A Tale Of Two "Conservative" Parties - Part 1: The UK

At a time when the left has swung the pendulum hard to the left in both the UK and the US, at a time when the electorate of both US and UK appears poised for a massive move to the right, the "conservative" parties - the Tories in the UK, the Republicans in the U.S. - seem far from up to the task. When we need Churchill and Reagan, we instead have leaders in the mold of Clement Attlee and Herbert Hoover. The problem is particularly acute in the UK.

The UK's political structure has failed systemically. Democracy in Britain does not result in a "representative" democracy. The people of Britain only get a vote for their own local representative. The position of Prime Minister is never voted on by the people, but rather is chosen by the party. The people get no say in the House of Lords - and it is a body that has been politically emasculated by the socialist Labour Party at any rate. Britain has no constitutional limitations on the power of government, despite centruries of agreements that specified such limits and that enshrined individual rights, begining most famously with the Magna Carta. That is because, over two centuries ago, Britain's Parliament declared their decisions the paramount law of the land, thus enshrining what is today a tyranny of the majority. Indeed, it should be noted that the U.S. Bill of Rights is little more than an amalgam of the rights of Protestant Englishmen that existed as of 1776. Unfortunately, many of those rights are circumscribed in Britain today. What all this means in the aggregate is that the wants and desires of the electorate are significantly minimized, the role of a left wing media is greatly magnified, and the desire of politicians to accrete power goes all but unchecked in the UK.

Labour has spent its years in office deconstructing Britain with multiculturalism - including as part and parcel thereof active discrimination against the indigenous population of Britain - open borders immigration, a massively expanding welfare system with incredibly perverse incentives, an ever more intrusive nanny state, huge increases in government spending, an insane energy policy centered on the canard of global warming that is driving up enery costs exponentially and threatens the viability of their energy infrastructure, a war on Christianity, and the transfer of Britain's sovereignty to the EU without the promised referendum of the people. On top of that, only a few short months ago, an MP (Member of Parliament) expense scandal rocked the Labour Party and brought the popularity of the Labour government already at or near its nadir, to a level of popularity slightly below that of the ebola virus.

By all accounts, Labour should be knocked from government in the next election in a blood bath. Yet so weak are the alternatives that it is actually an open question today, but a few short weeks from Britain's next election, whether Britain's conservative party will manage to pull a defeat from the jaws of what should be a victory so vast as to result in a banishment of Labour from political power for years to come. Indeed, EU Referendum reports that the Tories maintain only an 8% lead in the polls over Labour as of today.

When speaking to a very close friend the other day - a woman of uncommon perceptiveness and intellect born and living in Kent - she stated that, while the electorate is poised for a radical move to the right, the problem is that there is no political party to lead them. She thinks that David Cameron, the head of the Tory Party, is the worst kind of unprincipled political opportunist. The Tories, she said, have done nothing to differentiate themselves from the socialist Labour Party and are promising, in essence, to continue many of the same policies that are destroying Britain. The Lib Democrats are even worse. The UKIP is perhaps the only true conservative party, but they are wholly ignored by the media and stand little chance of making significant gains. The BNP is demonized by the media and, while many of their policies are good, their history of racism and anti-semitism makes them an unacceptable choice. In short, the people of Britain are, at a critical moment in their history, being disenfranchised by a broken political system.

My friend recommended a recent article by Simon Heffer as accurately summing up the situation (or, in her vernacular, "spot on.") This from Mr. Heffer at the Telegraph:

. . . The Labour Party has failed utterly in government. It has not merely wrecked the economy, with long-term consequences: it has taken a path of repairing the damage that will, through its emphasis on high taxes, borrowing and public spending, cause more harm before it does any good – if it does any good. It has also been derelict on matters of such significance as our schools, our universities, law and order, immigration and our Armed Forces. . . . Mr Brown's stewardship of our nation has been shocking. He does not deserve to have it renewed.

Yet, despite this atrocity, the Conservative Party has, in the five years since its last debacle, done remarkably little to convince the public that it understands what is going on, let alone that it has any concept of how to make our country more prosperous, better run and generally happier. When David Cameron spoke to activists on the Embankment yesterday morning, one was at once splashed in the face by the cold water of the obsession with image: almost everyone in sight was young, several of them (including a man Mr Cameron ostentatiously embraced with that warm insincerity that is his trademark) from ethnic minorities, a correct proportion of them women. His approach has always been about ticking the boxes of militant superficiality. His main argument is that he is not the Labour Party. Well, not in name, at any rate.

And the Liberal Democrats? They have a flexibility of principle that leaves even that of Mr Cameron standing; a record of opportunism and incompetence in local government (the only place they have had any power) that puts Mr Brown's moral and intellectual inadequacies in the shade. One would be inclined to ridicule them entirely were they not likely to do as much damage to Labour in some parts of the country as the Tories are, and because of the far from impossible prospect of Vince Cable having some say in the running of our economy in a month's time. With various useful independents standing in certain seats, with the Greens in with a chance in Brighton Pavilion, with Ukip a not impossible prospect for the Speaker's seat in Buckingham, with votes being split in a way they have rarely been split before, not just by the Greens and Ukip, but also by the knuckledusters of the BNP, anything could happen.

