Power to the people - by Richard... Sunday, September 18, 2011

Power to the people - by Richard... Sunday, September 18, 2011

The Mail on Sunday is all over the shop with this story. On the one hand, it is telling us that "a powerful cross-party coalition of MPs plans to put unprecedented pressure on the Government to pull back from Europe – as support grows at Westminster for Britain to leave the EU altogether".

It thus has Tory MP Douglas Carswell telling us that support was growing for complete withdrawal from the EU, added that it would be as successful as the battle to keep the UK out of the single currency.

"There were three distinct stages in the fight to make sure we kept out of the euro", he says. First came the stage when we were branded mad for wanting to stay out. Next they said it was OK in theory to stay out – but it was impractical to do so. Finally, we have got to the point where the same people are claiming it was always their idea all along.

Says Carswell, "We are following exactly the same pattern on the idea of quitting the EU completely. Most people have left stage one, and are currently poised somewhere between stage two and three".

So … four cheers for Carswell and trebles all round … except that the Mail piece concludes with the message that campaigners see the chaos in the eurozone, triggered by the near certainty of Greece defaulting on its debt, as a once-in-a-lifetime chance to "refashion the EU" and "repatriate" key powers to Westminster.

In other words, this is exactly the "same old – same old" about which Booker and I (and many more) complain. That the Mail is all over the shop simply reflects the confusion in the ranks. In truth, the MPs have no idea where they are going, have little idea what they want, and even less idea how to get there.

Therein, in fact, lies the peril. Lower profile than they were during, say, the campaign to get Britain to join the single currency, the europhiles are still there – a dark, brooding presence, buoyed up with huge funding from the EU commission and other sources, and unanimity of purpose that, at the moment, we cannot match.

Here, I stick to my position, that renegotiation is not an option, but further add that, should a referendum be called, we could not guarantee a victory. Thinking strategically, I also take the view that leaving the EU would not make very much difference. Our entry to the communities and continued membership is simply a symptom of the decline of our political competence.

If we address the root cause of our problems, withdrawal becomes a necessary and almost incidental consequence – and something that is going to happen anyway, as the EU progressively collapses. Our focus then, should be on a post-EU political settlement, in much the same way that discussion during the Second World War focused on "peace aims" and the shape of Britain when the war had ended – thinking which ushered in the 1945 Attlee government.

To give him his due, Carswell – with his soul-mate Hannan - recognises that something more than EU withdrawal is needed. The pair have at least come up with their own template, called The Plan. The trouble is – for me, at least – is that I find their recipe no more alluring that what we have already.

Like so many superficial thinkers, this pair concentrate on the processes, rather than the realities of power. Their emphasis, therefore, is on creating additional tiers of elected officials, with insufficient attention given to how we control those officials. And, as we all know, elections are capable of giving us nothing other than an elective dictatorship, unless other measures are in place.

For sure, the deadly duo do doff their caps to the idea of direct democracy, but the main issue of importance is control over the annual budgets – at local and national levels. And in the nature of power, politicians are never going to accept the transfer of control over something as vital as the money tree.

Thus, as always, if we the people want such power, we are going to have to take it. There is an absolute truth here, which we must confront. Power of any consequence is never given. It always has to be taken. We need people power, but we are going to have to take it. No one is going to hand it to us on a plate.

Based on recent experiences and long-term thinking, I have some ideas of how to make this happen. I will start addressing our own "plan" tomorrow, as I attempt to pull together the threads. They, the political classes, are weaker than they look. The time is right for change. Even a small number of determined people is sufficient to bring them down.

Autonomous Mind is absolutely right. We have nothing to learn from the politicians. It is revolution time.

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Holed below the waterline - by Richard...

Although the hundredth anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic is not until next year, Booker uses the obvious imagery in his column, under the headline: "The Euro Titanic is sinking but there's no lifeboat for Britain".

We are of a mind, as you would expect. Neither of us is taken in by the spin, with Booker asserting that the euro spinning out of control is the biggest crisis the "project" has ever brought on itself. Further, its implications for the world economy and for the EU's own future are incalculable.

However, as the Titanic of the European Union looks to be slipping slowly beneath the waves, the thrust of the piece is to have a swipe at those "plaintive voices" that are saying we must look for a lifeboat. Included in those are the 120 so-called "eurosceptic" Tory MPs, calling for a "redrawing of our relationship with Europe".

But particular venom is reserved for the poseur Max Hastings, who delivered his two-page "recantation", headed "Sorry, I was wrong", in The Daily Mail last week. The thing about Hastings, as Booker recalls from the days when he worked for him (as did I briefly when Booker and I ran a joint column in The Daily Telegraph), is that he could scarcely conceal his contempt for his criticisms of the EU.

Yet this is a man who, for all his supposed erudition and claims to be a historian, has never grasped the real nature of the "project" or the vision behind it. He is at one with so many Tories who believes that it was originally set up as a free trade area and has somehow gone off the rails.

I find it intensely irritating when these "above the line" figures waft through life, with their lofty, condescending demeanour, asserting that which is palpably untrue, simply by dint of their refusal to get to grips with the reality, or to do their homework and ground their beliefs in fact.

In fact, I can't even begin to express how sick I am of these patronising, sneering grandees who have spent decades looking down on us all, so superior in their profound ignorance, and so absolutely certain that only they can possibly understand the true nature of their beloved "Europe".

But it is the likes of Hastings who – even to this day – simply cannot accept that, for fifty years, building itself up step by step into a form of supranational government, the "project" has only ever had one aim – to take away ever more powers of member states to govern their own affairs.

People like him think that the over-regulation which so typifies the EU is an aberration, totally unable to comprehend that the community has had no more sacred principle than the acquis communautaire, a means by which economic regulation is used to achieve political integration.

Thus, no sentence in Hastings's piece was more poignant, writes Booker, than his observation that "in its early decades the Common Market was a benign institution, set up to liberalise trade". This is so far off the wall that one really struggles to accept that anyone could be so monumentally thick as to believe that.

He just cannot grasp that the Common Market was only ever intended as a first step towards the ultimate goal, the embryo of everything the EU has since become – a vast overblown system of government reaching into almost every area of our lives, and symbolised above all by its hubristic desire for its own single currency.

Locked into this sagging myth, it is noticeable how Hastings and all the other born-again Tory "eurosceptics" do not say "we must leave the EU". Believing that their own flawed vision can be restored, they thus call for EU powers to be curbed, that we must "reform" the EU, that we must "repatriate" powers or "loosen our ties".

In other words, all these muppets are calling for things which are never to going to be on offer, because they defy the bedrock principle on which the European project was founded, and which has guided every step of its accretion of power to the centre since the Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957.

This is a frustration that so many of us share, Boiling Frog and Witterings from Witney being the most recent to express what Booker articulates for us.

Generations of Britons, europhiles and eurosceptics alike, he writes, have never managed to get their heads round this simple fact that the EU was always designed as a machine to achieve European political integration. It has no other purpose.

This is why the muppets still babble about the possibility that we can change it, or our relationship with it – because they imagine that the project is something quite different from what it is and was always intended to be.

Thus, concludes Booker, it is very likely that the EU will eventually disintegrate. But if and when that happens, he wouldn't mind betting that the last people still in there will be the British, still bleating about the need to reform it, as the pillars of the whole mad edifice crash around their ears.