The road to ruin

'The European Union is a state under construction.' Elmar Brok, Chairman of the EU Parliament's Committee on Foreign Affairs.

'The time for individual nations [in Europe] having their own tax, employment and social policies is definitely over. We must finally bury the erroneous ideas of nations having sovereignty over foreign and defence policies. National sovereignty will soon prove itself to be a product of the imagination,' Gerhard Schröder, Chancellor of Germany, January 1999.

Guided to a super-state

Over the years our MPs have deluded themselves and deceived the British people into believing that the Treaty of Rome was no more than a common market – a European-wide free trade area.

Ted Heath famously dismissed the idea that joining the common market would bring about a loss of sovereignty or independence.

Either he didn’t know what he was doing, or like so many other British politicians, he did know but wasn’t about to tell the public. In this he was only following the advice of Jean Monnet, the man who mapped out the plans for the modern day European Union.

‘Europe’s nations,’ Monnet wrote back in 1952, ‘should be guided towards the super-state without people understanding what is happening. This can be accomplished by successive steps each disguised as have an economic purpose but which will eventually and irreversibly lead to federation.’

In that brief but candid sentence, Monnet revealed both the true intentions of those who drew up the plan for a United States of Europe, and the dishonest and deceitful methods they would use to get their way.  The building blocks of this new super-state would be cemented in to place by a ruthless contempt for the will of the people.

When our politicians tell us that Europe is moving our way – do not believe them. From the very beginning, the architects of the new Europe have wanted a common country not a common market.

The Treaty of Rome

‘…. the ever closer union of the peoples of Europe’ from the preamble to the Treaty of the European Economic Community 1955.

The Treaty of Rome grew out of the earlier European Coal and Steel Treaty signed between Germany and France shortly after the war, with the aim of rendering war between the two nations ‘not only unthinkable but materially impossible.’ (Robert Schuman 1950).

The Treaty of Rome was a very different document, much bolder in its political ambitions. So bold, in fact, that when the outline of the treaty was being discussed in Messina our civil servants said that it ‘was unacceptable to Britain.’

Many say that this was our missed opportunity to shape the new Europe to our liking. But the truth is that France and Germany wanted to create a centralised, undemocratic and bureaucratic structure from the very beginning.  All the evidence says they have succeeded.

Joining up

Less than two decades after Messina, British officials were busy trying to join the very club they had said was ‘unacceptable.’ Officials knew that little, if anything, had changed since 1955, but now our politicians were desperate to join the European club. So desperate, that the civil servant leading the talks at the time says:

‘The Government’s guiding principle was to swallow the lot and swallow it now’ Sir Con O’Neill, British diplomat.

And swallow it they did – hook, line and sinker. To disguise the deal they had done, Tory politicians were prepared to lie to the British people. A White Paper was published which promised there would be ‘no question of any erosion of essential national sovereignty.’

The sacrifice of Britain’s traditional fishing waters, and the livelihoods of the people who depended on access to these waters, was not even mentioned. The impact on our links – political and economic – with our friends in the Commonwealth was never discussed. And the high price taxpayers would be forced to pay to keep this lumbering, corrupt giant in funds was barely mentioned when our politicians signed us up to the European Community in January 1973.

Two years later, Harold Wilson’s Labour government held a referendum on Britain’s continued membership of the common market. His government recommended a' yes' vote and the 'yes' campaigners outspent the 'no' campaigners by a factor of ten! The result was never in doubt. Nor, for those who had read the Treaty of Rome was the future direction of Europe.

Ever closer union

‘In ten years 80% of laws on the economy and social policy will be passed at the European and not the national level. We are not going to manage to take all the decisions needed between now and 1995 unless we see the beginnings of a European Government’ – Jacques Delors Commission President 1988.

‘We want European Union, the United States of Europe’ – Helmut Kohl, German Chancellor 1989.

It is one of the cruel ironies of history that it was Margaret Thatcher, perhaps the most strident opponent of ever closer union, who put her signature to the next big step that Europe took towards the creation of a United States off Europe.

The Single European Act was about much more than the opening of Europe’s market to global trade – it was, in fact, a giant step towards a more integrated, centralised Europe with power increasingly concentrated in Brussels the capital city of an emerging country.

It was after the Act was signed that Europe pressed ahead with the creation of a single currency – an issue which cost Thatcher her premiership and which, eventually, led to Britain’s ejection from the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the beginning of the Tories long exile in the political wilderness.

Before that happened, however, John Major made his own contribution to the integrationist effort by signing the Maastricht Treaty in 1992.  By this time the Tory party was wracked with division over the future of Europe, and Major seemed powerless to stop the various factions tearing the party apart.

Major declared Maastricht a victory for British diplomacy – ‘game, set and match’, he boasted after his return to Britain. Others saw it differently. According to Chancellor Helmut Kohl, Maastricht was:

‘a new and decisive stage in the process of the European Union which within a few years will lead to the creation of what the founding fathers of modern Europe dreamed of after the war, a United States of Europe.’

New Labour, New Europe

The drive to deeper integration gathered pace under the new government of Tony Blair, who harboured dreams of one day becoming the first president of a United States of Europe. Treaties were signed in Amsterdam (1997) and Nice (2001) which extended the Commission’s power to new spheres of influence.

The European Union itself also began to expand, with proposals to bring the former Warsaw Pact countries into the Union. Such enlargement was encouraged by the Tories who thought it might weaken the Commission’s drive to deeper integration. They were wrong: enlargement gave the federalists the excuse they needed to draw up a constitution for the new Europe.

What happened next is typical of the way European events have always been presented by British politicians – just as Ted Heath had said that joining the Common Market would lead to no loss of sovereignty, and John Major declared Maastricht a victory for Britain, Tony Blair declared the proposed EU constitution as nothing more than a ‘tidying up exercise.’

Again, it was left to Europe’s politicians to spell out the truth.

The people say No

When the new constitution was put to the people of France and Holland it was rudely rejected. Not that this bothered the Commissioners or the architects of the new Europe.

As the twice disgraced British Cabinet Minister Peter Mandelson put it shortly after the French referendum: ‘One country, even France, does not have a veto.’  So, even though the referendum result should have spelled the end of the Constitution, the Commission has been busy using the so-called ‘period of reflection’ to quietly continue drawing its discredited threads together into a new constitution.

How has this happened? The former French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine is under no illusions. Last year he argued that the Commissioners and Europe’s political elite had become infected by a ‘religious fervour’ .

They were, he said, ‘planning urgently to end the nation state. Everything outside this objective was heresy and had to be fought. This was in the spirit of Jean Monnet, the rejection of self and of history, of all common sense. European power was a variation, the code name for a counterweight to America that excited France alone for years and towards which the Constitution was supposed to offer a magical shortcut.’

The passengers may have uncoupled the carriages, but the political elites driving the train towards a United States of Europe have not noticed – they are stoking the fires to speed the engines towards greater integration leaving the disgruntled people far behind them.