‘B’ How bad is
it now and how does it work?
So, first, how bad is the present
situation? Few people realise what huge areas
of our national life have already been handed over to control by Brussels. Put simply, these include all of our
commerce and industry, our social and labour policy, our environment,
agriculture, fish, and foreign aid.
What do we mean by “control from Brussels”? Well, in all
those areas of our national life, which used to be entirely controlled by
Parliament, OUR Government can be outvoted in the
Council of Ministers from the Member States, where it has [only] 111/2% of the
votes. You need 30% to block a new
law. That is
the system known as Qualified Majority Voting, or QMV. If our Government agrees or is
outvoted on any new law in those areas, then Parliament, being the House of
Commons and the Lords, must put it into British law. If they don’t, the country faces unlimited fines in the
Luxembourg ‘Court of Justice’. So Parliament has already become
a rubber stamp in all those areas. (1)
Our foreign trade relations are in an even worse
category. The EU bureaucracy, the
Commission, itself negotiates those on our behalf, (2) and so in this area the EU already has its own legal
personality (to which
we shall return).
In addition,
laws affecting our ‘Justice and home affairs’, and our ‘foreign and security
policy’, must be rubber-stamped by Parliament if they have been agreed by our
Government and all the other Member States’ Governments in Brussels. (3) In other words, our Government can still veto new laws in
Brussels in those areas of our national life, but if they don’t, we have to
enact them. If Parliament were to
reject an EU law thus agreed in Brussels in these areas, we would not be
subject to unlimited fines in the Luxembourg ‘Court’, but we would be in breach
of our Treaty obligations, which is equally horrifying prospect to our
political classes in their diplomatic cocktail parties and so on.
There is no appeal against the
Luxembourg ‘Court’. This is not a court
of law, but rather the engine of the Treaties.
It must find in favour of’ the closer union of the people’s of Europe’, and it
interprets the Treaties with much laxity in order to do so.
The
Government admits that over half our major laws, and 80% of all laws, now
originate in Brussels. (4)
No law passed in Brussels
has ever been successfully overturned by Parliament.
There are at
least four other features of this Brussels system, which are worth emphasing, all of
them innately undemocratic.
First: The unelected and corrupt
bureaucracy, the Commission, has the monopoly to propose new laws. (5) They simply can’t believe that in Washington [USA]
Second: The Commission’s legal proposals
are then negotiated in secret by the shadowy Committee of Permanent Representatives,
or bureaucrats from the nation states, known as COREPER. Decisions are taken in the Council of
Ministers, again by secret vote. Even national Parliaments are precluded from knowing how
their bureaucrats or ministers negotiate and vote, and few details of the
continuous horse-trading leak out to the general public.
The Eurocrats pretend that
democracy is maintained because decisions are taken in the
Council by national Ministers, who were elected as national MP’s. But the point remains that
Parliament itself is excluded from the process, except as a rubber stamp when
decisions have been taken.
Examples of how
we have suffered under the system are too numerous to mention, but there is for
instance the ‘Young People at Work’ Directive
Which hit our paper rounds, and the ‘Working Time Directive’, which is now haunting our National Health Service.
The Government
could have vetoed the infamous EU Arrest Warrant because it was
proposed under “Justice and Home Affairs”. This
allows British subjects to be extradited, purely on the say-so of a foreign EU
magistrate, to stand trial in that magistrate’s country, without the benefit of
habeas corpus or a
jury, perhaps for crimes which are not crimes in the UK-such as ‘Xenophobia’, for which we
don’t even have a legal definition (but I expect I’m committing it
now!) The
decision to proceed with that particularly pernicious piece of EU legislation
went through on the nod in the Council of Ministers. The Home Secretary, David Blunkett, did not
utter a single word, because the whole project had already been stitched up in COREPER. So
much for even the shallowest pretence at real democracy.
Please don’t be fooled by the
propaganda which says that Parliament can scrutinise and debate EU
legislation. Indeed we do, until the cows come home, but we cannot change
a comma of it unless that change is unanimously agreed by all the Member States
in the Council of Ministers. This is
entirely unrealistic and indeed no such changes have ever been suggested by
Parliament. We also
debate and vote on each new EU Treaty, but again we cannot change a word.
We either
accept the whole thing, or we reject it all.
So Parliament has always accepted every Treaty precisely as agreed in
Brussels, even if some of us have forced votes against them in protest.
A
third feature of this awful system, enshrined in the
Treaties, is that once an area of national life has been ceded to control of
Brussels, it can never be returned to national Parliaments. (6)
This is known
in Euro-speak as the ‘Acquis Communautaire’- or ‘powers acquired by the
Community’. In plain English this
translates as the ‘ratchet’, which can only grind in one direction toward the ”ever closer union of the peoples of Europe”
The
fourth feature is that no changes can be made to the Treaties unless they
are agreed unanimously in the Council of Ministers. (7)
So renegotiation of the Treaties
is not realistic; the only way out is the door. [TO FREEDOM]
For good
measure, we should remember that the EU
is corrupt and corrupting from top to bottom. Its own internal auditors have
refused to sign its accounts for the last 9 years. No fewer than 5 whistleblowers have been
sidelined in the last 5 years. The
problem is that there is no European demos, so there can be no European
democracy to hold the fraudsters and free-loaders to account.
The MEPs are
supposed to sort the Commission out in this area, but their own travel and
office expenses are famously bogus. The
MEPs are also far too frightened of bringing the EU into further disrepute to
fulfil their duty to the taxpayer. They
would risk bringing the whole gravy train to a halt, or they might be pushed
off it; most of them are unemployable elsewhere, certainly at anything like
their present salaries and ‘conditions’.
It’s also worth
saying that the whole of continental Europe will continue in steady and
irreversible demographic and therefore economic decline over the next 50 years.
(8)
The
UK and Ireland will improve their demography, as of course Turkey. The USA also looks healthy, Japan looks
terrible, and China and the Far East are set to boom. Add to this the unemployment and decay
caused by the EU’s adoption of Franco-German social and labour policies, and
you have to ask: ‘WHY stay on the Titanic?’
So
those are the huge areas of our Sovereignty we have already given away. That’s
why giving away most of what is left, under the proposed new EU Constitution,
is described by the Government as a ‘tidying-up’ exercise. They have a point. The Constitution would merely sweep most of
what is left under the Brussels carpet.
End
of Part ‘B’