Christopher Booker's notebook
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
07/07/2007
EU treaty: the great double deception
Many people must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at Gordon Brown's statement to MPs last Tuesday when, in announcing his new "constitutional settlement", he promised to give "more power to Parliament and the British people" on the one hand while, on the other, ruling out a referendum on the new EU treaty - which would take away a lot more power from Parliament and the British people.
The layers of spin and deceit that surround this wretched EU treaty are so convoluted that it takes some working out to disentangle the contradictions, U-turns and straight lies it has come to involve.
The fundamental problem is that the EU's leaders are determined to foist on the peoples of Europe the final components of a supranational government, as agreed in their constitution, without giving the peoples of Europe any say in the matter.
Ever since the constitution was rejected by the people of France and Holland, they have been trying to find a way of smuggling it back in, by pretending it was something else.
What they cleverly came up with last month was a document which looked very different and much shorter. But this was only because the original version, scrapping all the earlier treaties, reincorporated them in the new constitution.
The new document simply leaves the old treaties on the table, but adds as amendments to them all the new bits included in the constitution, such as giving the EU a full-time president and granting it a mass of other new powers.
Apart from a few cosmetic changes, such as changing "Foreign Minister" to "High Representative", and leaving out the flag and the anthem (which the EU has had since 1986 anyway), the net result is precisely what the French and the Dutch rejected in 2005.
Many Continental politicians have been quite happy to admit this. As Luxemburg's prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker put it, the new treaty contains "99 per cent" of what was in the old "Constitution for Europe".
But their hope is that, because the list of amendments making up the new document look so impenetrable, they can be slipped through without the people noticing.
This Continental trickery, however, looks quite mild compared with the sleight of hand being practised by Gordon Brown. Because he was elected on the Labour manifesto of 2005, which promised a referendum on the constitution, he dare not, like his Continental colleagues, admit that it is the same thing.
He must pretend it is something totally different. And here he has immediately become ensnared in all sorts of difficulties, because this is so blatantly not true.
One of Mr Brown's excuses for not having a referendum was that the new treaty doesn't give away as many powers as Maastricht, on which there was no referendum, But up then pops his new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to blurt out that it in fact gives away much more power than Maastricht.
Mr Brown's other excuse was that Britain has held onto all its "red lines", such as being given an opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
But up jumps the EU's former justice commissioner, Antonio Vittorini, and a gaggle of lawyers to point out that this is nonsense. A cross-reference in the treaty shows that Britain is just as much subject to the charter as anyone else.
The title of the EU's Foreign Minister may have been changed, on Tony Blair's insistence, to High Representative, but he is still being given new powers to decide EU (i.e. our) foreign policy which Jack Straw, when foreign secretary, described as "simply unacceptable".
As the think-tank Open Europe and others have pointed out, it is truly astonishing that Mr Brown should begin his premiership, while promising to be "open" with the British people, with a deceit so shameless as to make his predecessor look like an honest man.
It is made even more remarkable by the fact Mr Brown should do this in the very week when he was busy wrapping himself in the Union Jack and ordering that our national flag should be flown on every government building.
The British people should not just be rubbing their eyes in disbelief at Mr Brown's behaviour: they should be shouting with anger.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Pay through the nose for an eye in the sky
If the reluctance of our politicians to admit the ever-growing weight of EU laws that govern our lives has long made the EU "the elephant in the room" of British politics, at least last Monday MPs were for once allowed a brief debate on the ever-soaring expense to British taxpayers of the EU's ill-fated Galileo satellite programme.
As the EU's most ambitious project to date, Galileo is a complete shambles. Running six years late, its commercial backers having pulled out, only one little satellite (made in Britain) has yet been put up (by a Russian rocket), and the European Commission now wants EU taxpayers to foot the colossal bill for an ongoing programme which will cost UK taxpayers alone an estimated £1.3 billion, and will run at a massive loss. All to no discernible purpose.
Originally we were told that Galileo, as the EU's rival to the USA's perfectly adequate and free GPS system, was going to be a huge moneyspinner. Taxpayers would only have to make a modest initial outlay and then the profits would roll in, an estimated £8 billion, plus billions more in commercial spin-offs.
One by one, however, all the original claimed purposes of Galileo have dropped away: that it would be the key to an EU-wide road charging scheme; that every aircraft in the "single European sky" would have to pay to use it; that it would enable the French to sell Galileo-dependent weaponry to China.
Although various Tory MPs, led by their front-bench spokesman Owen Paterson, tried to point all this out on Monday (completely ignored by the BBC's travesty of a report of the debate on its website), the minister, Rosie Winterton, simply insisted that we must carry on paying for it, without being prepared to admit any of its true costs (the figures she cited were way out of date).
