I want to talk to you a little bit about democracy in the European Union. I came home today from my fourteenth floor office in Brussels in the heart of the evil Empire. Because I spend a large amount of my working time in the Brussels and Strasbourg institutions, I know a great deal about what they say and even perhaps a little bit about what they believe.

What they say is that the European institutions are democratic, and they say that one of the key reasons for the enlargement of the EU to the new countries of central and eastern Europe is to extend democracy and the rule of law to those countries. And yet the amazing thing, as we have seen, is that they are prepared to ignore democracy and the rule of law in order to achieve enlargement. We saw this in Ireland just recently and I think the outcome of the Irish referendum, and still more the response of the European institutions to it, is astonishing.

We have here a phenomenon called biased finality, and I must say I wish I had invented that phrase – I think it was actually Alastair Heath at the European Foundation - but biased finality refers to a decision which you can make as often as you like but there is only one answer that is going to be accepted. I will give you an example.

The argument about fox hunting, which is a debate I have been much engaged in. There have been literally dozens of attempts in the last hundred years to ban fox hunting, each time those attempts have been seen off, but nobody is in much doubt that if we ever do get a ban on fox hunting that will be the end of it. So that a No answer can come as often as you like, but the only answer that is permanent is the Yes answer.

The Irish Republican Army expressed this in a striking and sinister way after an unsuccessful assassination attempt, when they sent a message to their victim which said "You were lucky this time, but you have to be lucky every time, we only have to be lucky once". And that is exactly the situation that we saw in Denmark in the Maastricht referendum, when they voted No in 1992 and they were told to go away and vote again, and it now seems to be happening in Ireland.

The argument I am going to make to you is first of all, and I don’t think you will take much convincing, that the EU is not a democratic organisation but, more importantly, that it cannot be.

We have already heard from other speakers, including Roger Pincham, making the argument that the European institutions are so complex that they actually defy any representation of democracy and, indeed, they are. The European Parliament is the only institution that even makes a pretence of democracy and it is one of four major institutions and there are many minor ones linked together by rules so complicated that even after two years in the Parliament I do not fully pretend to understand them. So its very complexity prevents it from being accountable.

Within the Parliament there is a built-in bias in favour of federalism and the reason is very easy to see but very important to understand. Throughout the history of the European Parliament, from every country and every political party, virtually the only people who offered themselves as candidates for Members of the European Parliament were on the extreme europhile wing because they were the only people who were remotely interested in it. And this certainly applies, I am afraid, to my Conservative colleagues from 1979, when the first elections took place to the European Parliament. It was only the Quisling tendency within the Conservative Party that was really interested in putting itself forward as members and in fact a new development in 1999 was for the first time people like myself and Daniel Hannan who is here today and a number of others actually put our names forward not because we were part of the Quisling tendency but for exactly the opposite reason, that we thought the whole thing had gone quite far enough and we wanted to put a spoke in the wheel. So that built-in bias exists. The fact is that in the Parliament something like 85% of all the Members of that Parliament are unthinking, totally committed federalists and integrationists, but that does not represent the views of people across the European Union, as we have seen from many, many referenda recently.

For the third reason why the European institutions simply cannot be democratic, I will quote very briefly from three political philosophers from three centuries. From the nineteenth century, John Stuart Mill said, "Where people lack fellow-feeling, and especially where they speak and read different languages, the common public opinion necessary for representative government cannot exist." Of course there was no European Union in the nineteenth century, but he could have been describing it. In the twentieth century Enoch Powell said pretty much the same thing. He was, as you know, a classical scholar and he pointed out that a democracy requires a demos, a people who share enough in common in terms of their history and their culture and their economic interests and their language that they are prepared, in his wonderful phrase, to accept governance at each other’s hands. That is clearly the case in the nation state. It is clearly not the case across Europe. If a decision is made in Westminster I may accept it even though I disagree with it, but if a decision is made by a coalition of Belgians and Portuguese and Greeks and Lithuanians, there is absolutely no reason why I should regard it, or you should regard it, as having any democratic legitimacy. Roger Scruton in the twenty-first century, to bring us completely up to date, put it very briefly and very succinctly. He said, "Language is at the root of the difference between us and them".

I will not go on elaborating the point, but my point is very simple. It is that the nation state is the natural forum for democracy and across 15 countries today, and perhaps 20 or 25 countries in a few years’ time, the very concept of representative democracy is meaningless. The choice which faces the British people is a very simple choice. We have to choose between British democracy at Westminster or no democracy at all.