Britain and Europe: The Culture of Deceit
Christopher Booker
"There are some in this country who fear that in going
into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty.
These fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified."
Prime Minister Edward Heath, television broadcast on
Britain's entry into the Common Market, January 1973
This country quite voluntarily surrendered the once
seemingly immortal concept of the sovereignty of parliament and legislative
freedom by membership of the European Union ... as a once sovereign power, we
have said we want to be bound by Community law.
Judge Bruce Morgan, judgement in Sunderland metrication
case April 9, 2001
Contents
I am grateful to the Bruges Group for the chance to expand on a talk I gave
to their 12th anniversary meeting in February 2001, and which I rather
frivolously suggested might be entitled “Having Made Our Bed, Must We
Continue To Lie In It?”.
The starting point for my talk was the release under the 30-year rule last
January of documents relating to Britain’s application to join the Common
Market in 1970. What these papers revealed more starkly than ever before was
just how deliberately the Heath Government and the Foreign Office set out to
conceal from the British people the Common Market’s true purpose. They were
fully aware that it was intended to be merely the first step towards creating
a politically united Europe, but they were determined to hide this away from
view.
It may no longer be particularly shocking to see such clear evidence of a
British Government’s dishonesty over our relations with ‘Europe’, if only
because this is something which has since become so familiar. Scarcely a day
now goes by when British politicians and civil servants do not make statements
relating to the European Union which can be shown to be based at best on
concealment of the truth or even on direct falsehood.
The purpose of this paper is to explore the fundamental reason why our
involvement with ‘Europe’ has introduced into our politics a culture of deceit
which is quite new in our history, not least by obscuring the scale on which
it is changing the entire way in which our country is now governed.
In the light of the European Union now making the final moves towards
political integration, it is particularly urgent that the nature of this
culture of concealment should be analysed and more widely understood.
It is not often a British Prime Minister remains active in politics long
enough to be caught out by secret papers released under the 30-year rule from
the time he was in office. But such was the case in January 2001 when the
Public Record Office at Kew opened the files relating to Edward Heath’s
application to join the Common Market in 1970.
The most striking of these documents were those reflecting the Heath
Government’s reaction to something called ‘the Werner Report’. In 1969, the
Council of Ministers had commissioned the Prime Minister of Luxembourg, Pierre
Werner, to draw up a plan to move the Common Market forward to full economic
and monetary union. As luck would have it, his confidential report began
circulating in Brussels in October 1970, just as Britain’s negotiations to
enter the European Economic Community were getting under way.
In the British Foreign Office, as we can now see, the Werner Report rang
fearful alarm bells. A secret briefing note to Mr. Heath from Con O’Neill, the
senior civil servant responsible for Europe, explained that, if implemented,
Werner’s proposals would have enormous political repercussions. They envisaged
“a process of fundamental political importance, implying progressive
development towards a political union”. The long-term objectives of economic
and monetary union, it was made clear to Mr Heath, “are very far-reaching
indeed”, going “well beyond the full establishment of a Common Market”. The
Werner plan could lead to,
“the ultimate creation of a European federal state, with
a single currency. All the basic instruments of national economic management
(fiscal, monetary, incomes and regional policies) would ultimately be handed
over to the central federal authorities. The Werner report suggests that this
radical transformation of present Communities should be accomplished within a
decade”. (PRO/FCO 30/789)
Such a political and economic union, possibly also including a common
defence policy, would thus involve a massive loss of national sovereignty,
which would ultimately leave member states with somewhat less power “than the
autonomy enjoyed by the states of the USA”. But what alarmed the Foreign
Office was not the contents of the Werner Report. Mr Heath and his ministers
did not throw up their hands in horror and say “good heavens, we had no idea
this was what the Common Market is about. We could not possibly accept such a
thing”. On the contrary, when Geoffrey Rippon, the minister in charge of our
negotiations, went to see M. Werner on October 27, the minutes of their
discussion show that Rippon went out of his way to congratulate him on his
report, which he said “well stated our common objectives”. Privately, Her
Majesty’s Government had no objection to the political union Werner was
proposing. (PRO/CAB 164/771)
The only real concern of Mr Heath and his colleagues was that this plan
should not be talked about too openly in public, because this might so inflame
public opinion that it would be much harder to persuade Parliament and the
British people that it was in their interests to join what they were being
assured was no more than a ‘common market’, intended to boost trade.
