This article was first published in Brexit Central and we republish with its kind permission.
Napoleon is reputed to have said, scornfully, that the British are “a nation of shopkeepers”. Well, he then discovered that as warriors we didn’t do too badly, at Trafalgar and Waterloo.
However, to a large extent he was right. This concern has become almost a fixation on trade to the exclusion of all else, as regards our relations with Europe and with the EU project. Right from the beginning we called it the Common Market. In 1975 we voted to remain in it, thinking (and being deliberately told) that it was basically just a free trade arrangement. Even today the argument is nearly all about how Remaining or Leaving will affect jobs and prosperity. We have disregarded the fact, openly proclaimed in continental nations, that the purpose of the project is to build a United State of Europe. The economic steps taken so far, like the single currency, have been but stepping stones to that ultimate aim, as the founding fathers wanted.
I have said a United State, singular, not United States, of Europe as it is commonly called. The Constitution of the United States (plural) of America defines matters which fall into the purview of the federal government and distinguishes them from matters which are the exclusive prerogative of each individual state.
Not so the draft EU ‘Constitution’, later translated into the Lisbon Treaty. This defines matters of “exclusive Union competence”, and matters of “shared competence”. The latter are areas where individual states may be allowed to legislate unless the union has already legislated in them. There are no areas reserved for the exclusive competence of the member states. This means all power is in effect concentrated in the centre. Such is the Napoleonic model.
Now, if Europe is going to become a single state, we need to ask, what does that mean in practice? What is the essence of state power? The state is that body in society which alone can use violence, legally, on the bodies of the citizens. If anybody else seizes someone and locks them up, against their will, beating them and manhandling them forcibly if they resist, they are criminal kidnappers. But if officers of the state do it, under its laws, it is called justice.
Likewise if a private person takes money from someone, threatening to seize their property by main force and lock them up if they refuse to pay, they are robbers or protection racketeers. But if the state does it, it is called taxation. These powers are regulated by the criminal laws of the state in question. The control of criminal laws is thus the handle for control of the state and of all the people in it.
The legal monopoly of the state over the use of violence also serves to constitute armed forces, which defend the state from external aggression, providing its external security. They can also be used on the home front, against disorders and rebellions, providing internal security where the police alone are unable, or perhaps unwilling, to cope.
For 370 years now we in Britain have experienced transfers of power without violence, by voting, elections and agreed legal procedures. We think that to win power, what matters is the presentation of ideas, winning debates, column inches in papers, airtime on radio and TV. We have forgotten the old truth that when push comes to shove, bullets beat ballots. Or as Mao Tse-Tung put it: “Power springs from the barrel of a gun”. They are learning that lesson in Venezuela today. And they are aware of it in continental Europe, where nearly every nation has experienced violent transfers of political power in living memory.
To pursue its aim of building a United State of Europe, the Eurocrats in Brussels are now openly taking steps to set up a unified European Defence Force. Mrs May’s (badly misnamed) ‘Withdrawal Agreement’ would bind the UK to sourcing our military matériel from EU providers. This alone would limit greatly our freedom of movement.
A group of retired high-ranking officers of our armed forces and intelligence services – Veterans for Britain – have been working to alert the public and the politicians to these developments. Their work has been largely ignored by the mainstream media. Clearly once the UK’s and other member states’ armed services are amalgamated into a unified force under the EU flag, controlled and commanded from Brussels, British regiments could be deployed to fight abroad in wars not decided by our Parliament.
Not only that, there is an even greater danger: our soldiers could then be stationed far from Britain, say, on the Ukrainian border, while, say, Latvian, German and Romanian units could be deployed in Britain, available for public order service, to face down riotous behaviour by members of the British public protesting, for instance, against laws passed by the Eurocrats in Brussels, who we did not elect and cannot dismiss.
This would be the consequence of handing control over our external security to Brussels as Theresa May was planning to do and, it appears, was already quietly doing (see PESCO and other measures monitored by Veterans for Britain). Her civil servants will doubtless aim to continue this process with her successor.
But Brussels also wants control over our internal security, our legal system and in particular our criminal laws. In 1997 the Commission held a seminar, which I attended, in Spain, to unveil its ‘Corpus Juris’ project for an embryo single criminal code for all Europe. This code embodies the principles used in the Napoleonic-inquisitorial procedures of continental European countries, and our unique safeguards of individual freedom such as Habeas Corpus and trial by independent jury, part of our Magna Carta heritage, were to be ditched.
It would set up a European Public Prosecutor, who would have a delegate in each member state, to whom national public prosecutors would owe a duty of ‘assistance’, i.e. would be subordinated. He and his delegates would be armed with fearsome powers of arrest and detention of suspects for up to six months, renewable for three months at a time, “pending investigation”, while the authorities seek evidence to justify the arrest, with no right by the prisoner to a public hearing during this time nor obligation on the prosecution to produce any evidence of a prima facie case to answer. This is the regular practice in countries governed by the Napoleonic-inquisitorial systems, and Corpus Juris would extend it to the British Isles.
