VERBATIM REPORT OF SPEECH BY DANIEL HANNAN MEP
TO THE FIFTH CONGRESS FOR DEMOCRACY, 2 February 2001

"The summit was a triumph for the Prime Minister. "The Treaty marks the defeat of federalism." "It achieved all our objectives." "It's game, set and match to Britain." All of these things were heard in the few weeks immediately after the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, and the same things were heard in the days just after the Amsterdam Summit - including from some eurosceptic commentators who ought to have known better.

The trouble is you are reliant on government spin for all your sources of information during the period of the negotiations and it is very easy to buy the government's line. If you did this on this occasion - well you don't need to buy the government's line, you had it faithfully relayed by the BBC - the Nice Summit was "a triumph", apart from a little bit of wonkery about voting weights. "The Nice Summit was a tremendous personal triumph for Tony Blair who secured those vital objectives of keeping our opt-out in the fields of taxation and social security." It is very interesting by the way, the way in which the BBC, like so many commentators, has redefined "victory" in the EU context to mean the maintenance of the status quo. So a "victory" is when you fail to give ground in one area in return for conceding ground in another, which is why of course the ratchet keeps twisting.

Let me give you seven short reasons why I do not believe that the Nice Summit amounted to very little, why I believe that the Nice Treaty is immensely important, and why I think we should as a movement be preparing our resources to battle against the ratification of the Treaty in Parliament.

Reason number 1: the European army. This will be familiar to all of you. Of course it is not called that, it is called the "European rapid reaction force" - although, as Romano Prodi helpfully reminded us, it would still be a European army even if we called it Margaret or Mary Anne. Throughout the EU the only person still sticking, or trying to stick, to the line that this is not a threat to NATO, that it is not a separate military force, that it is all just going to bolster the western alliance, is our own Prime Minister. For three years every other European leader was saying "What we are talking about is a mobile military force of mobile EU personnel answerable to the politico-military structures of the EU". It is very difficult to see what that is if it is not an army. But even as the summit was going on, Tony Blair was still trying to stick to his line that this was all going to help NATO. It was only when we saw the final communiqué from Nice that we read that this was to be "wholly answerable to the EU under the supreme political direction of the EU", "would deal with NATO on an equal footing" and so on. A European army.

Point 2, the European Constitution. Again, of course, it is not called that. It is referred to as the Charter of Fundamental Rights.

I would just stand back and say let's for a moment take them at their word. Let's pretend that this is a Human Rights Charter aimed at protecting freedoms throughout Europe. Where in western Europe is there some monstrous human rights violation that this Charter is going to address? We are not dealing here with fifteen Rwandas or fifteen Burmas. We are dealing with fifteen advanced liberal democracies, fifteen countries which, by the way, are already bound by the European Convention on Human Rights, by the UN's Universal Declaration, and so on.

Why does the EU additionally need a Human Rights Charter? Well, of course, the answer is that it doesn't. The whole point of having this document is to make it justiciable before the European Court, at which point of course it ceases to be a Declaration and becomes a Constitution. Again, this is clear to everyone except British Ministers. In every other European country when you ask them why they are doing this they will say "That is precisely why. We want a European Constitution. How can the EU assume the attributes and trappings of statehood if it does not have its own constitution, just as it must have its own army, its own police force, its own currency, its own parliament and the rest of it?" And yet Tony Blair and Keith Vaz are still trying to stick to the line that this is a document with no more binding force than a copy of the Beano.

Actually, just in case there was any doubt lingering in your mind, I have here an answer given by the Home Affairs Commissioner, Mr Vittorino, in answer to the question "Does he think that this document will be ruled on, will be justiciable before the European Court?" He replied as follows: "To verify respect for fundamental rights by the institutions of the Member States when they act under Union law, the Commission therefore thinks it highly likely that the Court of Justice will refer to the Charter when handing down judgements in the future." And yet the British government still sticks to this line that it is not really a constitution it is just a declaration.

Point 3 - the abolition of 39 of our remaining 45 national vetoes, including in some pretty important areas, to do with regional policy, industrial policy, anti-discrimination initiatives and so on.

Point 4 - this is referred to now as the Haider clause in Europe - Article 7 of the Treaties. This is the mechanism whereby a country which is judged by the other European Member States to be in violation of human rights, as set out in the Treaty of Rome, may have its voting rights and any other privileges that derive from EU membership suspended. That decision, astonishingly, would not be taken by any judicial body whatever but by a majority vote among the other Member States. The defenders of this will say that of course it is a last resort to use in case of a Greek Colonels type of situation. If you had a sudden breakdown of democracy in one of the Member States, you would need to have some method of redress. Again, does anyone here really believe that if you were faced with that kind of situation, the Member State concerned could remain in the EU? It seems to me far more likely that this is a mechanism for temporarily disabling the veto of any member country which has the temerity to elect an anti-federalist government.

If that sounds paranoid to you, if it sounds as though I am fantasising, so surely until recently did the idea that the EU would have challenged the general election result in one of the Member States, as it did in Austria last year. I do not think it is fanciful now to envisage a situation where if Britain, say, or one of the other Member States were holding up a measure to which all the others were committed, Article 7 could be invoked on the grounds that Britain refuses to put women in the front line or is engaging in some other form of human rights violations, as a way of disarming our veto until that measure were passed.

