The "Norway Option"

Above is a trailer for the video of the Norway Option, which can be purchased here. I will be attending a Bruges Group meeting on Saturday (£20 on the door), along with Witterings from Witney, which has a discussion on the best way to exit the EU. Speakers include Richard North, Christopher Booker, Mary Ellen Synon, Professor Tim Congdon, Kieran Bailey (the 15 year old who's made it onto the shortlist for the Brexit prize).

Given the fundamental disagreements between Tim Congdon and Richard North on how to exit, it will more than likely prove to be a lively affair.

The Great Deception Continues

One of the main themes of our membership of the European Union is that it has been based on a gargantuan lie. Our entry was a lie, arguments for our continuing membership are generally lies and a referendum campaign for our exit will be shrouded in lies.

The problem with deception though as is widely acknowledged that the only person you end up deceiving is yourself. With this in mind I turn to Norman Tebbit's latest column in the Telegraph. In some quarters he appears to be viewed as a so-called "sound Tory" - for example he's highly critical of Cameron and is seemingly a supporter of Ukip:

How I wish that someone in the No10 circle could understand that there might be a better approach to winning the election than a mud-slinging exercise to expose the real or imaginary personal shortcomings of Mr Farage and just hoping that Labour will passively surrender.

Yet further down the article, in response to comments on his blog, he writes this rather revealing paragraph:

As usual Amos 47 banged on about the Single European Act. As I have explained before, that was designed to make a reality of the single market. Until then any member state could veto any action to open its markets to other members, notably against British exporter of services such as insurance and banking. It also gave us a chance to undo foolish decisions by our predecessors in Government.

And therein lies the classic deception - or self-denial - of a Tory, depending on how you view it. The SEA was not a single market treaty but instead part of a process to further integrate the member states into the EU, a clue given explicitly in its title.

Its origins lie with Altiero Spinelli who in 1984 via his Draft Treaty establishing the European Union proposed a massive and bold leap forward in European integration. So bold was this leap forward that for tactical reasons it was decided to split the draft into two separate treaties which happened 5 years apart. Thus it became the SEA (part 1) and Maastricht (part 2). One can see for example Article 3 from the original 1984 draft:

The citizens of the Member States shall ipso facto be citizens of the Union. Citizenship of the Union shall be dependent upon citizenship of a Member State; it may not be independently acquired or forfeited. Citizens of the Union shall take part in the political life of the Union in the forms laid down by this Treaty, enjoy the rights granted to them by the legal system of the Union and be subject to its laws. 

 ...which then went on to appear in Maastricht. Even some Tory MPs subsequently acknowledged the significance of the SEA and regretted its passing through Parliament. Peter Tapsell said: "We didn't give it the attention we should have done."

The second assertion by Tebbit is the implication that the abolition of the veto was a benefit, giving the then Tory government the chance to "undo foolish decisions of the past" created by vetoes. One is staggered by his naivety if he believes that. Abolishing the veto is the holy grail of EU integration as it transforms an intergovernmental organisation into a supranational one. Jean Monnet abhorred the right of veto. The SEA lead to the biggest-ever number of "competences" on which national vetoes would be abolished - it was a treaty precisely because it involved so much surrender of powers to Brussels.

Thus Tebbit's comment that it was designed to make "a reality of the single market" is a lack of candidness that fails to acknowledge that the EU is not an economic project but a political project disguised as an economic one. A lack of candidness that has lead to the collapse of the Tory party as illustrated by this article in the same paper:

....the party's own MPs openly admit [membership figures] could be lower than 100,000, around half Labour’s membership. Speak to those in the party outside Westminster, and they will tell you the branches out in the country are withering, and this could cost David Cameron an outright majority at the next election.

A collapse of the Tories, or indeed of any credible alternative, leads to a vacuum - one that inevitably gets filled which, as Political Betting starkly shows via this graph, leads to a rise of the others:

Mrs Thatcher eventually acknowledged the deception and real intent of the SEA - albeit too late, how revealing that a party that is so intent on admiring her can't bring themselves to do the same.

Time For The UK To Divorce The EU

...so says Norman Tebbit in another spot-on post. He argues, rightly, that the two different systems of law between the UK's common law and the EU's European law (which is now supreme) are incompatible:

"It saddens me that in the bastardised ruins of what was once an educational system even children taught the importance of what happened at Runnymede are often told that the barons forced King John to grant rights, such as free speech, freedom from arbitrary arrest and imprisonment and the right to a fair trial. No, not quite so. The King was forced to sign a declation that he would not interefere with, nor abridge, those rights which were were the inherent rights of English freemen (and women too, Harriet) according to rank.

Our fellow Europeans may well enjoy similar rights, but they are rights which have their origins in constitutions and laws. The right of a German or Frenchman to free speech is a grant by law – essentially an entitlement rather than a right. Here, it requires a law to set limits upon that right, which in this Kingdom is (I’m sorry Professor Dawkins) the God-given right of an Englishman or woman from birth.

What I discovered during many days (and not a few nights) negotiating and dealing around the table in Brussels was that my colleagues were, with a few wonderful exceptions such as Count Otto von Lamsdorff, not just corporatist by nature, but inclined to the unspoken assumption that man was made for the state rather than that the state was made for man. At its worst, that became an assumption that whilst the citizen must obey the law and his rights were limited by the scope of the law, the state could do whatever was not specifically forbiden to it.

The basic assumptions underlying the two systems of law, English Common law and European law, are such that they cannot exist side by side. While we are members of the EU as it is constructed today, wherever the two clash on a matter within European competence, European law is superior."

Tebbit concludes:

"I believe that we should have a treaty relationship with other European nations covering matters of mutual interest, but that our Parliament should remain fully sovereign.

Divorce is never easy, but it may be better than persisting in an unhappy marriage. The question should not be whether we part, but what sort of relationship would follow."

He's absolutely right, although I suspect it will be quite some time - and more damage inflicted on the UK - before Tebbit's vision of a divorce comes to pass.