INTRODUCTION

"One ring to rule them all ... and in the darkness bind them". With apologies to J R Tolkien.

The examples on this web site have been collected at random and are by no means comprehensive. They are simply a snap-shot of the thousands of pages of new laws and regulations that come pouring out of the emerging European Empire. The examples come from the press, internet, radio and TV and should be treated with caution. There is much misinformation surrounding the EU, some of it comes from self-interested groups and some from the European Commission itself. See below, for example, the items on Caerphilly cheese, or the marketing of rare vegetable seeds, or the banning of Bombay Duck. Some examples may have changed because alterations are not often reported in the media.

A REGULATED SOCIETY

The EU has opted for the oppressive regulatory regime. De Tocqueville warned us of a government that "covers the surface of society with a network of small, complicated rules, minute and uniform... till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals of which the government is the shepherd."

Lionel Josplin, the French Prime Minister in a speech to the Economic and Social Council on 30 January 2002 said, "Thanks to regulation, Europe is taking some tremendous steps forward."

Some European Union regulations are in abeyance and will surface later but many already govern our lives. Some are subject to temporary waivers, called derogations, but the intention is that these should eventually become laws. Some "proposals" never advance into law.

UK civil servants and their Ministers must also carry a large share of the blame for converting many EU rules into absurdities. The EU has given our own regulators an immense new power that they have taken with alacrity by "gold-plating" directives. Belatedly, in January 1997, the DTI Minister Roger Freeman asked ministers to think small first. The UK Parliament can hardly be blamed because it has no right of input into the two-year drafting of a Directive and is often treated with contempt by officials and ministers. There are moves, however, to allow parliamentary scrutiny of EC proposals but with the proviso that the government would be able exceptionally to agree a measure before scrutiny was completed. The Commission, however, blames member governments for much of the excessive increase in legislation. In 1994 the Commission proposed 13 measures concerning industrial products but in the same period member states brought forward 442 proposals for new regulations, including 62 from the "anti- regulatory" UK. (Letter from the DG of the EU, FT 16/2/95). The total number of directives issued in 1994, however, increased by 12% to 1,800. By 1997 there were a total of 8,814 new regulations and 10,549 directives, all written on 2 million pages.

Michael Howard, who was a minister in the last Conservative government, explained to the Federation of Small Businesses (9/10/02) how EU directives become "gold plated"; "The people who convert the EU regulations into British law are of course lawyers - who owe a duty to their clients. But they see their clients not as you - the businesses who have to work within the law, but as the Government - they write the law to make sure that the Government cannot be charged by the EU with failure to enforce the rules. It was only at the end of our time that I realised that, and told them that that was not what we wanted - they should in effect consider the businesses to be the ones whose interests they needed to look after, and that the Government was not that bothered about complaints from Brussels."

There is a significant shift now taking place. Romano Prodi is planning is the greater use of regulations as opposed to directives. The significance, of course, is that directives must be ‘transposed’ into the national laws of each member states before they take effect while the regulations take effect the moment they are 'enacted' in Brussels. While the ‘transposition’ process at least requires input from the legislatures and parliaments of the member states, the regulation process completely sidelines both, as EU regulations do not require the assent of either.

Many of the regulations come out of Germany and this is the regulated society they want for us. Here is an extract from a BBC Radio 4 programme about modern Germany, The New Face of Germany :

A further example of the difference between the British and some Europeans was explained in the House of Lords by Lord McNair (Hansard 28/1/98) "…We in the Anglo-Saxon world assume that the state exists to serve the individual. That is not so in Germany, where the Hegelian model prevails. The contrary view to our own, correlating with Hegel's scornful disdain for the individual and his or her rights, is that the individual exists to serve the state".

The French philosopher Gustave Le Bon explained in 1896:

"For the Latin peoples the word "democracy" signifies more especially the subordination of the will and the initiative of the individual to the will and the initiative of the community represented by the State. It is the State that is charged, to a greater and greater degree, with the direction of everything, the centralisation, the monopolisation, and the manufacture of everything. To the State it is that all parties without exception, radicals, socialists, or monarchists, constantly appeal. Among the Anglo-Saxons this same word "democracy" signifies, on the contrary, the intense development of the will of the individual, and as complete a subordination as possible of the State, which, with the exception of the police, the army, and diplomatic relations, is not allowed the direction of anything, not even of public instruction".

