With chilling candour, a paper from a senior government official laid out the difficulties that Britain would face in the proposed Common Market.
The Greek disturbances and national strike are the most vehement expressions so far of Europeans’ political disaffection
All across Europe, from riots in Greece to those protest votes for Marine Le Pen and George Galloway, we see signs of how alienated people now feel from the “political class” which rules over our lives, out of touch with the rest of us, without meaningful opposition, no longer responsive to any democratic control. I am reminded of a document I discovered in the National Archives at Kew in January 2002, when sifting through papers released under the 30-year rule relating to Britain’s negotiations to join the Common Market. It was a confidential 1971 memorandum, clearly written by a senior Foreign Office official, headed “Sovereignty and the Community”.
With chilling candour, this paper (from FCO folder 30/1048) predicted that it would take 30 years for the British people to wake up to the real nature of the European project that Edward Heath was about to take them into, by which time it would be too late for them to leave. Its author made clear that the Community was headed for economic, monetary and fiscal union, with a common foreign and defence policy, which would constitute the greatest surrender of Britain’s national sovereignty in history. Since “Community law” would take precedence over our own, ever more power would pass to this new bureaucratic system centred in Brussels – and, as the role of Parliament diminished, this would lead to a “popular feeling of alienation from government”.
It would therefore become the duty of politicians “not to exacerbate public concern by attributing unpopular measures… to the remote and unmanageable workings of the Community”. Politicians of all parties should be careful to conceal the fact that controversial laws originated in Brussels. By this means it might be possible to preserve the illusion that the British government was still sovereign, “for this century at least” – by which time it would no longer be possible for us to leave.
In other words, here was a civil servant advising that our politicians should connive in concealing what Heath was letting us in for, not least in hiding the extent to which Britain would no longer be a democratic country but one essentially governed by unelected and unaccountable officials.
One way to create an illusion that this system was still democratic, this anonymous mandarin suggested, would be to give people the chance to vote for new representatives at European, regional and local levels. A few years later, we saw the creation of an elected European Parliament – as we see today a craze for introducing elected mayors, as meaningless local figureheads.
But where the author was perhaps shrewder than he knew was in predicting how all this would eventually lead to “we the people” feeling alienated from the whole process of how we are governed. We now see a gulf yawning between, on the one hand, the consensus government of our new nomenklatura and, on the other, all the rest of us, aware that we are democratically powerless. To the growing groundswell of contempt and resentment that this is creating, those who rule us with such sublime incompetence will eventually find they have no answer.
(Anyone wishing to read the relevant document may find it, with commentary, at www.eureferendum.com.)
The green mystery we must ask our MPs to explain
David Cameron, reiterating his claim to lead “the greenest government ever”, has again highlighted one of the great political mysteries of our time – one I would be grateful for my readers’ help in unravelling. Four years ago, our MPs voted almost unanimously for by far the most expensive law ever enacted by Parliament. According to the Department for Energy and Climate Change (Decc), the Climate Change Act will cost us all up to £18 billion every year until 2050. It commits Britain, uniquely in the world, to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases to only a fifth of what they were in 1990.
As we all know, emissions of CO2 from fossil fuels are inseparable from almost every economic activity of our civilisation. We rely on them for some 75 per cent of the electricity needed to provide us with almost all the necessities of life. Without CO2 we would not be able to light and heat our homes, power our computers, get money from cashpoints, buy food from shops. Our transport system would be paralysed.
Hence the mystery: how can we meet that obligation to cut our emissions of CO2 by 80 per cent in just 40 years? After six hours debating this in 2008, 463 MPs of all parties voted for it, only three against. But of the 50 MPs who spoke, not one showed the slightest interest in how the target might be met.
May I therefore ask as many of my readers as possible to write to their local MPs, asking how we can hope to achieve that four-fifths cut without virtually closing down our economy?
It won’t be enough to reply that, by then, we shall be able to generate almost all our electricity from “renewables”. However many windmills and solar panels we build, thanks to the vagaries of wind and sun, these could at best provide only a fraction of what is needed. Even if a few nuclear power stations somehow get built by then, they could be only a very partial answer. So how will our economy continue to function? That is what we want our MPs to tell us.
In fact there is another mystery they need to explain. It seems, according to Decc’s figures, that we are already miraculously on course to meet our target. In 1990, Britain supposedly emitted 590 million tons of CO2. But by 2011, according to Decc’s provisional figures, this had already been slashed to just 456 million, a drop of 23 per cent. The chief explanation Decc offers for this is the switch of many of our power stations, after 1991, from coal to gas, which is less carbon-intensive. But even this by 2007 had only helped us to cut CO2 by 8 per cent. By far the biggest drop – a further 15 per cent, so Decc claims – has been since 2008, when the Act came into force and we went into recession. Nevertheless, Decc would have us believe that in two of those years, 2009 and 2011, emissions fell by 50 and 40 million tons, respectively (though in 2010 they rose by 24 million).
How can our MPs explain such a staggering reduction? It may give the politically convenient impression that the Government is meeting its target but it is, frankly, quite implausible.
The MPs might also be reminded that Britain accounts for 1.6 per cent of the world’s man-made CO2 emissions. China’s emissions increase by that much each year, and now amount to 25 per cent of the global total. So, finally, can our MPs explain why we should close down most of our economy when this will have so little effect on the supposed global problem?