On October the 2nd, a foreign country, the Republic of Ireland, goes to the polls in a statutary referendum to decide the fate of the United Kingdom.

The alleged UK Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, urged on by Peter Mandelson and Tony Blair, outsourced the British decision on the European Union’s constitution — the Lisbon Treaty — in the manner BT might employ a call centre in Bombay to answer customer queries. The decision was not an economic one.

Since only Ireland is obliged by law to hold constitutional referenda, it was plain that ultimately the Emerald Isle would hold all British history going forward in its hands.

It’s a doubly strange quirk of circumstances that those who would most like to hurt the British, the republicans and the IRA, are piled up on the “no” side of the argument. One’s enemy’s enemy is one’s friend, whoever he may be. One could say it’s very Irish.

Nonetheless, here we are, in the worst of all possible positions, in the worst of all possible worlds. Panglossian, it isn’t.

Only Brown could engineer such a colossal cock-up out of a straightforward situation: you promise a vote, you give a vote. Whatever the outcome, people will like you for being honest with them and reward you with a vote in return.

But such open and guileless psychology is beyond the iron-girder wit of a man for whom the truth induces an anaphylactic shock. Why couldn’t it be peanuts like everyone else?

The next Prime Minister of these much put-upon islands, David Cameron, is caught in a vice of his own making. Terrified that he could be accused of being a eurosceptic — which he is — he panders to the likes of wily reprobates like Kenneth Clarke, a putative ally of Mandelson, in suppressing the overwhelming majority view of the new intake of Tory MPs that the Lisbon Treaty must be torn up by whatever means.

Impaled on both horns of his self-created dilemma, Cameron triangulates like a contortionist in a three-ringed circus. A pretty sight it isn’t.

Meanwhile, over at the National Liberal Club, young Nicky Clegg balances precariously on the point of a needle, prompting the question, how many Liberal-Democrats can dance on the head of a pin?

Clegg believes that if you go off on a tangent, you’ll confuse so many people they’ll think you haven’t moved at all. It’s called the Ostrich Gambit, I believe.

Simply put, the Lib-Dems originally promised a referendum on the EU constitution. Like Brown he reneged on that promise, but cleverly called for one on a similar theme: Britain in or out of the EU? His manipulative gamble is that it would be more likely to be lost.

Have they all gone raving mad?

It’s hard to avoid the view that Britain will not be saved from the new fascism by its politicians. Who then may come to our rescue? It’s a three-horse race: the Irish, the saintly Czech President, Vaclav Klaus, and the Polish President.

First the Irish. Andrew Hawkins, CEO of pollster ComRes is predicting a “no” vote in Ireland: “Looking at likely Irish referendum result – difficult to call but on balance am expecting a ‘no’.” Could the Irish punish premier Brian Cowen for his handling of the economy in its worst slump since the 1930s? Or would they prefer not to be left alone with him after a “no” vote? There’s no way of telling until the ballots are counted next week.

Perhaps Vaclav Klaus, President of the Czech Republic is our best hope. He lived under the Soviet yoke for 50 years and knows a thing or two about totalitarianism. He was even attacked in his own headquarters by an EU delegation headed by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the leader of Paris’s 1968 student revolution. President Klaus has so-far refused to sign the Treaty, which he opposes, until complaints against it in the Czech’s constitutional court have been heard.

Poland is also holding up the ratification process pending a number of issues. Both men’s parties now sit in the same EU parliamentary grouping as the British Conservatives. You can bet some intense discussions have been going on, but how long can the two leaders hold out?

If a British election is held in May, a referendum Bill would have to be passed through Parliament. It would need to be included in the Tory manifesto to get comfortably through a House of Lords stacked with Labour placemen, using the Salisbury Convention.

A month for the campaign would take us to July, or even August. Our two Eastern European heroes would have to hold out for nearly a year. It doesn’t sound realistic to me.

So, it’s up to Ireland.

Six days to party time or Armageddon.

Update: Benedict Brogan has an interview with Shadow Foreign Secretary William Hague in Saturday’s Daily Telegraph. He writes: “If the treaty is ratified before the election, he [Hague] and the Tory leader will issue an immediate statement setting out the way forward. It is being drafted even now.” When it comes, we will be left in no doubt that they mean business, says Hague.