An enthusiasm for the collectivist and statist conception of society is also prevalent in Italy. The journalist Luigi Barzani writes "the contemporary capitalistic world is still almost incomprehensible to most Italians...This is one of the reasons why all kinds of rigid organisation of economic life finds favour in Italy".

Chateaubriand, in reviewing Napoleon’s achievement of the creation of a European superstate said, "There is nothing in this world without liberty... and Napoleon has offended against liberty." Following Napoleon and Hitler we are experiencing the third attempt to create a European superstate. Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo was a battle lost in the greater war of European unification; another battle was lost at Luneburg Heath on the 4^th May 1945. Now the final episode is being enacted by stealth not far from Waterloo in Brussels, this time victory is very near. Even at this late stage in the "Third Great European War" the British do not know whether to support it, or oppose it. As Jack Straw, foreign secretary said in a speech at The Hague, 21 February 2002; "We stand on the edge of a genuinely historic moment – the unification of Europe not by force of arms, but by force of argument." Our ruling elite has been dazzled by this delusion of grandeur, but the British people have not spoken yet.

An alternative future for us is suggested in this is extract from a commentary on the future of Canada by James C Bennett, "But a third gateway is now becoming visible. This is the set of reforms needed to accommodate the fluid entrepreneurship and rapid capital deployment of the new scientific-technical revolutions. Seemingly small things may serve as indicators of much more entrenched cultural-social issues --such as Germany's law forbidding directors or officers of bankrupt companies from serving in such roles again for 10 years (a law that would destroy Silicon Valley as we know it!). Only the United States has even begun to pass through this third gateway in parts of its economy, notably Silicon Valley. The only other countries even beginning to show similar developments have been England, Ireland, Australia and Canada. Cambridge, England, is beginning to generate the web of spin-off entrepreneurial ventures that Cambridge, Mass., has long enjoyed -- a pattern not seen around the university towns of France or Germany. As the "third gateway" changes are unlikely to be implemented by plan or fiat, we may see a widening gap between what writer Neal Stephenson has dubbed the "Anglosphere" -- the world of English-speaking nations with strong open civil societies -- and other market democracies. This gap is due neither to random chance, nor to any inherent virtue of English-speaking people - indeed the Anglosphere is remarkably multi-ethnic; it is rooted in historical chance. Francis Fukuyama, in his book Trust, tells the story of how England and France had comparably rich civil societies well into the 17th century. France, under the pressures of Continental military competition, chose the route of increasing centralization, destroying much of its developing civil society. England, inoculated against such temptations by the traumas of its Civil War, saw its civil institutions strengthen and grow..."( published in National Post, Canada, December 1999)

Millions of citizens have become actual or potential criminals, by doing hitherto lawful activities, such as selling bananas by the pound. EU directives should be simply advisory. If the EU changed its policy from restricting to expanding choice then trade in goods and services would multiply and thousands of people would be restored to the jobs that the EU has destroyed. Thousands of products that have been banned by the EU, which previously passed home member state standards, would be restored to the marketplace.

In 1993, 20 July, the DTI issued a press release stating that, “a programme of deregulation will make life a great deal easier for business and the consumer in a wide range of spheres”. The European Policy Forum in its report on the Hidden Costs of Regulation (20 Queen Annes Gate, London SW1, September 1995) says that EU regulation costs in excess of 9% of GDP. It states that the current economic malaise in the EU, the inadequate number of jobs and mass unemployment, can to a large extent be traced to excessive regulation. The United Nations Conference on Trade, Aid and Development, UNCTAD, has said that EMU will increase EU unemployment by 5%, or another 10 million (11/97). The Financial Times said that Europeans need to be told that low employment and high unemployment are no accident. It is what the continental model of labour market regulation guarantees. Taxes and social contributions as a proportion of GDP reached a new high in 1996. Even the denizens of the vast palaces of bureaucracy in Brussels and Strasbourg are dimly aware of the harm they are doing: Commissioner Monti says, belatedly, "that over-regulation is a major obstacle to the internal market". Ex-Commissioner Bonino has written that Europe has created its own crisis by trying to force the pace of integration and expansion having failed, beforehand, to win the support of the European people. In another belated move the EC is to set up business test panels as part of a drive to stop more unnecessary red tape from Brussels (FT 16/2/98). More recently the European Commission has moved slowly towards tightening up the system of regulatory impact assessments, which are often ignored by officials. There is even talk of a retrospective review of all existing EU regulation to check that the burdens on industry are not out of line with projections. Such a review would require approval from the full Commission, but officials say it would provide the opportunity to strip "enormous costs" out of European business (FT 2/8/00). No progress has been made – in the government’s white paper ‘Realising Europe’s Potential’ (1/3/02) the UK wants to "Cut unnecessary regulations and ensure that the impact of all new EU regulations is rigorously tested." (But don't hold your breath!-Ed). In December 2002 the European Commission issued a report stating, "Too many regulations and too little attention to manufacturing industry are damaging the EU economy." Then in February 2003 the European Commission presented a proposal to clean up the mass of EU law, also known as the acquis communautaire, and to reduce the volume of European Union legislative texts, 97,000 pages. By 2005, it is estimated that some 35,000 pages could be cut without anybody noticing at all. (EUobserver.com 12.02.2003) Our own Better Regulation Task Force announced a crusade against EU red tape . (Financial Times 2/10/03 ) However, in December 2003 Ruth Lea wrote: “There is no sign that the EU is shifting away from its pro-regulation mindset towards more liberalised labour markets - indeed, such markets are regarded as a nasty "Anglo-Saxon" anathema.” (Money Telegraph 1/12/03 )

