Flying Free (26 page)

Oh, it was fun. The BBC and ITV, to their shame, almost totally ignored it, just as they were almost totally to ignore our friend and fellow
banner-waver
Dan Hannan’s brilliant demolition of Gordon Brown in March 2009. You can, I am delighted to say, still see both events on a public service broadcast medium, YouTube.

Yes. We had broken the rules of civilised debate. We had brought demonstration into a place where there should be debate, but the self-appointed rulers of Europe had broken the rules first. They had prevented debate, so all that remained to us and to the people whom we had pledged to serve was demonstration.

Later that day, the servile ideologues had their say.

What is it about these people that they all spout the same words at the same time? Is it like that Darwinian phenomenon whereby, I am assured, monkeys on Madagascar started washing their yams in the sea for added salt intake at the same moment as their distant cousins on the African mainland, though there can have been no contact? Or could it just possibly be that they had all received similar briefings from on high?

The EU was being accused – and justly – of using totalitarian techniques to suppress democratic debate, so Martin Schulz, chairman of the Socialist Group, stood up and told the parliament that our conduct had resembled that of the Nazis in the Reichstag. Then up popped our Liberal (?) Democrat (?) friend (?) Graham Watson, who repeated his trusty football hooligan line, then compared us to the Nazis in the Reichstag. He also demanded that the president expel us.

It was left to Danny Cohn-Bendit – no stranger, God knows, to demonstrations – to supply the supposedly tolerant line. No, no, he said. Just because we were mad and ‘mentally weak’, there was no call to expel us physically. There were 500 other members who were sane. This parliament was surely big enough to cope with a few dissident madmen…

We were disciplined for being undisciplined – or, rather, thirteen of us were disciplined, including an Austrian nationalist who had actually been in Frankfurt on the day.

Although I had been very audibly and visibly there and the president had identified me as a ringleader, I was mysteriously spared. A few weeks later, I was forced to stand up, raise a fist and declare ‘I am Spartacus!’, at which many of my colleagues did likewise – to the total bemusement of the president.

I flew to Lisbon that night, tried in vain to grab a couple of hours of sleep and was at the glorious sixteenth-century Hieronymites Monastery
in Lisbon in time to witness the signing of a treaty which no signatory had actually read. Gordon Brown, of course, turned up five hours late for the ceremony, so it was left to David Miliband to sign on his behalf and that of the entire British people. Security appeared to be non-existent. I buttonholed Miliband as he set off up the steps. ‘Remember your promise,’ I said. ‘We have to have a referendum.’

He smiled weakly.

Those were the last words spoken to him before he scrawled his name on a document which bound Britain into a soviet without the consent of the people whom he claimed to represent.

I sincerely hope that they – and his residual conscience – ruined his one big day.

From that point onward Dan Hannan and I resolved that we must use the tactics of the great Charles Stewart Parnell. Neither of us is exactly a procedure man, and I certainly never thought that the day would come when I would go everywhere with the EU Parliament’s rules of procedure under my arm. We resolved, however, that we would use every procedural rule, every point of order and every opportunity for filibustering to register our protest.

But this was not Westminster nor any democratic chamber where the rules are more sacrosanct than the members or any principle. We might have known.

The new president of the parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, simply wrote a request to the parliament for the right to silence any member whom the Speaker or president deemed to be obstructive to ‘the procedures of the House’. Again, rules were not intended to apply to the divinely appointed masters. They demanded arbitrary powers. The parliament surrendered yet another guarantee of liberty.

Outraged, Dan now joined Roger Helmer in the outer darkness where all Conservatives so sinful as to fight for liberty must go. His microphone was hastily switched off by a vice-president, but he spoke on regardless.

‘An absolute majority’, he said, ‘is not the same as the rule of law. I accept that there is a minority in this house in favour of a referendum. That there is a minority in this house against the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. But this house must nonetheless follow its own rule-books. And by popular acclamation to discard the rules under which we operate is indeed an act of arbitrary and despotic rule. It is only my regard for you, Mr Chairman, and my personal affection for you that prevents me from likening it to the
Ermächtigungsgesetz
of 1933, which was also voted through by a parliamentary majority.’

