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Why are we deaf to the truth about Europe?
Britons must realise that the EU is now a domestic – not foreign – issue, argues Daniel Hannan MEP
Did you see the thousands of people outside Parliament on Wednesday, campaigning for a referendum on the European Constitution? No? I can't say I’m surprised. The lobby went almost wholly unreported. Five idiots protesting about climate change made top billing; thousands of respectable citizens politely asking their MPs to keep their word got no mention.
Why are we so indifferent to the question of becoming part of a European state? Normally, when questions of nationality are at stake, they dominate political discourse. Think of Kosovo or Kashmir or Northern Ireland or any other territory in the world where there is an argument about which country to belong to. Yet, when it comes to UK independence, we flex our shoulders in a shrug so bored as to be downright Gallic.
Perhaps it is fatalism: an understandable belief that, whatever we say, politicians will ignore us. Perhaps it is the old British vice of leaving things until too late. Or perhaps it is simple ignorance. Even now, after 35 years of membership, few Britons understand the nature of the European project.
They still think of it as a disagreeable business that takes place across the Channel - expensive, undemocratic, corrupt, but far less immediate to them than, say, the admissions policy of their local school.
In fact, the EU is a domestic, not a foreign issue: its institutions pass 80 per cent of our laws, even in areas that have no conceivable international dimension: the ban on vitamin supplements, car seats for 12-year-olds, HIPs, fortnightly recycling (mandated by the EU's Landfill Directive), the nonsense of fitting different stamps to different sizes of envelopes (the Postal Services Directive), the rigmarole involved in opening a bank account (the Money Laundering Directive)...
We have replaced our system of parliamentary government with EU rule. And we haven't noticed. ·
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Anyone who expects a politician to keep his word, or tell the truth, is living in cloud-cuckoo land.
The Brits are being swallowed into the belly of the Beast. The German-EU is no friend of freedom and is an enemy of sovereignty. Likewise, the Americans are being betrayed with the North American Union scheme and are also being sold down stream.
This is a real Left-Right coalition opportunity. Brown let a very important cat out of the bag at PMQs this week: only the EU can ultimately redress the grievances giving rise to the Temporary and Agency Workers Bill. Well, not in Norway or Switzerland, it can't. But we don't want to end up in their economic condition. Do we?
Meanwhile, like neo-Fascists and neo-Nazis, both Stalinist and Trotskyist parties sit routinely, not only in the European Parliament, but also in the governments represented in the EU Council of Ministers, which makes eighty per cent of all the laws that apply in this country, and which is one of only three legislatures in the world to meet entirely in secret and to publish no Official Report; the other two are in Cuba and in North Korea. But those parties have hitherto sat only as junior coalition partners.
However, the recent election result in Cyprus means that a Stalinist is now the Head of Government of an EU member-state. Therefore, as an EU member-state, the United Kingdom now has a Stalinist government. Where is the party of Attlee, Bevin, Morrison, Bevan and Gaitskell?
The ban on vitamin supplements, car seats for 12-year-olds, HIPs, fortnightly recycling (mandated by the EU's Landfill Directive), the nonsense of fitting different stamps to different sizes of envelopes (the Postal Services Directive), the rigmarole involved in opening a bank account (the Money Laundering Directive)...
That's it then. I think you have answered your own question as to why no-one cares.