The UK enjoys a relatively lower level of regulation than the rest of the EU but the situation is changing for the worse. It seems as though the current Labour government is determined to level the regulatory playing field to our disadvantage. Helped by the EU, but not exclusively so, the burden of regulation on industry has increased costs by at least £10bn over this parliament. (British Chamber of Commerce report January 2000). At the CBI conference in November 2001 the director-general said that the Government is introducing new regulations at the rate of 3,800 a year. But in 2001 the government broke all records with 4,150 new regulations. In five years the Labour government has issued 17,521. Britain and Italy are now the most difficult European Union countries to do business in according to Gallup Europe in September 2000. Our government is also hell bent on levelling the tax playing field. When it came to power in 1997 taxes were 35.6% of GNP. By 2003, the tax take has risen to 37% and will reach European levels of 40% by 2005. (Centre for Policy Studies 28/7/03)

Incredibly, the government is keen to level the pensions playing field by introducing the EU's new pensions accounting rule - a "gold plated" version known as FRS 17 - (see the pensions chapter) before all the other EU countries. Our pensions policy has been exemplary but this new regulation will lead to a massive shift to reliance upon state pay-as-you-go pensions.

The British economy is robust. It has survived much "sniper fire" from Brussels. It survived the closure of the little factory making children's toys from pipe cleaners, the (illegal) appropriation of our vast rich fishing grounds, the loss of 1,000 abattoirs, the elimination of 1,200 cheese makers, the rebuilding of all cremators, the closure, or strengthening of thousands of road bridges, the outlawing of most horse medicines, the banning of Bombay Duck from curry house menus, etc. Disregarding the personal tragedies involved in each example, few EC measures have generated much collateral damage. We have, however, sustained some serious direct hits; the ERM cost billions of pounds, unemployment doubled, we lost 100,000 businesses, and 1.75 million homes fell into negative equity.  Another direct hit has just landed; the Working Time Directive is specifically designed to harm the UK because we work the longest hours in the EU. It has also cost industry billions of pounds. The national shortages of policemen, doctors and nurses is entirely attributable to the new limits on working hours. Now the EC has decided to tighten the screws even more by referring our apparent soft approach to the European Court of Justice. This will hurt the competitiveness of British firms', according to the Institute of Directors . Similarly, because we have the majority of "agency" workers in the EU, we are to be subjected to rigid new regulations that will destroy the advantages of this important element of our flexible labour market. The ban on most vitamins and minerals is also aimed to do most harm to Britain as we are the top vitamin-takers in Europe (Telegraph 4/7/03). The proposed EU consumer credit directive is aimed to cause the most damage to the UK market that represents 30% of all credit granted in the EU. It will make it difficult for 2m consumers, those with low incomes, to obtain credit. Consumer spending will fall by £4bn. This will reduce GDP by 0.2% (FT 8/7/03 )

A COMMON MARKET?

