of Bavaria is issuing its own money, while shops from Italy to the Netherlands have started to accept their former currencies, to the delight of their customers. Suddenly, the question is not who will be the next to join, but who will be the first to leave. In anticipation of a collapse, Germans are being advised to hang on to euro notes beginning with serial number “X” (which, apparently, indicates that they’re issued in Germany) and to ditch those beginning with “S” (issued in Italy).
Amazing how quickly something can go from being inevitable to being unthinkable. Eight years ago, most commentators assumed that the three recalcitrants – Britain, Sweden and Denmark – would have to join sooner or later. But guess which of the then 15 EU states have since enjoyed the highest growth rates? That’s right: Britain, Sweden and Denmark. As the Americans say, go figure.
German plan to resuscitate EU Constitution
If only their politicians would listen to what Germans want.
For two years, I was Germany's only Euro-sceptic columnist. The editor of Die Welt had approached me because, tellingly, he couldn't find a single German writer prepared to criticise Brussels. The readers' letters I got during those two years opened my eyes to a very different Germany. Die Welt is, as it were, Germany's Daily Telegraph: intelligent, cultured, Right-of-centre. Its readers were cosmopolitan, and they loathed the Brussels racket. Every article I wrote provoked a crop of exasperated emails. "Why does it take a foreigner to write as you do," they would ask. "Why won't anyone in Germany say these things?"
Nowhere in Europe does the chasm between government and governed gape so wide as in Germany. A poll in FAZ in November showed that 29 per cent of Germans believe that EU membership has been harmful, while only 22 per cent see it as beneficial. Yet the programme of the German EU presidency, launched last week, is palaeo-federalism: more integration in transport, energy and the environment, a common foreign policy with a military dimension, the harmonisation of civil and criminal laws, more power for the putative EU police force.
Angela Merkel even plans to revive the constitution, holding a special summit for the 18 countries that have ratified later this month, and another for the non-signatories in February. Then, in June, the constitution's bandaged corpse will formally be stretched out on the laboratory table, and the Euro-Frankensteins will jolt it to life. As Mrs Merkel told the Bundestag in December: "I would consider it a historic failure if we did not have the substance of the European constitution in place in time for the next European elections [in 2009]."
That 55 per cent of French voters and 62 per cent of Dutch voters rejected the constitution does not trouble her in the slightest. Nor does the fact that her own countrymen would almost certainly vote "No" if given the chance. German politicians have always had a certain disdain for what they call "populism" (what the rest of us call "democracy"). The disdain is reciprocated: in a survey published last week, 80 per cent of Germans said that they did not trust a single politician to represent them.
You can see their point. Their political system has been deliberately designed to minimise the popular element. Not only are plebiscites illegal, but party lists ensure that MPs owe their position to their whips, not their electors. The political caste remains locked in the postwar consensus, enlarging its ranks with candidates who reflect the views of elderly party leaders rather than those of their constituents. Thus does the dead hand of Helmut Kohl's generation lie across the Bundestag.
The Euro-fanaticism of this generation is understandable. No one surveying the wreckage of 1945 would have dreamt that, by the 1960s, Germany would be a trusted and prosperous member of the comity of nations. Germany's postwar leaders calculated that their former enemies would permit such a revival only if they thought of Germany as, in some sense, their country, too. As late as 1990, Mr Kohl was insisting that "German unification and European unification are two sides of the same coin". What he meant was that Germany would not be allowed to become the largest, wealthiest and most populous state in Europe unless it invited neighbouring countries to share in its administration.
I know that a lot of British Euro-sceptics think that German politicians use the EU as a cover for their national interests. As Bismarck once put it: "I have always found the word 'Europe' in the mouth of those politicians who were demanding something that they did not dare demand in their own name." Some even make the unlovely assumption that Germany is seeking to secure through the EU what it could not achieve through war, and circulate lurid pamphlets showing that the Kaiser wanted a European customs union, or that Hitler had a plan for a single currency.