It was vital, Mr Rippon urged on M.Werner, that this goal of political and
economic union should be achieved only in a “step by step approach”, because
“it was natural for people to be afraid of change” and “part of his problem in
Britain was to reassure people that their fears were unjustified”. When these
documents were released 30 years later, this was confirmed by a retired
Foreign Office official Sir Crispin Tickell, who had played an intimate part
in Britain’s Common Market negotiations as Geoffrey Rippon’s private secretary
and was present at the meeting with Werner. In a BBC interview Tickell frankly
admitted that, although worries over Britain’s loss of sovereignty had been
“very much present in the mind of the negotiators”, the line had been “the
less they came out in the open the better”. Here was chapter and verse to show
how politicians and civil servants had been party to a quite deliberate
attempt to hide from the British people what Britain’s entry into the Common
Market was letting them in for. So successful were they at burying the Werner
Report, indeed, that when 30 years later the journalist Hugo Young came to
compile This Blessed Plot, his lengthy and detailed history of Britain’s
relations with ‘Europe’, he did not even mention it.
But this curious glimpse of what was going on behind the scenes back in
1970 provides an apt starting point to explore one of the oddest things which
has ever happened to British public life: the way in which our involvement
with the “European project” has introduced an element of deliberate deceit
into our politics which, in its depth and scale, has no historical parallel.
To anyone who follows such matters in detail, nothing is more striking than
the way, again and again, we see supporters of Britain’s participation in this
project apparently having to resort to obfuscation and subterfuge, both to
disguise what the project is really about and to hide what they themselves are
up to. And the fundamental reason for this culture of concealment is that
there have always been two quite different perceptions as to the nature of
this European project.
For 40 years British politicians have consistently tried to portray it to
their fellow-citizens as little more than an economic arrangement: a kind of
free-trading area primarily concerned with creating jobs and prosperity, which
incidentally can help preserve the peace. On the continent, however, right
back to the dreamtime of Jean Monnet and Robert Schuman in the late 1940s and
early 1950s, the ‘European construction’, as its supporters call it, was
always seen as something very much more ambitious. However long it took, and
however much it might be desirable not to come too much into the open about
it, the real long-term aim of the project was always that the countries of
western Europe should eventually come together in complete political and
economic union. The setting up of a common market (which itself was never
intended to be a free trade area but a highly regulated internal market
protected against external competition by tariff barriers) was regarded as
merely a first step along the way. And this is of course precisely what we
have seen over the past 50 years, as the whole project has inched forward,
step by step, treaty by treaty, directive by directive, always moving in the
same direction towards that distant, never very clearly defined but always
utterly consistent goal.
The real problem for the British has been that, from the moment our
politicians first decided in the 1960s and 1970s that we should join the
project, they have never dared to admit openly to the British people that this
was its true nature and purpose. And this has had two particularly damaging
consequences.
The first is that, right from the start, it created that need for a culture
of deceit, whereby our politicians and civil servants have consistently tried
to downplay the significance of ‘Europe’, and to present it as something
different from what it is. Apart from anything else, this has meant that every
time the project has taken another step towards its ultimate goal, as that
original “European Economic Community” first evolved in the 1980s into just
the “European Community” , then in the 1990s into the “European Union”,
Britain’s politicians have at every stage along the way, had to go through
that process with which we are now so wearyingly familiar: whereby first they
express opposition to much of what their continental partners are proposing;
then find themselves having to agree to more than they intended; and finally
have to hide from the British people just how much they have given away.
The second, rather less obvious consequence has been the need to conceal
the startling extent to which our ever-greater involvement in ‘Europe’ is now
changing the way in which Britain is governed. Few features of our political
scene have in recent years been more curious than the way our politicians and
civil servants try to hide away how deeply our political system is now
enmeshed with that of the European Union and how much of the legislation which
rules our lives now derives from Brussels. All too often we see them
announcing new policies or laws which they pretend are their own, only for it
to emerge that they are merely passing on edicts from the EU. Again and again
we see them having to conceal just how much of the power to run our country
has been given away to a new system of government which has no particular
concern for the interests of the people of Britain.
But ultimately this culture of concealment, which is far more prevalent in
Britain than in any other country in Europe, derives from that same basic act
of deception: the pretence that the nature of the ‘European project’ is
something different from what it is.
The moment when our political leaders first took this fateful decision to
conceal the real purpose of the European project from the British people was
not, in fact, 1970 but ten years earlier when, in 1960, Harold Macmillan’s
Government began discussing the dramatic reversal of national policy which was
to lead to our first abortive application to join the Common Market.
This we can see from an illuminating book published in 1995 by Lionel Bell,
The Throw That Failed, based on studying the Cabinet papers which reflected
those discussions in the months leading up to our application in the summer of
1961. What was striking about the documents Bell uncovered was just how frank
Macmillan and his colleagues had been in private, even at that early stage,
over where the Common Market was heading. They were in little doubt it was
intended to be just a first step towards eventual political and economic
union. Yet this, they decided, should be kept hidden from the British people,
because otherwise it would not be acceptable. The Common Market had to be
presented as no more than a trading arrangement.