A major problem for Britons is that we thought we had joined a Common Market. In 1971 Edward Heath the Prime Minister said that, "There was no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty." On 17th February 1972, the minister proposing the 1972 European Communities Act Geoffrey Rippon, told parliament: "It is important to realise that Community law is mainly concerned with industrial and commercial activities. The greater part of our domestic law would remain unchanged after entry". In the 1975 referendum the 'Say Yes' pamphlet issued by Harold Wilson’s Labour government of the day made the following promises: 

"There was a threat to employment in Britain from the movement in the Common Market towards an Economic and Monetary Union. This could have forced us to accept fixed exchange rates for the pound, restricting industrial growth and so putting jobs at risk. This threat has been removed".

None of these promises were true. The average annual growth of gross domestic product post-1973 has been lower than pre-1973. We had a trade surplus with the EU before we joined, now it is in deficit.

We are constantly lambasted with the claim that we enjoy enormous benefits from membership of the EU. The government, however, has pointedly refused to order a proper cost/benefit analysis. Fortunately one has been done by the Institute of Directors. It shows that membership is costing us at least £15bn pa, more likely £25bn pa, rising to £50bn pa if we join EMU.

But how were we persuaded to vote 'yes'? A BBC Radio 4 programme ("Document" 3/2/00) described how Edward Heath, Prime Minister, changed public opinion from 70% against the "Common Market" (EEC), to a majority in favour. In 1970 he asked a department of the Intelligence Services, IRD, or Information Research Department, in the Foreign Office to conduct a propaganda campaign. IRD, with the connivance of the Editor, managed to publish a letter in The Times every day in favour of the EEC over a period of two years. It also held a "working breakfast", fronted by the European Movement, each week for industrialists, media leaders and opinion formers at the luxury Connaught Hotel. The IRD targeted the BBC Today Programme, World at One and ITN News with favourable stories about the EEC. News at Ten gave an extra 5 minutes a day to these. The presenter of Today, Jack Dimanio, was against the EEC so IRD persuaded the BBC to move him off it. The philosophy of the campaign was "never tell the truth". The European Movement (EM) was heavily involved in this work; it received £5m from industry and millions of US dollars from the CIA. The EM is still active. The principle that guided the negotiations leading to Britain's accession to the EEC was "swallow the lot and swallow it now", according to the official history of the talks recently published by the Foreign Office. 

All the players are still in place to turn round public opinion to learn to love the euro, currently opposed by 70% of the population. The new Referendums and Elections Act ensures that there will be a gross imbalance in favour of the government which, together with EU multinationals and the EC itself, will throw a wall of money into a pro-euro campaign, until 28 days before the actual vote. Only then will expenditure be controlled but Pro-euro campaigning agencies will be allowed to spend twice as much to push their case because there are twice as many of them.

Our complete loss of sovereignty was confirmed recently at the "Metric Martyr" trial in Sunderland on the 9 April, 2001. District Judge Morgan said, "We are now living under a 'new legal order'... The 1972 European Communities Act is a 'bold new source of law. ' Parliament surrendered its sovereignty in 1972... The courts can overthrow any act that contravenes it in the future... The ancient principle, that where two laws are incompatible the later one is good, is no longer relevant... The doctrine of the primacy of European law now holds good... European Union laws have overriding force with priority over our law... The precedents described in the annals of our legal system now represent the "yesteryear"... The chapters on the supremacy of Parliament are now only of historical perspective, they are non-binding." The Appeal Court judgment confirmed this view by claiming that Parliament embraced EU law as supreme in 1972.

According to Jacques Santer, the ("sacked") previous President of the European Commission, it was never intended that the EU should be a free trade area "it was always intended that it should be a political union", he said. (BBC R4 12/3/96). Commissioner Monti has said that "if the single currency fails then Europe risks collapsing into a free trade zone, which is exactly what we have been struggling to avoid for the last 25 years".

NO, AN OLIGARCHY

It is difficult to understand why our politicians willingly signed away our democratic rights and stole our freedoms. It could be exasperation at the failings of democracy itself. Perhaps it is because the EU offers an attractive and lucrative career path? It is curious that one can avoid the 40% capital gains tax by living in Belgium for just one year. The EU offers real unaccountable power to politicians and officials, an irresistible temptation. In an interview with WorldNetDaily.com, Peter Hitchens said: "(Blair) knows, or rather the people who pull his strings know, that the British electorate and the British Parliament would never have accepted the socialist program they want to put into practice. So what they want to do is to put Britain under the control of the institution of the European Union, which is -- and this is an important point -- a new Soviet Union in the making. They want to use the institutions of the European Union to impose on Britain the high taxes, the regulation, the centralisation, the authoritarianism which they could never have gotten through a British Parliament. That's what they plan to do, and the trap is due to be sprung when we will all be confronted with a referendum which the government will run on its own terms and rig. We will all be invited to abolish the pound sterling and enter the European single currency. Which of course means the complete loss of any kind of national economic independence and effectively the abolition of our independence as a nation state." 