Quite apart from being terrifically rude, this could not be further from the truth. Germany gets less out of the EU than any other member, making a larger contribution to the budget and getting fewer votes per head of population. Its Euro-fanaticism is based not on revanchism, but on its precise opposite: a sense of national abnegation bordering almost on self-loathing. The dullards and mediocrities who comprise Germany's political class are like Harry Enfield's comical tourist, aggressive in their pacifism, overbearing in their internationalism.
Happily, though, the rest of the country is at ease with itself. The 2006 World Cup soaked the last taint of stigma from the tricolour. We British should be delighted about the normalisation of German patriotism. Germans are our obvious friends, for Heaven's sake: our chief trading partners and the one European country we can rely on to deploy serviceable troops next to ours. They even resemble us in character: brave, plain-speaking, morose, law-abiding, belligerent, occasionally drunk, much misunderstood.For hundreds of years, our alliance was regarded as the one fixed point of European diplomacy: the interests of Europe's most maritime state, it was reasoned, could never clash with those of its most continental. If it weren't for the wretched EU, we'd be getting along famously.
Vote for an independent Britain!
The Today programme on Radio 4 is running a listeners poll to find the
most unpopular law in Britain. The Christmas Repeal invites you to nominate
the piece of legislation you would most like to see scrapped. You can
vote online at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/vote/2006vote/
This is a huge step forward from two years ago, when Radio 4 wanted us to squeeze yet another law onto our already crammed statute book (in the event, listeners plumped for a Bill to allow householders to shoot intruders, but the Labour MP who had promised to propose the winning entry in Parliament backed out).
There are, of course, many otiose statutes: the Football Supporters Act, the Firearms Act, the Human Rights Act, the Hunting With Dogs Act and a goodly chunk of the illiberal legislation that has been brought in over the past five years under the guise of anti-terrorism legislation.
But there is surely one outstanding candidate for repeal: the 1972 European Communities Act. This is the piece of legislation that gives EU decisions automatic primacy over British Acts of Parliament. When it was passed, most people assumed that this precedence would be confined to cross-border questions, such as trade, competition and pollution. Thirty-four years on, we know better. Brussels is now the primary source of legislation in the United Kingdom, accounting for 80 per cent of our laws. This astonishing statistic, as regular readers of this bulletin will know, comes from the German Government; our own refuses to name a figure, claiming that it is too expensive to compile the data.
What is the point of voting when four out of every five legal acts in Britain are proposed, not just by people that we didn't vote for, but by unelected EU officials whom nobody voted for?
Scrap the 1972 European Communities Act, and we will automatically restore the supremacy of our elected representatives. From that moment, EU directives and regulations would have force in this country only following a specific decision by Parliament to enact them; otherwise they would be treated as advisory.
I shall appear on the Today Programme on Thursday morning (December 14th) to argue the case for repealing the 1972 European Communities Act. If you share my belief in an independent, democratic Britain, please add your vote on the Today programme website. The address again:
www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/today/vote/2006vote/
No votes ignored as Constitution
presses ahead
Let’s review where we stand, shall we? Since the French and Dutch
“No” votes, five more states have approved the European Constitution,
bringing to 18 the number of nations to have ratified. Meanwhile, every
government remains devoted to the text.
Germany’s Angela Merkel says the European constitution is “vital to German interests”. Italy’s Romano Prodi says he interprets the “No” votes as “a demand for more Europe, not less”. Spain insists that its “Yes” vote be allowed to stand. Austria and Finland want ratification to be completed by the end of 2007, and Belgium suggests changing the rules so that this can happen by a majority vote rather than by unanimity.
In France, both main presidential candidates are committed to pushing ahead: Nicolas Sarkozy says he wants a “mini-treaty” that will contain all the constitution’s main elements, while Ségolène Royal says that, if Britain has problems with the constitution, the rest of the EU should go ahead without it. Not that the UK is trying to back out: it seems to have agreed in principle to the Sarkozy “mini-treaty” proposal.
Am I forgetting anyone? Oh yes, there is one solitary voice of dissent: that of the ordinary citizen who, whenever invited to express an opinion on the Constitution, keeps rejecting it. Opinion has swung against the constitution over the past two years, both in France and the Netherlands and in those countries whose governments went ahead with ratification – most spectacularly in Germany, where two thirds of people now say they would vote “No”. Not that any of the governments seems to care.