This was a far more apposite reference to Nazi Germany (though Dan had specifically refrained from making it) than that which our critics had used. Hitler’s 1933 ‘Enabling Act’ allowed the cabinet to enact legislation, including laws deviating from or altering the constitution, without the consent of the Reichstag. The Reichstag approved it – in large measure because the opposition was already in gaol.

This time, however, because the allusion referred to the establishment, not to a minority, the EU suffered a serious fit of the vapours. The Conservatives became apoplectic (the distinctly silly Christopher Beazley even stood over Dan and invited him to ‘come outside’. Joseph Daul, the head of the EPP group to which Pöttering himself also belonged, at once demanded Dan’s expulsion.

French farmers’ leader Daul already disliked me. In fact, he had been threatening to sue me for a year or so. He had somehow never got round to it.

Yes. Yet another one, I’m afraid, again right up at the top…

Back in January 2007, when he was named the EPP’s new leader, I had thought it worth mentioning to the parliament that Daul had been under investigation since 2004 for ‘complicity and concealment of the abuse of public funds’ (€16 million or £10.6 million) by French farming unions. There was no suggestion that Daul had personally profited, but his alleged complicity was surely a matter both of public interest and of concern to those who were about to elevate him.

Daniel Hannan was, unsurprisingly, expelled from the group on 19 February for presuming to tell the truth and for making – or rather for
not making – a comparison which our opponents had lately made about us to obsequious applause and official approval.

The following day, we were thoroughly childish. Our staff dressed up in chicken suits and we in the chamber wore T-shirts in matching yellow bearing a picture of a chicken and the legend ‘Too Chicken for a Referendum’.

Well, we had to attract the attention of the media somehow.

In my time, there have been many costumes seen in the parliament buildings. It is, after all, an acknowledged weapon in the protestor’s armoury. Climate-change activists, for example, have worn death-masks and black cloaks and have been treated with due deference. When our staff, however, dressed up and cavorted in the lobby a bit to draw attention to the cowardice of the Commission in declining to face public opinion, they were harried, pursued and threatened with disciplinary action and arrest.

A memorable note was delivered to me in the chamber. It read, ‘Your chickens are being arrested. Please can you help?’

I ran out into the lobby and attempted to reason with the officials who by now had the chickens cornered.

I was interviewed by veteran ITN correspondent Jim Gibbons. I told him that the parliament was now resorting to totalitarian methods, that we had been accused of being mentally ill and of being Nazis and that all that we were in fact doing was seeking the consent of the European people for the actions of its
soi-disant
parliament. At this, the head of audio-visual services in the parliament stepped forward and told Jim, ‘I don’t want you using that clip. We’re not here to record dissent.’

My jaw dropped. Jim blinked and stared. Here was blatant totalitarian censorship in action in the middle of western Europe.

Fortunately a senior BBC correspondent showed a little more articulacy and presence of mind than I. Shirin Wheeler, the daughter of the great Sir Charles Wheeler, briskly told the Jacques-in-office, ‘Very well, if that’s your attitude, the BBC will withdraw from the European Parliament.’

There was a bit of stammering then.

The would-be Brussels Beria gulped and sadly bethought himself that he had not yet been granted that degree of arbitrary power.

It had been an aberration, it was later explained, an excess of zeal…

Unfortunately, that sort of thing is highly infectious.

One by one, the professional politicians in member-states acceded to the EU’s demands and ratified the Lisbon Treaty without reference to their citizens.

Only four nations held out – Germany (who managed to extort an admission that Basic Law had precedence over the European Court of Justice), Poland (who saw no point in signing until the Irish had approved), the Czech Republic – or, rather, one man in the Czech Republic, President Václav Klaus (who declined to sign for a long as he could, and first obtained an opt-out for the Beneš decrees) – and Ireland.