In a Letter to The Times January 02, 2003, R. F. Atkins wrote, "Tony Blair is now willing to admit a desire to create a European superpower which, in his words, 'will contain over 500 million people, a political and economic entity bigger than the US and Japan put together'. The real question is not whether, or how, but rather why create a superpower like the United States of Europe? For what purposes would its creation be essential - so essential that the British people must, if necessary, be dragooned into the union without their explicit consent? Would a USE superpower confront and contend with the USA, or would they jointly dominate the world in perfect harmony? Is either desirable? What response is expected from nations outside of the two superpowers? If creation of such massive blocs is an evident good for their peoples, would Mr Blair and the European political class support with enthusiasm the creation of a United States of Asia? Or a United States of Islam? Would a world so divided be a safer, happier, more prosperous place? Or would the blocs collide, as nations do now, but with more terrible results? "

John Laughland, writing about the emergence of old left-wing radicals in power in the EU today, who were once virulently antagonistic to the EEC, notes:" They have discovered that they can wield power and dictate people's lives with no democratic restraint. Suddenly they have discovered the society they once sought to create by revolution can easily be achieved through the EU." Interviewed in the Austrian magazine Profil in June 1997, Joschka Fischer, the German foreign minister, declared: "I realise more and more the extent to which I have remained a Marxist . . Europe is an objectively Left project." Until now Lionel Jospin the French premier has always denied his Trotskyite past but now he has admitted he was a member of the Organisation Communiste Internationale. The French President Jacques Chirac in his youth distributed the Communist daily L'Humanite (FT 6/6/01)

Jennie Bristow writing for Spiked-online.com offers a further insight: "This distance between the EU and the electorates of its member states is precisely what national governments find attractive about Europe. At a time when the political elites across the Continent are facing serious questions about the legitimacy of their own, domestic, role - what with falling voter turnouts and the never-ending story of sleaze - EU recognition can provide a veneer of legitimacy that is easier to manufacture than it is to gain support at home. The issue at stake is not 'to integrate or not to integrate'. It is the extent to which domestic governments can hide behind Europe, to excuse bad decisions or to justify decisions they are too cowardly to make themselves. Not only are unaccountable decisions taken, but even discussion of these decisions is apparently rendered unnecessary. As has become clear over recent years, the impulse of domestic governments, in many spheres of social life, is to legislate and regulate in the name of safety and stability. How much faster this can happen in the European institutions, where fewer arguments need to be had, fewer tactical decisions need to be made in order to appease certain groups, and the consequences are that much more extensive. The pace of EU regulation picks up an impulse shared by governments across Europe and runs with it like the wind. When faced with domestic opposition, governments can bemoan 'Brussels bureaucracy' and 'EU red tape' as they shrug their shoulders and claim they had no choice. And when the EU regulates one thing, that provides a justification for governments to bring something else 'in line' with regulations - by regulating that as well."

There is a similarity between our own Europhiles and Oswald Moseley's British Union of Fascists. (Mosley's British Union of Fascists was the first political party in Britain in 1949 to call for a European Union.) They were dazzled by the dream of a united Europe, a socialist superstate that could dominate the world, or at least the USA.  Commissioner Chris Patten characterised the USA as a "rogue superpower." Some British Europhiles are so disdainful of their own country that they are eager to seek an accommodation with the supremacist powers developing in Europe, much like the Vichy French. They are contemptuous of any that oppose them, characterising them as mad extremists, or hopelessly outdated Empire loyalists. The Europhiles are the extreme cosmopolitans, who view nation states and national identities as a dangerous anachronism. To them the idea of placing the national history and culture at the centre of teaching in schools is attacked as ethnocentric and reactionary.