Indeed, the distinction between governments and peoples has been explicitly acknowledged by the constitution’s chief author, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing. “It was not France that said ‘no’ to the constitution,” he said the other day, “it was 55 per cent of French people.” France, in other words, is represented, not by its ill-informed population, but by its exquisitely tailored former President. “L’état, c’est Giscard.”
Relying on Giscard’s argument, the EU will continue to adopt as many of the Constitution’s proposals as it can under the existing structures. It has, after all, already enacted the document’s chief provisions: a European criminal justice system, a diplomatic corps (the “European External Action Service”) the Charter of Fundamental Rights. Some 85 per cent of the clauses can be pushed through this way. Then, at some stage in the next 18 months, there will be a perfunctory Inter-Governmental Conference to tie up the loose ends: the new voting weights, for example, and the end of the rotating presidency. There will be no disagreement in principle about these things, which the 25 – now, with Romania and Bulgaria, 27 – governments have accepted in principle all along. The national leaders will then tell their electorates that it would be absurd to hold referendums on such detailed and technical proposals. The result? We will end up with virtually the entire text of the constitution, but with no more referendums.
EU accounts not approved for the
12th year running
Why no riots? Why no mob of aggrieved taxpayers, descending on the European
Commission with burning brands? On Tuesday, for the twelfth year in a
row, the European Court of Auditors refused to approve the EU budget.
Yet the story has pretty much passed Europe’s media by. If a national
government agency could not account for the majority of its spending,
it would be front page news. But, faced with the usual Brussels tales
of bogus invoices and non-existent farm products and collusion between
the authorities and the fraudsters, we shrug our shoulders indifferently.
In our collective reaction, I think one can descry the beginning of the end of Britain’s relationship with the EU. The other day, I happened to read a review of a book about successful relationships. The author’s chief point, if I understood her correctly, was that a marriage can weather a good deal of arguing. Rows between husband and wife suggest that each values the other’s opinion enough to want to change it. It is when bickering gives way to scorn that the marriage is over.
That, it seems to me, is what is happening vis-à-vis the EU. For seven years, I have been writing about Euro-corruption. I have recorded the petty extravagances — MEPs’ expenses, Commissioners’ allowances — and the gargantuan sleaze: the billions of euros that disappear from the CAP, structural funds and foreign aid. At first, these articles used to provoke furious reactions from readers. But, as the years have passed, a resigned, disdainful tone has crept into their responses. People seem to be giving up on the idea that Brussels might ever be reformed. The relationship has reached that fatal stage where anger is giving way to contempt. Sooner rather than later, we shall file for separation.
EU regulation costs businesses
€600 billion a year
It’s hard to avoid the suspicion that the two events are linked.
One day, Günter Verheugen, the Commission Vice-President, attacks
the cost of Euro-bureaucracy. The next, photographs appear of the Commissioner
strolling hand in hand with a female aide while on a visit to Lithuania.
Mr Verheugen denies any impropriety and, in the absence of any evidence
to the contrary, it would be churlish not to believe him. It just seems
odd that photographs taken two months previously should suddenly appear
in the press at the very moment that the Commissioner is making himself
awkward.
A Commissioner can get away with many things. He can be idle, incompetent or drunk. He can be a former Stalinist, or have been convicted of political corruption. But he cannot give voice to the belief, held almost universally outside Brussels, that the EU is overly meddlesome. All manner of sin and blasphemy shall be forgiven unto men: but the blasphemy against the Holy Ghost shall not be forgiven unto men.
Nor was Mr Verheugen simply mouthing off. He offered figures to back his claim, and very scary figures they were. According to the Commissioner’s findings, EU standardisation now costs businesses €600 billion a year. A billion here, a billion there — after a while it starts to add up to real money. €600 billion is a larger sum that the total spending of 20 out of the 25 member states. It dwarfs the EU’s €110 billion budget. In fact, on the Commission’s own statistics, it is nearly four times as much as the €180 billion savings supposedly generated by the single market.