Even before the Treaty of Rome had been signed in 1957, the Foreign Office
had been briefed to the effect that its six original signatories wanted:
“to achieve tighter European integration through the
creation of European institutions with supranational powers, beginning in the
economic field … the underlying motive of the Six is, however, essentially
political”. (PRO/FO 371/150360. Bell op.cit. p.1)
In the summer of 1960, when British entry was first being actively
discussed behind closed doors, Sir Roderick Barclay, head of the UK delegation
to the European Commission in Brussels, sent a despatch to the Foreign Office
stressing, in Mr Bell’s words:
“that the aim of the Community was not merely
harmonisation but the unification of policies in every field of the economic
union, i.e. economic policy, social policy, commercial policy, tariff policy
and fiscal policy. That this was not just pie in the sky needed to be made
clear to the politicians”. (based on PRO/FO 371/150363, Bell
p.22)
When Edward Heath, Minister of State for Europe, visited Professor
Hallstein, the President of the European Commission, in November 1960, his
report on the meeting noted how Hallstein had emphasised that joining the
Community was not just a matter of adopting a common tariff “which was the
essential hallmark of any ‘State’ (and he regarded the EEC as a potential
‘State’)”. It would be necessary, Hallstein insisted, for any new entrant to
accept the principle that the EEC was intended to evolve into something much
deeper, “some form of Federal State”, which was what the Commission was
working towards (PRO/FO 371/150369).
Particularly revealing in this context was the reply given in December 1960
by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Kilmuir, to a request from Mr Heath for comments
on what would be the constitutional implications of signing the Treaty for
Britain’s sovereignty. Kilmuir responded that in several respects the loss of
sovereignty would be considerable: by Parliament; by the Crown in terms of
treaty-making powers; and by the courts, which to an extent would become
“subordinate” to the European Court of Justice (PRO/FO 371/150369, Bell
pp.36-9).
On the making of laws, Kilmuir said it was clear that:
“the Council of Ministers would eventually (after the
system of qualified majority voting had come into force) make regulations
which would be binding on us even against our wishes …it would in theory be
possible for Parliament to enact at the outset legislation which would give
automatic force of law to any existing or future regulations made by the
appropriate organs of the Community. For Parliament to do this would go far
beyond the most extensive delegation of powers, even in wartime, that we have
ever experienced and I do not think there is any likelihood of this being
acceptable to the House of Commons”.
As for the subordination of Britain’s courts to the European Court of
Justice, Kilmuir wrote:
“I must emphasise that in my view the surrenders of
sovereignty involved are serious ones, and I think that, as a matter of
practical politics, it will not be easy to persuade Parliament or the British
public to accept them. I am sure that it would be a great mistake to
underestimate the force of the objections to them. But these objections should
be brought out into the open now because, if we attempt to gloss over them at
this stage, those who are opposed to the whole idea of joining the Community
will certainly seize on them with more damaging effect later on”.
These were pretty direct warnings. And when in the summer of 1961 the
Cabinet finally considered whether to apply for entry, Mr Macmillan opened the
discussion by pointing out that the first question they needed to consider was
that,
“…if we were to sign the Treaty of Rome we should have
to accept its political objectives, and although we should be able to
influence the political outcome we did not know what this would
be.”(Bell pp.59-62)
Macmillan conceded that a decision to go in would “raise great
presentational difficulties”. On the one hand, it would be important to
convince the Six that “we genuinely supported the objectives of the Treaty”.
On the other:
“we should have to satisfy public opinion in this
country that the implementation of the objectives of the Treaty would not
require unacceptable social and other adjustments. The problems of public
relations would be considerable.”
Nevertheless the Cabinet ruled in favour. Mr Heath was sent off to Brussels
to negotiate the terms of British entry. And when on October 10 he made his
opening speech to the other member governments, he could not have been more
fulsome in expressing Britain’s desire “to become full, wholehearted and
active members of the European Community in its widest sense, and to go
forward with you in the building of a new Europe”. (Bell p.73).
But when, two weeks later, his fellow Cabinet Minister Duncan Sandys
followed him to Brussels and made a speech emphasising that the British
Government recognised how the Treaty of Rome was not just an economic
agreement but also had important “political content” (FO
371/158302), Heath became alarmed that he might be letting the cat out
of the bag. As Bell discovered:
“He set officials urgently to work to check what
Ministers had been saying in public and a line was developed of arguing that
the Treaty contained no political obligations, only implications. The United
Kingdom would not regard itself as committed to any particular development or
extensions of obligations simply by virtue of EEC membership”.