It should be spelled out at the Tory Conference in Manchester next week. They say it won’t be, but what possible reason can silence the truth? Could it be that if the treaty is ratified, the Tories will offer a referendum on staying in? After all, there won’t be much point having one on the Lisbon Treaty at that stage.

John Evans

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Labour MP, Gisela Stuart’s prescient warning of a “democratic deficit” inherent in the Lisbon Treaty is a rare moment of clarity from a mainstream politician on the almost taboo subject of the European Union.

The treaty, she said, would leave EU leaders accountable to no one, and with the ablility to grab yet more power from nations without consultation. It contains a “ratchet clause” that permits the closing down of national vetoes by diktat.

There will be “no more treaties, no more referendums anywhere” on future transfers of power from the nation states to Brussels. Gordon Brown’s hollow promise that there would be no more treaties for at least 10 years was, as ever, subtly misleading.

She went on, “My basic test of democracy is: can I get rid of them? By casting a vote, you can change the people who are in control of you. Lisbon does not give you, as a citizen, the means to control the executive or the politicians who decide on your behalf, and that’s the hurdle it falls on. The nature of democracy is really at stake.”

I’ve long argued that what’s being built in Europe is a new platform for Fascism. Continentals don’t have the same reflexes against it as the British do; their Napoleonic systems are already deeply autocratic in nature. This is very attractive to people like Blair, Brown and Mandelson, but hated by the English as a whole.

The steely bureaucrats of Brussels are terrified of Britain having a referendumed veto on this final nail in the coffin of democratic pluralism across Europe, which is why they have been making promises to Blair on the newly-created Presidency of the Council. Next year, Tony Blair could wield more power over us than new Prime Minister, David Cameron.

Silly, malleable Blair would be putty in the hands of the backroom power brokers of Brussels. At some stage he would be replaced by the longed-for “strong man” and … here we go again.

How did we sleepwalk into this?

Fascist Frankia is but a few steps away from completion. The 20th century is about to repeat itself.

Wake up, Britain. It’s not too late to get out.

Last week I wrote about the replacement of the postwar baby-boomer generation in our politics.

We have been passing through a period when the spoilt brats of the 1950s and 60s have held political power. Dr Spock’s experimental kidscape proved to be just as destructive as he himself later apologetically admitted it would be.

But consider what’s over the horizon. China has had a one-child per couple policy for decades. Most families made sure it was a boy … and boy, was he mollycoddled.

The young masters of China will be even more frustrated because there’ll be no wives for them. They will soon begin the climb to political power in a newly-resurgent superstate. With its massive reserves of cash and foreign assets, especially dollar-denominated, it will hold immense power over the rest of us.

Imagine such a powerhouse controlled by the spoilt brat generation.

No, let’s not go there.

Nick Clegg topped the Andrew Marr show this morning looking and sounding like a spoilt-brat school kid playing at being a politician. His adolescent attempts at damaging David Cameron with scornful invective misfired completely because it was so plainly not true.

After Gisela Stuart’s grown-up perceptiveness on the Lisbon Treaty, Clegg just seemed gullible and infantile. His boyish enthusiasm for all things euro was shallow and ill considered in the circumstances.

If this man is the next Leader of the Opposition, David Cameron is not going to face much flak from the other side of the House of Commons.

Clegg should be reminded of what happened when Sampson had a haircut.

Paraphernalia is everywhere. In various forms it blights our lives and gums up the works across the board. It’s hard to escape from the growing lakes and mountains of paraphernalia.

Consider weddings — where the word originated. Nowadays they can take a whole day to get through. All that’s really needed is for a couple, in everyday clothes, to walk into a church or registery office. The presiding officer then asks them if they really, really want to marry. If the answer is yes, they are pronounced man and wife and asked to sign a chitty. Next, please! The rest is paraphernalia.

Autobiographies are full of paraphernalia. Chapters on grandparents, parents, siblings, cousins and other family members, litter the pages with unwanted dross. By the time readers get to the real story, they’ve lost the will to live … and 25 quid.

