MAJOR ISSUES BULLETIN
 
 
 

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‘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’