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EU: History Of Deceit
Christopher Booker
London
Telegraph
Monday October 22, 2007
Lisbon crowns a history of deceit
It was apt that Gordon Brown's agreement to the EU treaty should
have coincided with the announcement that MPs are to get an additional
two weeks' holiday a year because there is so little for them
to do.
The Lisbon Treaty, after all, is another giant step towards a
new form of government, empowered to decide most of the laws that
govern our lives, making our Westminster MPs even more redundant
than they are now.
It was equally appropriate that Mr Brown and his puppet foreign
minister, David Miliband, should have agreed this treaty on the
basis of the most shameless political lie one can recall: that
the new treaty is completely different from the rejected EU constitution
– with which it is 96 per cent identical.
(Article continues below)
Three years ago, when Richard North and I were writing a history
of the European Union, trawling hundreds of books and thousands
of documents, nothing struck us more than how consistently this
grandiose project has been built on deceit as to its true nature
(hence our title, The Great Deception).
It is more than 60 years since one of its progenitors, Altiero
Spinelli, wrote that its aim should be stealthily to assemble
the components of a supranational government and only to declare
its true purpose at the end of the process by unveiling a "constitution".
It is more than 50 years since another founder, Paul-Henri Spaak,
advised Jean Monnet, who was above all "the Father of Europe",
that the only way to achieve their goal – a politically
integrated Europe – was to pretend that it was only a "Common
Market".
It is more than 40 years since Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath
went along with this, deciding to withhold from the British people
that the real aim was a European state – a deceit perpetrated
by Heath in spades when he took us into the Common Market in the
1970s.
Of all our prime ministers since, the only one who did not go
along with this concealment was Mrs Thatcher. In the last years
of her premiership, she woke up to the dangers of this stealthy,
relentless drive towards full political integration – and
her determination to fight it played a crucial part in the way
she was brought down.
In this respect, the decision of Europe's political leaders in
2001 that the building of the European state should culminate
in drafting a "Constitution for Europe" was entirely
in keeping with the strategies proposed by Monnet and Spinelli
decades before, marking the moment when the "project"
could at last come out in its true colours.
When, to their horror, it was rejected, their solution was simply
to bulldoze it through regardless of popular wishes, as recent
months have shown.
Mr Brown's deceit over this treaty is in some ways no worse than
that practised by Macmillan and Heath before him. But he has pulled
off a brilliant tactical victory by focusing discussion on those
"red lines" (so aptly described by Gisela Stuart MP
as "red herrings"), thus diverting attention from the
treaty's real significance as a further huge step towards creating
a European state.
Of all the immense changes this will make in how we are governed,
none is arguably more important, or has received less attention,
than the formal creation of the European Council as the cabinet
of our new government. The prime ministers who make it up are
placed under a wholly new obligation to put their loyalty to "the
Union" above that to their own countries.
With this treaty we shall finally be ruled by a government that
cannot be dismissed, making Britain, in effect, a small part of
a giant one-party state. This may make Mr Brown feel important,
as part of "the Big Show", but it is hardly surprising
that he does not dare consult the wishes of his countrymen on
what he has done.
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