As I am not an astrologer – and also because I genuinely don't have a clue – you must forgive me if I don't predict the outcome. We shall know soon enough. All that is certain (and here comes another rare fact) is that we shall end up being governed by a social democratic government of some sort. This is not because I expect a coalition including the Lib Dems, though that joy may well await us. It is because the likely programmes and conduct of another Labour or a new Conservative administration will be broadly social democratic. By that, I mean that the state will play a large role in the management of our country; there will a strong redistributive element to policy; levelling down, whether through the education system or the welfare state, will continue. What this means is that a significant proportion of the electorate that wants none of these things will have been effectively disfranchised. Our understandable boredom is tempered by a frustration that none of the main three parties seems to want to represent what so many of us believe in. . . .

For the frustration of the non-social democratic majority in this country has only just begun. No one from the main parties will tell the truth about the need to sack hundreds of thousands of people on the public payroll in order to ensure we live within our means. Nobody will tell the truth about how lower taxes increase revenue, because there are too many cheap votes in bashing bankers who earn lots of money. Nobody will properly defend capitalism as an essential ingredient of a free society. Nobody will champion selective education, which gives such a chance in life to bright children from poor homes, and nobody will be truthful about the pointlessness of much university education.

Nobody will dare to be radical about the corrupt effects of the welfare state. Nobody will take the radical approach needed to counter the results of unlimited immigration. Above all – and that last point leads on to this – nobody will confront the public with the realities of our membership of a European Union governed by the Treaty of Lisbon, which has left us with a choice of staying in on Europe's terms, or getting out.

All these things matter to people who are honest, hard-working, love their country, and seek only to be allowed to get on with their lives, undisturbed by the state, and to keep more of what they earn. There will be millions of voters missing from the polling booths on May 6 because there is an agenda missing from the discourse of our leading politicians, all of whom fear challenging a consensus that exists more in their minds, or those of their teenage advisers, than in reality.

The tedium to come can be obviated by not turning on the television for a few weeks. Newspapers, believe me, will ensure the diet of politics is kept to the minimum: our readers are precious to us, and we wish neither to bore them with the self-importance of politicians nor to insult them by bombarding them with propaganda. Strong drink and martial music may be useful. That still leaves the problem of how Britain will ever be run properly, whether by a tribal introvert who wishes to suffocate us with his "values", or a PR spiv whose "big idea" is to appoint 5,000 commissars to assist the development of "communities". There will be more absurdity yet. "Democracy," wrote Carlyle, "which means despair of finding any Heroes to govern you!" How right you were, Tom, how right you were.

These are dark days indeed in Britain. And there is no light at the end of the tunnel. I would highly recommend the blog EU Referendum for following this election and the various issues associated therewith.


See: A Tale Of Two "Conservative" Parties - Part 2: The U.S.

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A Tip O' The Hat To Democracy, A Tip O' The Knickers To The EU

Ireland, the only country out of 27 given an opportunity to vote on the new EU Constitution, have just saved the other half billion people in Europe. They have pulled Britain's crown jewels out of the fire. They have voted no to the Treaty of Lisbon. One can only imagine the number of Guiness Stouts being poured across Britain and the rest of Europe today.

As I blogged below, Britain had three last chances to stay out of the EU. One was the a vote on ratification of the EU Constitution by the House of Lords, an institution radically altered by Labour PM Tony Blair when they were not seeing things his way. Unfortunately, but predictably, they voted with Labour to approve the transfer of Britain's sovereignty to the EU. A second chance was a law suit to force a referendum in Britain based on Labour's pre-election promises to the nation. That one is ongoing. The third chance was the Irish vote. And they have not disappointed.

The Irish just tossed a huge wrench into the anti-democratic wheels of EU. Every other nation in the EU was having the new Constitution imposed on them by their political class. Ireland was required by the terms of its Constitution to hold a referendum. And hold it they did. All 27 nations have to agree for the Treaty of Lisbon to come into effect and the new EU super-state to be born - at least according to existing treaties. There are without doubt thousands of socialists in Brussels right now combing every possible nuance of every EU treaty to see if there is a way around that.

The EU Referendum, whose raison d'etre has been to fight this EU coup in Britain, should have the first word on this:

Overall result so far: 53.6 - 46.4 for the "noes", but Corbett speaks (see bottom of this post) - and so does Barroso. Despite that, there is no way that the "colleagues" can get round this. Spin they might, but the fact is that, in the ONLY referendum on the treaty, the voters said Nooooooooooooooooooooooo! . . .

OPENING A NEW FRONT: As this is not the end, the beginning of the end or the end of the beginning, a new front has been opened in the war. In a day or so there will be more about the BrugesGroupBlog and the thinking behind it.

What you will now hear is loud squealing from the direction of Brussels as the incredibly anti-democratic folks who are determined to make an EU super-state wholly irrespective of the wishes of Europe's citizens try and figure a way around this. And as the EU Referendum documents, it has already started:

UPDATE: Reuters is reporting that France's secretary of state for European affairs, Jean-Pierre Jouyet, is saying that an Irish "no" should not stop other member states ratifying the treaty. "The most important thing is that ratification should continue in other countries and I have good reasons to think that the process of ratification will continue," he told LCI television. "We would have to see with the Irish at the end of the ratification process how we could make it work and what legal arrangement we could come to."

So, the mice are gnawing away at it already. We told you this would happen! . . .

UPDATE: David Heathcoat-Amory says on BBC Radio 4 that the Conservatives should press for the UK ratification to be abandoned. Some chance!

UPDATE: Ahern says: "We're in uncharted waters." You bet!

UPDATE: The founder of Libertas, Declan Ganley, says: "The Irish people have rejected the Lisbon Treaty. "it is a great day for Irish democracy ... This is democracy in action ... and Europe needs to listen to the voice of the people." Ganley adds that Brian Cowen, "has a mandate to go back to Europe and do the best job possible".