I’ve been mulling this over because I’m considering writing a sort of autobiography without paraphernalia: A Life in Episodes. Sample episode: How I was betrayed by a fish and became a paid writer and photo-journalist at 12. It’s unmissable, I promise you.

Could we not get to grips with this paraphernalia overload in society rather than waste our time counting carbon footprints? We should recognize that they are paraphernalia too.

Automatic stabilizers are the pride of leftwing politicians and that strange group of economists known as Neo-Keynesians.

They kick in when the country goes into recession, automatically increasing spending as the economy splutters. They comprise various benefits paid to the unemployed as they are laid off in growing numbers.

Surely this must be a good thing? To listen to Labour ministers, you’d think so. The problem is, they have no ceiling once they start, and our system pays them out of borrowing, not investments. Borrowing has to be paid back out of taxes, which further depresses the economy.

An economy can easily spiral out of control under limitless “automatic stabilizers” and loss of tax revenue. The United Kingdom is a classic example of that right now.

Never has there been more need for a “social fund” to mop up the automatic stabilizing leakage in the national finances. Surely, there’s now an unstoppable impetus for putting the whole welfare budget on a sounder footing for the future?

Dan Brown’s latest novel, The Lost Symbol is now in the bookshops and, by all accounts, shooting off the shelves at supersonic velocities.

I bought a copy yesterday, despite a self-imposed ordinance not to buy any more books until I had finished writing my own: The Eternal Quest for Immortality — Is it staring you in the face?.

W.H. Smith is offering the £18.99 hardback at £5.99 if you buy 15 quid’s worth of stationery. How can anyone resist an offer like that? I just hope my own much more serious tome doesn’t face similar head-chopping discounts.

Does the author get a royalty on the stationery too? We should be told.

John Evans

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Despite the spate of negative results in referendums on aspects of the European Union, the EU Commission and its heavyweight political supporters have not given up on their main aim: to convert the EU into a single country.

The currently proposed constitution — now called the Lisbon Treaty — would turn a grouping of nation states into a legal entity in its own right with the power to sign international treaties on behalf of member states and the right to overturn any nation’s laws. It includes an embryo army poised to requisition the forces of any EU country worth having, a flag, a “national” anthem, a passport system and the beginnings of a diplomatic corps with its own embassies around the world.

All it needs is a name.

The European Union is largely operated for, and on behalf of, Germany and France, the two original founders. What they want, they tend to get. In the treaty after next, assuming they find a way to browbeat Ireland into accepting most of the Lisbon Treaty, the question of the name of the new country of Europe is sure to figure. What might it be?

It would have to satisfy the egos of the Germans and the French and be mildly acceptable to the rest. One obvious name stands out: Frankia.

France was originally named after the Germanic tribe, the Franks, which gave us Charlemagne and other worthies of the “Holy Roman Empire”. It’s a name that would flatter both Paris and Berlin, and emphasize their status as joint controllers of the new European empire. The former French currency, naturally, was the franc.

The British would hate it, of course, and, assuming Labour governments are a thing of the past by then, would probably withdraw.

But would, say, a David Cameron government have the moral force to renegotiate Britain’s terms along the lines of an association agreement? Matthew d’Ancona has an excellent “testing the waters” piece in today’s Telegraph on what Cameron can expect on becoming PM in two years from now. One of his most important points is that serious challenges bring massive opportunities for radical change.

Cameron will certainly be faced with the kind of economic reconstruction that Margaret Thatcher tackled so fearlessly in the early 1980s. She succeeded in transforming Britain from basket case to Anglo-Saxon Tiger in less than a decade.

I’m not going to recite my own shopping list of what a new British government needs to do, as it’s way too long. But lancing the European boil is absolutely essential for British independence and for unity in the Tory party. It would also allow the country its familiar role as a freebooting trader again, free from the paralysing regulatory environment and toxic cost base spewing out in all directions from Brussels.

Frankia, in any shape or size, is no longer in Britain’s national interest. David Cameron may just become the saviour of the nation, a Winston Churchill for the 21st century.