The Irish have known much of oppression and cherish their freedom. In accordance with common sense and principles of fairness, they hold that no change can be made to the Constitution without the explicit approval of the people. They rejected the Nice Treaty in 2001 and accepted it in 2002 only after they had obtained an opt-out from any common European defence policy and established the primacy of the Dáil in any further integrationist measures.

They must once more ratify the treaty by referendum or it must die.

Since Nice, of course, the Celtic tiger had all but transformed Ireland. A combination of a superb educational system, native savvy, low interest-rates and massive grant aid from Brussels had seen a gold-rush. A stable, largely rural and frequently black economy had morphed into an international boom which was the envy of the rest of Europe.

Admittedly, some of the smooth new highways being built to replace pot-holed byways actually led nowhere in particular, property prices soared, immigration was managed with staggering insensitivity with tiny rural villages suddenly having their populations all but doubled within weeks and the despised ‘Foxrock Fannies’ were suddenly the kings and queens of the castle that they had always believed themselves to be, but the folding stuff was there in plenty. 

It takes more than that, however, to make Ireland meek and compliant.

The ‘Yes’ contingent denied that the treaty had constitutional significance. Just in case there should be any democratic dissent, Taoiseach Brian Cowen stated that any member of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party campaign declaring against the treaty would be expelled, The media were all but unanimously yes-men.

The executive council of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, demonstrating that they had learned something from the EU, voted to support a Yes vote but omitted to consult members of the individual unions. In fact, the Technical, Engineering and Electrical Union (TEEU) advised its 45,000 members to vote ‘No’.

Kathy Sinnott, an independent member of our group, led our ‘No’ campaign. Millionaire Declan Ganley, founder of the pan-European party Libertas, ran his own. Sinn Féin were opposed to the treaty, the Greens undecided. Otherwise, we had no support amongst the professional politicians.

Once again, we mustered such money as we could from MEPs and from the information budget. We printed a glossy leaflet which was distributed to every household in Ireland. We visited as often as we could.

Some 53.13 per cent of the electorate turned out for that referendum, and 53.4 per cent of them voted ‘No’. Cowen paid me an enormous compliment by saying that ‘Nigel Farage and a few extremists subverted the democratic process in Ireland’. He did not deign to explain how, by public speaking on behalf of an under-represented majority, I had contrived to ‘subvert the democratic process’.

OK, it was close, but it was a ‘No’. Had the ‘Yes’ faction won, it would have been an irrevocable sanction.

But as with Nice, as with the Constitution, the EU demonstrated that it does not understand that word. When someone else looks like winning the game, it simply changes the rules.

As ever, the serial date-rapist took a deep breath, administered a huge dose of Rohypnol and moved in once more. This, by the way, is a model which we will soon see replicated in our courts.

The Lisbon Treaty allows for the appointment of a European public prosecutor who will have the power to arrest and charge British subjects.
The model for the new European justice will be the French, under which there is no such thing as double jeopardy.

As I write, Dominique de Villepin, President Sarkozy’s bitterest opponent, has just been acquitted of conspiracy to destroy Sarkozy’s career by linking him to arms dealing – this despite the fact that Sarkozy publicly declared de Villepin ‘guilty’ during the course of the trial.

The public prosecutor (or, rather, his master Sarkozy) did not like the verdict so, without any new evidence being adduced, he has declared his intention to appeal it. De Villepin, though not guilty, must now face a retrial until they find a jury which agrees with the prosecution.

As for the Irish vote, the Commission played safe. They resolved that the second referendum would take place after the 2009 European elections. By then, Declan Ganley was wiped out as a political force. Kathy Sinnott had lost her seat. The European Commission ploughed millions into the ‘Yes’ campaign. Furthermore, the Irish Referendum Commission now resolved that its original purpose was not appropriate in this case.

In 1995, Patricia McKenna had won a Supreme Court case which established that it was unconstitutional for taxpayers’ money to be spent on promoting just one side of the case in a referendum. The Referendum Commission had therefore been set up to ensure that information about both sides should be disseminated equally in the media and elsewhere.