European Union - The great deception: can the European Union survive?

The Great Deception

CAN THE EUROPEAN
UNION SURVIVE?

Christopher Booker
and
Richard North

THIRD EDITION

If you open that Pandoras box, you never
know what Trojan orses will jump out.

Ernest Bevin, on the first attempt to impose a
supranational government on the peoples of Europe.*

*Barclay, Sir Roderick, Ernest Bevin and the Foreign Office (Latimer, 1975), p. 67.

Since this book was first published in 2005, the story it tells has moved on a long way. We ended it then on the attempt to impose a Constitution for Europe which had just been rejected by the voters of France and Holland but which in 2007 was then smuggled back in, virtually unchanged, as the Lisbon Treaty. We have seen the ongoing crisis of the euro which, having reduced large parts of Europe to misery and penury, is still unresolved. We have seen the great migration catastrophe, as millions of refugees flood into Europe from the Middle East and Africa. And in 2016 we have seen the British people being given the chance to Remain in the EU or Leave it.

Something which yet again became painfully apparent in the referendum campaign, however, was how remarkably little the protagonists in the debate seemed to understand about the very thing they were talking about. For 43 years Britain had been increasingly ruled by this vast, amorphous new system of government centred in Brussels. Yet again and again it became clear how astonishingly ignorant the politicians were about how the European Union actually works, what its rules are, what were the core principles which have always driven it let alone how, if it came to the crunch, we could in any practical sense manage successfully to extricate ourselves from it.

When we first began researching for this book, we had already long been learning how the European Union worked and reporting on the extremely damaging effects it was in so many ways having on British life. But when we got seriously to work we were continually amazed by how much about the history of the European project had never been properly uncovered before, and how often we came across crucial episodes in the story which had been quite deliberately misrepresented.

No one before, it turned out, had tracked down how the core principles which were to shape the evolution of the European project from the early 1950s onwards had in fact originated in the minds of two men back in the 1920s. No one had really uncovered how their real purpose all along was to create a wholly integrated United States of Europe, ruled by an unelected supranational government or how in the 1950s it was deliberately decided to disguise that ultimate goal, and only to work towards ever closer union, step by step, starting with the pretence that what was being set up was only a trading arrangement, a Common Market.

We were able to tell more fully than ever before the story of how, when Britain applied to join in 1961, the Macmillan government deliberately decided to go along with the same deceit. Although he and his minister for Europe Edward Heath had been fully briefed behind the scenes that the real aim was full political and economic union, they decided for what they called presentational reasons to conceal this from the British people behind the same pretence that we were only joining a Common Market.

We told for the first time the real story behind the French President de Gaulles veto of Britains application to join, that he wanted first to get firmly in place the financial arrangements for the Common Agricultural Policy, which would allow Britain to hand over huge sums to subsidise his French farmers and to buy in return some of their resulting surpluses.

Only when this had finally been put in place in 1969 was Britain welcome to join, which Heath was desperate to do when elected prime minister the next year. And throughout the negotiations, Heath followed that same policy of deception, hiding what he well knew was the real aim, full political and economic union, by repeatedly claiming that our membership would involve no essential loss of sovereignty.

Even while the negotiations were continuing, Heath learned that there were already plans in Brussels for a single currency, and had to send over his Europe minister to implore them to keep this under wraps until Britain was safely in: just as his ministers deliberately lied to Parliament about the extent to which we had given away the richest fishing waters in Europe as part of our price of entry.

So the deceptions continued continuing with secret plans in the early 1980s for further moves towards integration so ambitious that it was agreed they would require not just one new treaty but two. The first of these, the Single European Act in 1986, was again sold to the British people as involving no more than the setting up of a Single Market, when in reality it was much more than that and just what its title should have indicated: a further giant step towards creating a Single Europe.

The second of these two planned treaties was signed at Maastricht in 1992, transforming the European Community into the European Union and launching on its way the single currency and much more. This included the first serious moves towards giving the fast-emerging government of Europe its own foreign and defence policies further supported after 1997 by Tony Blair, who was also enthusiastic for giving the now vastly expanding European Union its own Constitution after 2001.

Not once in all those years did any British prime minister, with the exception of Mrs Thatcher, try to explain what had always been the projects real ultimate goal: any more than we were ever told the truth by David Cameron when he staged his referendum in 2016. It was for this and so much more that we had no hesitation in calling this book The Great Deception. But, alas, the British people have still not really begun to understand how consistently and comprehensively they have been deceived.

Christopher Booker, March 2016

In the summer of 2005 the European Union was hit by an earthquake. For decades Europes politicians had been working towards bringing the countries of their continent together in ever closer union, the ultimate symbol of which would be the adoption of a Constitution for Europe. Just when they seemed on the edge of their goal, on 29 May 2005 the people of France responded to the constitution with a resounding Non. Four days later the people of Holland rejected it with an even more decisive Nee. The European Unions bewildered leaders were suddenly confronted with a crisis unlike anything they had faced before.

When the original edition of this book appeared in 2003 our one regret was that, although we had been able to reconstruct most of a long and extraordinary story, history had not yet given it a proper ending. Not only did the events of the summer of 2005 bring that story to something of a climax; it was one which emerged naturally from all that had led up to it.

The purpose of this book is to tell for the first time the real story of how, through what had come to be known to its insiders as the project, the continents politicians had for half a century been seeking gradually to construct and to impose on their peoples a unique system of government. Not the least remarkable feature of this political experiment had been how few people really understood its real nature, aims and origins. The form of government it created was unique because it was designed to place the nation states which belonged to it under a supranational power, unaccountable to any electorate, ruling its citizens through the agency of each countrys own national authorities. Although the nation states and their institutions of government remained outwardly intact, all these institutions, from heads of state and parliaments to civil services and judicial systems, in reality became increasingly subject to the decisions and laws of the new power that was above them all.