(based on M.Camps, Britain and the European Community 1955-63, cited in
Bell p.74)
This was to remain the line until, in January 1963, President de Gaulle
vetoed Macmillan’s attempt to join. Although the Cabinet was well aware that
the Common Market was ultimately a political project, involving considerable
surrender of sovereignty, and was likely to develop much further in these
respects in the future, this was not what the British people were to be told.
All this was to be downplayed in favour of a pretence that the Common Market
was little more than its name implied: a trading arrangement which would be
good for Britain’s economy. It was a line which was still to be the official
orthodoxy four decades later. The seeds of the culture of deceit had been
sown.
By the time Mr Heath came to launch his own, successful application to
‘enter Europe’ in 1970, he was already well versed in how to pretend that it
was something other than what it was. Over the next five years, up to the time
of the referendum in 1975, Parliament and the British people were incessantly
assured that entry into the Common Market was simply a matter of trade and
jobs. In no way would the British way of life be changed or Britain’s right to
run her own affairs curtailed.
An oft-quoted line from Mr Heath’s White Paper circulated to every
household in the country in June 1971 promised,
“there is no question of Britain losing essential
sovereignty”.
In a television broadcast to mark Britain’s entry in January 1973, Heath
said:
“there are some in this country who fear that in going
into Europe we shall in some way sacrifice independence and sovereignty. These
fears, I need hardly say, are completely unjustified”.
Yet shortly after Parliament had approved British entry, word came from
Paris that President Pompidou was proposing that member states should make a
solemn commitment to “move irrevocably to economic and monetary union by
1980”. This made a complete mockery of all the assurances given to Parliament
that any plans for monetary union had been dropped. In a BBC documentary
series The Poisoned Chalice in 1996, a former Foreign Office official Sir Roy
Denman recalled the Foreign Secretary, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, looking askance
at the news. He said to Heath “the House isn’t going to like this”. “But that”
Denman recalled Heath replying, “is what it’s all about”. When Heath himself
was asked by the BBC whether he could really have said such a thing, his only
response, after an unsmiling pause, was “well, that’s what it was about”.
Another revealing measure of how deeply the culture of deceit had now set
in was the curious story of the common fisheries policy, and the Heath
Government’s response to the crude ambush set up by the Six to ensure that, as
part of their price of entry, the four applicant countries, Britain, Ireland,
Denmark and Norway, would have to hand over to the Community their fishing
waters, the richest in the world. (all documents cited on the CFP are
from PRO files in FO 30/656-9)
On the very day the applications went in, June 30 1970, the Six hastily
approved the principle that member-states should be given “equal access” to
each other’s fishing waters, under Brussels control. The point was that,
because this had now become part of the acquis communautaire, the body of
existing Community law, the applicant countries would have to accept it as a
fait accompli. Within a few years, as everyone knew, national fishing
waters were due to be extended out under international law to 200 miles.
Because the waters belonging to the four applicant states would then contain
most of the fish in European waters, this would give the Six an astonishing
prize.
In fact the Six knew their new fisheries policy was not even legal. Among
the Foreign Office papers released in 2001 was an internal Council of
Ministers document, dating from June1970, which shows how desperate the
Brussels lawyers had been to find some article in the Treaty of Rome which
could be used to authorise such a policy. There was none. The policy therefore
had no legal justification, and other papers show that the Foreign Office knew
this too.
But so determined was Mr Heath not to offend his prospective new partners
that he decided not to challenge them. Britain would simply accept the illegal
new fisheries policy, even though this would mean handing over one of her
greatest renewable natural assets and would spell disaster for a large part of
her fishing fleet.
Gradually the British fishermen got some idea that they were about to be
sacrificed, and in the closing months of 1970 various MPs for fishing
constituencies wrote to ministers asking what on earth was going on. They were
fobbed off with evasive replies. Indeed, as the recently released papers show,
civil servants eventually worked out a careful form of words, intended to
reassure the fishermen that “proper account would be taken of their
interests”. But behind the scenes, as a Scottish Office memo put it on
November 9, ministers were being told how important it was not to get drawn
into detailed explanations of just what problems might lie ahead for the
fishermen because, “in the wider UK context, they must be regarded as
expendable”.
The following year the White Paper promised that Britain would not sign an
accession treaty until the Common Market’s fisheries policy was changed,
Geoffrey Rippon repeated this promise to Parliament and to the Tory Party
conference. But in November Mr Heath realised that time was running out.
Unless he accepted the fishing policy as it stood, his plans for Britain’s
entry in January 1973 would have to be abandoned. He instructed Rippon to give
way, and when Rippon was questioned about this in the House of Commons on
December 13, he answered with a straight lie. He claimed Britain had retained
complete control over the waters round her coastline, knowing that this was
simply not true. So barefaced was this deceit over fishing rights that
successive governments and fisheries ministers would continue to obfuscate the
truth of what had been done for the next three decades.
