I'm sure that's true. I would only like to add that, many years ago and in circumstances too complicated to explain here, I turned to Churchill for help against a very powerful bully. Churchill did not hesitate. He stood up for me. The bully backed down. Whatever failings the younger Winston may have had, he didn't fail me. I'd like that to be remembered. 26 February 2010 3:43 PM When David Cameron broke his promise that he would ensure the British people had a vote on the Lisbon Treaty once he came to office, he promised instead that they would be given a vote before any further powers beyond the powers in Lisbon were passed to Brussels. For a lot of reasons, that idea is guff, not least because the Lisbon Treaty has a mechanism for adding powers to the EU institutions without need to have any more treaties. However, one of the surest ways the EU has for grabbing powers is a method quite beyond anything defined in the Lisbon Treaty. We see it now in the eurocrats' manoeuvrings over Greece. There is no way Cameron can stop this technique, not unless he has a spine of steel and muscle to match. Which, on evidence so far, he hasn't. Here is how it works. We see it every day in Brussels, but Jean Quatremer, the Brussels blogger for the left-wing French newspaper Libération, has nailed it best. Today he quotes an unnamed high-ranking EU diplomat as saying: 'La véritable mise sous tutelle de la Grece décidée par l'Eurogroupe le 15 février aurait tout simplement été inimaginable...' Enough of that. What the diplomat was saying was that the eurogroup putting Greece under surveillance, as decided by the Eurogroup on February 15th, would have been quite simply 'unimaginable' some months ago. The unnamed highly-placed EU diplomat continues: 'We are beyond a simple application of the European treaties, we are in the process of modifying them without saying so, in order to bring about an economic government of the eurozone.' I prefer it in the original French. You gain the full sinister tone that way. Think of the evil Cardinal Richelieu in the 1939 film, 'The Three Musketeers,' and you have it: 'On est au-dela d'une simple application des traités européens, nous sommes entrain de les modifier sans le dire pour faire entrer dans les faits un véritable gouvernement économique de la zone euro.' The eurocrats and the euro-fanatical Continental politicians are indeed 'entrain de' modifying the European treaties without saying so, without needing any new laws to be passed, without waiting for any democratic agreement by the member states of the EU. The eurocrats are setting up an economic government of , first, the eurozone, and then the entire EU, with no agreement by any voters anywhere. And from everything we have learned about Cameron, he does not have what it takes to stop such power-grabbing eurocrats when, or if, he becomes prime minister. To quote from that famous sinster exchange with Richelieu in the film: 'Your Queen is in danger.' And much else, too. Here she is (circled) in 1982, posing outside Number 10 Downing Street with other top officials of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND). Then she was plain Cathy Ashton. Now she is the lushly-paid, unelected, life peer EU High Rep. Yet where has she been in the EU team photos? She was only parachuted into the job on December 1st, but she has already been leaving a gap, and more than once: she has been missing key meetings. The most recent one was just yesterday. She did not turn up for the two-day meeting of EU defence ministers. Her office told the press she had a conflict in her diary (turns out she wanted to go the the inauguration of the new Ukrainian president instead). Ashton should have been at the defence meeting. It was the second defence meeting she has missed this month. What is usually forgotten, in the continuing mystification that she is the EU foreign minister at all, is that her job also makes her head of the European Defence Agency (EDA) and chairman of its steering board. The board is the EDA's decision-making body composed of the defence ministers of the 26 participating member states (all EU states except Denmark) and the European Commission (of which Ashton, by virtue of her office as High Representative, is also vice-president). The steering board also meets at sub-ministerial levels, such as with national armaments directors and military capability directors. Nato is involved as well. Instead Baroness Ashton, EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, was in one of the former Soviet bloc countries watching some political theatre. Perhaps it was nostalgia for the old days when CND was working to make all the Soviet empire's dreams of an undefended West come true. Unlike other small countries, Iceland is not some shivering spaniel puppy longing to be allowed into the EU. The majority of the people of Iceland -- one of the most physically and mentally tough nations on earth -- do not want to join. They have the courage to say that they and their rich fishing grounds and their independence do not need the European Commission and the European Council and all the rest of the EU institutions telling them how to run their country. The ruling social democrat party is a pro-EU party -- indeed, it is the only pro-EU party in Iceland -- but repeated opinion