Socialist Party leader Joe Higgins has said the likely "no" vote is a "huge rebuff to the political establishment" but a vindication of the rights of "tens of millions of workers" in the European Union. He believes the "no" side "won the argument", despite the fact that the main political parties and "big business" were in favour of the treaty. . . .

UPDATE: Poland's President Lech Kaczynski's office says he will still sign the treaty. "The president has already said the issue of ratification is a done deal," Mariusz Handzlik, head of the foreign affairs department in the president's office, told Reuters.

UPDATE: Andrew Duff, Lib-Dim leader says, "we cannot accept this result". Corbett on his blog says, "there are 26 other member states whose opinion matters too. It is inconceivable that all of the others will simply say 'too bad - one country has said no to the package as it stands, so let's forget reform and stick with the current system for evermore."

UPDATE: Deutsche Welle reports: "A feeling of gloom and uncertainty fell on Brussels on Friday after Ireland's justice minister said it appeared that the 'no' camp had pulled ahead in the referendum on the European Union's new reform treaty." The eurosceptics, meanwhile, have decamped to Kitty O'Shea's - yards from the commission building - drinking pints of Guiness while they hold an impromptu press conference.

UPDATE: EU commission President Jose Manuel Barroso is still calling on other members states to ratify the treaty. "I believe the treaty is alive and we should now try to find a solution," he says.

UPDATE: Minister for Justice Brian Lenihan says Ireland has lost influence in Europe. He was "very, very disappointed" with the outcome, adding: "I think it is a very sad day for this country and for Europe as well." It was a "serious matter for Ireland," he said, then declaring:"We have to accept the decision of the people… and that's democracy and I accept that." . . .

Read the entire post. This certainly ought to be a signal to Tory Leader David Cameron to finally get off the fence and start challenging this stealth coup being imposed on Britain. And hopefully it will put much more pressure on Labour and Gordon Brown to stop the ratification process.

We will give the last word on this to Brits At Their Best who say a very sincere "Thank You" to Ireland:

We think the Irish have said NO to the EU with gusto!

They alone, three million of the half a billion people in the 27 nations of the European Union, had a democratic vote on the undemocratic EU constitution.

Read the entire post. The war is hardly over. But think of this as Dunkirk. The socialists are not defeated, but they just lost their best opportunity to destroy the allies.

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Britain's Final Chances

The EU will become a super-state once its Constitution, embodied in the Treaty of Lisbon, is fully ratified by all member countries. The EU is an anti-democratic experiment in socialism that stands in contradiction to Britain’s anglo-saxon traditions of representative democracy, individual rights and capitalism (see here, here, here and here). While membership in the EU has proven a boon for Britain’s political class, it has proven very bad for the rest of Britain in innumerable ways that only portend to worsen.

Britain's integration as an EU province is also very bad for the U.S. Britain has been America's closest European ally. As Britain is subsumed into the EU, so goes both its special relationship with the U.S. and, in a larger context, a critically important member of the anglosphere whose traditions and values animate the freest and most prosperous nations on earth.

Britain is at a tipping point on the EU membership in many ways. Things look bleak at the moment. Gordon Brown and Labour are determined to transfer Britain’s sovereignty to the EU without any vote of the people. The "conservative" Tory Party is little more than a light version of the socialist Labour party. As I posted here, it is led by David Cameron, a weak man driven by political expediency rather than conservative principles who has said that he will treat Labour’s actions as a fait accompli. What is going on in Britain is a stealth coup by a disingenuous political class that is being largely supported by British media though minimalist and superficial coverage.

We are down now to the last three chances to derail British ratification of the Lisbon Treaty and transfer of the bulk of its sovereign powers to the EU. The House of Lords must vote on the Lisbon Treaty this week. Ireland is the only country to hold a referendum on the treaty, and they do so on Thursday. Lastly, there is a court case seeking to force Labour to uphold its pledge and hold a referendum on the EU. Speaking on these issues are Melanie Phillips, John Bolton and EU Referendum’s Dr. Richard North.
________________________________________________________

Author Melanie Phillips has written an exceptional article documenting the current situation and the stakes at issue:

. . . The EU is the issue that all politicians are ignoring in the hope we will forget about it. Most immediately, they hope we have forgotten to be concerned about the European Constitution, which is masquerading as a bog standard treaty over which we need lose no sleep.

This constitution, which would bring into being an unprecedented bureaucratic super-state and end once and for all what remains of the independence of EU member nations, was dumped after it was rejected by French and Dutch voters in 2005. It was then resurrected in all but name as the Treaty of Lisbon, which Parliament is in the process of ratifying. This week, that constitution faces a triple test.

Today, businessman Stuart Wheeler's legal challenge to Labour's refusal to honour its manifesto pledge to put it to a referendum reaches the High Court. On Wednesday, the ratification Bill reaches the House of Lords. This Bill was ruthlessly shoe-horned through the Commons. This week we will see whether their Lordships will also spinelessly roll over, or recall their historic role as a last- ditch defence of this country's interests against such abuse of power.

But something else is happening which our politicians didn't bargain for. As we know, the constitution has to be approved by every member state or else it falls. On Thursday, Ireland votes on the treaty - and it looks as if it might vote against it.
The Irish government is filled with panic and horror at the possibility that the Irish public might actually be thinking for themselves. For the EU has always relied on bamboozling the public about the joys of EUtopia and terrifying them that their whole world will collapse if it is thwarted.

