Flying Free (23 page)

Of course not. What on earth has the will of the people to do with the EU?

The Laeken Declaration, which set up the Convention, is quite open about the Constitution’s purposes. Its claims to democratic validity are based on that infantile demagoguery, the unsubstantiated ‘Everyone says so!’

To give the federalists on the other side of the Channel their due, they have always been quite frank about their intentions. British politicians, however, have been disingenuous … economical with the
actualité…

Oh sod it. They have lied through their teeth.

First we were told that there was no Constitution. This was where Andrew Gilligan, later to be forced to resign from a pusillanimous BBC for truthfully reporting the ‘dodgy dossier’ with its ‘sexed-up’ 45-minute warning, invoked the loathing of Tony Blair and Alastair Campbell.

It was not the first time. Gilligan’s record is exemplary and heroic. If honours were given for public service – that is, for service to the public, not service to self-important, soi-disant public servants – he would surely by now be a duke.

He started out by publicising the contents of leaked Ministry of Defence reports showing that RAF bombs had consistently missed their targets in
Kosovo, that rifles and radios had failed and that a £1 billion overhaul was needed if RAF jets were to drop ‘smart bombs’ – that, in short, our troops were woefully ill-equipped for the battle (for democracy!) in Iraq.

Defence Secretary Geoff (‘Buff’) Hoon, a former MEP who, it turns out, was not even consulted about Blair’s decision to go to war, stood up in Parliament and declared that Gilligan’s report was rubbish. He demanded a public apology. Unfortunately, a National Audit Office report confirmed Gilligan’s findings. Hoon’s public apology has yet to be received.

In 2000, as defence and diplomatic correspondent for the
Today
programme, Gilligan reported on a document being drawn up at an Italian university on the command of the EU Commission. Professor Alan Dashwood of Cambridge had been asked to contribute his expertise, said Gilligan, and it had all the hallmarks of a Constitution. The government had assured us that in no circumstances would it countenance a Constitution.

Rod Liddle, Gilligan’s editor, later recalled, ‘All hell broke loose. The BBC received three furious complaints, almost identical in tone and content, from John Williams, the head of press at the Foreign Office, a pencil-necked EU bureaucrat called Jonathan Faull and a certain Alastair Campbell. Andrew Gilligan was attacked by Godric Smith, one of Campbell’s Downing Street scullions (though purportedly an impartial civil servant!). “Gullible Gilligan,” he told the lobby hacks, “falling for the Eurosceptic agenda.”’

Yep. Gilligan was getting the UKIP treatment. Naive, fanciful, paranoid, credulous, scaremongering, dumb – that’s us who presume to question the pledges given by British governments.

In November of that same year, Keith Vaz, Minister for Europe (a confirmed Eurosceptic until in office), also derided the very notion of an EU Constitution and those who believed in its existence. He told the House of Commons that ‘if a telephone directory were published in Brussels, the Honourable Gentleman would believe that it was the forerunner of a European Constitution. We are not going to have such a constitution, so I am happy to deny categorically his statement.’

Plans for the draft Constitution were announced by the government within a year.

On 16 October 2000, the
Irish Times
correctly stated of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that ‘there is good reason to accept this text as the basis for an eventual European Constitution’.

Vaz, however, informed us that the ECR ‘will be no more binding than the
Beano
or the
Sun
’.

The EU Commission surely missed a natural star in property-flipper and serial ‘failure to disclose’ merchant Vaz, soon to be sacked as Europe Minister for his part in the Hinduja passport affair (the Commission had already acquired one Briton who liked to keep dodgy deals to himself, and they could not be greedy), is at the time of writing chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee and a Privy Counsellor.

And who better, given their similarities in function, to counsel privies?

Vaz’s place was taken by Peter Hain, another notable non-discloser who later clean forgot about a donation of £100,000 to his campaign to be deputy leader of New Labour. Hain had plainly been carefully briefed, because, although he sat on the Convention drawing up the Commission and presumably knew its contents, he described it as merely ‘a tidying-up exercise.’ Coincidentally, Foreign Secretary Jack Straw used precisely the same phrase.

This was not how we nor leading lawyers saw it. Martin Howe QC, for example, said, ‘A constitution would be to turn the whole EU system upside down. At the moment, states confer powers on the Community through treaties. But the effect of a constitution would be to limit the powers to the states, turning them into local councils that are not allowed to do anything unless authorised to do so.’

Some tidying up.

But then, Hain’s view of the Constitution changed with the sympathies which he expected of his particular audiences.

For the general public listening to the
Today
programme, he was oncemore consolingly dismissive. ‘This is not a major change. There is no need for a referendum.’

In the House of Commons, he was a little more circumspect. ‘I am not saying it has got no substantial constitutional significance. Of course it will have…’

In the
Financial Times,
a well-known Europhile title read by his chums, however, he finally told the truth. ‘Our task is nothing less than the creation of new constitutional order for a new, united Europe.’

So nice to hear him being honest – well, truthful – at last.

The ability to fit the right person to the right job is crucial in management. Anthony Blair is plainly brilliant at it. In a fresh, new, bright-eyed ‘people’s party’ elected to battle sleaze, how on earth did he manage to find Vaz, Hain and Mandelson, all to be forced to resign for putting their own interests or those of their cronies above their duty to the people but all still in high office – to sell the European federalist cause? Or were they the only people so unhandicapped by silly scruples – about democracy, for example, or service to their employers, or Britain – as to accept the job?