In June 1975, the month when inflation hit 27 percent, its highest level in
history, came the referendum, Surrounded by all the evidence of a major
economic crisis, the British people voted by 2 to 1 to remain in a “Common
Market” which the vast majority believed was intended to be no more than a
free-trading arrangement. The supporters of the ‘Yes’ campaign, including the
leaderships of all three political parties, did little to disillusion them.
The message was that a ‘yes’ vote was all about protecting ‘jobs and
prosperity’, offering the lifeline Britain’s ailing economy required. As for
any fears that there might be moves towards “an Economic and Monetary Union”
and “fixed exchange rates for the pound”, the Wilson Government’s own leaflet
to every household promised categorically “this threat has been removed”.
Ten years later, when Britain’s economy had begun to make that historic
recovery which had nothing directly to do with being part of ‘Europe’, it was
Mrs. Thatcher, curiously enough, who was put in the position of the British
people, in believing that the Common Market’s chief purpose was to promote and
liberate trade. It was this which led her to fall for the proposal that there
should now be a further big push to turn it into something more like a genuine
free-trading area.
Since, as she imagined, this was the Common Market’s real aim, it could
surely be achieved without any need for another treaty. But at the Milan
summit in May 1985 she was rudely disabused. The powerful new troika at the
head of what had become ‘the European Community’, President Mitterand,
Chancellor Kohl and Jacques Delors, now President of the Commission, were keen
to see another major leap forward to European integration. With the aid of the
Italian Prime Minister, they set a clever ambush, insisting that what she was
after could be achieved by only a new treaty, and calling for a snap vote. The
reason they wanted this was because it could give Brussels a raft of new
centralising powers not allowed for in the original Treaty, significantly
extending both the areas of lawmaking to be handed over to Brussels and
restrictions on national veto powers.
By the end of the year their treaty had been already signed and they had
got all they wanted. Mrs Thatcher had been hoodwinked. And to disguise her
frustration, she now felt she had to sell the Single European Act back home as
if its main purpose really had been just to set up a ‘Single Market’, as she
had told everyone, rather than to move towards a ‘Single Europe’ as its name
implied. This confusion, alas, only helped to compound the deceits of her
predecessors.
In fact one of the most significant points agreed at that same Milan summit
had been the adoption of a document known as the Addenino Report, which in its
own way was to do as much for European integration as any of the treaties.
Pietro Addenino was an Italian MEP who had been commissioned, after the
so-called “Solemn Declaration on European Union” at Stuttgart in 1983, to draw
up a whole range of measures specifically designed to create what was called
“a European identity”.
These included giving the Community its own emblem and flag, the “ring of
stars” and its own anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode To Joy”, all of which were
ceremonially unveiled. Other recommendations ranged from adopting a Community
driving licence to sponsoring its own sports teams and cultural organisations.
These were all deliberately intended to give ‘Europe’ the symbolic
appurtenances of a nation state. And they were nodded through at that Milan
summit by a roomful of people including Mrs Thatcher, whose officials, one may
suspect, had no more given her a proper briefing on the real intentions of the
Addenino Report than they had on the Single European Act.
But it was Mrs Thatcher’s growing alarm at just how far and how fast the
integrationist tide was now running which led her in 1988 to give that great
Cassandra-like warning speech in whose memory the Bruges Group was founded. M.
Delors was now speaking openly of how the President and his Commission would
soon be the new “Government of Europe”, the Council of Ministers its “Senate”,
the European Parliament its “House of Representatives”, which within ten years
would be enacting 80 percent of Europe’s legislation: to all of which in 1989
Mrs Thatcher famously responded, “no, no, no”.
Only a year later she was bundled out of the way, soon after she had in
effect been blackmailed by her Chancellor Nigel Lawson and her Foreign
Secretary Geoffrey Howe into accepting Britain’s catastrophic entry into the
ERM. This of course involved precisely that freezing of exchange rates which
the British people had been promised in the 1975 referendum would never
happen. We then saw Mrs Thatcher’s successor going off to Maastricht, to face
yet another treaty which was now quite unashamedly designed to transform the
European Community by another giant step into the European Union.
Yet again in 1991 we saw a British Prime Minister caught out by the gulf
between that cosy idea that “Europe” was just a trading arrangement and what
it was really intended to become. Indeed, this time it was a “bridge too far,”
because John Major realised at Maastricht that if he gave in completely to two
of the main integrationist proposals on the table, economic and monetary union
and the social chapter, he would risk serious rebellion from his own party
back home.