Point number 5 - Just in case that failed as a way of disarming a national veto, you now have this new procedure called co-opération renforcée - enhanced co-operation. Up until now, any move towards deeper union by any group of Member States has to be endorsed by all Member States. It involves a change in the Treaties and therefore has to be unanimous. Under the new rules set up at Nice, any sub-group of eight or more Member States would be allowed to push ahead on their own without requiring the permission of the others.

Now that may seem a rather technical piece of wonkery of little interest compared with these great things like the European army and the European Constitution, but I submit to Congress that this is actually one of the most important pieces of the Nice Treaty tactically. Up until now it has always been at least theoretically possible that a eurosceptic government, either in Britain or in one of the other Member States, might have used its national veto as a lever to secure the repatriation of powers from Brussels. A government in one of the Member States might in effect have said, "We will only allow you to take several steps further forward if in return you allow us to take a few steps back. We will allow you to push ahead with a pan-European policy on recognition of trade unions or whatever it is only if you allow us greater control over fisheries or agriculture or some other power previously ceded to Brussels." That option is now deliberately closed off by this Article, which has been introduced for the specific purpose of preventing a Member State government taking such a negotiating stance. So please do not underestimate the significance of this. It is now effectively impossible for a Member State to secure any retrieval of power from Brussels while remaining a member of the European Union on current terms.

Item number 6 of our Seven Deadly Sins - the Statute for European Political Parties. There is now a proposal that political parties should be formed at transnational level to contest elections on a pan-European party list. In order to qualify for recognition, they would have to be part of a political party spanning different Member States and fighting elections on a common and binding manifesto. You should not need me to spell out that there are quite a number of political parties which would automatically be disqualified by that provision alone. The British Conservative Party, for example, is not a member of any transnational political party - unsurprisingly, given our policy towards European integration. We would therefore fall foul of this rule and not qualify for formal recognition as a party allowed to contest European elections as one of these recognised movements.

There is even a proposal to amend this rule to say that political parties again could be disqualified unless they abide by human rights and democratic values as set out in the Treaty of Rome. That again may sound as if it is a perfectly reasonable thing, but you should not need that vivid a historical memory to recall that this was precisely the procedure used in eastern Europe to disqualify opponents of the regime. The Soviet regimes did not ban elections. They did not even necessarily proscribe opposition parties. They simply forbade them to contest elections if they qualified as bourgeois, anti-revolutionary or fascist parties, which came to apply to everyone except the party in power. Again, off the record people will say, "Of course, this is intended to act against Haider, the UK Independence Party, or anyone else who challenges our common European dream." Now I am not suggesting that we are living in a kind of Stalinist system in Europe. But it does gravely worry me that nobody in the European institutions has spoken out against the principle of what is being proposed.

Finally - and this is something that has received almost no attention in the British media - my seventh of the Deadly Sins in Nice is the step to establish a European criminal justice system. Nice establishes a body called Eurojust, which as a first step will bring together Public Prosecutors from the fifteen Member States to deal with transnational crimes such as terrorism, drugs trafficking, counterfeiting, fraud against the EU institutions, Internet crimes, trafficking in human beings, and a number of other listed areas. This is explicitly only a first step. Once the national Public Prosecution Services are welded together into a single unit, the next step - and this is explicitly flagged up in the Treaty and the Declarations around it - is to give that European Public Prosecution Service its own jurisdiction. This means that for the first time it will be possible to be tried not under English or Scottish or French or German law, but for crimes against the EU.

What is envisaged, in effect, is a US-type two tier system where you have federal law for the big international offences and state law covering the minor infractions. And, of course, once you have a federal law code you need a federal police force to enforce it. Hence we have Europol, which has grown up, still with immunity from prosecution, but now with the right to engage in national policing operations. Again, please do not underestimate the seriousness of this. It is now conceivable that within one or two years you could be arrested by a Europol officer with jurisdiction on British soil, arraigned before a European court and tried and sentenced under EU jurisdiction, without proceeding through any of the national systems. Naturally the system concerned would follow the inquisitorial Napoleonic system favoured in most of the Member States, rather than the Common Law system of England, Wales and Ireland.

Those are seven good reasons to campaign against the ratification of the Treaty. At the very least I would have thought that they amount to a sufficient transfer of power from this and the other national capitals to Brussels to merit a referendum. If we are not being offered a referendum, I suggest that we treat the next election as the next best thing.

I would say one final thing. When listening to the exponents of the Nice Treaty in Parliament or on the airwaves, I have never heard them advancing any case as to why any of these seven major transfers of power from Westminster to Brussels are in our interests from first principles. What they do instead is to fall back on this oldest and most tired of europhile arguments, that we may not have started from here but all the others are going ahead and so we have no choice if we are going to keep our place at the European table. We may not like it but we are too small to survive on our own.

Too small to survive on our own! We are the fourth biggest economy in the world. We are the fourth military power on the planet. We are one of five members of the UN Security Council. We are one of the Group of Seven industrialised countries. We have unparalleled links with the United States, the Commonwealth and the rest of the English-speaking world. How much bigger do we have to be before we are able to run our own affairs in our own interests? This, it seems to me, is not a government actuated by a calculation of where the balance of our advantage lies. This is a government that begins from a lack of confidence in Britain and a feeling that they do not feel comfortable speaking for those whom they purport to represent.

I would like to send a message from this Congress today that we do believe in our capacity to survive as an independent people. We do not feel that we should adopt inferior legislation simply because others are doing it. That, ladies and gentlemen, is the wisdom of the Gadarene swine.

- END -