So, as headlines scream that vain bids to save the euro threaten us with
“Armageddon”, the EU’s ruling elite has toppled two more elected prime
ministers, to replace them with technocratic officials who can be trusted to do
Brussels’s bidding.
The new Greek prime minister, Lucas Papademos, was the man who, as head
of Greece’s central bank, fiddled the figures to enable Greece to get into the
euro (against the rules) in the first place – before being rewarded with a
senior post in the European Central Bank. He is no more democratically elected
than Mario Monti, who will most likely be Italy’s new prime minister and had
hurriedly to be made a “senator for life” to qualify him for the job. Monti’s
main qualification is that, as a former senior EU Commissioner, he has long been
a member of the Brussels elite himself.
One of the few pleasures of watching this self-inflicted shambles
unfolding day by day has been to see the panjandrums of the Today programme,
James Naughtie and John Humphrys, at last beginning to ask whether the EU is a
democratic institution. Had they studied the history of the object of their
admiration, they might long ago have realised that the “European project” was
never intended to be a democratic institution.
The idea first conceived back in the 1920s by two senior officials of the
League of Nations – Jean Monnet and Arthur Salter, a British civil servant – was
a United States of Europe, ruled by a government of unelected technocrats like
themselves. Two things were anathema to them: nation states with the power of
veto (which they had seen destroy the League of Nations) and any need to consult
the wishes of the people in elections.
As Richard North and I showed in our book The Great Deception, this was
the idea that Monnet put at the heart of the “project” from 1950 onwards,
modelling his “government of Europe” on precisely the same four institutions
that made up the League of Nations – a commission, a council of ministers, a
parliament and a court. Thus, step by step over decades, Monnet’s technocratic
dream has come to pass.
The events of last week were by no means the first time that an elected
prime minister has been toppled by the Euro-elite. The most dramatic example, as
we also showed in our book, was in 1990, when Mrs Thatcher had emerged as the
biggest obstacle to the next great leap forward in their slow-motion coup
d’etat, the Maastricht Treaty, creating the European Union and the single
currency. Following her ambushing at a European Council in October 1990, when
she was outnumbered 11 to one, the trap was sprung. An alliance between the
European elite, led by Jacques Delors, and our own Tory Europhiles, led by
Geoffrey Howe and Michael Heseltine, brought her down within
weeks.
They had disposed of the greatest political obstacle to the onward march
of their project just as ruthlessly as they were later to brush aside all those
referendums expressing the objections of the French, the Dutch and the Irish to
their Constitution. The one thing for which there has never been any place in
their grand design is democracy. What a pity the Today programme didn’t wake up
to that years ago.
The BBC reveals how Blair’s 'multi-billion-pound gaffe’ may triple our
electricity bills
I would not have wished it on anyone to sit through last Monday’s
laborious Panorama, entitled “Who’s Fuelling the Rise in Your Fuel Bills?”, but
two things about it were remarkable. One was that it was the first BBC
programme, as far as I know, to admit that electricity from wind turbines is
“eye-wateringly more expensive” than that from conventional power stations.
According to one estimate cited by Panorama, Chris Huhne’s wish for us to spend
£200 billion on renewable energy in the next nine years could triple our
electricity bills, pushing millions more households into “fuel
poverty”.
The programme’s other startling feature was an interview with Sir David
King, formerly Tony Blair’s chief scientific adviser. This confirmed that in
March 2007, the prime minister had made “a multi-billion-pound gaffe” when he
signed us up to the European Council’s historic commitment that, by 2020, the EU
would derive 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources. What Blair did
not realise, as he and the EU’s political leaders argued “until two or three in
the morning” without their technical advisers, was that “energy” includes many
things, such as gas for heating, which cannot be derived from
renewables.
A Treasury official explained to Panorama that they had worked out that
Britain could not hope to generate more than 15 per cent of its electricity from
renewables. But Blair recklessly signed up to a target which meant that 32 per
cent of our electricity would have to come from renewables, which would be
fantastically expensive were it even feasible. By the time King and Blair’s
other advisers learnt what he had let us in for, it was too
late.
The programme ended with the ineffable Mr Huhne assuring us that “the
overall effect of government policy will be to lower bills”. Even the BBC was
clearly not convinced.