That is the question put by The Independent, reflecting on the possible outcome of the Irish referendum, now less than a week away.
Certainly, if the latest poll is to be believed, the Irish are about to become yes-men. According to a Red C/Sunday Business Post poll, 55 percent of voters back theconstitutional Lisbon treaty, compared with 27 percent against, and 18 percent undecided.
Excluding the "undecided" that equates to a 67 percent score for the "yes" side, with the "no" campaign trailing on 33 percent. There is still a huge – some say unbridgeable – gap to close.
Earlier last week, the Irish Times, under the headline "Relief for Yes side but opponents can take heart too", was parading the results of an Irish Times/TNS mrbi poll.
Here, the result – again excluding the "undecided" – came out at 59 percent for the "yes" side with 41 percent for the "no" campaign, compared with 61 percent and 39 percent at the beginning of the month.
With three polls in the bag, therefore – although not necessarily comparable – we see the "yes" side scoring 61, 59 and now 67 percent, against 39, 41 and 33 percent for the "no" campaign. This does not seem to make sense, as the report on the Red C/Sunday Business Post poll talks of the "yes" side having dropped seven points since "the last poll two weeks ago" as against the "no" side having increased by four points.
Whatever the precise situation, though, it looks as if the "yes" vote is holding firm, offering a gloomy prognosis for next Friday. The situation is even more gloomy when one appreciates that, at a similar stage coming to the end of the first referendum campaign, the "no" side had gone into the lead by 35 percent to 30 percent, with 35 percent still undecided.
Enter then Christopher Booker into the lists, with his column headed "Ireland's EU referendum is the last stand against the 'project'". On the basis of the polling, it looks more like Custer's last stand, the dwindling band of naysayers surrounded by the Sioux, on the verge of defeat.
If we do see an EU-inspired version of Little Bighorn, however, it will come as no surprise. Short of Karzai-style stuffing of the ballot boxes, Booker observes, the European and Irish political establishments could scarcely have done more to push this referendum in the way they want. He writes:
To ensure a "yes" vote, all the normal rules governing balanced media coverage were suspended. The European Commission has poured €1.5 million into an unprecedented advertising blitz. EU commissioners, led by President Jose-Manuel Barroso, MEPs and officials have been flooding in to promote the cause. However, when one or two British outsiders – including Nigel Farage, leader of a group in the European Parliament, and Lorraine Mullally, director of the think-tank Open Europe, and of good Irish stock – came over to campaign for a "No" vote, their "foreign intervention" was greeted by orchestrated howls of abuse.From thereon, Booker deals with the reasons why the political class of "Europe" has been so desperate to get its way over this treaty. His story, straight out of The Great Deceptiontells of a "hugely cumbersome, inefficient, corrupt and remote form of government, riddled with dishonesty and wholly undemocratic," which the people of Europe could never again call to account.
When the voters of Ireland go to their polling booths this week, they will be the last in Europe with a chance to say "no" to the political class which now rules over us – thanks to what has amounted to the most extraordinary slow-motion coup d'état in history. And, sadly, it looks as if the yes-men might have it.
But, if this is to be Custer's last stand, the eventual outcome for Sitting Bull wasn't that happy either. Barroso beware!
Probably the main reason why the debate on the European Union does not progress is the wilful refusal of the political classes to come to terms with the reality of what the EU is, and where its ambitions lie.
No better is this illustrated than by the current Telegraph leader which closes its dire, ill-informed series on "The State of Europe".
In one short paragraph, it tells us that, "the EU's origins lay in the rubble of the Second World War and in a laudable desire to develop an association in which free people could trade and thrive together after centuries of political tensions and catastrophic warfare."
Notwithstanding that the intellectual genesis lay in the aftermath of the First World War, the central myth which this newspaper perpetuates is that the ambitions of the founding fathers were limited and benign. Thus do we get the: "... laudable desire to develop an association in which free people could trade and thrive together ... ".
This ignores the very essence of the "project" which was to achieve political integration through economic means. This was the so-called "Monnet method", which recognised that the "peoples of Europe" would not accept the overt imposition of a unified European government. Therefore, the process had to be carried out step-by-step, each step leading to another in a mechanism which came to be called engrenage.
Ignoring this reality, though, the Telegraph goes on to say: "But the EU has become a vast, bureaucratic, unaccountable empire whose remit runs way beyond policing the common market." By this means, we are invited to believe that this current state is an unintended consequence and that, from its "laudable" beginnings, the EU has somehow gone off the rails.
We are therefore supposed to lament the fact that: "Its policies are made in secret, then insufficiently scrutinised in Brussels or national capitals. Yet its directives and regulations affect the lives of half a billion people." What is (deliberately) not acknowledged is that the system was designed to be secretive and opaque, otherwise it could never have achieved its aims.
Nevertheless, the newspaper, having indulged in its turgid exercise of woolly thinking about the EU, then exhibits a stunning lack of self-awareness by declaring: "It is time we were asked what we think about it."
But the fact is that the "project" is a deliberate attempt to create a supreme government of Europe, subordinating the national governments and imposing its rule of the peoples of Europe – whether they like it or not. If the newspaper had been at all honest in its treatment of the subject in the last weeks, it would have said precisely that – and there would be no need to ask us "what we think about it".
Hence, of course, the newspaper fudges the issue and offers faux euroscepticism, pretending that there is something to think about, something to consider, something to weigh up. There isn't. Membership of the EU is a one-way street to political integration and a government of Europe. If you want that, go for it. If you don't, we need to get out. But, for goodness sake, stop pretending there are any other options.
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