Think about that for a moment. Here is the Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry — the man in charge of the whole thing, as it were — admitting that, from a business point of view, the EU has been a failure: that the benefits of cross-border trade are massively outweighed by the disbenefits of administrative and compliance costs.
Of course, Mr Verheugen’s analysis will come as no surprise to those who work in commerce and industry. A handful of multinationals love Euro-regulation, seeing it as a way to squeeze their smaller competitors out of the market. But most firms find complying with Brussels rules an increasingly difficult struggle.
The Commission itself, however, inhabits a different world: a virtual world of deregulation and competitiveness and “slashing red tape”. In any speech about business, a Eurocrat will kick off by telling his audience about something called “the Lisbon agenda”, which will give the EU “the most dynamic enterprise economy in the world by the year 2020”.
On one level, he genuinely believes it. Or, to be precise, he is so removed from the outside world that it does not occur to him to assess the real impact of his policies. I have lost count of how many times I have had variants of the following conversation:
HANNAN: “This latest proposal of yours [maximum working
hours, or equal rights for temporary workers, or REACH] will destroy jobs
in my constituency.
EUROCRAT: “Nonsense: we’ve just passed a resolution that says
that the fight against unemployment is one of our top three priorities.”
HANNAN: “Yes, but in the real world, your policy is making it harder
for firms to take on staff.”
EUROCRAT: “Didn’t you hear what I just said? One of our top
three priorities...”
Mr Verheugen’s crime was to intrude a dose of reality into the virtual world, to crash through the careful suspension of disbelief that sustains so much European integration. What he said was true, and everyone knows it. That is why he won’t be pardoned.
Brussels is using terrorism to
further its federal ambitions
The European Union is a solution in search of a problem. Whatever the
question, the answer is invariably "more Europe". War in Lebanon?
We need to be able to deploy an EU army. A breakdown in the World Trade
Organisation talks? Let's have a more integrated European economy. People
voted against the constitution? They obviously thought it didn't go far
enough.
So it was more or less inevitable that Brussels would respond to the recent security alert by awarding itself new powers. And, sure enough, John Reid and his fellow interior ministers have rushed to announce the further harmonisation of aviation and policing. Never mind that the liquid bomb plot was thwarted by the system currently in place. Never mind that, as far as we can tell, the countries chiefly involved were Britain, Pakistan and the United States, and that collaboration among the intelligence agencies of these three states would be unaffected by any new EU rules. An emergency Euro-summit is always a handy way to look as if you're doing something.
Oh, come off it, Hannan, I hear you say. Even you Euro-phobes must accept that there are some things that we ought to do together. I mean, if the terrorists are operating at an international level, don't we need to take them on at an international level?
Yes, indeed – and we have been doing so for decades without any help from Brussels. Sovereign states have evolved highly developed mechanisms for police and judicial co-operation: the Hague Convention, extradition treaties, intelligence sharing, Interpol, mutual recognition of court orders, acknowledgement of sentences spent in each other's prisons.
What is being proposed now, in effect, is that such collaboration should principally be administered by the EU. I don't know about you, but this doesn't make me feel any safer. It is these same Euro-apparatchiks, after all, who have brought us the Common Agricultural Policy, the destruction of North Sea fish stocks, and accounts that have not been approved in 12 consecutive years. Why should they be any better at thwarting bombers than they are at, say, thwarting fraudsters within their own bureaucracy?
Actually, the question is no longer putative: we can assess the EU's efficacy as a counter-terrorist organisation on the basis of empirical evidence. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, there was a massive extension of EU jurisdiction in the home affairs field: common rules on immigration and visas; a European Public Prosecutor; harmonised court procedures; extra powers for Europol (which the EU artlessly refers to as "the embryonic federal police force"); and a unified list of designated terrorist organisations, with agreed procedures on police surveillance and asset seizures. There was even a new category of "crimes against the Union", to be tried, not within national jurisdictions, but under the legal authority of the EU itself.
