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Martin Cole at Ironies has a link to Free Nations

It was reported in early December by EU Observer that there will be no referendum in Sweden on the new EU Constitution. Of course to be more precise we should say “a new Swedish Constitution” (and of course a new German, British, French etc Constitution as well because all those democratic constitutions will also disappear).
The words of the relevant Article (I-10) are groundbreaking because of the first two words:
“The Constitution and law adopted by the Union’s Institutions in exercising competences conferred on it shall have primacy over the law of the Member States“.

There may be one or two gullible and naive people in the world who believe Blair and Straw when they say “it is a constitution like that of a golf club”. But we all know - and we know that the arch eurofederalists know - that any International Court and certainly the all-powerful and highly politicised “European Court” will interpret the word Constitution to mean just that.

It is impossible to live under two Constitutions with their separate Courts. One MUST BE superior to the other and sure enough what we have here is the superiority of the EU - with its Constitution, Constitutional Court, embryo Euro Army, Executive, Legislature, passport etc etc.

So the Swedes are about to abolish Sweden - but the Swedish people will not be able to vote on the matter! There has been a stitch up of the kind we have observed all over Europe between the four right-wing opposition parties in the Swedish Parliament and the Social Democrat Prime Minister Göran Persson. As in Britain these arrogant little nonentities believe that sovereignty rests with Parliament and that because they control Parliament (today) the people should do as they are told (for ever or irrevocably and irreversibly as the EU Treaties say). This is the Mitterand, Chirac, Kohl and Schroeder School of Democracy.

(Blair has only agreed to a referendum in Britain as an electoral ploy against the Conservative Opposition.)
I actually disagree with this, I believe that Blair had no intention of allowing a referendum but it was pointed out to him, possible by the Palace that to install a new Constitution for Britain without one was illegal the Bill of rights says that any law which attempts to overturn it is illegal, thus leaving the whole constitution open to a later challenge in the courts however if he can win the referendum any such challenge would be undermined.

Break

The Swedes rejected the Euro in a referendum in September 2003 against all odds and against the recommendation of the political establishment. So the political Establishment cannot risk another exercise in Democracy - no more than can the EU, which is why the whole fascist edifice was constructed long before any votes were possible.

Telegraph | News | Christopher Booker’s notebook

America rises to the challenge

There was a striking contrast between the initial American response to the tsunami catastrophe and that of the EU. Although President Bush came under fire for promising “only $35 million” (subsequently multiplied by 10), the more immediate US response was entirely practical. Two US Navy battle groups were sent from Hong Kong and Guam, fully equipped to mount a major disaster-relief operation.

These units include scores of helicopters, some of which were already yesterday searching for survivors, and landing craft capable of delivering huge quantities of supplies, particularly food and fresh water, directly to otherwise inaccessible beaches.

A fleet of the giant C-130 transport aircraft has already landed relief supplies, including 80,000 body bags, in Sumatra and Thailand. Thousands of military personnel, medical specialists among them, are on their way to Thailand, Sri Lanka and India to assist in relief operations.

Meanwhile the EU, which initially promised 3 million euros and “a visit to the areas affected… in the near future” by Louis Michel, the commissioner for humanitarian aid, plans this week to host a “donors’ conference” in Brussels to discuss what to do next. As Dr Richard North observed in his daily EU commentary (www.eureferendum. blogspot.com), “the caterers are on high alert”.

As we enter Election year, when the British political parties will be putting out their hand carts to display their policy offerings for the discerning voter, and as the media begins to fill up with press releases and discussions on which party leader, or which policy will be best for Britain in the next five years.

As they rush around from one TV studio to another in an attempt to get their own message out to the voters in time for the six o’clock news, these British politicians know that without our vote they are no longer relevant, they a non persons, as far as the British Politics is concerned, unless of course they happen to be members of that a select elite who seem, no matter what the voters do, to be placed in position of power by those we do elect, the likes of Christopher Pattern who since being ejected as the sitting MP for Bath, has gone from one public paid top job to another finally ending up in the House of Lords with a nice big EU pension.

All of these politicos have one thing in common, and that is they are all playing their own part in a great charade, they all know that to take part in the game they must first secure our vote, this is the entry card that all must posses, and to gain that pass they must appeal to the real sovereign power, the people, every cross we place on the ballot paper in the privacy of the voting booth plays its part in the big sham. We all know who these people are what they have or have not done, which great positions of power they have held,the Tony Blair’s and the Michael Howard’s of this world are the recognised front men in the big debate, but Christopher Booker is asking us to pause for one moment, to stand back and look at who will really have the power to run this country, when the election has produces a winner, the media circus has left town and the dust has settled, he has a wish that in 2005 that we got a little more clued up as to who really runs the show.

Do you recognise your rulers?

How many of these faces of our government can you identify? A New Year resolution for 2005 might be for us all to recognise just where the government of our country now lies. If government is measured by who has the power to put forward the laws which rule our lives, then to a great extent our rulers are not Tony Blair and John Prescott but the 25 commissioners of the European Union. There are few people in Britain who have even heard of most of these commissioners.

It is astonishing how much power these anonymous officials now exercise, over ever more areas of our national life. Even the Cabinet Office website admits that “around half of all legislation with a significant impact on business, charities or the voluntary sector now originates in Europe”.

The true proportion is probably much higher. In the coming year, hundreds of new laws will come into force, costing us billions of pounds, over which our elected representatives in Westminster will have no influence whatever.

