News from the New Party

Wednesday, February 21, 2007

EU reverts to stealth politics

The European Union is returning to stealth politics. After the brief experiment with open democracy in the form of the Dutch and French referenda on the European Constitution, which delivered a resounding rebuff to the project of continuous political integration - "ever closer union", the EU is reverting to type and attempting to implement the European Competition by the back door . Daniel Hannan MEP in yesterday's Telegraph outlines in detail the method by which this is occurring even now. The Constitution has in fact been ratified already by 18 EU member states and rejected by just two - the Dutch and the French. The problem is that the nay-sayers in Holland and France have been the voters - in most of the rest of Europe the ratifiers have been members of national parliaments. There is no appetite for a repeat of the ratification process, especially in countries with large eurosceptic electorates such as Sweden, Poland and the UK, where the Government has already promised a referendum on the issue, so Daniel Hannan tells us how the EU are going to dodge the voters and bring in the Constitution anyway:

"We have the answer," says Alain Lamassoure, a former Europe minister who is now Nicolas Sarkozy's vicar on earth. "We shall go through the text with a rubber instead of a pencil. Many of the clauses are unnecessary, because they reiterate what is already in the treaties. But these are generally the articles that people object to. So, if we take out what we don't need, we can avoid any new referendums."

It is a horribly plausible plan. For the fact is that, as Peter Hain, then Europe minister, kept trying to tell us, three quarters of the EU constitution is a rehash of the existing treaties. This shouldn't make it any more acceptable, of course: the whole point of the constitution was that it was an opportunity to draw up a settlement in accordance with people's wishes. If we objected to something that Brussels was already doing - the Common Fisheries Policy, say - this was our opportunity to remove it.

Still, excising these articles will allow supporters of the constitution to claim that the document has been medicinally purged - especially if they also cut the clauses that offer a legal basis for something the EU is already doing unofficially: the diplomatic service, the space programme, the defence procurement office, the human rights agency, the charter of fundamental rights, the external borders agency, and so on.

Of course, we still get the EU President, the EU Foreign Minister, the extension to majority voting and so on, but without a lot of verbal ballast which makes up most of the weight of the constitution. The beauty of this from the pro-constitution establishment point of view, is that the constitution is reduced in size to a "mini-treaty" (no matter what the content of that treaty or its impact may be). And the Government has confirmed that in these circumstances a referendum will not be called.

Naturally enough, the New Party deplores such duplicity and deceit, whether it comes from the European Commission or the UK Government. However, we do not believe that withdrawal from the European Union will solve all our problems either. While we can and should reassert our national sovereignty and repeal the European Communities Act, it is nevertheless easier to withdraw from the EU in theory than in practice. As Finland discovered during the Cold War, living next door to a tyrannical superpower rather than within its borders does not guarantee independence. A Finlandised United Kingdom outside the EU will inevitably be economically dominated by the EU, and with still less influence over EU policy and direction.

It is not enough for us to abandon the European Union, we need to dismantle it. However, we cannot do this alone. We need to seek out allies among the nations and peoples of Europe to achieve this goal. The New Party aims to build an Open Europe, in which we work together with other countries in Europe as sovereign states cooperating to achieve mutually beneficial objectives, without the oppressive bureaucracy overarching the whole continent which the current European Union represents, and which the European Constitution will strengthen.

Saying "no" to the anti-democratic European Union does not mean saying "no" to Europe.

We say "yes" to an Open Europe of free peoples in sovereign states working together on the principles of liberal democracy, economic freedom and national sovereignty.

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EU reverts to stealth politics