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The
Rt Hon Lord Peter Shore |
The two principal speakers at the Second Congress for
Democracy were William Hague, Leader of the Conservative Opposition, and Lord Shore of
Stepney, the former Labour Cabinet Minister. |
| ONLY seven months
separate the Second from the First Congress for Democracy but much has happened - and we
who are proud to call ourselves Euro-sceptics or Euro-realists have much to be pleased
about. In spite of the best efforts of the Europhiles - in the Government, in the CBI, in the TUC, in the Conservative Party, and in the BBC - to con the British people, there is significant and encouraging evidence that in the battle for the minds and hearts of our fellow countrymen we are winning: and they are losing. THE EUROPEAN ELECTION RESULTS: the real message On the crucial battle ground of the Single Currency, the opinion polls record a further strengthening of majority support for those who are determined to keep the pound sterling. Better still, on 10 June, polling day in the European Parliament Elections, the British people gave the Europhiles a bloody nose. The parties which supported the pound clearly outstripped in support those which advocate the Single Currency. Even more clearly by their mass abstention - just think of it: 77% of the British people shunned the polls in a nationwide election - the British people sent two messages of fundamental importance to our Government and Parliament. First: their hostility to and rejection of the new system of voting. No longer can we vote for a candidate or a list of candidates in our order of preference, but only for a Party whose top officials then decide themselves their approved list of candidates; and in the order of their preference. This so-called Regional Closed List System is in fact the Continental voting system which our Government smuggled in to the UK without acknowledging its parentage. But the people of Britain know when they are being robbed. They know that a vote is not worth having if it is simply a gift from them to unaccountable party officials rather than their choice for a named candidate who they can hold to account. Yes, it is the Continental system. And of course it is a proportional representation, a P.R., system as well. It is a system which, under any normal circumstance, is bound to lead on to a coalition because no one Party is likely to emerge as a winner with an overall majority. Such a system inevitably devalues the manifesto policies on which elections are fought. It devalues the election manifestos because as soon as the results are known the bargaining and negotiation begins, behind closed doors, between the two or more parties who are to form the coalition. We have had a vivid demonstration of that in Scotland only a few weeks ago. The Liberal Democrats are now joined with the Labour Party in the new Scottish Executive. And the price that the Liberal Democrats were happy to pay was the principal item in their election manifesto - the abolition of student fees in Scottish universities. CONTEMPT FOR THE EUTOPEAN PARLIAMENT: richly deserved The second message, even more important than the first: by their unprecedented mass abstention, British voters expressed their feelings of contempt for the European miscalled 'Parliament', the European Commission and the whole supra-national institutional structure of the European Union. It is difficult to define, accurately, the feelings of the British people towards the European Parliament and its Members. Without question they feel that they are remote, out of touch, and virtually irrelevant. But mingled with that near universal judgement of the European Parliament are stronger and more critical sentiments. The European Parliament and its Members are seen to be self-serving and self-indulgent - shamelessly indulging in endless freebies and expense account fiddles involving their alleged office costs and travel expenses. Not only has the European Parliament failed to halt the abuses of its own Members, but more seriously it has patently failed in its duty to hold the unelected European Commission to account and to check the truly massive and costly abuses which that arrogant and power-mad group have allowed to flourish in the various expenditure departments that they control. The Committee of Independent Experts reported only three months ago that nepotism, mismanagement and fraud were rife in and under the Commission. Not only that it was rife, but that it had been continuing for at least four years past, as documented in the published criticisms of the Court of Auditors. Yet in spite of this mass of evidence the European Parliament, which has the special duty of supervising and "discharging" the budget accounts of the Commission, has, in effect, turned a blind eye. It was only the courage of a Commission employee, an honest Dutchman prepared to play the part of "whistleblower", that brought the most recent scandals to the light of day and forced the European Parliament to set up the Committee of Independent Experts. What a record! And I haven't even mentioned Commissioner Bangemann! LOSS OF UK DEMOCRACY The great question for all of us here is the future of democracy in our own country; the continued threat to it that the European Union poses; and why there can be no transfer of our democratic power to the bogus European Parliament and the other non-elected institutions in the European Union. From the British point of view, the origin of this problem goes back to the Treaty of Accession that Heath negotiated in 1972 prior to the membership of the United Kingdom in the Common Market on 1st January 1973. From the start the Government accepted that in a large area of our affairs the British electorate and their elected Westminster Parliament and Government were no longer sovereign; that we were henceforth to be subjected to the provisions of the Rome Treaty and all the laws and treaties that had been made under its authority in the 16 years before we joined. And along with the surrender of our Parliamentary Sovereignty went the supremacy of our own Courts of Law. Henceforth the European Court of Justice was to be the final arbiter in our affairs. Of course, the Treaty of Rome covered a substantial part, but by no means the whole, of our national affairs. But steadily over the years, as the Brussels Commission and the Council of Ministers have activated different dormant clauses of the