Luckily this project was eventually brought to public attention, and in 1998 Kate Hoey, then Home Office Minister, promised Parliament that the Government would veto it if it were ever formally introduced.
Part 2 of this article will be published on Independence Daily tomorrow.
What a wonderful language we have that so many subtleties can be related. That very versatility can also be frustrating in that meaning can be fudged; shared competence, exclusive competence?! Does ‘shared competence’ create incompetence with individual groups all talking at once? The difference between exclusive and inclusive is not lost. With elitism the difference between affluent and effluent is not lost either.
“What does that mean in practice” (para five). Exactly! What will happen to us? Do people know? I suspect not.
Why is London one of the International centres of commerce? Quote from someone, it matters not who, “You British are pirates. You were founded by pirates. You grew rich on piracy. You invent new forms of piracy. Your culture is still full of piracy”. We would quarter and shred anyone on the continent with regard hedging the bets and manipulating the choices. Frankfurt and Paris?? But here we are, made to walk the plank or worse, be castrated, or both.
The teeth are now being implanted in this fascist Frankenstein. We must win this struggle regardless of our treacherous elites.
FRIGHTENING, IN FACT TERRIFYING. What can we do to stop it? This voter at this moment feels POWERLESS. Our Westminster Parliament is majority REMAIN in it. An election would probably not change that.
Thank you Torquil. A wonderful reminder on D-Day of what the ” resilient generation” fought for and what we continue to fight for today. D-Day remembrance reminds us we can triumph againt the odds and that ought to inspire today, too.
Your piece here, and in Brexit Central, is a powerful reminder to those careless of our freedom what Brexit is all about.
Thank you, I think this point about the One-State EU is so desperately important. This idea of the Europe-A-Nation is not new and bizarrely this 3rd-Way state/corporatist(socialist) concept found exact echoes in the equally romantic and totalitarian ones of the aristocratic Fabians of the 1930s, united by a utopian concept of the “high intellectual vision” of a perfect future world. The philosophical basis for this is that the ends justify the means, that – as shown by HGWells in ‘shape of things to come’ and other similar 20s, 30s, and 50s concepts claiming to be based on all sorts of ideals and utopian dreams – whatever needs to be done using technology and technocracy, laid out by secretive committees and elites, must be done, to make people obedient and destroy their “ignorance”. This essentially Continental concept goes right back to the French Revolution and to the Marxists and anarchists after them, who started wars to “free” people in the name of peace. It doesn’t make a lot of sense and this was what divided Burke from Paine and created a rift in Conservative thinking too. Nowadays the Tories, LibDems and Labour seem equally enamoured with this paradox and it allows them to cheat over legal sell-outs of tried and trusted traditions, in the cause of “progress” – which usually means the establishment of rules that are supposed to benefit all but in reality benefit only the core elite, a new “nobility of the enlightened” who deems themselves superior and justified in cheating or in denigrating anyone who disagrees, even to the extent of double standards in public and private life, that they think are just fine but that everyone else should be excluded from. In the exact same way the UK has been asset-stripped in the name of “harmony”, and some members of the EU are deemed more equal than others.
It’s a dangerous extension of the fanaticism of the 20s and 30s that has its roots in Marcuse and Levi and Baboeuf, revolutionary thinkers whose culturally-marxist ideas now sadly infuse every layer of academic and educational thinking. Since they do not understand that the People themselves are able to make choices that affect policy, these new elites have decided to create a single state that will force them to make the “right” choices. Even when they clearly are not and cannot be challenged or changed. It’s very worrying because of its inherent arrogance and desultory lack of respect for the intelligence of ordinary people.
From my limited knowledge of law (OU Law degree) I have always understood English law to be primarily about the rights and freedoms of the individual, whereas I believe that the legal systems that have their roots in Napoleonic law are all about the supremacy of the state. We should never let our legal system be sacrificed.
Taking Ireland as an example, using Eu rules the EU elite were able to perpetrate one of the great scams in history.
The Eu is set up in such a way that the EU makes the “law” while being able to renege on all responsibility for its implementation. This loophole was used by the EU to make the law requiring Ireland to allow the free movement of money, people, goods, and services (i.e. take over the Irish economy). This allowed the lending institutions to create as much debt as possible as quickly as possible through mortgages, loans etc without collateral (the boom). When demands were then made to honour the loans the lending institutions went to the government, And the EU then, reneging on their responsibility for the chaos caused by the boom, came up with the TROIKA forcing the Irish taxpayer to carry the can (claiming these institutions were “too big to fail”) for the ever increasing billions the lending institutions kept coming up with claiming they “owed” to anonymous bondholders.
And the rest is history that has yet to be written.
A practice run for the UK?