As we await Brussels’ chosen timing to announce the single state called Europa (aka United States of Europe) Bismarck’s warning has unique, overwhelming significance for Britain. Future generations will look back on late 20th and early 21st Century British history with incredulity. Like Tóibín they will recognise the effect of a loss of legitimate pride. Within its overall massive war sacrifice Britain had uniquely fought a modern successful Thermopyle, exemplified by “”The Few’ winning “The Battle of Britain” – the most crucial battle of the war as judged by the German Field Marshal von Runstedt himself (Andrew Wheatcroft The Sunday Times, Section 8, page 9, 24 June 1990). Yet within a few decades the country had been reduced to a province in an EU “Empire”, so designated in 2007 by Barroso, President of the EU Commission (Sunday Telegraph, 11 July). Indeed, its people had been deceived by its governments into actually paying to lose their independence. Its annual EU payments alone amounting to multi billions of pounds. Deep concern was felt by many, including a stream of whistle- blowing officials from the heart, or as as one of these, Bernard Connolly, phrased it, the “rotten heart” of Europe (Faber 1995). But these were execrated as “wide-eyed extremist xenophobes” by the Europhiliacs in a massive process of prevarication.
Historians will raise the obvious question: how could the Establishment have been so silent, unaware of the resulting inevitable devastation? Perhaps overall they will see them in denial with a toxic, hypnotic self-centred deception, engendered by a naïve idealism – the condition epitomised in d’Estaing’s Praesidium hot house of politician wheelerdealers, portrayed so poignantly by Gisela Stuart in her The Making of Europe’s Constitution, 2003. They will also see how self denigration by both Britain’s political oligarchy and its glitterati, noted by Tóibín, undermined the defence of national interests. Also they will see how this mindset was reinforced by the gross inadequacy of its Foreign Office – as demonstrated throughout he Couraud Consultancy report in August 2008 which made such damning assessments as: “The Foreign Office is not good at taking decisions and making things happen” (page 6) and “How can the FO get so many obvious commonsense things wrong” (page 22).
This grotesque British “naïve lack of robust sense of national interest”, as he terms it, has been analysed by former ambassador, Sir Christopher Meyer, in his new book, Getting our Way. Any such national concern would have shattered that EU central deceit they term “shared sovereignty” as a nonsense since, by definition, a sovereign state can share only its power, which then, as a sovereign state, it can resume at will (see NATO). But, by a Goebbels – like repetition, the lie became implanted.
This morass of political sleepwalking, entwined with endemic machiavellianism, may be handled though two Establishment figures who allowed this amnesia and then expressed their crass error so differently. First, and most moving, is the evidence of the late Lord Annan. Here was a statesman involved across the globe in the most intricate negotiations but who then, with a sense of despair, produced the most moving lament at his failure to recognise the suffocating EEC/EC/EU process. He wrote: “In their last years our generation looked at where they left their country…Few of us realised that that three bodies that made law in the Community – the Council the Commission and the Parliament – were going to rule the lives of their successors … (and our Ministers) had lost their voice and a rubber stamp had been put in their hand.
Few of us had grasped that the Westminster Parliament would become the equivalent of a State or provincial legislature.” It is an emotional confession which fills the first two pages of the 27th Chapter of his “Our Age,” 1990.
Second, a decade later, in March 2009, senior Law Lord, Lord Hoffman, also deeply regretted a pan-European development as an intolerable interference with national expression. This time it was on a specific but widening area. Speaking in April 2009 to the Judicial Studies Board, a body that trains judges, he made a “withering attack on the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg because of its aggrading itself and intervening in a minutiae of laws in a process of imposing a federal legal system, thereby blanketing out differing legal traditions.” (Radio 4, Today, 4 April 2009). But, it has been insisted, the Convention on Human Rights Law, with all its grotesque ineptitudes, has a court independent of the EU and that Britain was the first to embrace it in 1950. Indeed, but developments involved here present us with a textbook example of how the EU grows its influence. For now the EU Charter of Human Rights has caused the two institutions to intertwine. As Martin Howe QC asserts “An important effect of the Charter will be that the Courts and tribunals of the EU will be ruling on human rights issues which affect everybody” (A Constitution for Europe 2003 page 48)
However, it has an even greater significance through its forwarding the overall policy of EU federalisation. As Lord Blackwell asserts: “The initial authors intended the Charter of Human Rights to lay the foundation for a European Constitution of social and civil law that would unite the EU under a single jurisdiction (corpus juris.)” (“Sleepwalking into an EU Legal System”, eurofacts 7th April 2006 p 3). Indeed the EU Commission itself has described it as “no less than a new transformation of European integration from its essentially economic origins to a fully fledged political union.” (The Telegraph, 21 Sept 2000).