She could not come up with a single good reason for continuing with what has now become the EU's "white elephant in the sky". But if the commission insists we must go on forking out hundreds of millions of pounds more, for nothing, who are we British to say no?
telegraph.co.uk
By Christopher Booker, Sunday Telegraph
07/07/2007
EU treaty: the great double deception
Many people must have rubbed their eyes in disbelief at Gordon Brown's statement to MPs last Tuesday when, in announcing his new "constitutional settlement", he promised to give "more power to Parliament and the British people" on the one hand while, on the other, ruling out a referendum on the new EU treaty - which would take away a lot more power from Parliament and the British people.
The layers of spin and deceit that surround this wretched EU treaty are so convoluted that it takes some working out to disentangle the contradictions, U-turns and straight lies it has come to involve.
The fundamental problem is that the EU's leaders are determined to foist on the peoples of Europe the final components of a supranational government, as agreed in their constitution, without giving the peoples of Europe any say in the matter.
Ever since the constitution was rejected by the people of France and Holland, they have been trying to find a way of smuggling it back in, by pretending it was something else.
What they cleverly came up with last month was a document which looked very different and much shorter. But this was only because the original version, scrapping all the earlier treaties, reincorporated them in the new constitution.
The new document simply leaves the old treaties on the table, but adds as amendments to them all the new bits included in the constitution, such as giving the EU a full-time president and granting it a mass of other new powers.
Apart from a few cosmetic changes, such as changing "Foreign Minister" to "High Representative", and leaving out the flag and the anthem (which the EU has had since 1986 anyway), the net result is precisely what the French and the Dutch rejected in 2005.
Many Continental politicians have been quite happy to admit this. As Luxemburg's prime minister Jean-Claude Juncker put it, the new treaty contains "99 per cent" of what was in the old "Constitution for Europe".
But their hope is that, because the list of amendments making up the new document look so impenetrable, they can be slipped through without the people noticing.
This Continental trickery, however, looks quite mild compared with the sleight of hand being practised by Gordon Brown. Because he was elected on the Labour manifesto of 2005, which promised a referendum on the constitution, he dare not, like his Continental colleagues, admit that it is the same thing.
He must pretend it is something totally different. And here he has immediately become ensnared in all sorts of difficulties, because this is so blatantly not true.
One of Mr Brown's excuses for not having a referendum was that the new treaty doesn't give away as many powers as Maastricht, on which there was no referendum, But up then pops his new Foreign Secretary, David Miliband, to blurt out that it in fact gives away much more power than Maastricht.
Mr Brown's other excuse was that Britain has held onto all its "red lines", such as being given an opt-out from the Charter of Fundamental Rights.
But up jumps the EU's former justice commissioner, Antonio Vittorini, and a gaggle of lawyers to point out that this is nonsense. A cross-reference in the treaty shows that Britain is just as much subject to the charter as anyone else.
The title of the EU's Foreign Minister may have been changed, on Tony Blair's insistence, to High Representative, but he is still being given new powers to decide EU (i.e. our) foreign policy which Jack Straw, when foreign secretary, described as "simply unacceptable".
As the think-tank Open Europe and others have pointed out, it is truly astonishing that Mr Brown should begin his premiership, while promising to be "open" with the British people, with a deceit so shameless as to make his predecessor look like an honest man.
It is made even more remarkable by the fact Mr Brown should do this in the very week when he was busy wrapping himself in the Union Jack and ordering that our national flag should be flown on every government building.
The British people should not just be rubbing their eyes in disbelief at Mr Brown's behaviour: they should be shouting with anger.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Pay through the nose for an eye in the sky
If the reluctance of our politicians to admit the ever-growing weight of EU laws that govern our lives has long made the EU "the elephant in the room" of British politics, at least last Monday MPs were for once allowed a brief debate on the ever-soaring expense to British taxpayers of the EU's ill-fated Galileo satellite programme.
As the EU's most ambitious project to date, Galileo is a complete shambles. Running six years late, its commercial backers having pulled out, only one little satellite (made in Britain) has yet been put up (by a Russian rocket), and the European Commission now wants EU taxpayers to foot the colossal bill for an ongoing programme which will cost UK taxpayers alone an estimated £1.3 billion, and will run at a massive loss. All to no discernible purpose.
Originally we were told that Galileo, as the EU's rival to the USA's perfectly adequate and free GPS system, was going to be a huge moneyspinner. Taxpayers would only have to make a modest initial outlay and then the profits would roll in, an estimated £8 billion, plus billions more in commercial spin-offs.
One by one, however, all the original claimed purposes of Galileo have dropped away: that it would be the key to an EU-wide road charging scheme; that every aircraft in the "single European sky" would have to pay to use it; that it would enable the French to sell Galileo-dependent weaponry to China.
Although various Tory MPs, led by their front-bench spokesman Owen Paterson, tried to point all this out on Monday (completely ignored by the BBC's travesty of a report of the debate on its website), the minister, Rosie Winterton, simply insisted that we must carry on paying for it, without being prepared to admit any of its true costs (the figures she cited were way out of date).
She could not come up with a single good reason for continuing with what has now become the EU's "white elephant in the sky". But if the commission insists we must go on forking out hundreds of millions of pounds more, for nothing, who are we British to say no?
telegraph.co.uk