polls have shown it does not represent the will of the people on the question of Europe. Then of course there is the question of the way two big, rich EU countries, Britain and the Netherlands, are attempting to bully the Icelandic people over the failure of the Icelandic banks Kaupthing and Landsbanki, known as the Icesave dispute. The shortfall for meeting depositors claims' in Britain and the Netherlands is £3.5bn, and the British and Dutch governments want the Icelanders to pay it. Yet there are hardly more than 310,000 people in Iceland, babies and children included, and they don't have that kind of money. More, it is hard to see that there is any case, legal or moral, to force the plain people of Iceland to pay for the greed of depositors -- the two banks were offering above-market rates -- in other countries. But Britain and the Netherlands are trying to force the Icelandic people to pay anyway. So intense has been the bullying that the two big countries have even blocked the IMF from helping Iceland recover from its spectacular crash at the start of the global crisis until it agrees to pay the Icesave billions. The Icelanders have started the fightback. There will be a referendum on March 6th in which the people will decide whether they will accept responsibility for the banks' liabilities. The Reykjavik government (which consistently has shown itself unworthy of its own courageous people) have struck a crippling deal with the British and the Dutch; but the latest poll shows the people will reject it in the referendum by almost two to one. The same poll shows that the people, by 61 percent to less than 30 percent, think their president was right to take the final decision on such an important issue away from the government and give it directly to the people to decide. I've been in touch today with Hjortur J. Gudmundsson, director of the Icelandic free market think tank, Civis, about all this. He tells me, 'The government has been trying to get a new and better deal with the British and the Dutch to avoid the referendum since it fears it could mean it will have to resign if it looses it. Whether they will get a better deal remains to be seen but the time before the referendum is of course running out.' 'Since the president's decision, this issue has of course gained much more attention outside Iceland. Which is great -- the British and the Dutch governments obviously don't want this issue to get much attention. They don't want the dispute to be taken to the courts, as Iceland has repeatedly asked for. They quite simply know they would lose the case, and they don't want this to drag along more.' 'What makes this a bit more interesting is that we are now dealing with a temporary government in the Netherlands' -- the Dutch government must face an election within weeks -- 'and probably an outgoing British government.' 'In any case we are determined to win this war. We are not going to be bullied. That is simply against our nature. The atmosphere in Iceland since the autumn of 2008 regarding the Icesave dispute has been similar to a war time atmosphere, I imagine. However, we have from the beginning never seen the British or the Dutch people as our opponents, but only their governments. As we see it, the people of those two countries are just like us -- victims of reckless bankers and incompetent politicians.' Already the Icelanders have shown that the British and Dutch attempt to use the IMF as a weapon against them has failed, as has the threat by the two governments to block any negotiations by Iceland to join the EU: 'There are indications that we don't need further loans from the IMF -- and the IMF is extremely unpopular in Iceland -- and the vast majority of Icelanders don't want to join the EU anyway. These threats have worked somewhat on the government, but not so much on the public.' Or, it seems, on the businessmen of Iceland. On February 15th there was an opinion poll taken among the leaders of Icelandic companies about their attitude towards EU membership. Sixty percent of them now think the Icelandic economy is better placed outside the EU than on the inside. Just 31 percent think the interests of the economy would be better secured if Iceland were a member of the EU. You just have to love these people. One of the good things about Open Europe's debate this evening in Brussels was that it gave me a chance to watch Jonathan Faull up close for 90 minutes. The topic for debate was, 'Is the EU a threat to civil liberties?' Answer, obviously, 'yes,' but I went anyway as it is a wet night in the European Quarter. Faull is one of the most powerful men at the European Commission, he was on the panel, and he is always worth watching. Faull did of course decide the answer to the question was 'No, the EU is not a threat to civil liberties,' but then if he had said 'Yes,it is a threat' this item would be on the front page of the Daily Mail and not on a blog. Anyway, Faull is at the moment still the director general at the commission for what is called 'Justice, Freedom and Security.' He will however jump in April to become director general for Michel Barnier, the man chosen by Nicolas Sarkozy to take control of financial regulation, ie, to take command of the City of London. (Barnier and the three new EU regulatory agencies will have