Rome Treaty - and added to that Treaty the Single European Act, the Maastricht Treaty and the Treaty of Amsterdam - there is now left hardly an aspect of our affairs, however trivial, over which the European Institutions, the Commission and the European Court of Justice does not claim and indeed possess exclusive or shared "competence" or control. EUROPEAN UNION TAKE-OVER OF U.K. We are ceasing to be an independent sovereign state and we are ceasing to be a Parliamentary democracy. The Single Currency, the euro, is only the most vivid and most recent demonstration of what is taking place before our very eyes. The grinding relentless logic of European Union, leading to a Single European State, is clearly at work. The Common Market led to a Single Market, the Single Market to a Single Currency and Economic and Monetary Union. The Economic and Monetary Union will next lead to demands for a Fiscal Union. Already we face a new offensive to bring the realm of taxation within the scope of Community competence and control. And now foreign policy, security and defence. We began with the aim of co-operation in Foreign and Security matters. Fine. But then we moved on to the aim of a Single European Foreign and Security Policy and now we have Snr Prodi, the Committed Federalist whom we have helped to appoint to the most influential and powerful position in the European Union, calling for a Single European Army. And we shall hear again and again in the months ahead how necessary it is for the European Union to have defence forces of its own, independent of NATO, to give substance to the policies and purposes of the European Union. Parallel with this, bit by bit, that bogus body the European Parliament - that began its life under the Treaty of Rome as simply a consultative assembly where Parliamentarians from the different national parliaments met to exchange their views - will continue to acquire more and more powers so that it becomes co-equal in law-making and decision-making with the Council of Ministers itself. We shall then hear that it is not just the Commission and the Council of Ministers who have made policy decisions and approved legislation, but that the European Parliament has given its blessing, its approval, its democratic coverage, to the whole procedure. NO DEMOCRACY IN EUROPE We in Britain, however, know that it is a fraud. The very structures of the European Union are autocratic, not democratic. The key institutions - the Brussels Commission, the European Court of Justice and the European Central Bank - are wholly comprised of appointed, non-elected high officials whose independence is guaranteed and whose accountability is nil. The European Parliament is not, and never will be, their democratic master but their accomplice and democratic façade in the exercise of power. It is simply no good for the Europhiles to assert that all will be well if only the European Parliament was given the democratic powers, that in the past at any rate, we exercised here in Westminster. It is not just a matter of powers: as we have seen with the failure of the European Parliament to hold the Commission to account over financial fraud, when it has the power it simply fails to exercise it. No, the reason is much more fundamental than that. It is that a directly elected assembly, representing over 270 million people living in l5 separate nation states, is bound to lack the very fundamental requirements of a functioning democracy: legitimacy and acceptability. Democracy, as we all know, is a composite word made up of two entities: "demos" - the people; and "kratos" - rule or power. The truth is that there is no such thing as a European demos, a European people. There are English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and the rest. But they are European not in a political community sense but only in the loosest sense of being peoples, largely of ethnic Caucasian origin and Christian religious faith occupying the European Continent - that great swathe of land from the Volga to the English Channel and from the English Channel to the West Coast of Ireland. It is perfectly possible to build in such an area a "kratos", a state. Although those who have previously tried it, from Napoleon to Hitler, have managed only to achieve it temporarily and by conquest and war. But clearly, "demos" there is not. Of course culture, history, shared aspirations, fears and hopes, as well as economic interests, can so bind together different peoples that they feel so close to each other that something like a demos can come to exist. That is obviously the hope of at least the original six members of the Rome Treaty: and they may well be destined to realise this ambition. And in our own experience it may well be that, in spite of recent separatist noises, the Union of England and Scotland and Wales and Northern Ireland has achieved in the United Kingdom so strong a bond as, to all intents and purposes, to make us one people. THE UK'S RELATIONS WITH EUROPE : the truth But no such bond exists between the British people and the European partners in Continental Europe. This was vividly demonstrated in one of the most revealing public opinion polls ever conducted - by the BBC as recently as 1995 to mark the 20th Anniversary of the Referendum of 1975 which confirmed British membership of the then European Economic Community. Two questions of direct relevance were asked of the British people in a very large quota sample by the Mori poll. First: "How European do you feel - a great deal; a fair amount; a little; or not at all?" And the answer? No less than 49% said "not at all" and a further 25% only "a little". The second question posed a list of countries - France, Germany, Spain, Canada, Australia and the United States - and asked the question: "With which of these countries do you feel you have most in common?" The three continental countries, in total, scored 21%; the three English speaking countries over 50%! It couldn't be clearer. Only the politically blind, the politically deaf - the ludicrous Europhiles who have dominated our political parties far too long - can continue to fail to read the hearts and minds of the British people. With our continental neighbours: friendship, alliance, co-operation, trade, investment and reasonable free movement - YES. But: Union, integration, the single state - centralist or federalist, democratic or autocratic - NO. "
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