At least on these two issues he was therefore grudgingly allowed his
opt-outs, although that on economic and monetary union was not as complete as
he liked to pretend, since Britain had an opt-out only from stage 3 of EMU,
the single currency. Major had signed up to stages 1 and 2, handing over to
Brussels a considerable measure of control over Britain’s economic policy. And
a further large price he had to pay was in having to accept the foundations of
common policies on foreign affairs, defence and justice, all of which opened
the door to giving the EU several more of the crucial attributes of any
fully-fledged state, in addition to having that crucially symbolic right to
issue its own currency. In terms of the long-term plan to turn Europe into a
political union, most of the crucial building blocks were now moving into
place.
When Mr Blair went off to agree the next treaty at Amsterdam in 1997,
inflated by the hubris of his election victory and his wish to be “at the
heart of Europe”, he was a pushover for the next round of integration
measures, which included his surrender of control over social policy thatMr
Major had not dared give up in 1991. We then in 2001 saw the Nice Treaty
cementing a few more important building-blocks into place, from the Charter of
Fundamental Rights to institutional arrangements for the Rapid Reaction Force,
which is only not a “European army”, because it is a European navy and a
European air force as well. Nice may not have achieved so much as many
continental politicians once hoped. But of course it was also agreed that
there should be yet another treaty in 2004, to take the process another step
towards its ultimate conclusion.
What we now see, in short, is a European Union which has its own
government, its own executive, parliament and supreme court; its own
citizenship, passport, flag and anthem. It already has complete control over
its own food resources, through the agricultural and fisheries policies. It is
well on the way to having its own currency and economic policy and its own
foreign and defence policies, backed by its own armed forces and the embryo of
its own police force in Europol. It has taken the first steps towards creating
its own common legal and judicial system. In other words, it has taken on
almost all the essential attributes of a fully-sovereign state. Almost the
only thing missing as the keystone to the whole structure is a fully-fledged
constitution, and again that is planned for the next treaty conference in
2004.
But what else is missing? Quite simply, any admission from our own
politicians in Britain that this is the reality of what we are now part of,
and towards which they have stealthily, reluctantly, deceitfully been leading
us for the best part of 40 years. It is the most remarkable political sleight
of hand which has ever been practised on the British people: to lead them step
by step into exchanging their own country and political system for another,
totally different; and to pretend at every stage that none of it is really
happening. And it is that fundamental dishonesty which in the end accounts for
that ubiquitous culture of deceit which now permeates every corner of our
dealings with the European project, like an all-pervading fog: so that not a
day now goes by without almost everyone involved in the government of our
country, from the most senior cabinet minister down to the most junior civil
servant, making statements which are at best misleading and often demonstrably
untrue.
In summarising the range of deceptions which have characterised Britain’s
relations with ‘Europe’, we may categorise these under three main
headings.
1. The first has been the way British politicians have
consistently misrepresented the nature and purpose of the ‘European project’.
Never more obviously than in recent years, there has been a startling contrast
between what continental politicians are prepared to say about its real aim -
the need to drive on to full political union - and the far more limited and
woolly version sold by British politicians to their own people.
Even in the run-up to Nice in 2000, while continental leaders like Gerhard
Schroeder, Joschka Fischer, Jacques Chirac and Lionel Jospin were making
speech after speech calling for political integration, all we heard from Prime
Minister Blair was a weak, waffly speech in Warsaw, trying to evade the issue
by suggesting that Europe’s future lay in more “intergovernmental
co-operation”. The Conservative’s spokesman Francis Maude was even more
implausibly evasive when, in a speech in Berlin, he persisted like other
Tories before him in vague day dreams about building a ‘flexible’ Europe of
independent nation states, a scenario simply not on offer.
In this respect successive generations of Europhile British politicians
have put themselves in the position of being the true ‘little Englanders’, as
they have continued to talk about ‘Europe’ in terms so far removed from those
in which it is discussed by the politicians of any other country that they
might come from another planet. But since privately they have been well aware
that their continental partners had a wholly different view of ‘the project’,
this in itself has amounted to a massive act of deception.
2. A second major area of deception has been the
concealing from the British people of just how far control over their
country’s affairs has been handed over to this new system of government
centred in Brussels. One former Tory minister privately admitted she had found
nothing more disturbing about her time in office than the pressure from her
officials, wherever possible, to hide the fact that policies she was
advocating had originated from the European Union.
In April 2001, when the Sunderland greengrocer Steve Thoburn was charged
with the criminal offence of selling a pound of bananas, the judge Bruce
Morgan ruled that he had no choice in finding Mr Thoburn guilty because, when
we went into the Common Market back in the 1970s, Parliament and the British
people had -
“quite voluntarily surrendered the once seemingly
immortal concept of the sovereignty of parliament".
When had we ever heard any of our politicians telling us so baldly that we
had “voluntarily” handed over our sovereignty, even though this flatly
contradicted everything the British people had actually been told in the 1970s
about how they were not losing any of their sovereignty?