Britain's financial industry locked up into the controlled Continental system -- no more of that Anglo-Saxon free market stuff. Faull will be Barnier's right hand man.) Faull is the highest ranking British eurocrat in Brussels, but you can forget the 'British.' When the Conservative MEP Roger Helmer stood to ask a question about the danger British subjects face when they are extradited to other EU countries which do not have the ancient British protections such as habeas corpus, Faull showed yet again how eurocrats are 'cleansed' of their national identities. In his reply to Helmer, Faull would not speak the words 'British,' or 'Britain,' or 'United Kingdom.' He would only say 'the country to which Mr Helmer refers.' Indeed, so irritating was his manner of being distant, perhaps slightly puzzled by the idea that 'the country to which Mr Helmer refers' may have a system of justice that is in anyway superior to any of the other 26 systems of justice in the EU (Greek jail, anyone? Romanian prosecutors?) that I was rather longing to stand up and dare this man, who remains one of Her Majesty's subjects whatever his pose may be, to repeat after me: 'This royal throne of kings, this scepter'd isle, This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars, this other Eden...' Admittedly, it would be like asking Dracula to grab hold of the garlic, but I was longing to have a go: 'Try it, Mr Faull -- This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England.' And I'm not even English. I just find national eunuchs to be distasteful creatures, whichever nationality it is they are trying to cut off. Of course Faull spoke to every point in that slightly bored, somewhat condescending manner that the eurocrats adopt whenever they have to deal with anyone who is so tiresome as to question the aims and activities of the EU institutions. I suspect that manner is what such men as Faull are taught when they train at the College of Europe in Bruges, the breeding house for top eurocrats. Lately some of the euroenthusiasts in Britain have been complaining because the number of scholarships being given to British graduates to study there is being cut from 28 to two each year. The cut is part of the Government's review of education spending. Those euroenthusiasts who still imagine Britain can put its interests and its influence 'at the heart of Europe' are whining that by cutting the numbers of British wannabe eurocrats the British taxpayers send to the College of Europe, the fewer British policy-makers will be at the top of the Commission and other EU institutions in future. Such euroenthusiasts just don't get it. It doesn't matter how many of the top eurocrats are British subjects. By the time an aspiring eurocrat has made it through the College of Europe and the exams and the training and worked his way up through the ranks, he has been through a kind of kidney dialysis: every drop of his British blood has been pumped out of him and sent through the system to cleanse it of its Britishness. When it is pumped back into his veins, he is filled with nothing but European nationalism. Whether he still holds a United Kingdom passport is irrelevant. To paraphrase Gilbert and Sullivan, 'He has given in to temptations to belong to other nations, he does not remain an Englishman' Having said all that, I understand from wiser observers than myself that Jonathan Faull is one of the better men at the commission, and that we should be pleased he is with Barnier -- that it could have been worse, Barnier could be operating with a French financial enforcer at his right hand. That is probably true. But then, I've never had any doubt Faull is decent. I am sure you could trust him to walk your dog or water your house plants. I'm sure you could trust him as well with your wife as with your money. Just not with your civil liberties. The problem is that men such as Faull are the 21st century version of 16th century Jesuits: the training, the transnational loyalties, the manner, the skill. It may be time for the British, at least those British who are not yet themselves national eunuchs, to regard the eurocrats as Elizabeth I regarded the Society of Jesus: as seditious and dangerous.
04 March 2010 9:16 AM
RIP, a decent man
'Modifying the treaties without saying so,' and Cameron won't stop it
25 February 2010 9:36 AM
Ashton: Missing in action
24 February 2010 2:16 PM
The clue is in the bloodline: Viking
23 February 2010 8:19 PM
Another man without a country
Sunday, 7 March 2010
The death of the younger Winston Churchill has of course meant obituaries saying not much more than that he never was, nor ever could have been, a match for his grandfather.
You have to wonder how our prime-minister-in-waiting is going to get out of this one.
Baroness Ashton, the new EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, seems keen enough to turn up for some team photos, though not for others.
Today the European Commission is due to recommend that the EU starts membership talks with Iceland. If I cared about the welfare of the eurocrats who are going to get involved in the negotiations -- and I don't -- I'd warn them them to strap on some Kevlar before going into the talks. They are about to 'negotiate' with a nation like no other.
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