Here is an edited version of my column in today's Irish Daily Mail: What a delight the Greeks are. All that noise, all that passion. All that debt, all that ignorance: I mean they still don’t seem to grasp exactly what it was their Government agreed to when it accepted the €110bn international bailout. They have been squealing that nobody can be allowed to run Greek affairs except the Greeks, that the EU and the IMF should butt-out. All I can say to that is: Zorba, it’s time to read the fine print on the contract. It is also time for the Irish to look up from the election and pay attention to exactly what the EU and IMF are doing to the crippled Club Med country. It’s the Greeks now, but the Irish later. What set off the Athens anger last week was that the inspectors made it clear Greece would have to get on with selling €50bn of state-owned assets over the next four years to pay down debt. The problem is the Athens government wants to sell just €7bn worth. The Greek people, already suffering with spending cuts, tax rises and unemployment, are angry at being told they must also sell off great chunks of national property. Yet at the same time Mr Petalotis said: ‘We asked nobody to interfere in domestic affairs. We only take orders from the Greek people.’ So you can reckon he doesn’t have much of a grasp on just how much power his government has handed to the EU-driven bailout powers. Reason? It would have meant a member state becoming independent of Brussels. The IMF could have helped the member state drop out of the euro. Staying in the euro and paying off all the bondholders, as the EU insists, means recovery has to come the more slow and painful way – by the anti-growth austerity Greece and Ireland are both suffering now. Of course, this means leaving the people of both countries burdened with loans they can never pay off, and with spending cuts and unemployment levels from which they will not recover for a generation. The bailouts are designed in this way for just one reason, to forge the final link in the chain that will shackle Greece and Ireland, and in turn other eurozone countries, to a centralised European government. That is why the Greek spokesman’s cry that ‘We only take orders from the Greek people!’ is both absurd and heartbreaking. The fact is that the euro-elite are now speaking with satisfaction of Europe entering ‘the post-democratic age.’ The dismissal of Ireland's first Lisbon Referendum result by Brussels was only the most brazen example the EU policy of ‘post-democratic’ government. The unelected technocratic elite of Brussels see government as being too important, too complicated for the little people to control. Sending in inspectors named Klaus to direct the fiscal and economic movements of the government of a member state is more what the euro-elite have in mind -- what they have in mind now, and have always had in mind. Certainly during this election many Irish people are beginning to question the power that the EU has over this State, and the power that the EU may allow the German government to take over this State and the rest of the eurozone. The extent of that may be decided at the European Council meeting next month, at which the new Taoiseach will have no more influence than a member of the catering staff. But these powers have been growing since the moment the Irish greedily signed on to join the Common Market because they thought it meant free money. The gush of cash drowned out the sound of what the euro-elite were really saying. It is hard to sympathise with the Irish whimpering now that ‘We have lost our sovereignty’ when the loss of our sovereignty was always the point, and the Brussels elite made no secret of it. Here is commission president Romano Prodi in 1999: ‘The single market was the theme of the eighties; the single currency was the theme of the nineties; we must now face the difficult task of moving towards a single economy, a single political unity.’ As long ago as 1991, Hans Tietmeyer, then head of the Bundesbank and the most powerful central banker in Europe, said: ‘A European currency will lead to member nations transferring their sovereignty over financial and wage policy as well as monetary affairs. It is an illusion to think that states can hold on to their autonomy.’ Here is the present head of the European Central Bank, Jean-Claude Trichet, in 1998: ‘The Council of Ministers will have far more power over the budgets of member states than the federal government in the United States has over the budget of Texas.’ Here is Roman Herzog, then the German president, speaking in 1996: ‘The day of the nation state is over.’ Listen to the then-president of the commission, Jacques Delors, talking in 1988. He said that within ten years ‘80 percent of our economic legislation, perhaps even fiscal and social as well’ would come from the EU and not from national parliaments. As the authors Craig and Elliott point out: ‘This was actually quite an accurate prediction – in 2007 the German president calculated that about 84 percent of all legislation passed by the German parliament came from the EU.’ There is no reason to imagine the amount of legislation passed by the Irish parliament but originating in the EU is much less than the same 84 percent. So what the Irish are voting for is a group of politicians who will be able to control 16 percent of our laws: not control the country's budget, of course, not the monetary policy, nor the tax policy – the Irish can't really imagine they are going to be allowed to hang onto that, surely? – not the currency nor the debt nor the foreign policy. In fact, the complaints being made in this election that parliamentary Deputies must stop acting like local politicians are rather too late: planning permission, town drains and going to constituency funerals are probably the only things left over which the Deputies have any sovereign power. Though I wouldn’t be too sure about the planning. Or the drains. This noise about how Britain may now stand against the council's European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) is at best naive and in most cases (yes, you, David Cameron) is synthetic. What Cameron has done on this one is pretend this is the crucial line he won't cross. Meanwhile, very much more quietly and apparently without a moment of squeamishness (odd that, how selective the prime minister's stomach is on parliamentary sovereignty), his Government hands over more and more power to the European Union. What he has done by stirring up this prisoners' votes business is simply give the euro-anxious Tories a different kind of 'European' bone on which to chew. Yet this issue is not the meat. The ECHR and its decisions are not the things most endangering Britain's sovereignty now. Still, if MPs are really so determined to stop this so-called 'encroachment' by Strasbourg, maybe a technical note first. Britain freely (and foolishly) agreed long ago to give the court at Strasbourg all the powers that the ECHR has since been using. This so-called 'court' has never invaded Britain -- the supine British opened the gates to all these European 'justices' and their powers to decide Britain's laws. All parliament has to do if it really does want to stop the powers of this 'court' is just vote to pull out of the Council of Europe, ECHR and all. Then this absurdity of votes for prisoners, and every other ECHR so-called 'human rights' absurdity, goes away; or at least -- and this is what Cameron is hiding in this debate -- until Brussels reminds the United Kingdom that by signing up to Lisbon Treaty and the rest, powers across the Channel can go on imposing these 'human rights' on Britain whether the UK tries to derogate from the ECHR decisions or leaves the Council of Europe altogether. The Lisbon Treaty, among many other poisonous things, gave the EU 'legal personality' for the first time. That means it can sign international agreements, not as an agent for a group of 27 sovereign states, but as a state in its own right. And as this new country called Europe, it is going to join the Council of Europe. It will be a member just as the United Kingdom is now. What that means is that Britain, even if it pulls out of the Council of Europe, will still be bound to the damned thing as a part of the EU: remember, Lisbon made us all 'citizens of the EU' now. If you are a native of England, Scotland Wales or Ireland, your nationality is now 'European' whether you want it or not. The treaty says so, and the treaty, thanks to the refusal by Cameron and William Hague to fight it, is law. Treaties and other international agreements now signed by the EU will be directly binding on the UK and have primacy over all UK laws and the British constitution. And, no, Britain does not have a veto over most of the things the EU might sign treaties on. Slightly delicious note: I gather the EU's signing for the membership has been held up because the EU is demanding that decisions of the ECHR cannot over-rule the decisions of the ECJ. In other words, Brussels is demanding that its own court have supremacy over the ECHR, something Britain has surrendered for its own Supreme Court. So there could be turf conflicts between the euro-courts. As Open Europe notes in its briefing this week on the votes for prisoners dispute, the EU has its own catalogue of justiciable rights -- '' 'the so-called Charter of Fundamental Rights, enshrined in the Lisbon Treaty. The Charter allows citizens to contest rights set down in EU law at the European Court of Justice, and, in future, possibly also the ECHR (when the EU accedes to it).' This will make it 'increasingly difficult for the UK to negotiate a carve-out from European human rights legislation.' As for the detail of this particular case of prisoners' votes, 'Withdrawal from the ECHR would allow the UK to ignore ECHR rulings on prisoners votes when it come to general elections. However, as voting rights in European Parliament and local elections are covered by EU law as well as national law, their application in the UK could in future be challenged at the ECHR or the ECJ.' Oh, and as for the Cameron fudge about limiting the vote to prisoners serving four years or less, the ECHR has already struck down that notion in a similar case, Scoppola v Italy. It decided that the prisoner's rights were violated because Italian law barred him from voting on the basis of his sentence. So they will knock down Cameron's four years, too, and I'd suspect he knows it. So the MPs might as well go home; or go around to the 'Scrubs for a bit of canvassing. 
