By Laveen Ladharam

So it is official. The Republic of Ireland has been harangued into voting in favour of the Lisbon Treaty by the likes of Mr Sarkozy and Ms Merkel as well as the rest throughout the EU. By those who see the belief in national self determination to be an ‘extremist’ and grossly ‘nationalist’ thing that only those love children of Hitler and Mussolini would vote against such thing where your nation would lose a great deal of its own ideals to the ‘good idea’ of a European Superstate.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Europe, and indeed I realise that Europe will have to act together in the future. And for us in the UK Europe has done things that have benefited us such as the improvement of water standards in Britain through the standards set by Brussels (and the privatisation of the water companies). But Europe needs to get that democratic legitimacy from the people of Europe. For instance the possibility that Tony Blair will be President of Europe when we finally got rid of him here is simply sickening – especially as we do not have a say. I must also say that I do agree that certain ‘undemocratic’ institutions such as the Monarchy and the House of Lords are good for us because they work well in terms of government but the fact that we have an untried and untested group of officials sapping power away from our national parliaments is fundamentally wrong.

This is especially the case where the European Parliament does not follow its own laws for instance as a freely debating chamber, cutting off Daniel Hannan in the middle of his speech about the lack of the rule of law within the chamber and a large number of delegates walking out when the Czech President Vaclav Klaus stated that the European Parliament had no opposition to the federalist idea – branding him as some kind of extremist. When it comes to the rule of law, the EU is willing to override national law and extradite someone to another part of the EU to answer for something that is not illegal in the state that someone was arrested – in the case of Gerald Toeben, an Australian citizen who although had disgusting views on the Holocaust had every right to make them in the UK and should not have been put into custody. No country in Europe has had the track record of democracy and the rule of law that Britain has had and the Eastern European countries such as the Czech Republic and Poland have suffered under Soviet influence see the same thing coming from Brussels, yet we are expected to be silent when our nations may repeat the mistakes of history. I think that is wrong. Some may say that the EU has created peace in Europe. Those who feel the need to ignore history obviously have not heard of NATO and its incredibly important role in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.

The most disgusting issue of this is indeed that the European Leaders and our own Prime Minister have not told us the virtues of the Constitution but have instead stated that it is not a constitution and not a treaty – even though 90% of the text is the same. It is like a young girl trying to hide a pregnancy eight months along by simply breathing in – they are trying to treat us (and the Irish) as fools. This should make us realise that they know that the two are the same but simply fear that they will choke on their own words if they said so. Instead choose to ignore our wishes and simply bully and browbeat us into submission.

Our Prime Minister has tried to taunt those who oppose the federalism of the EU essentially as ‘loners’ – those who stand up for our freedoms. Well I tell him that this fine country has stood alone in the past, against Spain (with the help of the Dutch republics) in the late 16th Century, against Napoleon for a while in the 18th, and against the might of Hitler’s Germany in 1940. By telling us not to stand up for our principles would be like telling Churchill (as the likes of Halifax almost did) not to stand up to Hitler or even Moses not to stand up to the Pharaoh. If we do not preserve this, the greatest bastion of freedom in Europe – regardless of whether we have anyone with us doing what is right or not – then we are prepared for a master and we damn well deserve one.

John Paul II once said ‘Freedom is not the power to do what one wants. Freedom is the power to do what is right.’ For a man who had lived under Military, Nazi and Soviet Tyranny, he is one with the moral authority to allow us to stand tall in the face of injustice. Sadly the Irish have been forced to cower. It now lies in the Czech and Polish Presidents’ hands to save us from tyranny.