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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Protectionism is not for us, says Gordon Brown in exclusive Davos yesterday. So too does Peter (Lord) Mandelson, who has his own vested interest.

Brown should realize that if a leader refuses to protect his own nation, he is by default giving comfort to the rest of the world.

The Prime Minister can only say that because he’s never been elected by the whole nation — nor even by the Labour party. He has no sense of obligation to a body of people to whom he owes his job. Worse, he probably despises the electorate, believing they will never elect him to the highest office in the land. He’s right on that one.

Stodgy bureaucrat and international socialist that he is, he views the entire world as his field of gold, the backdrop to his fame on a global stage. Britain is a minor matter in the calculation.

Nothing else explains his fixation on global structures at the expense of national ones, which are there just to be destroyed. His refusal to staunch the mad scamble of immigration that occurred on his watch for a decade, is a scar on the Labour party that it will not live down for a generation.

Even when Brown had the chance of a derogation on Eastern European migration, he brushed it aside. It would damage his reputation as a world statesman, and besides who cares about the workers whose jobs would be undercut? Not the master theorist with no experience of the real world.

This disconnect between Brown’s actual policies and the support his own countryfolk have cried out for, is not to be found in the lame rhetoric, “British jobs for British workers”, but runs through his actions like veins in a blue cheese.

We have a Prime Minister who doesn’t actually care much for the British and their concerns at all. Trappings of power and the airy-fairy “world coming together as one”, are the driving forces behind everything he does.

This leaves the electorate with a very serious subcrisis to add to the emerging economic and financial woes: a government that governs for anyone but them.

Prime Ministers are appointed to office on the basis that they command a majority in the House of Commons. In the case of Brown, he came to power in mid-Parliament — another fine mess left by Tony Blair — so lacks the nation’s backing for his Soviet-style political philosophy.

Until fairly recently (1997 to be precise) you could count on a PM having strong patriotic instincts that would put Britain first. It is the essence of the job, after all. Until next summer that assurance is missing. We are governed by someone who puts the rest of the world before our own interests.

Brown’s principal sidekick Peter Mandelson — a man attracted to power like a mosquito to blood — is so caught up in the European “project” that he can’t be relied upon to make any decision in the UK’s best interest. Less globalization than continentalization. But it comes to the same end.

It’s hard to imagine a more dangerous situation for the country. A Prime Minister and deputy acting for overseas “friends” rather than for our much depleted country.

Brown’s late countryman, novelist and historian John Buchan would have had blunt words to describe both of them, none ideologically-correct in Labour’s terms. Suffice it say that Richard Hannay and Sandy Arbuthnot would be on their trail like unforgiving tigers.

It’s time to put the country first. Globalization has failed spectacularly, especially in the Ponzi-scheme financial sector. It came up with idiot’s gold that blew away with the first whiff of cordite, leaving millions with lifelong indebtedness or facing default and bankruptcy.

Britain will not break out of this home-grown disaster until its principal authors are persuaded, or forced, to leave the scene. The party that demonizes others for a living should in turn be demonized by those who come after … in the long-term national interest.

Then what? Ralph Waldo Emerson had a simple solution to most economic woes:

“If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mousetrap than his neighbour, tho’ he build his house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door.”

That worthy objective can’t be achieved by government. All it can do is ensure that education is tip-top, support meritocracy and real social mobility, and give up trying to micromanage national life.

Gosh, I think I’m making a case for a Conservative Government.

It would be a new dawn, would it not?

John Evans

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