Italy's then Prime Minister Giuliano Amato explained how the EU is being developed as the Democratic Way to Totalitarianism: "One must act "as if", in Europe: as if one wanted only very few things, in order to obtain a great deal. As if nations were to remain sovereign, in order to convince them to surrender their sovereignty. The Commission in Brussels, for example, must act as if it were a technical organism, in order to operate like a government. …The sovereignty lost on a national level does not pass on to any new subject. It is entrusted to a faceless entity: Nato, the UN and eventually the EU. The Union is the vanguard of this changing world: it indicates a future of princes without sovereignty. …The new entity is faceless, and those who are in command can neither be pinned down nor elected. …Most people don't realise that the New World is already among us. The truth is that shifting sovereign power will make it evaporate. Disappear. …In it there will no longer be individual identifiable sovereigns. In their place there will be a multitude of authorities at different levels of aggregation, each of which will be at the head of different interests of human beings: levels that possess ambiguous fields of power which they share with other authorities. …By moving, the power we were used to will disappear. That's the way Europe was made too: by creating communitarian organisms without giving the organisms presided over by national governments the impression that they were being subjected to a higher power. That's how the Court of Justice as a super-national organ was born: it was a sort of unseen atom bomb, which Schuman and Monnet slipped into the negotiations on the Coal and Steel Community. That was what the "CSC" itself was: a random mixture of national egotisms which became communitarian. I don't think it's a good idea to replace this slow and effective method - which keeps national States free from anxiety while they are being stripped of power - with great institutional leaps. …As to the Commission, I would like to make this clear. To me the executive branch undoubtedly has a political role. I'm just certain that it will exercise it best by employing the technical power that the Treaty assigns to it as an executive organ. Therefore I prefer to go slowly, to crumble pieces of sovereignty up little by little, avoiding brusque transitions from national to federal power. As you see, the building sites are immense." (Europe Doesn't Need a Sovereign, by Barbara Spinelli, July 13 2000 La Stampa)

The appalling attack on the free world, the destruction of the World Trade Centre, has been seized upon by the federalists as a golden opportunity to rush through a raft of oppressive measures in the name of "fighting terrorism". In 1996 the European Commission reported, "It will be difficult to achieve political union without there being the perception of an external political threat. A terrorist outrage would contribute to the perception of an external political threat." (Daily Telegraph 28/9/01). One month after the terrorist attacks on the United States, Romano Prodi, the European Commission president, called for an acceleration of European integration, saying that the tragic events in the United States opened the way for political integration in Europe. Peter Hain, the Europe Minister, argued that an enlarged EU would help to fight international terrorism and, in turn, make Britain safer, richer and greener. He said enlargement was even more important since the terrorist attacks on September 11. (Parliament 17/10/01) 

The ministers of justice and home affairs of the EU countries reached agreement on a common definition of terrorism, an important piece of the anti-terrorist package promoted after the terrorist attacks in the United States. According to the deal, a terrorist activity is an act which "intentionally intends to destabilise or destroy the fundamental political, constitutional, economic and social structures of a country." The list of terrorist activities includes kidnapping, murder and hijacking. The ministers of justice and home affairs adjusted an earlier definition of terrorism to avoid that demonstrations or anti-globalisation actions, fall under the label of terrorism.  (EUobserver.com 06.12.2001) It will cover people who would not, in British law, have previously been regarded as terrorists at all. A new European-wide arrest warrant is being rushed through by 6 December 2001 to combat terrorism. It actually allows foreign police to order the arrest of a British subject for any offence carrying a sentence of four months or more.

The tragedy also prompted the EC to boost the "Single European Sky" project, with a view to increasing the security and the efficiency of managing the European air space. Transport commissioner Loyola de Palacio said that all European carriers she was in contact with following the events of 11 September are in favour of a single European Sky. The latest example of what is known as "the beneficial crisis" is how Brussels has seized on the recent greatly overblown Sars scare as a further excuse to set up a European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control. A similar "beneficial crisis" was the Belgian dioxin scare of 1999, used by the Commission to seize control over food law and to set up its European Food Safety Authority (Sunday Telegraph 27/7/03 )

ACCOUNTABILITY

Only Danish and Finnish ministers have to account to their Parliaments for their actions in the Council of Ministers. If they are over-ruled by majority voting (QMV) there is nothing those parliaments can do about it. It is claimed that the Council of Ministers is democratic because it is composed of elected representatives. Its decisions, taken in secret, are virtually 'infallible', they cannot in practice be changed - this requires total unanimity  - unlike when they are adopted, usually by QMV. Any electorate that objects to Council decisions cannot vote it out of office. 