The EU chose “Human Rights” as a vehicle for this massive expansion of influence because on the one hand it is universally accepted as a beneficent concept and on the other it is conveniently all – embracing – especially in the hands of the EU courts with their raison d’ etre of affecting political union. The learned Judge Hoffman and his colleagues should, more than anyone, have known all about this, the true nature of the Charter, and have demolished the government’s slur that all questioning of it was merely “conspiracy theory”, and dismissed the puerile media-bites of such as Vaz, who said, it was “of no more legal significance than the Beano.” (The Telegraph, 14 Oct 2000).
The obvious lateness of Hoffman’s concern has been noted (e.g. Joshua Rozenberb, in Standpoint, April 2009). However, with honourable exception of such as Lord Denning and former high Court Judge, Popplewell, most of the legal profession has been happy with the EU’s policy of increasing the role of lawyers in the running of the country at the expense of national democratic control, which is anathema to a federalising EU. Moreover, the lawyers themselves were adept at rationalisation. Their claim that they were completely subservient to Parliament, merely implementing the laws it had passed, was at best ingenuous. They were empowered to interpret these laws in doing so they increasingly came into conflict with the government, especially in a nebulous area like Human Rights where every claim will almost inevitably cause a counter claim. Amazingly, they seemed to be completely unaware that, as demonstrated above, this Charter is intended to be the precursor of a European legal system with their English law subsumed, it a all, as a mere nominal tincture into the main body of a Napoleonic based pan-European corpus juris.
This serious, national, developing conflict between Judges and Government, is highlighted in another very significant episode, typically little noted at the time. In 2003, it was announced that the Law Lords were to be moved from Westminster and housed separately as a Supreme Court – this costing £60m with a running cost of £12m p.a. as opposed to £2 p.a. currently (Charles Moore, Spectator 25 July 2009). This immediately resulted in the former Law Lord, Lord Lloyd of Berwick accusing the government of perpetrating “Constitutional Vandalism”, especially as the legal profession was not consulted. With unique perception he say the EU’s fingerprints in this stealth: “The government, it seemed, meekly followed the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe which in April 2003 … recommended the creation of a supreme court whose members would not be members of the Upper House.” (The Spectator, 29 November 2003)
It is only with the proverbial “hind sight” that Hoffman also now sees that though this Supreme Court will lead to even greater powers for the judiciary, it will be under EU jurisdiction, especially through the exponentially expanding remit of the “Human Rights” Charter – which, however, typically in Article 5, 1 sinisterly excepts the EU itself from any human rights claims against it in order, as it puts it so comprehensively, “to meet objectives of general interest being pursued by the Union.” (The Telegraph, 21 Sept 2000) Compare this with the EU’s own general attitude to “free speech”: “Criticism of the EU is akin to blasphemy and could be restricted without violating freedom of speech” according to opinion No. C6274/99 P issued by the Advocate-General at the European Court of Justice (The Telegraph, 18 October 2000)
This apprehension of increasing friction between an elected Parliament and non-elected judges among legal commentators was highlighted in the Radio 4 programme “Top Dogs: Britain’s New Supreme Court.” In particular Lord Neuberger, Master of the Rolls, inter alia warned of the law of “unintended consequences.” The BBC presenter confirmed with typical superciliousness what the EU has always intended: “So there it is: Goodbye the supremacy of Parliament, welcome the Supremes.”