More and more people, however, are realising that they have been lied to, not only about the constitution but about the whole EU project. In Britain, we were told from the start that it was only an economic union which would entail no loss of sovereignty.

That was the very opposite of the truth. The dirty little secret is that, even without the constitution, political power has simply drained away from Westminster to Brussels.

In a little-noticed but quite devastating speech in the Commons last week, the Tory MP Peter Lilley recorded that last year the EU passed no fewer than 177 directives - more or less equivalent to our Acts of Parliament - and 2,033 regulations enforceable in the UK, as well as making 1,045 decisions which affect us.

Our own Trade Minister has admitted that 'around half of all UK legislation with an impact on business, charities and the voluntary sector' stems from laws passed in Brussels. . . .

Now the former Tory policy adviser Lord Blackwell is arguing that Britain should renegotiate the terms of its EU membership, restricting it to trade agreements and common security and environment policies, but rejecting EU control over monetary policy, foreign affairs, defence and justice.

An opinion poll run by his group Global Vision suggests that more than a third of voters across all parties would back a prospective Conservative Government pledge to negotiate such a change, and that people would support it in a referendum by more than two to one.

The fact is that those opposed to the creation of a European super-state are not the 'xenophobes' or 'Little Englanders' of the overheated Eurofanatic imagination.

. . . The EU is fundamentally an anti- democratic project, based on the belief that the individual nation is the source of the ills of the world and that by contrast supra-national institutions offer the solution to all its problems.

It is that absence of democratic transparency which is now corrupting not just European politics but our own. The fresh outbreak of 'Tory sleaze' over the expenses gravy train is rooted in Brussels, where corruption is the accepted way of EU life.

Yesterday, the Irish government said that a 'no' vote over the constitution would be a crisis for Europe. What rubbish. The plain fact is that the EU has brought about a crisis for democracy within Europe. Which is why it is essential that we should renegotiate our place within it.

Politicians, however, run a mile from any such suggestion. The terror of acknowledging the true nature of what has happened, in case he is required to address it, has propelled David Cameron into a cul-de-sac.

His pledge to allow the British people a vote on the constitution is worthless since - as he has only now admitted explicitly - once the treaty is ratified it will be almost impossible to do anything about it.

But since his party has warned that the constitution will spell the end of British self-government, this turns Mr Cameron into the Hamlet of the European debate - an awesome talent for speeches denouncing tyranny, but a complete inability to act against it.

Mr Cameron is paralysed by fear of reigniting the Tories' internal civil war over Europe. But the Tory Europhiles are now moth- eaten has-beens who have comprehensively lost the argument with the British people.

The fact is that Parliament is now so emasculated it is becoming the equivalent of Westminster regional council in the Republic of Euroland.

. . . It is time to end this charade. Whatever happens to the constitutional treaty in Ireland or anywhere else, Britain must now re-negotiate its relationship with the EU. The politician who does so will be a hero to the nation. Which is why Mr Cameron should ignore the faint-hearts and suede-shod Euro-fanatics in his ranks. This country must rediscover its identity and sense of purpose, or else it is finished. It can do so only if it regains the power to govern itself.

The issue is quite simply whether democracy in Britain has a future at all. It could not be more fundamental. . . .

Read the entire article. Former UN Ambassador John Bolton spoke at the University of Dublin against ratification of the EU treaty, both because it is anti-democratic and its effects on NATO and the US-British relationship:

The Lisbon Treaty poses a threat to NATO and undermines democracy by handing more power to Brussels, a former senior advisor to President George W Bush has warned.

John Bolton, . . . said the new Treaty could hurt the military alliance between Europe and the US.

He was speaking only days before Ireland hold a referendum on the EU Treaty, the only member country to do so, with the latest polls showing the Yes campaign slightly ahead.

But an Irish vote No on Thursday will mean the Treaty, which abolishes dozens of national vetoes and creates the new post of EU president, cannot come into force in any of the 27 member states.

. . . Mr Bolton has previously warned the deal threatens Britain's special relationship with the United States and yesterday said he would not understand the Irish giving "more powers to bureaucrats."

He added: "The only people you elect have a very limited role and I think this treaty will further enhance the power of institutions in Brussels without extending democratic authority to people."

. . . A Global Vison/ICM poll published yesterday found 64 per cent of Britons would back a renegotiated looser relationship with the EU in a referendum, against 26 per cent who would oppose it.

Read the entire article. Dr. Richard North, who runs the EU Referendum blog, added his own thoughts to those of John Bolton:

. . . For sure, the official US view is very much at variance, expressed in a report last month from the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. This stated that Washington would support a more "muscular" EU, provided that European defence spending was sufficient for a radical improvement in military capabilities on this side of the Atlantic. Some four months previously, in a speech in Paris, Victoria Nuland, the US ambassador to NATO, had overtly supported a militarily stronger European Union . . . That support, though, was conditional on the Europeans embarking on a "radical improvement in military capabilities, with a far more focused policy on defence spending.

"While we cannot say that Bolton's view in any way reflects official US policy, it may be a straw in the wind. From the Istituto Affari Internazionali in Rome, we recently had a report indicating that many of the EU member states were having trouble meeting their existing defence commitments. While between 2001 and 2006, France, Britain and Spain spent more than three percent of gross domestic product on defence, Italy spent only 1.47 percent, and spending in Germany and Sweden sharply declined.

Even more recently, we had seen reports that the French military is in trouble, with most of France's tanks, helicopters and jet fighters are unusable and its defence apparatus on the verge of "falling apart".