Another explanation for the attraction of the EU to ruling elites comes from the Times on the 25 January 2000: "The financial scandals currently engulfing the German Christian Democrats allow the last piece of the jigsaw to fall into place in the systematic pattern of corruption which led to the creation of the single European currency in the early 1990s. They show that many of the major players who sat around the table at Maastricht in 1992, to force the euro on to the statute book, were crooks." Some say that the EU was born much earlier by advocates of a "New World Order". In 1931 in a speech to the Institute for the Study of International Affairs at Copenhagen, historian Arnold Toynbe said: "We are at present working discreetly with all our might to wrest this mysterious force called sovereignty out of the clutches of the local nation states of the world. All the time we are denying with our lips what we are doing with our hands....". (Britain Held Hostage - L Jenkins). Jean Monnet, founding father of the EU, said: "Europe's nations should be guided towards the superstate without their people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as having an economic purpose, but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation" (English Churchman 20th-27th Sept 2002). Foreign office advice to ministers in 1970, recently released, says, "It seems we are unlikely to achieve a homogenous Western European structure by 1985...Our attitude ... should be to work towards the federal objective in a piecemeal and pragmatic way in various fields as opportunity offers and public opinion develops". (Daily Telegraph 25/6/01)

The government is vaguely conscious of the wrong it is doing. Nowadays it claims a success when it manages to preserve our veto, such as in the Nice Treaty, on tax, social security, defence, own resources, border controls and Treaty change.

The truly astonishing aspect of our current predicament is that we have no appeal to higher authority if the terms of the European Community treaties are broken. The most recent example is the Treaty of Nice. Because the Irish rejected it on a first vote, it was nullified. It can only be adopted in law if all countries ratify it. Yet the EU is proceeded as though it had been passed by every country. The Irish were been told in no uncertain terms that enlargement, deemed crucially dependent on the terms of the Nice treaty, is going ahead, regardless of their vote. To quote the European Foundation: "This is, quite literally, a coup d’état." By dint of overwhelming propaganda pressure and a rigged referendum question the Irish have been brought into line and have, on the re-run, voted the "correct" way - they have now accepted the Nice Treaty.

LITTLE ENGLANDERS

In order to convince the people that Britain has no hope of surviving as an independent nation, politicians constantly warn that "we will be left behind" if we do not follow the path to an ever closer European union. The fact that we are the fourth largest economy in the world is never mentioned. The propaganda is subtle. In a recent speech Jack Straw, then Home Secretary, said we were a "small island." Again, we are actually the eighth largest island in the world. (Spectator 21/10/00). But as Martin Wolf writes in the Financial Times (March 2001), "Size of country is irrelevant... most of the world's big countries are poor." Mr Frank Field the eminent Labour Member of Parliament said in a broadcast (BBC R4 Today 27/2/02) that it was significant that the younger age groups did not think of Britain as a failure. They see us as the fourth largest economy in the world, an economic success with no need to cling to the euro for safety. Their attitude contrasts with the older generation that remembers the years of failure, when we were the Sick Man of Europe. These are the people who rule us now; people who believe that by joining with the EU its dynamism will somehow rub off on us. The reality is that we have left the European nations behind, we are the model for them to follow.

THE END IS NEIGH!

We will get one final chance with the coming referendum on the single currency when we can vote for complete economic, and therefore political, union, the "Full Monty"! The "economic test" arguments are a smokescreen. The referendum vote can be characterised as "One man - one vote - once". Everything we need to consider before voting is summarised in Lord Pearson of Rannoch's masterful paper "Better Off Out". If we do hand over the control of our economy, money and financial reserves to un-elected and unaccountable officials in Brussels it will be our final surrender, a bloodless, humiliating, national defeat.

Frank Field MP says "If we ditch the pound, that is the end of Britain as an independent country…it is the closing of the book on Britain. We may now be facing the end of our island story…I cannot see any circumstances in which it would be right ever to join the euro. We are the fifth (now 4^th) strongest economy in the world and we can stand on our own two feet." 