When in February 2001 Britain’s countryside was hit by the barely credible
foot-and-mouth disaster, the great puzzle was why was it being so
catastrophically mishandled? Why in particular did it appear that every one of
the recommendations of the official report the last time Britain had a major
foot and mouth outbreak in the 60s was being so flagrantly ignored? Why was it
taking so long to kill infected animals? Why were they not being immediately
buried on the spot, as that report had insisted? Why the piles of rotting
carcases left in fields? Why the awful funeral pyres? None of this seemed to
make any sense until it gradually emerged that the crisis was being run not
under British law but in accordance with a series of European Union
directives. This may not have excused the way that, as so often before, the
Ministry of Agriculture made such a shambles of implementing those directives.
But the fact was we had handed over ‘competence’ on handling foot-and-mouth to
Brussels. And again, not one of our politicians explained this - not even the
Tory front bench spokesman Tim Yeo - because they wanted to preserve the
illusion that Britain still retained the power to run its own affairs.
Just before the 2001 general election a curious public meeting was staged
in Exeter, chaired by the local bishop. This so-called ‘constitutional
convention’ was staged to create the impression that there was popular demand
for an elected regional parliament for the ‘south-west region’ of England. It
might have seemed curious that identical meetings were being planned in all
the other seven regions of England. But of course it wasn’t really curious,
because this whole exercise of splitting up the United Kingdom into regions,
each with its own little regional government and regional parliament, was all
part of a grand plan, promoted by Brussels, to set up a so-called ‘Europe of
the Regions’.
Already this plan is much further advanced than most people realise. We
have already seen the dividing up of Britain into 12 Euro-regions for the
European Parliament; the setting up of the Scottish Parliament and assemblies
for Wales, Northern Ireland and London; the creation of eight regional
development agencies for the rest of England. The only major building block
left to put into place is to set up elected assemblies for each of those eight
English regions, which is why in 2001 we were being told that there was a
spontaneous grass roots demand for such assemblies in every one of those
regions.
But again none of our politicians has had the honesty to explain openly
what is going on. Indeed so determined are the promoters of this grand design
to deny that there is any connection between regionalisation and the EU that,
as they demonstrated in Exeter, they will even shout down anyone who dares
suggest such a thing. Was it not odd therefore that there on the platform in
Exeter was a senior official of the European Commission, sent over from
Brussels by the EU’s Regional Commissioner Michel Barnier? The truth is that,
over on the continent, there is no secret that this is what the
regionalisation policy is all about. Here in Britain, ironically, the only
politician who has been remotely honest about it has been that great Europhile
Michael Heseltine who, at a fringe meeting at a Tory conference in 1998
suddenly launched into an extraordinary outburst against the regionalisation
plan. He was all in favour of European co-operation, he said, but this
breaking up of Britain into Euro-regions was very much a step too far, and the
stealthy way in which it was being brought in he described as “deeply
sinister”. (transcript from British Management Data
Foundation).
It would be easy to cite countless more examples of how our British
politicians and civil servants now quite routinely try to conceal the extent
to which our lawmaking and forms of government are now becoming more and more
taken over by this new system of government centred on Brussels. The result is
that few people, except those directly affected, now have any idea just how
much of our power to run our own country we have already given away.
The areas of policymaking handed over to Brussels now stretch right across
the field of government, from agriculture and fisheries to much of our foreign
policy. Whole tranches of the power to pass laws and decide policy have now
been passed over to become what are known as Brussels ‘competences’. And
wherever such a competence has become part of what is known as ‘the occupied
field’, we no longer have power in that particular area to decide our own
policies or laws. That has passed out of our hands forever. What in fact has
been taking place has been a transfer of power from Westminster and Whitehall
to Brussels on a scale amounting to the greatest constitutional revolution in
our history. But much of this has remained buried from view because our
politicians like to preserve the illusion that they are still in charge. The
result is that remarkably few people now have any proper understanding of how
the political system which rules our lives actually works.
3. The third major area of deception lies in the often
quite comical compulsion of supporters of Britain’s membership of the European
Union to talk up the benefits we derive from membership. And where, as so
often, our membership in fact damages British interests, this again must at
all costs be suppressed or denied. This type of distortion has become so
familiar that I will only mention one or two examples.
One is the grandiose claim that it is somehow the ‘European Union’ which
has preserved ‘the peace of Europe’ since World War Two, when the chief cause
of this has obviously been the NATO alliance and the presence of America in
Western Europe through 40 years of Cold War; the very alliance which
influential elements in the EU, motivated by anti-Americanism, are now trying
so hard to undermine.