So now it was acknowledged that a Constitution existed and it was evident that it represented not ‘a tidying up’ but the surrender of Britain’s hard-won right to rule herself.

I earlier suggested that Dante’s ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter’ might be graven above the doors of EU institutions, but the EU itself would probably choose for its motto, ‘Softly, softly catchee monkey’ – or, since that is a reminder of British colonialism, its rather peculiar German equivalent:
‘Mit Geduld und Spucke fängt man eine Mucke’
– ‘With patience and spit you catch the gnat.’ Where spit comes into it rather than a rolled up newspaper, I am unsure, but the concept is the same, and we, the people of Europe, are the irritating midges, we the monkeys.

So it may be months or years before a directive has legal force in
member-states
, and it is often years after that, when the people have done with their expostulations and outrage and have assumed that the whole thing was a Eurosceptic myth, that the laws are enforced for the first time.

The commonest reaction, then, to EU treaties once signed is ‘What were you worrying about? Nothing much has changed, has it? Has the sky fallen in?’ followed by a certain amount of smug tutting and tittering.

And no doubt you would get much the same response if you had objected to the pit-bull being allowed to wander unmuzzled and unleashed around the home, or a loaded gun being left in the children’s toy-cupboard.

What is the EU Constitution? Well, listen to Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the man who supervised its drafting. He should know. ‘The Constitution, and law adopted by the Union institutions in exercising competences conferred on it by the Constitution, shall have primacy over the law of the member-states in … the competence to co-ordinate the economic policies of member-states … the competence to define and implement a common foreign and security policy, including the progressive framing of a common defence policy [and exclusive competence] for the conclusion of an international agreement…’

So, in other words, we as a people lose the ability to set taxes or interest rates, to form alliances, to make – or to remain outside – deals or to make – or to remain outside – wars. We sign away our democratic sovereignty over our own destiny.

This may or may not in time mean a European army. ‘If you don’t want to call it a European army, don’t call it a European army. You can call it “Margaret”, you can call it “Mary Ann”, you can find any name, but it is a joint effort for peace keeping missions – the first time you have a joint, not bilateral, effort at European level…’ said Commission President Romano Prodi in 2000.

It certainly consolidates for once and for all the surrender of common law to European regulation, and so (I here demonstrate a seldom-acknowledged debt to my long-suffering English master at Dulwich, because it seems that Richard II tried the same trick, and was quite properly usurped for his pains) Britain,

‘A single European state bound by one European constitution is the decisive task of our time,’ said German Foreign Minister and one-time political extremist Joschka Fischer back in 1998.

This was to be the moment and means of its attainment.

It seemed evident to us that only the people were entitled to authorise the overthrow of the entire British constitution – particularly since so many of their purported representatives were bent upon sanctioning it.

If, we argued, our leaders were elected to office and entrusted with temporary power by the democratic votes of their constituents, if they were paid by those constituents and so employed by them to represent them and their interests in Parliament and if they were bound by the same rules as those whereby they were elected, how in the name of God could they claim the right to change those rules in perpetuity, regardless of the electors’ will?

To revert to Richard of Bordeaux:

It is as though the fans owned a football team and stadium, appointed a manager and then saw him assume ownership, dismiss the players, sell off the ground for building plots and share the profits with his cronies. It is as though directors of a mutual building society were to privatise its assets without the consent of its owners.

I would have thought all this incontrovertible and inoffensive enough. If the shareholders see sufficient profit in selling out, they are at liberty to do so. If they don’t wish to do so, well, the board of directors recommending demutualisation must accept their masters’ decision. They can always find another job.

In North Korea, say. Or any borough council.

And anyhow, the Laeken Declaration had told us that ‘the image of a democratic and globally engaged Europe admirably matches citizens’ wishes’, in which case the Commission had nothing to fear by putting their assertion to the test.

Well, so we thought, so thought children who knew how games must be played and so – they said – thought the Tory party. So had thought Blair, back in the days when he was merely a lawyer seeking political power: ‘If there are further steps to European integration, the people should have their say at a general election or in a referendum,’ he had said back then.

We had a two-year deadline by which the Convention must be ratified. Between us, we piled pressure on Blair and Co. to allow the British people their say.

Blair at least cannot be accused of lying or concealing the truth for personal gain. He told the British people an untruth, certainly, in order to plunge them into a futile war which killed and maimed many, and he did not like to bother his employers by seeking their consent, but yes, whilst you would not buy a used skateboard from Vaz, Hain or Mandelson, you might mortgage the family home for a used Ferrari peddled by Blair.

He is generally smooth and persuasive, and all that hackneyed ‘It touches me here’ and ‘Don’t tell anyone, but I’m an ordinary guy with ordinary feelings’ stuff plays extraordinarily well when he does his version.

I think that I am the only person who has ruffled the Blair calm and caused him to scream in anger in a public place. He did not look quite so persuasive then.

In general, however, he is the most dangerous of all salesmen. He believes every word that trips from his lips.

He is also, to mix metaphors, a weathercock. Blow him – if you see what I mean – and he spins, right wing or left on show as the conditions dictate.

Initially he was ‘on message’. ‘I can see no case for having a referendum on this,’ he said in May 2003. (Hang on. How is it possible for a man to maintain a case and then, a few years later, to ‘see no case’? Ah. There’s the Blair magic for you.) ‘And, indeed, in relation to many of the allegations made about the impact of the European convention, they are indeed scaremongering…’