eurealist.co.uk

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.