On paper, for instance, Margaret Beckett is one of our most powerful ministers, presiding over the environment, agriculture and fisheries. Yet in reality she exercises far less power than Stavros Dimas, the Greek environment commissioner, who alone has the right to initiate any environment laws – for example, those which produced the notorious “fridge mountain”, or last summer’s reduction in the UK’s landfill sites for hazardous waste from 218 to 10.

Britain’s fishing waters are now run by Joe Borg from Malta, our farming policy by Mariann Fischer Boel, a Danish farmer’s wife. In terms of real power, our energy minister is now Andris Piebalgs, a Latvian former Communist.

Other former Communists on the commission include Laszlo Kovacs, the Hungarian in charge of taxation, and Dalia Grybuskaite, a Latvian educated in Leningrad in Soviet times, now in charge of the EU budget.

Nothing better brought home how little all this is understood in Britain than coverage of l’affaire Barrot, which blew up around the commission’s vice-president, who had been convicted of illegally manipulating party funds in France. Even a senior Conservative MEP, Caroline Jackson, claimed that Jacques Barrot only occupied “the humble post of transport commissioner”. In fact his portfolio could scarcely wield more power.
Commissioner Barrot has control over all aviation policy in the EU. He presides over road safety policy, not least through the Galileo satellite programme, which will be used to run road tolls, congestion charging and even speed limiters on vehicles. He will be in charge of the EU’s proposed Railways Agency. He is also responsible for the Trans European Network scheme, supervising the spending of £400 billion by national governments, the most costly single investment programme the EU has ever undertaken,
Still the doings of our EU government are reported as “foreign news” and we go on pretending that our country is run by Tony Blair and John Prescott. It is time in 2005 that we got a little more clued up as to who really runs the show.

EuroSavant - Commentary on the European non-English-language press: “Sun Jan 02, 2005

Catastrophes in Human Memory

Back today to devastating tsunami flooding off the Indian Ocean, with hundreds of thousands dead. Wait: no, I’m not referring here to the tsunami flooding of Boxing Day, 2004. I’m referring to the cyclone-driven big waves that inundated Bangladesh back in 1991, killing around 135,000. You say you don’t remember that disaster? Well, that’s the point here: what makes you think that you’ll remember the Boxing Day 2004 tsunamis for very much longer as Time resumes its inexorable advance? You may be concerned and alarmed now, but who (or what) is to say that for most of the world’s population (except those who have suffered losses, of course) this event in short order will simply be relegated to some list of disasters chronicled on an obscure (and, perhaps, a bizarrely olive-drab-colored) webpage?

Yes, as US Navy helicopters and other assorted equipment finally start moving in aid to those in Sumatra, Thailand, India, Sri Lanka, etc. who need it, some of those of us left behind here in the West, with little else left to do to help (presumably after giving money), have already taken up the intellectual exercise of trying to assess the likely place of the Boxing Day floods within the world’s historical memory. Here EuroSavant once again resorts to Denmark’s excellent commentary newspaper, Information, and specifically to Mette-Line Thorup’s recent article The Catastrophe’s Metaphysics.

More…

Neil Herron: Even on Prescott’s Home Turf…Money Wasted: “Hull Daily Mail
STILL PAYING FOR FAILED ASSEMBLY
09:30 - 01 January 2005″

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott has been accused of wasting almost £2m of taxpayer’s money on research related to his failed dream of a regional assembly. It means the total spend on the east Hull MP’s bid to introduce regional assemblies in the north-east and Yorkshire and the Humber could have cost the public a total of £12m.

New details revealed Mr Prescott’s department spent cash on a variety of regional assembly research projects.The most expensive was carried out by the University of Salford to evaluate the “operation and effectiveness of elected regional assemblies”.The research cost £979,274 and came out in July 2003, 16 months before the regional referendum in the north-east took place.

Now Tories claim that despite the “no” vote in the north-east last month, and the winding down of the campaign for elected regional assemblies, some of the projects will continue to cost money as one is not due to report back until 2011.

Shadow regions secretary Bernard Jenkin said: “Labour has created countless unaccountable and unelected regional quangos but has no idea what they’re actually doing.”It is amazing that John Prescott needs to waste millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to tell him what he should already know.”His department is out of control and heading in the wrong direction.”News of the additional funds being spent will come as a fresh blow to Mr Prescott, who has already come under a barrage of criticism for the phenomenal amount the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) has spent on his regional assembly dream.

According to official figures, the cost of staging the north-east referendum is expected to be about £3.1m.Mr Prescott’s office has also reportedly spent another £3.2m on an information campaign.Embarrassingly, a £25,000 advertising campaign promoting a voting date in Yorkshire was already under way in July when ministers decided to postpone the referendum across the region.

In addition, Mr Prescott’s own regional campaigning cost £184,143.

John Watson, chairman of the Yorkshire Says No campaign, said: “An awful lot of money has been wasted going through this whole process. I am just glad the referendum in Yorkshire is now dead and buried, otherwise there would have been more costs to bear.”

Last night, a spokesman for ODPM said: “The Government remains committed to improving economic performance and equality of life across all regions.”To achieve this we will continue local government reform and an active policy to decentralise power and strengthen the regions.”Research plays a key role in forming that policy.”The Mail opposed plans for a Yorkshire and Humber assembly on the grounds it would be an extra level of bureaucracy that would result in decisions being taken