A Bad Day for Europe’s Pariah State

Anticipating tomorrow’s overwhelmingly positive conclusions from the European Council and Commission (18 December 2007), following each Member State’s signing of the Lisbon Treaty, James McConalogue of the European Foundation said:

“This will be a bad day for Britain. Europe looks set to have its presidential King and artful Foreign Minister, throned upon the platform of Europe’s draconian legal system. The leaders of a new enhanced European government will – as the UK Parliament’s own body of Committee critics have suggested – sign away their control over sovereign national Parliaments.”

“The unelected British Prime Minister and 26 of Europe’s elected leaders have voluntarily surrendered the powers of their own national Parliaments, and further submerged the British people under stupefying provisions for the right to strike through the associated Charter of Fundamental Rights, a European jurisdiction over crucial aspects of their criminal justice system, a European management over immigration quotas and asylum tribunals, a greatly increased European control over energy policy, the introduction of an EU President to instruct our home affairs, and a Foreign Minister assuming control over British foreign policy.”

“Brown has put the people of Britain in the path of grave danger as they are further towed into the passing of the great European juggernaut. As Winston Churchill asserted, Britain must be associated, not absorbed by Europe. What we need is a Europe based on an association of freely trading nation-states, not a Europe under one super state.”