Another is the claim that we have somehow derived special benefits from
trading with our continental neighbours which we could not have enjoyed
without membership. The figures show that, although before we joined we had a
small trading surplus with the original Six members, we have subsequently run
up a cumulative trading deficit with our European partners amounting to more
than £170 billion. In terms of the balance of trade, our membership has been
hugely more beneficial to them than it has to us, and without the surpluses we
earned from trading and investing elsewhere in the world, we should long since
have gone bankrupt.
Linked to this is the claim we have constantly heard from such people as
Robin Cook when Foreign Secretary, that “3.5 million British jobs now depend
on trade with our European Union partners”. The intended implication of this
is that, if we did not belong to the EU, those jobs might somehow disappear.
What is interesting about this particular deceit is that we know precisely
where it originated. That figure of 3.5 million jobs came from a report
commissioned in 1999 by Britain in Europe from a reputable research
organisation, the National Institute for Economic and Social Research.
What the report actually stated was something very different, It did
estimate that 3.5 million UK jobs were linked to trade with the EU. But even
if Britain were to leave the EU, it pointed out, few of those jobs would
disappear, because we would continue trading with the EU much as we do now
(and as do other non-EU countries, such as Norway and Switzerland). But no
sooner did Britain in Europe receive the report than it put out a press
release claiming that “British withdrawal would cost 3.5 million jobs”. The
NIESR’s director, Dr Martin Weale, was so angry at this misuse of his report
that he described Britain in Europe’s behaviour as “pure Goebbels”. But this
did not prevent Robin Cook and Co. continuing to parrot a propaganda point
which can still be heard from Europhiles to this day.
Another deceit beloved by pro-EU propagandists is to pretend that one of
the advantages of membership is all the money Britain receives from Brussels
in grants and subsidies. What they fail to explain, of course, is that all
this money was handed over by British taxpayers in the first place, and that
we have merely received part of our own money back (in 1999 roughly £1 for
every £2 we paid in), What they also fail to explain is that many grants are
only paid on condition that “matching funding” of 50 percent or more is
provided by the UK government, so that for every £1 returned by Brussels the
taxpayer can end up contributing £3. But all this is hidden away, and the
grant is publicised as if it was simply another example of Brussels’ largesse
and of the benefits of belonging to the EU.
One could cite countless similar instances of the world of mirrors our
Europhiles now inhabit, but I will end on just one more, because it is one of
the most fundamental of all. This is the deliberate way they invariably try to
confuse the European Union with ‘Europe’, to suggest that anyone who is at
home with the peoples and civilisation of Europe must automatically support
the political project which has taken its name. Conversely, anyone who opposes
the project must somehow be “anti-European”, “xenophobic”, a “Europhobe”.
Rarely was the self-deception implied in this sleight of hand more cruelly
exposed than in the comment by Tony Blair during the Kosovo crisis of 1999
that this was a “tragedy taking place almost on the doorstep of Europe”. What
this revealed, of course, was the extent to which, for Mr Blair as for so many
other ‘Europhiles’, the idea of ‘Europe’ had become just an abstract concept,
identified with the EU, and almost wholly unconnected to the living reality of
a continent whose centre is marked by a monument in a Warsaw park, more than
200 miles east of where the EU stops.
In all this sorry fog of deception and falsehood, there is one last vitally
important issue which still remains to be decided, and it is the one on which
everything else will in the end be seen to rest. If Britain is finally to be
absorbed into this new country we are allowed to call anything but a
“superstate”, there is one crucial act of surrender we still have to make:
that of our currency. Because the one thing without which a nation cannot be
considered a nation is its money. So long as Britain fails to join the euro,
it can never be fully part of this new nation with which in almost every other
respect she is now so comprehensively enmeshed.
Mr Blair knows this only too well, which is why he is so desperate to get
us in. He knows that, so long as Britain remains outside the euro, we must
remain half-in and half-out of this new state, in a way which, as ‘Europe’
moves ever closer to full political and economic union, must eventually become
unworkable. It would be a contradiction so glaring that in the end this could
only lead to the unravelling of our political involvement in Europe
altogether. In that sense Mr Blair is right. But what does he do? He does
exactly what Mr Heath and his colleagues did back in 1970. He publicly tries
to make out that joining the euro is purely an economic decision, without any
political or constitutional implications, when privately he knows only too
well that the whole point of the euro is that, in terms of completing the
European project, it is the ultimate political act. Just like Mr Heath, he
pretends one thing when he knows another.
But of course in his own attempt at deception, Mr Blair is impaled on one
very large hook. He is skewered by that commitment that he cannot take us into
the single currency without the consent of the British people. After 30 years
of stealthily surrendering our democracy, that is the point on which the bluff
of all our politicians has finally been called. However much they may already
have given away, the British people have a last unexpected chance to give
their verdict. On that issue of whether or not we stay out of the euro, with
or without a referendum, far more now hangs for the future of our country than
most people have yet realised. | 