And let's not forget the European arrest warrant (EAW), which contains even fewer safeguards than the Anglo-American extradition treaty that has got everyone so hot under the collar: it provides only for a preliminary hearing to establish that the person in custody is the person named on the court order, that he is above the age of criminal liability, and that he has not already been tried for the offence. No need for any actual evidence whatever. Yet there were no marches of pin-striped financiers against the EAW, no fulminating newspaper columns, no complaints by headline-grabbing MPs. And why not? Because, I put it to you, no one wanted to appear soft on terrorism.
In fact, the EU's home affairs agenda was never about taking on the jihadists; if it had been, Brussels would long ago have listed Hizbollah as a terrorist organisation. The idea, rather, was to create a single juridical entity. Euro-integrationists wanted the EU to assume the key attributes of statehood: defined external borders; common rules on who might cross them; a criminal justice system and supreme court; police and security forces; and the right to deal as a sovereign entity with other states. Although there was some movement towards these goals at the Tampere summit in 1998, it was the World Trade Centre massacre that gave the federalists their break. All they had to do was re-label their schemes as "security measures" and no one would dare to vote against them. As the leader of the European Liberals, a British Lib-Dem called Graham Watson, put it: "Osama bin Laden has done more for European integration than anyone since Jacques Delors." Tasteless, Graham, but true.
Five years on, it is hard to identify a single anti-terrorist success that can be attributed to Brussels. On the other hand, we have just won a mighty victory through old-fashioned police co-operation between three countries which, although on different continents, are united by language, history and law. Why should such joint operations be improved by bringing Britain's procedures into line with Europe, rather than the Anglosphere?
For Euro-enthusiasts, of course, the question is irrelevant. Indeed, at the very moment that Brussels was pushing through the EAW, it was seeking to ban extradition to the US on the grounds that suspects might face the death penalty there. No, Eurocrats were not responding to an identified terrorist menace. Rather, they were starting from their conclusion – a united Europe – and then casting around for arguments to get there.
This is nothing new, of course. Every federalist departure is presented to the electorates as a remedy to some existing problem. The euro was meant to be all about making the single market work better. The common defence policy was sold as a way of bolstering Nato. What is new is the scope of the EU's ambition. The powers it is now annexing have always been internal to nation states: that is why we call them "home affairs". Willie Whitelaw used to tell his successors at the Home Office: "This is the easiest job in Cabinet: you never have to deal with foreigners." Not any more.
In a spasm of thoughtlessness, or perhaps of fear, we are giving Brussels control over matters that are central to the relationship between government and citizen. At the same time, we are tossing away the notion of territorial jurisdiction which is perhaps the supreme safeguard of national sovereignty.
"Europe – Your Country," say the signs at the European Commission. It soon will be.
Using children to sell the EU message
Geoff Hoon is evidently not familiar with that classic work The Raspberry
Ice-Cream War. He has plainly not spent hours with a gleeful four-year-old,
cackling like a hyena at what must be one of the unintentionally funniest
books ever written. If he had, he wouldn't be calling for children to
be taught about the benefits of European integration.
The Raspberry Ice-Cream War, published by the European Commission, tells the story of a group of intrepid youngsters who travel back through time to a land where there are still nations and borders. They explain to the ignorant inhabitants that, where they come from – the EU – frontiers have been abolished and, with them, every misery and misfortune that used to afflict mankind. The grateful natives agree to pool their sovereignty, thereby ushering in a period of cross-border trade and sustainable growth.
Mr Hoon, who became Europe minister at the last reshuffle, sees this sort of thing as the way to overcome Britain's stand-offishness towards the European project. Capture the children, he reasons, and the parents will follow. The trouble is, it has already been tried. The EU has spent hundreds of millions of euros on kiddieprop. As we Old Brussels Hands say, été là, fait ça.
Who can forget Let's Draw Europe Together, in which young readers are invited to colour in such phrases as "Europe – my country"? For older children, there is Captain Euro, a square-jawed superhero whose mission "to uphold the EU's values" brings him into conflict with the villainous – and for some reason Jewish-looking – Dr D. Vider, who plots "to divide Europe and create his own empire".
