Referendum News

The ever persistent Christopher Booker, who has done so much to keep the candle of resistance to the EU alive in the print media, returns to the fray today in The Sunday Telegraph (HERE).

He highlights the role which will be played by the much upgraded European Council within the institutions of the EU.

This beefed up group is one of the features of this constitution that do so much to give the EU all the formal apparatus of government which, if I am right in the contention I have made about the status of the EU in customary international law (HERE), will fulfill the requirement for a recognisable government that the EU needs in order to declare itself, perhaps on 1st. January 2009, to be itself acknowledged as a Sovereign Independent Nation State armed with plenipotentiary powers by the Treaty.

He also highlights the very wide ambit of areas of competence that the EU might arrogate to itself under Article 3.

A weaselly phrase gets used which is "social policy": if the EU decides to seize control of 'social policy', what does it mean? If one stops for a moment almost anything comes under the heading of 'social policy': education, health, employment, families, child protection law, you name it, it has something to do with social policy. Westminster will merely be the postman for whatever the unelected EuroNabobs want to do with us.

Finally he raises the spectre that this Treaty at last gives the EU the final power it needs to call itself a State: the chance to raise taxes propriu motu.

L'Empire arrive et c'est nous, les collègues!