ON THURSDAY voters go to the polls to elect members of the European Parliament.
The bizarre nature of this exercise can best be illustrated by recalling that from its inception until now the EU parliament has enjoyed neither the authority to initiate laws nor to repeal them. That is in keeping with the ethos of the European Unio
n, an organisation that believes power is too important to be entrusted to the masses.
The European Union is an enclosed tyranny, addicted to micromanagement of its subjects' lives and devoid of any kind of cultural coherence. It is the worst example in world history of the arrogance and wastefulness of an untrammelled bureaucracy. The greatest single step Britain could take towards freedom and self-fulfilment would be to remove itself from the control of this behemoth.
The EU, like its partner in corruption the United Nations, is a totally artificial construct. It has no roots in any real society and exists only as a vehicle for the power-hungry and the greedy to indulge their unhealthy appetites. Guarantor of European peace? Get real: who seriously believes we would have spent any part of the past 40 years at war with Germany, but for the benevolent interposition of Brussels? Metternich's Concert of Europe it is not.
At every stage in its growth, the EU has advanced by stealth, subterfuge and downright lies. Remember the dishonest agenda with which Edward Heath sold it to Britain? Purely a trading partnership, blah, blah… In reality, from the first moment of its conception, it was intended to be a political union, a major power bloc. With increasing power it has grown more dictatorial, as witness the way in which the wayward Irish were forced to vote twice, after they gave the "wrong" answer in a referendum, an experience that may be replicated this year. Ditto the Danes.
After the Lisbon Treaty had been rejected and thus automatically fell into desuetude, bureaucrats in Brussels continued to prepare its implementation, in the sure confidence that nothing so trivial as democracy or legality would be allowed to impede the development of the European project. Nor is it even culturally European, as the drive to incorporate Turkey, an Asian, Islamic nation, demonstrates.
The latest ploy among Europhiles is audaciously to conscript some Eurofolly of absurd regulation into their own argument and characterise it as the "caricature" case advanced by Eurosceptics. In reality, the demented banana-straighteners of Brussels are still in business; a recent example is the ridiculous directive that obliges all British buses travelling more than 30 miles to decant their passengers half-way through their journey, take them back on board and change the number of the bus.
Yet such buffoonery masks an infinitely more sinister agenda. The EU is a socialist institution, with all the rampant intolerance that implies. It is the embodiment of Marxism of the Frankfurt School, whose programme is political correctness, trampling down all traditional morality and every last vestige of the Judaeo-Christian ethic with ruthless determination. The author Vladimir Bukovsky identified this threat when he denounced the EU's "intellectual gulag known as political correctness" and warned: "This is the beginning of the gulag. The beginning of your loss of freedom."
Bukovsky knows what he is talking about: he was a prisoner for 12 years in the Soviet gulag and recognises the marks of the beast. In the building of our own prison camp, Britain has made a net contribution of £22 billion since 2002. In return, we have been rewarded with the loss of our sovereignty and the reduction of our voice to a representation of 78 out of 785 MEPs. Yet, for the eunuch parliamentarians of Brussels and Strasbourg, life is good.
From tomorrow, their basic salary will rise to £83,282 a year, plus up to £363,000 in expenses (receipts not required). They also receive £41,573 "transition payments" as golden handshakes on leaving office, with pension rights of up to £30,000 for one five-year term. As at Westminster, our MEPs have not been backward in employing family members on expenses: 30 of them do so.
No wonder MEPs are Europhiles. For the rest of us, there is no conceivable reason to love this evil empire. None of the major political parties offers any remedy. David Cameron's pledge to hold a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty is worthless, because he will not commit himself to doing so even if the treaty is already in operation, as it almost certainly will be by the time he is in a position to organise a plebiscite. The time for tinkering is past: the EU is unreformable. It is time to make our excuses and leave.
