Breaking News: The Lisbon Treaty is set to become law within weeks after the Czech Republic’s eurosceptic president, Vaclav Klaus, conceded his attempt to challenge it was futile.

It was once considered normal to ask for a two-thirds vote in favour to bring about major constitutional change.

The European Union has succeeded in stamping out any votes at all on itself. Where that has not been possible, as in Ireland, it has demanded just a simple majority. These now rare plebiscites have been accompanied by all kinds of foul play and the bribery of reluctant electorates.

Apart from numerous treaties of accession over the years, the main instruments binding countries into the sticky web of euro politics have been:

Acts of Accession 1972: Brought UK into Common Market (PM: Edward Heath).
Single European Act: Introduced the Single Market and European Political Cooperation (PM: Margaret Thatcher).
Treaty on European Union, Maastricht: 1997. (PM: John Major).
Treaty of Amsterdam: Introduced the High Representative, transferred powers to EC and integrated the Schengen Agreement. (PM: Tony Blair).
Treaty of Nice: prepared the EU to cope with enlargement. (PM: Tony Blair).
Lisbon (EU Constitution) Treaty (Not yet in force). (PM: Gordon Brown).

Even a cursory glance at public opinion at the times of implementation of these treaties demonstrates that all of them would have been lost to British referenda. Many other countries would also have voted against, most significantly perhaps, Germany when required to give up the Deutsche Mark by the Maastricht Treaty.

The political class has been widely divergent from the general public view on almost all matters European, especially in Britain. Realizing this, Brussels has adopted dishonesty, even treachery, as its preferred method of attack.

For Britain, the beginning of it all was the Acts of Accession in 1972, rammed through Parliament by Edward Heath as part of his miserable three-and-a-bit years in Number 10, which also included a three-day week and a crippling miners’ strike.

Heath promised he would only go ahead with membership of the then Common Market if a substantial majority supported it. In the event, his whips had to frogmarch aged and infirm Tory MPs through the voting lobby, even when they were against entry — I believe affidavits exist confirming the rumour. His fraudulent eight-vote victory was hardly a “substantial majority”. There’s little doubt the application would have been lost in a popular referendum.

When Britain was finally granted one three years later by Harold Wilson, the wily old fox set his swivel-eyed Cabinet colleagues free to oppose it. Thus the “no” campaign was led by the likes of Tony Benn and many from the hard left. Wilson got the vote he wanted.

The Single European Act, opened the way for the so-called single market of 1992. I’m convinced a British referendum would have scuppered it. Tellingly Margaret Thatcher complained afterwards that she had been duped by the French president of the Commission, Jacques Delors. The headline in The Sun newspaper said it all: “Up Yours, Delors!”

The people were against it. We still got it.

And so it rolls on. Maastricht squeaked through Parliament with tiny majorities after heroic whipping operations. The people, though, would have flattened it. Only John Major’s negotiated opt-outs from the single currency and the social chapter saved the day for the europhiles.

Note that Labour has since signed the social chapter, and Tony Blair and Peter Mandelson would have liked to take the country into the euro currency, with obvious deadly results.

The moral is that even opt-outs are no protection from the advent of a Labour government, as Brussels knows only too well. If you sign up to a treaty, you’ll get most of it in the end.

The open wounds from the current Treaty of Lisbon are still raw. Britain was promised a referendum, but Blair conspired with Germany’s Angela Merkel, France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Peter Mandelson and others to rat on the pledge. By the by, Blair would become Europe’s first president and that looks a likely appointment before the end of the year.

Again, a vote in Britain would have crushed this treaty for good.

The ongoing tragedy of this tale is that had Heath been square with the people and offered them a vote in 1972, even with a simple majority, the UK would never have entered what is now the EU in the first place. As time went on and Europe became more integrated, it would never have been possible to persuade the public to enter the so-called community.

The European saga is one of the most scandalous betrayals in all history. Because the power has been “salami-sliced” over 37 years, many people are only just waking up to the enormity of it.

Our only hopes now are that, 1) economic conditions get massively worse and the EU disintegrates as it deserves to do, or 2) David Cameron’s Conservatives win the General Election in May and set about restoring full powers to Parliament and the people of Britain, who are maritime Atlanteans, and have never been Europeans.

John Evans

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