Elsewhere on this blog we recorded the difficulties EU member states had in equipping its force for Chad and latterly we concluded that – in terms of military performance, the idea of European defence was an "unrealisable dream".Despite this, we have seen continued attempts by the EU to create a "European Army" – but all that actually amounts to is a "dedicated military headquarters", more structures and oversight of the military function by the EU parliament.

. . . For some member states . . . the objective of pooling military structure is to spend less money on defence.

Going back in history, one must recall that one of the greatest supporters of the nascent European "project" – in the fifties and sixties – was the US government, with CIA money being channelled into the European Movement. Not least, the US then saw in a united Europe a bastion against the emerging threat of Communism which threatened to engulf the whole of Europe.

Now, if Bolton is seeing the EU defence ambitions as a threat, he cannot be the only influential American to take that view. This may reflect the assiduous work of a number of British teams who have been over to the States, working through right-wing think tanks like the Heritage Foundation – warning them of the dangers.

As did it help the EU on its way, therefore, there is now a glimmer of hope that the US could be instrumental in prising away the UK from the "project", having seen – at last – that the EU represents a danger to the interests of democracy and global security.

Read the entire post. NATO as it is has significant, possibly existential problems. Most NATO nations other than Britain do not field a functional military and most NATO members are not fully supporting the NATO mission in Afghanistan. Moreover, given the anti-democratic nature of the EU, having all of the member nation’s forces integrated and under EU central control could prove problematic down the road for any states whose restive populations decide they no longer want to be part of the grand socialist experiment that is the EU.

At any rate, we are nearing the end of Britain's chances to sidestep the transfer of their sovereign rights to the EU. Much will be decided by week’s end.

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There Is Something Elegant In This

It is posted here that Gordon Brown has surrendered Britain's sovereignty by affixing his signiture set upon the Treaty of Lisbon - the EU Constitution by any other name. The Treaty will bind upon Britain if it is not defeated in Parliament. And it appears now that a true anachronism, the knighted class of England sitting in the House of Lords, may prove the last best line of defense against Brown's perfidy. There is bit of lyrical and ancient poetry in that, really. This today from Brits At Their Best:

There will be a battle in the House of Lords

We wrote to Lord Stoddart of Swindon to thank him for his stand in the House of Lords against the EU Treaty that will destroy British freedom. He replied

Dear Mr. Abbott,

Thank you for including details of our battle to defend Britain on your website. There will be many more to come when the Bill comes before The House of Lords.

Yours sincerely,

David Stoddart

It would be a good thing to show public support for the Lords when they attempt to stop the Treaty. Ideas?

All of Crown's loyal subjects should be marching on the House of Parliament for that one, I would think.

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Whither Britania?

England has had the single greatest positive historical influence upon this world of any nation. England spread throughout the world its system of government, laws and economy that are the cornerstones of all just and free democracies today.

In America, if one wants to investigate from whence our rights as citizens and the limitations upon our government derived, the starting point is not 1776 and the minds of John Adams and his compatriots. The starting point is the then extant common law of England. For it was the rights of freemen under the English law that the drafters of our Constitution used to provide the structure for the nation they would build in America. If you want to see the document from which our Declaration of Independence and our Bill of Rights derive, look to England's Declaration of Rights of 1689. It is not an exaggeration to say that the history of America does not begin with the Mayflower, it begins with the Magna Carta.

Unfortunately, Britain never adopted a written constitution. Their legal system provided for no strict foundation that court's could rely upon as the bedrock of their government. Indeed, in Britain, there is no such thing as an unconstitutional law - the laws of Parliament are supreme. This lack of a foundation is apparent in the evolution of Britain over the past century as it has embraced socialism, a government paradigm that involves ever heavier control of the individual. At the turn of the century, Her Majesty's subjects could all carry firearms. Now they are largely illegal and found in apprecialble numbers only amongst the criminal class. A century ago, people had the right of free speech in Britain. Today, the country passes "hate speech" laws. And now the end draws nigh for Britain as it prepares to jettison its sovereignty and become a vassal to the super-state in Brussels. Britain's Labour government, without a promised referendum of its people, is about to sign the "Reform Treaty" and join the grand experiment in undemocratic socialism that is the EU. It is an inexplicable and horrendous act of treason that sees the ruling class betraying the people of Britain.

Not all of Britain is going quietly into this national good night. As explained by Brits at their Best, there are many with their eyes wide open who see this for the epic catsatrophe that it is:

On the evening of the 5th of December three lords were battling in the House of Lords against the Government’s plan to sign the so-called ‘Reform Treaty’ at the European Council meeting on 14-16 December.

The treaty is appalling, but many people have yet to recognize the danger. The EU constitution in all but name, the treaty will devastate Britain’s sovereignty and British liberty. Fighting alongside Lord Pearson and Lord Willoughby de Broke was independent Labour peer Lord Stoddart of Swindon. Against them were many EU-pensioned Lords who are sitting on the scrutiny committee for the treaty without declaring their financial interest in the EU.

The EXTRACTS FROM HANSARD illuminate the main arguments that the Lords made with clarity and (teeth-clenched) wit -

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, when future historians come to sift through the rubble of what was once our proud democracy, they may stumble on one sentence in last month’s Queen’s Speech that they identify as the tipping point - the moment when the breakdown of trust between the British people and their political class became irretrievable. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, has already picked up on that sentence, but it is so beautiful that it bears repeating:
“My Government will take forward policies. . .to entrust more power to Parliament and the people”.