Greece, Ireland and the EU bailouts: the end of democracy in Europe
Votes for prisoners: how David Cameron is hiding the truth about European power over 'human rights'
Sunday, 20 February 2011
Last week in Athens the Greeks went another round with the EU and IMF inspectors, the
German-types – there is always at least one named ‘Klaus’ in the group -- who turn up every quarter to see whether the government is sticking to the bailout deal. Ireland gets the same sort of inspectors, of course, but the inspectors arriving in Athens get a much rougher time than the inspectors who come to Dublin. As I said, the Greeks are a delight.
The EU and IMF inspectors have ordered the government to sell water companies and mines and almost anything else that could find a buyer. However, so sensitive is the idea that these sales might include sales of land – you can bet at least a dozen people named Oleg or Abdul would have the money and desire to buy whole Greek islands -- that the government spokesman George Petalotis had to insist land would not be sold.
It is important to remember that these bailout conditions for Greece, just like the bailout
conditions for Ireland, were designed by the EU and not by the IMF. The IMF technique for bailout is first to devalue the currency and oversee spending cuts, then negotiate with bondholders. The reason the EU insisted on being leader in the bailout was to stop that very sensible IMF technique being used anywhere in the EU.
In ‘The Great European Rip-Off,’ a book by David Craig and Matthew Elliott published in 2009, the authors list many of the statements of intention made by the bosses of the EU over the decades. It’s worth recalling what the euro-elite said during all those years so many of the Irish were sucking up what they thought was a free lunch.
I will add that the day of national legislatures is over, too, unless the Greeks, and the Irish, and others, find the will to get out of the EU. What the Irish will vote for later this month is not in fact a parliament. We will vote to put highly-paid politicians into the shell of a parliament, a chamber that has given up almost all the sovereign powers held by a genuine parliament. Losing the power to control the budget is just the latest and most shameful surrender of parliamentary sovereignty.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, rhubarb, rhubarb, order in the House, 'physically ill' and the rest of it. All I can say to the Commons over this votes for prisoners dispute is: just shut up and pull the trigger and get out of the Council of Europe. Or admit you are too timid to pull the trigger, so shut up anyway and submit in the manner that suits men who are cowards.
The angry cries, even among my colleagues, that there has been 'remorseless undermining' of Britain's parliament and courts implies that the ECHR has been tunnelling away under the stone walls of Britain, rather in the manner of medieval seige warfare. It hasn't. The ECHR has done only and exactly what decades of euro-supine British politicians have allowed it to do. The drawbridge has been down all along, with 'We are all Europeans now' written on cloth-of-gold and slung from the battlements.
Cameron, being so very busy having a public relations-designed 'physcal illness' over the issue, won't admit that the problem with exactly this kind of control by foreign powers over
Britain's legislation will continue as long as Britain stays in the EU: even if Britain now refuses votes for prisoners -- and it won't; in the end, some man caught with 10,000 child porn images on his laptop will have the liberty to cancel out your vote -- ultimately the EU will have ways of getting the same decision reached in the European Court of Justice (the EU 'court,' this one in Luxembourg with the power to enforce EU law in member states). All that will be necessary is for some other ex-con lowlife to bring another case, this time in Luxembourg not Strasbourg.
Which is why the noise in the Commons over this is just noise. Either parliament is sovereign or it's not, and until the MPs vote to take Britain out of the EU, it's not: the 'legal personality' called the 'European Union' is sovereign.
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