My favourite is Troubled Waters, possibly the silliest thing ever published by the EU. Troubled Waters is a Tintin-style cartoon strip – except that, in place of the drippy Belgian reporter, we get a sexy MEP as the heroine. Among the lines of dialogue are: "You can laugh! Wait until you've seen my amendments to the commission proposal!" and, "I seem to spend my whole life on the train between Brussels and Strasbourg, but I'd hate to have to choose between mussels and chips and Strasbourg onion tart!"
These publications are funded out of the EU's information and communication budget, which currently stands at slightly more than 100 million euros a year. If money could buy you love, the EU would be the most popular organisation in history. But no amount of subsidy can sell an intrinsically wrong idea.
Do you remember the massive campaign to promote the Charter of Fundamental Rights and Freedoms? Or the blitz of propaganda in favour of the European Constitution? Or the squillion-euro "Plan D" to convince sceptical voters? You don't? My point precisely.
Yet my Europhile friends genuinely believe that all they need is better information. These "No" voters, they tell me, are suffering from false consciousness. If only they could be brought to see their own interests, they would vote in their millions for closer union. All it takes is a little more money.
In any crisis, the Eurocrat's first instinct is to reach for his wallet – or, rather, for your wallet. Thus, the EU's response to the French and Dutch "No" votes has been to whack up the information budget. Some of the funds are channelled through intermediaries – federalist think tanks, Jean Monnet professorships – some firehosed directly at the electorate. In fairness, Brussels is not unique in seeking to buy popularity: almost every big organisation has a PR budget. But there is surely something a little creepy about targeting children.
A couple of years ago, I stumbled across an internal commission report that concluded as follows: "Children can perform a messenger function in conveying the message to the home environment. Young people will often in practice act as go-betweens with the older generations, helping them embrace the euro." The notion that the government should get at parents through their children is a characteristic of authoritarian states, not liberal democracies. One thinks of Orwell's fictional youth organisation, the Spies; or of the revolting Pavel Morozov, who became a hero of the Soviet Union after shopping his father for hoarding grain. (Having decreed a state funeral for the boy, Stalin privately remarked: "He was a rotten little shit, ratting on his parents like that.")
You'd have thought that, what with all the propaganda being lobbed their way, young people would be better disposed towards European integration than their elders. You'd be wrong. According to a poll in this newspaper, the under-25s are the most Euro-sceptic section of the population, followed by the over-65s. I have recently spoken in a number of schools, as part of a programme run by the brilliant think tank Civitas, and I keep coming across the same pattern. Middle-aged teachers tend to be vaguely pro-Brussels.
They like to think of themselves as modern internationalists, and so support the European ideal without worrying too much about the details. Their students, by contrast, worry a great deal about the details: about the agrarian protectionism that is pauperising the Third World; about the ecological calamity of the Common Fisheries Policy; about the unelected commissioners and the unaudited spending. They are not prepared unthinkingly to support schemes that call themselves progressive.
Nor is this just a British phenomenon. In each of the past eight Euro-referendums – Denmark and Sweden on the single currency; Ireland (twice) on Nice; Spain, France, the Netherlands and Luxembourg on the constitution – "No" votes came disproportionately from the under-30s.
And here is another striking fact about those votes: whenever the government distributed factual information, the sceptics benefited. French and Spanish "No" campaigners agree that their best moment was the dissemination of the text of the Euro-constitution. The better people understood the Brussels system, the less they liked it.
The worst mistake that Euro-integrationists ever made was to start explaining themselves. For 40 years, the EU advanced without debate and without fuss. Then, whether from vanity, foolishness or an honest desire for a mandate, Eurocrats decided that they needed "to engage with the citizens". Immediately, the citizens started voting "No".
People, especially young people, have seen through the racket, Mr Hoon. That's why, in the long run, you've had it.
Giscard d’Estaing knows best
So we're all agreed. Angela Merkel says the European Constitution is "vital
to Germany". Bertie Ahern says it is "the right choice for Ireland".
The new Italian government says it interprets the "no" votes
as "a demand for more Europe, not less". The Belgian government
suggests changing the rules so that the European Constitution may be adopted
by a qualified majority vote. The European Commission plans to push ahead
with as much of the constitution as it can, with or without formal ratification.