Britain has overtaken Germany in terms of GDP per head, having left France behind some time ago. The figures measured at market exchange rates, show that GDP per head is 16% higher than the eurozone as a whole. (Financial Times 22/12/01)

But now, coming up very fast from behind, is the Constitution for a United States of Europe. In fact the Constitution may simply make adoption of the euro a condition of continued membership of the EU. The constitution is much the more important of the two, just as the constitution of the United States is more important than the Federal Reserve Board. Tony Blair's concessions to a United States of Europe include the extension of majority voting in foreign policy, the election by MEPs of the European Commission President, the creation of an embryonic EU diplomatic service and the adoption of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights. The government is adamant that we will not be allowed a referendum on this treaty which is bigger than the treaties of Maastricht, Amsterdam and Nice rolled together. (The Times February 03, 2003 )

The Federation of Small Businesses has voted, again, to urge the government to pull out of Europe. A group of major British and German companies has called for the relaxation of a raft of directives which are immensely damaging to competitiveness. Even a majority of UK exporters are against the common currency. The Union of Industrial and Employers Confederations of Europe also criticised pointless and complex regulations that harmed competitiveness. A group of leading businesses has formed a multi-million pound campaign called Business for Sterling to oppose membership of the EMU. Rupert Murdoch has complained against "the growth of neo-socialism among regulators and bureaucrats, which is hindering free enterprise. Career politicians and educators are destroying concepts of freedom, choice and individual responsibility".

As John Duffield, who founded Jupiter Asset Management, wrote in the Financial Times (27/6/01), "Britain has long been a bastion of freedom against people who wanted to unify Europe. To throw this away for unproven federalist gains would be a tragedy."

COMPLAISANCE

So why do we put up with such bullying and nannying? Why are the British so supine when confronted every day with the decimation of our power to control our own freedom, laws and destiny? The Prime Minister says we must be at the heart of Europe in order to have "influence". What does "influence" gain us when through it we have lost our "power" - our power to pass our own laws, control our own economy and enjoy the benefits of our own enterprise? Only a fool would trade power for influence.

EUROPEAN CONVENTION ON HUMAN RIGHTS.

I have been ambivalent in the treatment of this entity; sometimes its effects are classed as Eurofollies, sometimes as Euromyths. The fact is that the Convention shared the same birthplace as the EU. The Hague Congress in 1948 spawned the European Coal & Steel Community, the forerunner of the EU and the Council of Europe that created the ECHR. Ratification of the ECHR is a condition of membership of the EU. Under the Human Rights Act 1998, courts cannot actually strike down acts of parliament. But where a court is unable to interpret a piece of legislation in a way compatible with the convention, it can issue a "declaration of incompatibility." A government is then obliged to act on the recommendations of the court. Under the Act, the government has a special power to make "fast track" changes to the offending legislation. It should be noted that the EU itself would not ratify the  European Convention on Human Rights because it will not recognise a superior court, the European Court of Human Rights. Be warned, however, about the attitude to the law in Europe. It follows the old principle spelt out by Italian Prime Minister Giolitti a hundred years ago: "The law is something we apply to our enemies. For our friends, we interpret it."

The the European Charter of Fundamental Rights is a construct of the European Union. It is intended to by-pass the European Convention on Human Rights. Many clauses seem similar but Article 50, Paragraph One - one of the charter's most controversial clauses -says that it could be used to suppress the rights of EU citizens when "necessary" to "meet objectives of general interest being pursued by the union".

The ECHR is in crisis. A report reveals a 900% rise in registered applications between 1988 and 2000, with about 19,000 individual applications presently pending before it. The number of applications is likely to double by 2005. 

Once the apparatus of power is in the hands of The Brotherhood, all 
opposition, all contrary opinion must be extinguished by death ... If you 
will not fight for right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you 
will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly, you may 
come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you 
and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case - 
You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is 
better to perish than to live as slaves. Winston Churchill, 1918.

The Commission of the European Communities, CEC, at 8 Storey's Gate, London SW1P 3AT have a list of their own called Euromyths. I have indicated where they have denied responsibility for an Eurofolly by reference to CEC.

My list contains many references to the Sunday Telegraph and the work of Christopher Booker. He has made a special study not only of Eurofollies but also of our own home grown variety. He has characterised the fervor for regulation as "soft totalitarianism". I recommend his books written jointly with Dr Richard North: The Mad Officials, Constable Press, price UKP7.95 and The Castle of Lies, Duckworth £8.95. Christina Speight has produced a similar compendium to Eurofollies and any extracts are referenced FFP This can now be read on the Internet. Some items are taken from the European Foundation Intelligence Digest. This is issued free; for a subscription e-mail: euro.foundation@E-F.org.uk