When the Government wrote those words, they knew perfectly well that they were going to Lisbon next week to sign up to what is designed to be the final EU treaty, that that treaty consigns most of the remains of our national sovereignty to the clutches of the octopus in Brussels, that they had promised the people a referendum before they did so and that they were breaking that promise only because they had discovered that the people wanted none of it and would vote against it by a large majority. That they did all this in cold blood is proved by what the then Prime Minister said on 23 April 2004, before the French and Dutch rejection of the constitution:

“What you can’t do is have a situation where you get a rejection of the treaty and then you just bring it back with a few amendments and say we will have another go. You can’t do that”.

Yet that is exactly what the Eurocrats have done, and the Government are doing it, too.

This deception is underlined by statements from leaders of no fewer than 12 other member states that this treaty is indeed the same as the defeated constitution, as the noble and learned Lord, Lord Howe, and other noble Lords have said. It is also underlined by what has been said by four more leaders, who assure us that the main difference is that the new treaty has been designed to be unintelligible to ordinary people. I am particularly fond of the quotation from Mr Karel de Gucht, the Belgium Foreign Minister, who said:

“The aim of the Constitutional Treaty was to be more readable; the aim of this treaty is to be unreadable. . . The Constitution aimed to be clear, whereas this treaty had to be unclear. It is a success”. . .

The British people, however, are not fools. Their disdain for their political class in general, and of our membership of the European Union in particular, will only be deepened by this story, perhaps, as I have suggested, irretrievably. Let us look at those two developments separately. The first is Euroscepticism. Several recent opinion polls suggest that this is on the increase, with about 80 per cent of respondents saying that they would vote to leave the EU if that meant regaining control of our borders. Some 67 per cent say that they would vote either to leave the EU or to reduce our relationship with our friends in Europe to one of free trade and intergovernmental collaboration. Up to 40 per cent say that they would vote to leave anyway.

I believe that this is because our people are beginning to understand the Eurosceptic case and to realise that they have been deceived for 32 years about the true nature and final destination of the project of European integration. That process started during the referendum campaign of 1975, when they were assured that continued membership of the Common Market entailed no loss of “essential national sovereignty”. I remember thinking at the time, no doubt with many others who voted to stay in the market, that that meant that we would not lose any sovereignty at all because all sovereignty was essential and indivisible. But the slippery Prime Minister of the day really meant that we would retain only such sovereignty as the Eurocrats and our political masters judged to be good for us while the rest was gradually ceded to Brussels.

That process, largely hidden from the people, has brought us to where we are today, with the majority of our national law imposed on us by a secretive system in Brussels. The people have lost the right to elect and dismiss those who make most of their laws and their hard-earned right to govern themselves, and they do not like it. That is why the Motion on the Order Paper says that we are here to “take note” of the forthcoming European Council in Lisbon next week. There is nothing that we or the House of Commons can do. As other noble Lords have said, we can protest and debate as much as we want, but we cannot change a word of the treaty that will be signed. That is why pressure is building up.

Lord Watson of Richmond: My Lords, we have had this exchange before and there is a great familiarity to this debate. The noble Lord, Lord Pearson, has asserted, as he has many times in this House, that when we had a referendum on membership of the European Community, people were not told the implications and that, indeed, they may even have been deceived to that end. I have to inform the House that I was involved with BBC programming at that time. There was no secret of the term “ever closer union”, for example, which was already in the treaties. I was involved in three programmes that looked closely at the history and the implications of that. It is simply not true that this was hidden from the British public.

Lord Pearson of Rannoch: My Lords, I am grateful for that intervention, which I have had previously. I think that I replied before that I accept that there were a number of insiders. Some people in the House of Commons may even have read the treaties, but the vast majority of British people did not. I stick to my guns: the British people were deceived into believing that they were voting to stay in a common market.

I may be alone, but I am not sure how much good it will do if your Lordships or the House of Commons insist on a referendum and the people vote down the treaty. Of course, we would avoid its frightening provisions, but I fear that we would be left stuck where we are in the treaty of Nice and that the other countries would proceed under the present Article 43 to enhance their co-operation without us. At least the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, who I regret to see has left us, and I agree that that may happen, although he thinks that Nice does not go far enough whereas I think that it goes far too far.

Be that as it may, most Eurosceptics believe that we would somehow reorder our relationship with Brussels in the confusion that would follow our failure to ratify the treaty. But I see no sign of any such desire in the breast of the Government or in the Conservative Party. Although I support a referendum as being a possible step in the right direction, for me the only sure way out remains the door.

However, in the hope that a referendum might lead to more radical change, perhaps I may point out one of the flimsiest arguments advanced by those who do not want a referendum; namely, that referenda were not granted on previous EU treaties after 1975, so there is no need for one now. This does not make sense because clearly there should have been a referendum on each of them. After all, the Single European Act 1986 handed over all our commerce and industry, and our environment, to the qualified majority vote in Brussels. It also paved the way for a common foreign policy and gave up the veto in 12 other areas of our national life. The Maastricht treaty of 1992 made us all citizens of the Union and let Brussels’ tentacles into justice and home affairs, education, public health, culture, consumer protection, trans-European networks and development, among other areas. We gave up the veto on a further 30 areas as well.

Amsterdam in 1997 handed over our social and labour policy to Brussels and let the Eurocrats into human rights, asylum and immigration, and police and judicial co-operation in criminal matters, and 24 more areas were moved to qualified majority voting. So it went on at Nice in 2003, with a further 46 areas given over to majority voting in the Council. Clearly, all those treaties should have been put to the people, as should be the proposed treaty of Lisbon, which cedes a further 61 areas to qualified majority voting and surrenders most of our remaining power to govern ourselves. Five wrongs do not make a right.