Am I forgetting anyone? Oh yes, there is one lonely voice of dissent: that of the ordinary citizen who, when invited to express an opinion on the constitution, usually rejects it. Eurocrats keep telling us that two-thirds of the EU countries have now ratified, but this is not strictly true. Two countries, Spain and Luxembourg, endorsed the text; the other 14 ratifying governments pushed ahead more or less in defiance of public opinion.
This distinction between governments and people has been explicitly acknowledged by the constitution's chief author, Valery Giscard d'Estaing. "It is not France that has said 'no' to the constitution," he said on Monday. "It is 55 per cent of French people." France, in other words, is represented not by its ill-informed population, but by its de haut en bas former President. L'etat, c'est Giscard.
Giscard is tossing aside a principle that Europeans have fought for 300 years to establish, namely that rulers should be accountable to their peoples. This might not be quite so objectionable if governments were wiser than the rest of us. But it is these same Euro-leaders who have given us the CAP, the euro, the fraudulent EU accounts and all the rest of it. Perhaps they should listen to their voters a little more. They know a thing or two, these ordinary people.
What if Britain is left behind?
I have always had a sneaking regard for the new Italian Prime Minister,
Romano Prodi – a feeling which, as far as I can tell, is wholly
unreciprocated. Shortly after he was appointed President of the European
Commission in 1999, I conducted an interview with him, during which I
asked about the curious episode of Aldo Moro. Aldo Moro, you may recall,
was the former Italian Prime Minister who, in 1978, was kidnapped and
later murdered by the Red Brigades. While he was being held, Prodi, then
an academic, went to the police and told them (correctly) that Aldo Moro
could be found at a place called Gradoli. Asked how he knew, he replied
that he had been playing with a Ouija board when the spirits of dead Christian
Democrats had moved the glass to spell out G-R-A-D-O-L-I.
Prodi became more than a little testy when I raised the subject. Later, when the interview was published, his press officer falsely claimed that he thought he had been speaking off the record. But the episode did nothing to diminish my admiration for the old boy. Don't be fooled by the grey bureaucrat act. Prodi is a man who speaks his mind with admirable clarity. When other Commissioners were denying that EU armed forces were under construction, he cheerfully told a British newspaper: "If you don't want to call it a European army, fine – you can call it Margaret, you can call it Mary-Ann".
Now, evidently still under the influence of those dead Christian Democrats, he says he wants an advance guard of EU states to push ahead with much deeper integration, leaving the sceptics to stew in their indecision. To which I say: bravo! Most of the acrimony among EU members these past 30 years has been caused by differences over political union. Whatever compromise is reached, it is always a step too far for the British, but never enough for the founding, federalist states. The result is that no one is happy. The British – and, to a lesser extent, the Swedes and Danes – feel they are being dragged à contre coeur into a union that they do not want, while the Belgians and Germans and Italians feel that they are being impeded by constant British whingeing and vetoing. In consequence, a project that was meant to be all about friendship among Europe's nations ends up causing friction.
If the core, Carolingian countries want to merge themselves into a single polity, if they want an EU army, a European police force, a President of Europe, a Continent-wide tax system, good luck to them. Britain should look on as a friend and sponsor, an external flying buttress. It is no part of our business to tell other sovereign countries how to relate one to another – even if they want to abolish their separate sovereignties.
By the same token, though, Britain should be allowed to opt out of a number of policies currently under EU jurisdiction. Although it is reasonable to accept a degree of harmonisation of cross-border questions, Brussels is currently administering a number of policy areas of essentially domestic concern: farming, fishing, employment law, industrial relations, the status of local government, the interpretation of human rights, transport policy, immigration, defence, energy policy. In return for allowing the Euro-enthusiast states to use the EU's mechanisms and procedures to forge ahead on their own, Britain should seek to recuperate its autonomy in these areas – and to allow other states to do the same.
I suspect, although I have no way of knowing, that if Britain were to set the precedent in this way, others among the EU's more free-trading, maritime members would seek a similar status. They may even team up with the EFTA states, so that Europe would divide into two amicable associations: an inner core, with most of the attributes and trappings of a federal state, and a peripheral aureole of free trading nations, looking as much to the open main as to their Continental neighbours. These two bloc