The other main plank in the Eurosceptic case is that membership of the EU is cripplingly expensive in cash and to our economy and that a great many jobs would therefore be created if we left and carried on our free trade with the single market. Against that, the Government claim that the EU is good for peace, whereas we hold NATO responsible for peace in Europe since 1945. . .

8.10 pm
Lord Willoughby de Broke: My Lords, when I heard the noble Lord, Lord Campbell of Alloway, suggest that the Conservatives should have a manifesto commitment for withdrawal from the European Union, I could hardly believe my ears. Whether that will find favour with my erstwhile friends on the Front Bench I do not know. I thought I saw the noble Lord, Lord Howell, turn a whiter shade of pale when he heard that. We will see; I do not expect him to have to answer that this evening.

I will draw your Lordships’ memories back to the Laeken declaration. How many noble Lords remember that? I know that the noble Lord, Lord Tomlinson, did, but he was on the substitutes’ bench during the later convention. That was when, if noble Lords recall, the leaders of the European Union finally recognised that perhaps the people of European Union states were fed up with not being consulted, with their views not being taken into account, with deals being done behind closed doors and with the apparently incessant transfer of powers from their parliaments to the centre, to the unelected bureaucrats in Brussels. The Laeken declaration proposed returning powers to member states, to national and local level, at least to give the appearance if not the reality of some sort of redress of what has been referred to as the democratic process.

Even those minimal fig leaves for sovereignty and national parliaments were soon swept away during the subsequent convention under Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, which was given such a resounding raspberry by the French and Dutch electorates. I am rather sorry that they voted against the treaty, because it deprived us of having our say. Had the French and Dutch voted “Yes”, we in this country would have had a referendum; no prizes for guessing what the result would have been. The French and Dutch votes effectively allowed Mr Blair to slip out of his commitment to give us a referendum. The French and Dutch votes did not even dent the Eurocrats’ determination to press on with further integration. They went on as though nothing had happened. As Mr Juncker, the Prime Minister of Luxembourg put it:

“If it’s a yes we will say ‘on we go’ and if it’s a no we will say ‘we continue’”.

That is democracy in action for you.

So after what was amusingly called a period of reflection, the Eurocrats have come back with the reform treaty, which is a sort of constitution in drag, if you like; Tommy Cooper dressed up as Widow Twanky. I do not want to do the heads of state of the members of the European Union an injustice; they have been very honest about what the reform treaty is. It is the constitution. I will not weary your Lordships by going through the list. The noble Lords, Lord Waddington and Lord Howell, mentioned all the many heads of state who have said that this is just the same thing as it was before. You can take your pick; 90 per cent or 99 per cent the same, it is the treaty by another name.

. . .What popular approval has there been? This goes to the heart of the whole debate on Europe, as my noble friend Lord Pearson has said. There is the undoubted feeling in this country that we have been conned on Europe and that we have not been told the truth for a very long time, going right back to the early days of our entry to the Common Market - not, pace the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Richmond, the European Community; we voted for the Common Market in 1975, not the European Community - when we were told that there would be no essential transfer of sovereignty. Try telling that to the people of this country now; now that we have given away our powers over trade, immigration, social policy, energy, the environment, farming and fisheries. Try telling that to the people now that we have a European Parliament, a European Court of Justice, a European flag and a European anthem. I remind your Lordships that all that has been given away and transposed to Brussels without the people of this country ever being asked if that is what they wanted.

Here we are again, proposing to give away yet more powers without the permission of the people of this country and without a fight, telling another blatant whopper that the treaty is not a constitution because it has no constitutional character, even though it gives the EU legal personality, abolishes the national veto in 60 areas, creates a Foreign Minister and diplomatic service, and reduces our ability to block EU legislation by up to 30 per cent, as well as providing the means to transfer more powers to Brussels without consulting national parliaments at all. Kafka could have written the script.

The red lines have been effectively disposed of by others, particularly by the committee in the other place. Just under six months ago, on 24 June, the Prime Minister said that it was a matter of honour and trust. He said: “the manifesto is what we put to the public, we’ve got to honour that manifesto. That is an issue of trust for me and with the electorate”.

The more the Government talk about honour, the faster we count our spoons. We were promised, finally, a long-overdue referendum on our relationship with the EU. We were promised that; it is a fact. Now the Government are trying to wriggle out of that promise, which is shameful.

Fundamentally, this is about democracy. As the noble Lord, Lord Waddington, said, the last time that people in this country had a vote on Europe was 32 years ago. No one under the age of 50 has had a vote on whether we want to give more powers away to the European Union. . .I ask both Lord Watsons, what would be disastrous about actually leaving the European Union? Is it disastrous to be freer, to run our own trade, immigration or foreign policy? Is it disastrous to have powers in our elected Parliament or not to give away £14 billion every year to the European Union? Would it be disastrous to run our own agriculture and fisheries? Of course not. Masses of countries outside the EU prosper. We are the fourth or fifth biggest economy in the world, depending on whether or not you believe the Chinese statistics. Of course we can prosper outside the EU. We can trade with it perfectly happily, even though we trade at a massive deficit. The scare story that we need to be in the EU as a trading, financial and political necessity is simply a sham - a scare story that is not true.

I come back to the Laeken declaration. Is it not ironic that the Government are to give away more power without public consent? The Laeken declaration’s aim was to reconnect - I think that that was the word - with the voters. Why are the Government running scared of a vote if they want to reconnect with the voters? Is it because they might lose it? That would be democracy in action. If they lose the vote, they lose it. That is reconnecting with the voters. I thought that that was what Governments wanted to do. It seems that we are getting back to the position where the man in Whitehall knows best. If that is the case, it will be very dangerous.

8.47 pm
Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, everything that I wanted to say about the ‘reform’ treaty has already been said eloquently, and sometimes more than once, by other noble Lords this evening; that is the problem with being the 20th on the list. So I intend to take up one or two points which the noble Baroness the Lord President of the Council raised in the eulogy of the European Union in her opening remarks.

Beforehand, however, I am sorry that the noble Lord, Lord Watson of Invergowrie, is not in his place. He criticised the idea of a referendum, and said that he had great forebodings about it because referendums were divisive. First, the referendum held in 1975 was a healing process for the Labour Party, not a divisive one. Without it, the Labour Party was in danger of exploding, which I know because I was a Member for it in the other place. Secondly, I believe that the noble Lord, as a good Labour man, would have been in favour of the referendum in Scotland on whether it should have its own parliament. I am sure that he supported it and went out to vote in it. Thirdly, a country is not isolated because it does not join another organisation. Indeed, this country is a member of an organisation which embraces nearly a third of the world’s population: the Commonwealth. How can we be isolated if we are a member of Commonwealth? And even if we were isolated, after the Act of Supremacy this country pulled itself up by its bootstraps and became a great empire and a great power in the world. So sometimes isolation is quite clearly good for you.

. . .Let us look at the question of peace in Europe, raised by the noble Baroness the Lord President of the Council. Peace in Europe since 1945 has not been kept by the EC, the Common Market or the European Union; it was guaranteed by NATO and the armaments and weapons of the United States. It was nothing to do with the Common Market or the European Union. That persists today because the countries of the European Union refuse to spend sufficient on defence - and that includes this country. Let us not hear any more about the EU keeping peace in Europe. It is nonsense.

The noble Baroness also mentioned trade and boasted about the £150 billion of exports that we send to Europe every year. She failed to mention that we import £186 billion from the European Union, so we are in deficit by £36 billion a year on our balance of trade. The total accumulated deficit since we have been in is about £230 billion. She ought to take those things into account during her next eulogy.

She did not mention farming. What a disaster farming has experienced as a result of our membership. The number of people working in farming has halved. We have lost 500,000 jobs in farming and it is difficult for farmers to make a living at present. Our fishing waters have been depredated. We are throwing back edible fish, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, because of an edict from the European Union. How sensible is that? What good does that do to Britain and its economy?

What about the manufacturing industry since we have been in the EU? There was no boast about that. In 1973, 32 per cent of our economy was involved in manufacturing; today it is 14 per cent. So, membership has not done much good for our shipbuilding industry, our car industry and so on. Indeed, our car industry was rescued by the Japanese, not the European Union. The noble Baroness did not mention the cost in hard sterling - not euros - to the economy through our contribution to the European budget.

Lord Watson of Richmond: My Lords, I am most grateful to the noble Lord for giving way. He tells us that the British car industry has been saved by the Japanese. He will of course be aware that the Japanese have said many times that they have been able to locate manufacturing here because of our membership of the European Union.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, that is not the only reason. I do know something about the Japanese car industry. Honda has a great factory in my old constituency and it has provided many jobs. It says that it is not only a question of being near the European market - we have a big market in this country; do not forget that – but that it also values the loyalty and the skill of our people, and, if I might say so, particularly those of my former constituents in Swindon. So that is not the only reason the Japanese bring their factories to this country.

I was talking about our annual contribution to the EU budget. At present, we make a gross contribution of £12 billion, which is £5.5 billion net. By 2013, that amount will have risen to £17 billion gross, which is nearly £7 billion net. So we are paying quite a lot of money to be a member of this club.

Everybody in this House knows my view on the matter - and I think that I have just confirmed it - we should never have got into the Common Market and it would be better for this country if we now got out of the European Union.

Finally, I hope that we are going to have a proper debate on this treaty and that what is said in the House of Commons and here will have an effect. I hope also that the Government and the Opposition will have the guts to say, “We will take the Whips off”. Let Parliament really decide. If it is a Whipped vote, as I have said before, it will not be Parliament that has ratified the treaty, it will be the Government ratifying their own treaty.

I hope that we will have a great debate in the House of Commons and in this House, and that the usual channels will not try to restrict the amount of time we spend on the Bill, as did the Government of the day when the Maastricht treaty came before this House. The usual channels tried to restrict the debate to three days, but, due to the intervention of my good friend the noble Lord, Lord Pearson, we got 11 days. We had a very good informative debate and people in this House learnt a lot about the European Union and the Common Market.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, in the 1971 White Paper, did not Mr Heath also say that there would be no loss of essential sovereignty? Does that not look a bit silly at the moment?

Lord Lea of Crondall: My Lords, that depends on what you mean by essential sovereignty. If we are going to be invaded by Martians, it might be useful to be able to meet them at the cliffs of Dover. It begs the question. None of these fancy debates gets anyone anywhere apart from going round in a circle.

Lord Stoddart of Swindon: My Lords, sovereignty is indivisible. You either have it or you do not: you cannot divide it out. End of Extract

There is more at Brits At Their Best, including an update recognizing that the primacy of EU laws written into the Reform Treaty will take precedence over English common law. It is a blog I highly recommend, along with EU Referendum for those with a keen love of our cousins across the pond and all they have given to us.

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